Blog Reflections

Reflecting on the Experience of Blogging...


What did I learn from this experience?
I learned what a blog is- prior to this course, I didn’t know what a weblog was! This was an experiential, exploratory style of learning that was new to me. It was more unstructured and open ended, though the learning outcomes were clear, the path taken was very innovative and very challenging.

I learned how to create my own blog and comment on others. Though my blog wasn’t very pretty- no photos (until today...)or video clips, I’m proud I was able to set one up and post comments on others. I did learn how to hyperlink a URL, and really enjoyed reading and commenting on others blogs.
I learned what an RSS feed is, and how to use it to track other folks blogs, as well as other websites I check often. This tool turned out to be a personal favorite- I use it to track blogs, the weather, the news, etc. Even though much of the technical talk on the sites I found in my research was beyond my understanding, how to use an RSS feed and personal portal were a much needed lesson I learned through exploring the web for information about them.
I also studied independently re: social bookmarking, and how to use this service to organize information and sites that may be of interest in the future. Like the RSS reader, this is a tool I now use daily to keep track of websites I may need access to. I’m still learning how to “be social” and share bookmarks with others, but I expect as I continue to research specific topics, social bookmarking will become more and more useful to me.
I learned a great deal from other’s blogs. I was able to read about many web2.0 tools I’d never have time to explore independently, such as wikis, e-books, clickers, gaming, and more! I could also observe how my “blog mates” designed and utilized blog features creatively.


What can I do to improve my blogging (with or without the constraints of this assignment)?
Learn how to insert pictures (done 12/05- it's about time!)and video. I enjoyed reading other bloggers who have done this, and noted that this is a major function for many folks- a way for them to scrapbook and update family and friends all at once. Great idea, but I don’t keep home photos organized anyway… what makes me think a blog will help? I should also learn how to improve the overall design. Appearance of the site, layout, etc.
I need a topic to blog about. I see many people (outside of this class) blog just for fun, and write whatever comes to mind. I’m unable to devote the time or energy to that kind of journaling. I am glad that we had specific topics to research and write about in our blogs, as it gave some structure and focus to the assignment.

I sum, I enjoyed this assignment very much. I found it difficult to keep up with, especially before my RSS was set up to help me stay up-to-date with all the blogs. The small group format for this type of assignment is essential, and I got to know the bloggers and their topics quite well by the end of the semester. I will miss this informal information exchange when the semester ends, as I learned so much. Thanks and best wishes to Andrew, Mehkta, and Patrick!

Review of Social Bookmarking

My last blog post this semester will be a quick summary about Social Bookmarking. I started with the Wikipedia definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking ) : "In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine." Then, early in November, I watched a “how to” video by commoncraft (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU ), and set up my own del.icio.us page. My next challenge, and one I continue to work on, is my tagging system, or folksonomy. I used a couple resources to better understand tags: Guy & Tonkin, 2006 (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html ), and Pandia’s Search Engine News ((http://www.pandia.com/sew/327-social-bookmarking.html ). I also discovered ways to market new sites or products through social bookmarking services, which finds bookmarking sites and certain tags on each, and then targets the users of these for promotion of the marketed site/product. I continue to be amazed at the many new ways Web2.0 is being used, and how savvy web marketers and advertisers use these ways to find potential customers.
Through this blogging exercise, I have explored RSS feeds as well as social bookmarking, in addition to discovering ways blogs can be created and used. These experiential lessons have been very helpful as I increase my web2.0 use and fluency.

