Impressions Scholarcast

I mentioned in my Barcamp Brisbane IV report that we were privileged to have our photos taken by DJ Paine of Studio Promise. DJ has now sent us the high definition versions for free use in any context. In return I am happy to give him a big shoutout.

The barcamp photo collection is available on Flickr at http://bit.ly/barcamp09.

Had I known in advance that DJ would do such a great job in taking these portrati photos I would have worn something more tidy than my Twitter t-shirt!

It goes without saying I enjoyed another dose of digital scholarship (blog post to you and me) from Martin Weller entitled Arguments for social media engagement. Despite Martin being less direct and more subtle than usual he still managed to get my dander up. The topic in question is to what extent if any should academics have a public persona, ie have active blogs, wikis and even publish audio and video on other social networking sites. And no I’m not mad at Martin but at the views of his colleague, Chris. Chris Jones actually who exposed his public persona in a comment on a previous Martin post:

What of the bulk of other academics interested in research and publication? They may move to open access routes for publication but will they want to spend their time in developing a public persona? I am not sure they or I will.

Are we not witnessing these unstoppable trends?

1. Major research funding bodies including national research councils and higher ed institutions are beginning to insist on open access of research publications
2. The granting of research funding is gradually being based on the perceived impact on the wellbeing of the organisation/nation/world
3. Members of the public reading the open access research publications wanting to check up the credentials of the authors; the public includes the paymasters of academics
4. Checking of author credentials by the public will use online search engines, the only avenues available to them
5. Research authors without a readily searchable and accessible public persona will (possibly unfairly) lower their credibility

Chris then goes on:

I am not sure that digital scholarship covers all or even the main aspects of intellectual endeavour. Sometimes it is a lone academic quarrying away obscurely on a narrow point that makes a difference. Some of the dynamics of intellectual life require a position outside of the public gaze.

I cannot see how the scholarly outputs of even an obscure intellectual life when published can be other than digital and inevitably exposed to public gaze.

A digital public persona is part of digital literacy, a necessary life skill going forward even for academics. The days of only academics assessing fellow academics are slowly fading.

This week my confidence in predicting future trends on the web has taken a boost. For several years I have been suggesting that future web browsers will incorporate web servers, making every browser install a potential publisher of web pages and applications. This week we saw this prediction come true when Opera Unite was released in an alpha version.

We know that most versions of Windows for years have incorporated the Microsoft IIS web server which is trivial to switch on. Having to teach with web servers it have been continually frustrating that the default proxy setting at my university has always prevented browsers accessing the local web server at http://localhost. For years I have ranted that this will prevent local web servers sharing information, but no one has listened. Now Opera has vindicated my stance.

Yes I agree that a simple download and install of the free Apache for Windows is a good option for running a web server on every Windows box with other easy to use web server management software available as well. On the other hand we all know that running a web server from home raises the usual problems of domain names, dynamic IP addresses, firewalls, lack of SSL, and user authentication. I actually like the efforts of British company Ultidev that offer an upgrade of the tiny but powerful Cassini web server that solves these problems, and their upcoming HttpVPN product that promises even more. These and other Windows web servers all operate as separate software packages.

Now Opera Unite bundles a web server in the browser itself and solves all the problems listed above in just one 10 MB download – brilliant. Out of the box Opera Unite comes with a few Web 2.0 services in addition to the web server all controlled in the browser Unite panel.

the web server allows you to select a local machine folder to store the pages of your web site –use any web site publishing package to build these pages file sharing allows navigation of a chosen folder hierarchy on your local box and download any file the fridge is a simple sticky note notice board on which you and others can post the media player gives play access to any music folder containing MP3 files photo sharing builds photo albums and simple navigation between pages of photos the lounge is a simple, personal chat service you, your friends and other Opera Unite users can share You can also search and link to similar services offered by other Opera Unite friends and other users.

Overlaid on these services is a simple and consistent authentication mechanism. You basically choose between private services only the local machine user can access, shared services using a password you expose to other users, and public services open to the Internet.

As you would expect of Opera it is possible to create and add in your own services using a combination of XML configuration files, HTML/CSS documents and JavaScript. The developers’ manual shows how easy it is to build a simple blog service for example. No doubt we can expect a huge raft of third-party developed Opera Unite services soon.

I am confident this is the way of the future when every person browsing the web has the possibility, in a very convenient and straightforward way, to publish their own web pages and applications to share with the world.

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.

As usual Kent Anderson at ‘the scholarly kitchen’ is spotting new trends in publishing in a recent blog post. He leads with the recommendation in the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers that print no longer be treated as the default medium. Rather the MLA suggest ‘the medium of publication should be included in each works cited entry’, a fairly major change.

However much more significant in my view is the recommendation about the use of URLs in cited entries. They point to the well-known facts that a URL is likely to rot, ie no longer be functional, over time, and people rarely will actually attempt to actually type a URL into a browser. My feeling is that the latter point is valid but since I and others will more usually be reading an electronic version of every work, clicking on the link will usually work or a simple copy-and-paste will suffice.

The first problem of link rot is the more serious. In detail:

the MLA has ceased to recommend inclusion of URLs in citing Web-based works – unless the instructor requires it or a reader would likely be unable to locate the source otherwise. “Inclusion of URLs has proved to have limited value… for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or a session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors. Readers are now more likely to find resources on the Web by searching for titles and authors’ names than by typing URLs

What the MLA is saying is that if the URL fails people will simply use Google or their favourite search service to search for title or name fragments to locate the cited work. This is something with which I agree and it will force me to think twice about using URLs in citations in future.

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.