Impressions Scholarcast

Following the spirit of Peta’s example these are the first sentences of the last post for each month in this blog:

Thanks again to Fred Stutzman for his blog post alerting us to the release of a large collection of books on digital media and learning from MIT Press. After a free registration process all chapters of the books are available for download in PDF. The MIT Press site also generates the citation metadata in a variety of formats including EndNote.

This is a real overload of reading for the festive season!

I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Udell in his recent post, ‘Professional Services for Professional Blogs‘. Since my serious blogging debut in January 2006 I have striven to use this blog as a professional diary recording various aspects of my professional, and very occasionally, my personal life as it affects my work.

In the beginning I hosted WordPress myself, and WordPress has excellent features as a blogging engine per se. Eventually I found having to upgrade every couple of months or so tedious and somewhat nerve-wracking. Would I lose my precious posts in the next upgrade?

Therefore, in September 2007 I leveraged the import/export feature of WordPress 2.3 to move my blog to wordpress.com. I was pleasantly surprised that all posts, comments, tags and categories were preserved, but sadly uploaded images and files had to be transferred and re-linked by hand. This was not too tedious for 250 posts, but in another 2-3 years it will become unthinkable.

As Jon highlights we need a better way. A professional blogging engine needs to consider trajectories of decades not just a few months to a year or two. Not only do we need an agreed standard format for storing and transporting complete blog post contents, we need mechanisms to structure post sequences into threads, reports, books and even larger conglomerations.  [I recently introduced the notion of a 'blogknot' which uses a very simple notation to provide forward/backward links between related blog posts. See my example for the Australian Blogoz conference.]

Like Jon and the others he mentions in his post we need an enterprising startup or existing supplier of blogging engines to meet the needs of professional bloggers.

Once again Lee Le Fever has come up in his inimitable style to explain blogging in a 3-minute video. I thoroughly recommend this.

Thanks to Rob Paterson of FASTForward Blog for the heads-up.

I am intrigued to discover the phenomenon of mobile novels or keitai shousetsu in their native Japan where they have become a new publishing media. These novels are not only downloaded at a cost of about $15 to a mobile phone for reading, the authors also use their SMS keyboarding skills to write the novels on their mobiles! Popular mobile novels average 400,000 paid downloads each, often in instalments.

See articles about this in the SMH and Linuxworld and my original source at TechCrunch.

As can be seen from a previous post I have been dabbling with an intriguing new Web 2.0 site called Ask500People. While it is in beta each survey is actually limited to 100 people from all over the world. When you go through the free registration you are able to suggest questions. In Digg-like fashion others can elevate your question and you can elevate questions from others. Once a survey is complete the question with the most votes is selected for the next survey.

I put in a couple of questions. According to an email alert one rose to the top at 3 am our time so I missed voting myself. The results of all survey questions are still available. My results were:

The last 7 voters and their city and country are listed on the right and the distribution of votes is shown on a Google map. A full list of votes can be accessed. Also users can comment on each survey and as you see I received 4 comments.

Incredibly the vote was absolutely evenly split so I can’t use it to influence the Queensland govt