Bookmarking with a Purpose

The article this week is “Social Bookmarking Tools for Collaboration and Interaction”, http://www.speakingandmarketingtips.com/social-bookmarking.html. This not only gives a brief history of bookmarking and details of some of the most popular sites, but it also shares information for making the most of bookmarks for marketing your own website:
Making Social Bookmarking an Effective Web Promotion Strategy
There are three things you need to do to make the most of social bookmarking:
1. Tag your web site, blog, squidoo lenses, social networking sites and any other web presence you have on as many social bookmark sites as you can.
2. Encourage visitors to your sites to add them to their social bookmarks.
3. Network with other social bookmarkers and collaberate with each other to promote your sites.
Doing this by individually tagging links to a lot of bookmarket sites was impractical - also setting up links for people to click to add my site to their bookmarks meant having a page full of icons.” (http://www.speakingandmarketingtips.com/social-bookmarking.html )
In searching for more information about social bookmarking, I found another niche: a specialized social bookmarking site for academics, who can tag articles for scholarly journals for later retrieval. Sounds like a traditional file cabinet full of folders with arbitrary labels, that may or may not be easy to locate when you need them. http://www.cais-acsi.ca/proceedings/2007/kipp_2007.pdf . I like this article because it analyses the tags, which is crucial to making your bookmarking site work for you, so you can easily retrieve what you need when you need it. Hope these articles shed some light on the process for you- they have certainly helped me.

More on social bookmarking services:

I spent some time cleaning up my tags this week, following Guy’s advice (2006). I imported all the bookmarks from my browsers (I always use IEx and Firefox simultaneously, since I organize favorites in each so I can find them) This will work much better once I adjust to the move.
I also followed Patrick’s advice, and got rid of the extra toolbar- thanks, Patrick!
To learn more about social bookmarking, I found a site (a blog, maybe? I can’t always tell) called Pandia Search Engine News with an article entitled Top 5 social bookmarking services (http://www.pandia.com/sew/327-social-bookmarking.html ). Pandia gives some good general information about what bookmarking is, and then tested about 20 social bookmarking sites and looked for the following criteria:
• “A decent amount of users is necessary. Otherwise the whole social aspect loses relevance.
• The service has to have quite extensive documentation, FAQ and/or help pages, to guide users.
• More advanced users will want good import and export possibilities. Import is necessary for bringing old bookmarks from your browser or from another online bookmarking service, export is important for backup copies and to ensure that your bookmarks can go with you to another service if you decide to switch.
• A good bookmarking service should have feeds (RSS and/or Atom) of tags or groups of tags.
• I would want my bookmarking service to have a blog so I can be kept up to date about new features, bugs, bug fixes and more.
All the top 5 social bookmarking services in this article comply with these criteria, except for Bluedot which doesn’t have an export option.” (http://www.pandia.com/sew/327-social-bookmarking.html ). Pandia chose LookSmart’s Furl , Netvouz , Del.icio.us , Ma.gnolia , and Bluedot . So there are some good options available for social bookmarking out there.

As I was poking around to learn more about social bookmarking, I stumbled upon another type of social bookmarking services, which are ways that marketers, or “SEO”s (Search Engine Optimizers) can feed sites into your social bookmarking page, to increase traffic to the marketed site. This is a function of social bookmarking I had not anticipated, but it makes sense.. advertising creatively is a hallmark of the internet, and the “American way”. “Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and downloading all toolbars is madness! That's where SocialMarker.com comes in, the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.” From Social Marker (http://www.socialmarker.com/) one of these services.
“Social bookmarking submission has developed into a powerful tool for SEO experts. It involves linking sites within the various forums, blogs and message boards on social networking websites, blog sites and content centric sites like Digg. Considered a better alternative to submitting a website on blogs, manual social bookmarking is a simple, convenient and hassle-free way of making sure that your site is noticed and marketed in the right circle.”(from SubmitEdge, one such service, at : http://www.submitedge.com/social_bookmarking.html)
I had never thought about social bookmarking from a website marketer’s view… sites like del.icio.us are a great place to promote your own site, if you can use tags to get noticed by the users at del.icio.us. What a sneaky way to get your add to the perfect targeted audience… As I’m grappling to understand these services, I’ll make up an example: Pretend I’m a craftsman, making custom high-end furniture and shipping internationally. I own a company called woodsense.com (I made that up). I want interior designers and potential buyers to notice me, so I subscribe to SubmitEdge, who puts my company into a bunch of social bookmarking sites with tags that will attract the buyers I’m looking for. Great options for small business owners- but there must be a down side to social bookmarking services… I’ll look for that next week.

