September 2009 Archives

Thanks to a tweet from Cole, I just read Dave Cormier's thought provoking Identity, memory, death and the internet. Go read it. It's better than this post. If you want, come back and read what it made me think about.

I too have thought about what digital material might survive me, and what it might mean to those I leave behind.

I don't know what will really survive. This stuff isn't really all getting archived. Why would I want to keep my stuff at a place where it would get deleted if I unexpectantly shuffle off. Will my flickr photos be available 100 years from now? My aperture library? My blog?

Dave seems to rebel against the popular notion, especially in marketing and education, of "cultivating" digital your identity. I am thinking of this as an opening to the idea that it is okay to pour oneself into the internet. It does not all have to be academic and professional. Are we afraid to let other people know who we are? Maybe a tweet taken by itself is trivial, but what about a month's worth of tweet from a user, a year, a lifetime? I am not saying we all have to put ourselves out there, but what are we really afraid of? The question is not how complete a copy of ourselves we want out there, but how incomplete a copy of ourselves do we want out there?

This is stuff rattling around my head, not letting me sleep. The idea of where my stuff should go and what my stuff IS has been in my forefront of thinking of lately. Dave's post blew all that up in a beautiful way.

Using flickr to instantly publish video to my Penn State Blog. In the
days to come I plan on posting how-to's at the blogs@psu site
explaining how you can use other services and sofware to quickly and
easily get content flowing into your Penn State blog.

I have spent some time playing with posterous, and I have to say, I am quite in love with this service. It does so many things right.

If you haven't used posterous before, it basically a dead simple simple blogging service like tumblr. What differentiates it from tumblr is an emphasis on posting via email and automatically incorporating forms of media like images, movies, audio files, word docs, the whole nine yards. Posterous also has an emphasis on posting your content out to facebook, twitter, flickr, your blog, and many other social services / publishing engines.

What I love about posterous is how I can send it just about any file I want, and it presents in a very web friendly way automagically. I can take a video with my iphone, email it to posterous, and in moments it is posted with a friendly flash embed along with a link to download the original file. Send an email with multiple pictures and it makes a post with a pretty image gallery. Email it a word doc or pdf, and a viewer for the files gets thrown into the post.

Maybe I am so taken with it because it does so well what blogging systems like blogs@psu do so poorly. I have seen students struggle to figure out how to move the content they have authored in word to their websites, or how to embed a playable video. With posterous, the barrier truly is reduced to a point that it is no longer visible with the naked eye.

The rise of blogging over the past 10 years was all about getting a simple, small content management system in the hands of the people. It was a rebellion based in the fact that putting together a website by hand required such a technical overhead. Sites like posterous are a rebellion based in the fact that running a mini-cms requires too much technical overhead. I kind of agree with this.

Now, blogs@psu is not simply about posting stuff. It is a website generating tool, not just a sharing service. That is the existential tension of blogs@psu, being a website CMS, but also being a dead-simple way to share digital artifacts. I can't say it can't be both, but there is some work needed to bridge the gap. posterous isn't a full blown web site management tool, but it does offer a handful of built in themes and the ability to apply your own custom stylesheet. The interface for choosing themes, modifying your blog masthead and info is really elegant and slick. It's another thing that deserves some studying.

Let me talk about one more point related my exploration of posterous, ownership. A central tenant of blogs@psu (and behind most people running their own blog software) is that you own your own content. You can get it out easily. The files and data are all there for you to take. I have been trying to not dump content into facebook, flickr, or other sites without having my own copy somewhere. Almost all my content in facebook originates at my blog and flows into facebook. All my tweets get archived at my blog via MT's action streams. Posterous is great in that your posts can automatically flow back into your own blog. The one downside is that media still gets hosted at posterous. No doubt they made this decision to make it easier for users, but in terms of wanting my own copy, it falls a little short.

Posterous does have an api, however, and this api does allow you to get all your data and assets our of posterous. So, I could, in theory, with a little elbow grease, migrate from posterous to wordpress or MT.

The guys over at posterous are doing something really right. There is a lot we can learn from them.

You can check out my new posterous site to see examples of some of the things I am talking about.

In my previous entry, I talked about how my "Stuff" was also flowing into the main index of this blog.

As Cole pointed out, I forgot to mention how I actually did it. It is pretty easy, if you are comfortable making a small change to your template by hand.

I went into the template that publishes my blog, in the pro website template that would be blog/index.html.

I changed the <mt:Entries> tag to be <mt:Entries blog_ids="6,15948" author="bak147" lastn="10">

blog_ids is a comma separated list of blog ids. You can find the blog_id of a blog by visiting it in the dashboard and looking at the URL in your browser. You will see something like &blog_id=XXXXX near the end of the URL, where XXXXX is the number that is the ID for that blog. In my case, 6 is ID for edushizzle and 15948 is the ID for Stuff.

author should be your access account user id. This means it only includes entries authored by you. This means only my "stuff" gets published over in edushizzle.

lastn is the amount of entries to include on your blog index page. I used 10.  This means ten entries total will show up on my index page.

There you go. That's the change to the template. Rebuild your blog and you'll see the new content.

The next step is to set up a rebuild trigger. In my case, this will make sure edushizzle will be rebuilt when ever I post to stuff. Unfortunately the ability to add rebuild triggers is temporarily disabled due to conflicts with protected blogging. I hope to have them re-enabled soon, though. If you really really need a rebuild trigger right now, send me an email and I'll do my best to hook you up.

Lately, a few of us from around the University have been posting stuff to Stuff. As the masthead explains, it is an experiment in multi-author activity sharing from within Blogs at Penn State. I have been enjoying posting there. Is it the community part? Maybe. Is it the expectation that post will be short and simple with the super charged quickpost bookmarklet? Perhaps.

So, once again I find my digital life fractured with another place to post. In an attempt to minimize that a little bit, I have adjusted the front page of this blog to also include my posts to stuff in the stream. I didn't add the posts to the RSS feed for the blog (yet), just the front page. Let the stuff flow in.

This free flowing of content is one advantage of using one instance of MT for blogs@psu.