I just added a comment to the SANTEC thing as I felt it a worthwhile exercise. I’d be interested in your thoughts (my email jones@lis.net.au ). To save you the login, here is the full text…

Hi Folks

I was hoping to get into this exercise a lot earlier but then had one of those weeks, so here I am at the last…

I now have an appreciation of where SANTEC is coming from. For those of you in developing areas still on dial up & with unreliable internet etc - just hang in there. Take consolation in that things are changing fast, & as your tech picks up you have a chance to avoid the mistakes & false paths others of us have struck & are still battling with.

Make the most of what your tech will allow. Learn to minimize file sizes to minimize slow tech load times. Many see blogs as text based, & they can be. But they come into their own with added content. For example, for images, open an account with Flickr. On a slow connection it may take time to upload your pix, but Flickr will resize them into 5 file sizes, each with a different URL. Grab the fast loading thumbnail size for your blog, then hyperlink it to the Flickr URL for an optional larger version. Viewers will be able to tell from the thumbnail if they want to see the big pic, then they will decide if it is worth the download wait.

Secondly comes navigation. I tend to get annoyed with the other default blog archive feature which tends to hide useful stuff without making it obvious to newbies as to where it has gone. If I have the option in settings I try to make all posts visible (another argument for the minimal file size / fast load). In the SANTEC blog layout it took me a while to find the ‘show all posts’ option.

After all, for edu purposes it is unlikely that things will go on endlessly – they tend to be manageably finite – this seminar, for e.g. has been quite short (but content very valuable!). Try seeing a blog as a finite short story instead of an ongoing diary.

Blogs have limits & differences. It took me a while to get the feel of what makes the functionality of this one different to the others I have (yes, like others, I have a number of blogs for different purposes).

Blogs tend, by default, to have a centre text display with lots of space at the sides. This space is often taken with other content, but it is generally around the top of a page, & the experience soon becomes (especially for those of us who like long posts) one like doing a lot of scrolling work for content that feels like a long newspaper column.

Another aspect is the lack of a default useful ‘homepage’/ sitemap, as blogs generally display the last post at the top. A taglist just isn’t quite enough. I was very interested to read about the stickies. Basically I feel we could do with more intuitive tools. Yes, I truly loved the timeline & cloud tag, but I need more control. Now I could fudge it – e.g. start a blog with a single post which effectively becomes an unarchived homepage, which could have seamless hyperlinks to another blog which has all the content…?

Which, for anybody still hanging in there, brings me to my major points…

1) Collaboration. Blogs & other web 2.0 stuff claim to offer a new era of collaboration. It’s true, but overrated - don’t get get your hopes up. Most of your comments will be spam trying to sell you Viagra & Valium (why people would want to get horny just to fall asleep is beyond me, but still…). Your heartfelt epiphanies (like this comment) will generally go unread, in which case you have had the benefit of using it as a tool to clarify your thoughts for what may ultimately be a later interested audience. See Digital Maoism (esp the comments) referred to in one of my posts at http://bremer.edublogs.org/2006/11/28/collaboration-the-selfish-use-of-social-software/

2) Stop thinking in terms of blogs & start thinking in terms of what you can do with them. Yes they can be a text based journal, which according to Pew & Gartner is their dominant use. But to deconstruct, blogs are generally separate webpages with unique URLs & navigation possibilities via search, tagging & hyperlinks. Try using these to move around, not the default sequential appearance. And if you are in to HTML you can do all sorts of bizarre things. I was inspired by this one http://cat-diaries.blogspot.com/ & while far too techie for me I thought I’d try a blog as a presentation tool, so I recently tweaked a blog like a powerpoint session, each post being a ‘slide’. The ‘slides’ were in random order, but tagged so I knew what they were about, & this allowed me to move around wherever the session went without having to use a fixed sequence. And I had participants email posts in – without realizing it – so they then became part of the presentation. I had a ball (not sure about the participants…). For anyone silly enough, my notes & basic session layout are at http://bremer.edublogs.org/2007/03/21/blog-presentation-at-vementoring/ & my monotone podcast is at http://bremer.edublogs.org/2007/04/03/podcast-of-presentation-on-blogs/

3) Stop thinking about blogs as a package, but see them as part of a seamless web 2.0. Don’t ‘do blogs’ & then move on to explore image sites, etc. Web 2.0 is all the one big tool - a hyperlink can take you anywhere. Some blogs will allow audio & video posts. Others won’t, but you may be able to link to a separate account with Flickr, or a podcast, or a Youtube video (as has been nicely mentioned during the seminar), or a Zoho or Slideshare presentation, or a Zoho or GoogleDocs for notes or spreadsheet… Bolt them together & you have a potential multimedia, rich, free website, with potential participation. For e.g, I recently put up a blogpost on how to use Delicious, with an externally linked podcast, where in I invited the potential listener when to change slides in the accompanying Slideshare presentation, & links to 3 different Delicious sites, & invited comments - http://bremer.edublogs.org/2007/05/10/bookmarking-esp-using-delicious/ . Next time I’ll be adding video…

By the way, if you want to add video you do not need a videocamera - try something as simple as a digital stills camera in video mode – instant small file…

Compatible file formats can be another frustration. Try online file converters such as Zamzar http://www.zamzar.com/ or Media convert http://media-convert.com/ .

To conclude, most people try text based blogs, which satisfies their ‘been there, done that’ side, then give it away & move on to the next trendy thing. Gartner reckons that there are a lot of abandoned blogs out there & usage will peak in 2007. Possibly true, but ignore the hype, & after the pending dot.blog bubble I reckon in the shakeout there’s a lot of potential there, from predictable old journals & project records to a heap of other places most of us haven’t been yet. Then again, maybe wikis will come to dominate, who knows… And again for those in the disadvantaged areas, if you can get techie enough most of this is free…

Cheers
Brad