Impressions Scholarcast

Like many others I have been an enthusiastic user of the Delicious social bookmarking service for several years. At the time of writing I have 1085 bookmarks, but at my bookmark cleaning at the start of this year I cleared out over 400 bookmarks. Thus it would seem I accumulate about 500 bookmarks each year.

I divide my Delicious bookmark collection using individual tags or tag bundles into smaller bookmark caches. In my case each cache is used for a research project, working group, publication (paper, presentation, report) or student class. Others will create caches for consultancies, company and client communication and so on. Each bookmark cache has its own, unchanging URL that can be shared with others such as colleagues, clients, customers, students – hence social bookmarking. A bookmark cache also evolves over time, growing or shrinking as bookmarks come and go.

Efficient use of Delicious is made possible by a Firefox add-on and an IE extension, both produced by the Delicious team. These bolt on browser tools capture the URL and the page title but most importantly make it easy to add a descriptive note and the vital cache tags to each bookmark. Notes and tags with a bookmark make the whole bookmark collection reusable, shareable and valuable.

Assuming you are positioned on a newly discovered page to be added to one of your caches then in matter of seconds you can:

1. Select a sentence of two from the page to become the bookmark note
2. Click the Tag button provided by the Delicious browser tool
3. From the tag list generated from your tags and popular tags click on the tags that define your cache
4. Click the Save button to store the bookmark on Delicious

Here is how this process appears on an example found today:

This process works only if a page/site summary appears on the page. I shout out to all page authors:

Always have a line or two of text summary for your site or page near the top of the home page to make it ultra-convenient for the Delicious browser tools.

The key here is selectable text – so many sites have their summaries as graphic images which is fatal.

Bookmark cache creation and evolution is thus exceedingly simple, but making use of the caches contents is where the benefit lies. Here the tools come to the rescue again by providing a sidebar to access the caches quickly and return to pages in question. The actions are:

1. Click the Bookmarks button to show the sidebar
2. Scroll to the cache, expanding the cache subset (extra tag) if necessary to bring up the bookmarks
3. Click on the required bookmark to retrieve the page

Delicious bookmark caches make the management of bookmarks extremely convenient and I have yet to come across a superior social media tool for this. I know Delicious is in the top 5 of tools I couldn’t live without.

This is just a quick demo of two new WordPress.com features. Publicize allows WordPress to send a customisable tweet about every blog post. When creating a post on WordPress a new Publicize edit box is available so the tweet contents can be edited. As usual I am creating this post in Windows Live Writer so I will be interested to see if the tweet will still be generated. Like many people I have been using Twitterfeed to monitor my blog and generate a suitable tweet. This method leads to delays of up to 30 minutes.

A second notable feature allows the insertion of pictures from PicApp which incorporates advertising into the otherwise freely embeddable images like these social media cushions:

Once again WordPress uses its proprietary embed code and has simply persuaded PicApp to generate the WordPress code for each image.

The ‘Idiom: Here today, gone tomorrow’ page from UsingEnglish.com tells us the definition:

Money, happiness and other desirable things are often here today, gone tomorrow, which means that they don’t last for very long.

As explained by Craig Thomler in his post we now have a ‘desirable thing’ in the form of the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s climate change blog. As with the Digital Economy blog the one on climate change will exist for only 5 days. Comments will be moderated but only during weekday working hours. We will be limited to 300 words per comment; wow, that’s 10 tweets worth, more than enough. But not so fast, unlike tweets we can’t include links to other online materials to support our comment text. Sharpen your quills those words need careful tuning.

Still we have to be grateful and bring to mind another useful idiom ‘mighty oaks from little acorns grow’ which is taken to mean:

Big or great things start very small.

Get those blog comments happening.

This is a post to house the live blog for the barcamp held on Saturday 18 July at the East Brisbane Bowls Club.

The CoverItLive window is available here.

Like others before me I finally got round to downloading the free BookSmart desktop app from the Blurb self-publishing site. As well as the usual book publishing features BookSmart is able to download your blog posts so you can publish them as a book.

BookSmart was able to easily download my blog posts. However I immediately ran into my first disappointment as with one post per page I quickly exceeded the page limit. This meant looking at multiple book volumes, and working out with some difficulty how to delete large numbers of unwanted pages. BookSmart being a Java application suffers from the usual sluggishness of that ilk.

The next big disappointment came on the realisation that all the images in my blog posts are fine for web publishing but well below the high-resolution quality needed for professional publishing. BookSmart provides mechanisms to warn you of this but it required reformatting every page with an image and choosing page templates to properly compose the images and text – a lot of work.

With embedded URLs of no use on the printed page BookSmart does automatically extract the links and include them as footnotes at the end of the post. This was a very useful feature.

Uploading the edited book was also a long and tedious process which failed a couple of times before finally completing successfully. From there the ordering process was quick and easy. I ordered a soft cover edition. To see a preview of the book click on the image below. I made no attempt to add a table of contents or index so it is just a series of blog posts.

The well-packed book arrived within 10 days and I am really impressed with the quality of the soft cover, the paper and the graphics although the latter are on the small side. Although they could easily do so I don’t expect anyone else to order a copy!

Now I have my blog posts for posterity. That leaves open the question of whether this book would ever be accepted as evidence for a doctorate by publication – not in my lifetime I suspect.

The post today from Sue Waters about ‘Are You Getting The Most Out Of Pages On Your Blog?’ contains  good advice about blog page layout and continual auditing to keep the more static parts current. However it made me reflect about blog reading behaviour and my own experience in particular.

As I write I am subscribed to 97 blogs and have ‘read’ 1,270 posts in the last 30 days. So Google Reader informs me. I couldn’t subscribe to so many blogs without the help of such a feed aggregator which shows me only the content of each post contained in the RSS feed. It is the blog post content after all that interests me. There is simply no time to visit the actual blog pages, except perhaps to leave a comment, which in my case is about 1 post in 50 or so.

Professional bloggers and individuals who take pride in their blog pages spend a great deal of time adding supplementary material in the form of dynamic links to blog assets and many other types of widgets and external resources relevant to the blog. None of this no doubt excellent information is visible by default to a feed aggregator. This includes the adverts that many bloggers rely upon to sustain their blogs.

Sadly the supplementary blog material can deter a reader visiting the actual blog site. Switch on Firebug in your Firefox browser and note the download volumes. Visit one of my favourite blogs, Mashable, today and it results in 270 requests and over 2 MB of download for the main page. Sue matches this 2 MB download in only 63 requests. Another favourite, ReadWriteWeb, appears to take much longer to load but results in only 635 KB from 149 requests. Being aware of this blog bloat I have consciously simplified my own blog so it comes in at 240 KB in 39 requests.

Sue and I agree in opposing partial post contents in blog feeds. However with feed aggregators omitting ads it is easy to see why partial feeds are used to tempt readers to visit the actual blogs and be exposed to the those ads. Personally I prefer to have full feeds with small ads inserted in the content which will surface in feed aggregators.

My own advice on supplementary information in blog layouts is thus:

• reduce media and widget content to a minimum
• be aware of those widgets, apparently small in page real estate, that generate large numbers of additional download requests
• concentrate on blog post content and incorporate links, perhaps repeatedly, to other static blog content
• don’t invest significant time in blog page contents that readers using feed aggregators will never see

In my view the era of leisurely flitting from one blog to another, viewing blogrolls and other widgets, is over. Adjust your blog page design and layout to the era of feed aggregators and micro-blogging.