11/11/2008 by nicola.

I spent quite a bit of time recently - as per post last week re wiki - going through Stephen Downes / George Siemens websites in a bid to retrace my online steps and rediscover ‘aha moments’ (I’ve moved jobs / laptops quite a lot in the last few years and at times, I used to take notes from people’s presentations or whatever - but I never managed to write where / how / what so have random notes - I suppose I could have googled them). It reminded me a bit of moving house - when you unpack old boxes and find hidden wonders you had forgotten existed….

And speaking of old boxes, I’ve decided to abandon my unintentional quest to bookmark every single page on the web using delicious. In the first of a series of changes - I have packed everything up to and including today on NicolaAvery2 and just keeping ones that I think could use more regularly in the future. The one I have been using and will continue to use in the future is the regular NicolaAvery one. Hope that makes sense - if it turns out to be a complete disaster, will rethink again. I would welcome any feedback. The bookmark file is also attached below if anyone wants to import etc. Note - there are around 2000 of them and they will sit at the top of all your bookmarks (a lack of archiving facility is the reason I’m doing this at all)

I might be moving in the next few months to a different sort of space (ideally I would like to design / code it but I don’t know at this point if time possible) which will include a blog with a slightly different - tone? I’m not sure that’s the right word but will update here as and when.

old delicious bookmarks

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14/10/2008 by nicola.

Transcript:

To blog or not to blog, social media, networking, customer review sites, professional networks. Speaking to people in the room and overall discussion generated, majority of SMEs in the room have a web presence of some sort, mostly static, brochure type sites, maybe Flash. In terms of interactions with customers, comments and discussion being generated, the majority did not yet have that as part of their online presence. They were quite surprised about the volume and traffic being generated by social media and social networking sites. Presentation was more marketing focused, describing uses of viral marketing with good videos, interactive games, pictures passing on message etc

Traffic figures approximate (unsure of all sources, some were Nielsen):
1 billion searches on Google per day
131 million blogs with around 120,000 new ones daily
5 million photos uploaded daily to sites like Flickr
6,000 videos uploaded to Youtube every minute
22 million using Linked In
8.5 million on UK Facebook

Consumers are more in control, they want to interact rather than view. In Europe, around 73% indicated trust in consumer recommendations on or offline and 59% trusted online reviews. 80% of UK internet population used social networks in April 2008, 55% of total UK population. Monthly 179 mins spent on email, 302 on social network sites. Social networks in UK now have approx 1 in 5 page impressions and driving 1/10 visits to other websites. In UK professional networking - 49% use for interacting with colleagues and 34% for spying on peers !

She outlined the benefits of blogging - usual kinds of things - brand awareness, increasing consumer trust, interaction, mentioned about dialogue with customers and showed Lego example of potential innovation by customers. Also mentioned being aware of the time, commitment of being involved. Interesting that a lot of questions being generated about negative comments, handling negative comments / bad reviews about their products in an online environment, discussion around moderation but in most cases felt better to respond with positive ‘pr’ i.e. using online channels to communicate positively - also mentioned that where you have built up a community, the community may self-moderate and deal with negativity.

Similar to anyone who is using a public blog for learning / teaching / research. Most of the room felt that they could all go away and achieve one thing whether it was starting a blog, or just joining LinkedIn or a social network. Interesting to hear local business perspective too.

PS My 12 seconds videos finally showed up - I seemed to have messed up a bit and uploaded the same videos 3 times instead of separate clips (was moving, deleting at speed due to lack of memory space), it turns out they were hiding in the 12 seconds spam folder! But seeing as they are still in alpha…I was impressed by their customer service response actually but again I guess in alpha, its a smaller audience

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11/10/2008 by nicola.

Have seen loads of posts this week about the 27 Women Edubloggers post from ZaidLearn, it reminded me - I can’t remember if I ever actually put this in when I did a mini-series on female blogging earlier this summer, pageflakes has seemed a little buggy of late, but this pagecast is the one I used and still use - does not include all of the blogs by women that I read - all scattered everywhere… (see amazing blogs like Beth Kanter’s for lots of links to female blogging) my focus was not specifically learning / education. At some point will try and collect all of them in one place….

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14/09/2008 by nicola.

I’ve just watched this 3 min video of Antony Lowenstein talking about his experiences over the last few years travelling to China, Iran, Iraq, Syria and following their blogging practices. He has written a book called The Blogging Revolution which is now out on Amazon.

This reminds me of Doris’s post in Connecting-Online, a week ago about the how you can be better connected (in terms of richness of experience) when you know more than one language because there are lots of blogs in Arabic, Chinese, Korean which I would love to follow but because I don’t know the language, I can’t. As a result, you can end up following ones which are written in English as well, which may provide only one view of circumstances in a particular country.
One of the English ones I follow from Iraq (although she is leaving soon) is the Neurotic Iraqi Wife.

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