I did it...

I started my own del.icio.us page/site, and put half a dozed favorite sites there. Now I have 2 issues to resolve before I go further:
1. Tagging- it seems if I don't use a consistent labeling system, I'll have trouble retrieving the sites I want to access (just like I lose pdf articles and even student files on my own laptop all the time because I forgot which folder I put them in and what I titled them... will this be any better?). To help answer this question, I read Folksonomies: tidying up tags? and am now going to be more cautious of "sloppy tags"(Guy, 2006). The following tips were especially helpful (as quoted from Guy, 2006):"At the moment, although there are no standard guidelines on good tag selection practices, those in the folksonomy community have offered many ideas. Ways in which tags may be improved are presented frequently on blogs and folksonomy discussion sites. In his article on tag literacy, Ulises Ali Mejias suggests a number of tag selection "best practices" [14]. These include:

* using plurals rather than singulars
* using lower case,
* grouping words using an underscore,
* following tag conventions started by others and
* adding synonyms."

2. My other issue: I have a new annoying toolbar at the top of my screen, taking up valuable space that lists the sites I've recently saved in del.icio.us. I need to figure out how to get rid of it, as my igoogle page will lead my to my bookmarks as well, and I need my monitor space back.
So the new project continues, slowly but surely... All the tips and tricks I've received here have been really helpful- I can't wait for more!

How to bookmark...

To get a better understanding of social bookmarking, I watched a commoncraft video by Lee LeFevre which was very helpful.

It walks through the process of setting up your own social bookmarking page, using del.icio.us. From this video, I could answer Patrick’s question. Bookmarking requires no software- it is a free on line service of Web2.0, similar to this blog site in that way. (To be honest, Patrick, there may be some specific software available to do the same thing, but if so, I haven’t found it yet).

According to Lee LeFevre, the tags are important in order to retrieve the sites when you need them. The example he uses involves a math teacher needing access to algebra sites. So the folksonomy we read about earlier by Bryan Alexander (“Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?”) is pretty clear cut, and easy to re-identify and share (among other math teachers, since they will probably tag sites in similar ways).

This sounds simple and useful, as I have folders full of pdf articles and URLs stored on my computer, and since I don’t label them very well, I still need to search when I need to retrieve some information. The only site mentioned in the commoncraft video is del.icio.us, but I am sure there are others. Because Lee’s videos have worked for me in the past, I’ll go with his suggestion and try it this week. Next week I’ll report how it goes, and look for sites similar to del.icio.us (as well as software, if it exists) and compare them.

Social what?

I've been considering what my next blog topic would be, and have it narrowed down to 2 that, at first glance, seem related: Social Bookmarking and Social Networking. As I explored these applications, I find they are very different, but both interesting.

I'm one of the few people in my world without a on-line social network, unless countless emails, class management systems, and these blogs count. But I don't have a facebook or Myspace page, and know almost nothing about them- I really should learn, just to keep up with my students and my sons.

I also learned of social bookmarking in one of our readings, which seems related (well, it's social and on the web, right?) but very, very different. As I think of how I use the web, I think that a social bookmarking working knowledge could be very helpful. I am starting to collect files of URLs, interesting resources that I may want to return to. I collect folders of pdf articles, too, but they are getting harder to organize and find when I need them. Social bookmarking seems like a good way to keep track of resources, learn of new ones I'd like, and share them without forwarding them in an email all the time. So I'll start investigating social bookmarks in this blog.

I'll start by looking at wikipedia for a definition,so I can figure out where to start. Mehkta's wiki blog must be rubbing off... I start with wikipedia often now!
It says :
"In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine."
This sounds pretty useful for me, and since I need to blog about it, I'll probably learn how to start a bookmarking page of my own, since I learn best by doing, and my blogmates can help me through the process.
If I master this concept, I may move one on to social networking before the end of the semester... fat chance!