Policies For This Blog

I suggested recently that there’s a need to define the role(s) of a blog if any meaningful measurements of the effectiveness of a blog are to be carried out.

I’ve therefore published a Blog Policy page on this blog’s Web site which includes a summary of the aims of the blog together with descriptions of policies covering use of the blog.

In brief:

• The contents of the blog should address issues related to the Web, including Web standards, innovative Web developments and best practices in providing Web services.
• The blog will also provide a test bed for experiments and for testing new services and provide access to discussions about the experiment.
• The blog will provide an opportunity for me to ‘think out loud“: i.e. describe speculative ideas, thoughts which may occur to me, etc. which may be of interest to others or for which I would welcome feedback.
• The blog will seek to both disseminate information and encourage discussion and debate.
• The target audience includes Web authors, developers, designers and policy maker and the wider digital library and Web research community, in particular those in the UK higher and further education communities and cultural heritage sectors, together with key players in the international community.
• A set of procedures will be published which will aim to ensure that the blog implements these policies and that the blog is widely accessible, functional and interoperable.
• The writing style, grammar and design of links will seek to make the blog readable.
• Minor changes to blog postings and comments may be made to fix errors.
• Comments which are felt to be spam or are inappropriate will be deleted.
• In exceptional circumstances, postings and comments may be deleted.
• The scope, policies, target audiences and procedures may be subject to change in light of experiences, resource implications or changes in external factors.

Do we need such policies  or is this too bureaucratic?

Metrics For Measuring The Effectiveness Of Blogs

Do We Need Blog Metrics?

The TASI blog recently described how the JISC-funded TASI service had been found to be the top performer among the JISC Advisory Services, based on a JISC-funded Value For Money report.

In light of such surveys we might therefore expect cost-benefit analyses of services such as blogs to be included in similar surveys in the future. And such approaches might also be applied more widely, perhaps with institutions being expected to justify the costs of providing blog services. Indeed institutions would probably be wise in asking themselves such questions before committing themselves to significant expenditure.

What is the Purpose of the Blog?

If you wish to measure the effectiveness of a blog, you’ll need to be clear of the purpose of the blog. A blog may have several purposes, and in a teaching and learning context this might include self-reflection and collaborative working. However I will leave such issues for colleagues at CETIS to address. Instead I’ll focus on use of blogs by the research community and service departments (such as IT services and libraries), which are intended to provide dissemination to and engagement with the user community. Metrics for measuring dissemination and engagement are probably easier to identity than the complex range of activities associated with the learning process - so I’ll start off with the this.

I’m A C-List Blogger

Scott Wilson’s post about the C-List blogger tool was pointed out to me recently so I thought I’d explore this further. I discovered that, like Scott, I am a C-List blogger. So I am entitled to add the tasteful badge to my blog.

OK, I know, the badge is tacky, as is the methodology they use (it’s simply based on the ranking in Technorati). Not only that, but entering the URL of a non-existent blog and you’ll find that it’s classed a a D-list celebrity blog! Proof, I concluded, of the flawed nature of this service - although I then wondered whether this might be a subtle post-modern reflection of a Big Brother celebrity culture in which even Mr 404 can be a minor celebrity!

A Portfolio of Metrics

If a single metric can be flawed, can there be a portfolio of quantifiable statistics which can help identify the effectiveness of a blog? Some possibilities include:

Numbers of visitors: If nobody visits your blog, then it has failed has a dissemination channel. If it has lots of visitors, then it may be working effectively. As with conventional Web usage statistics, this metric isn’t without flaws, but it will have a role to play.

Numbers of posts: If a blog is meant to provide a dissemination function, then the number of posts will provide a measure of this (although clearly this metric is open be abuse!)

Numbers of comments: If a blog is meant to provide a means of engaging with the user community, receiving feedback, etc. then the number of comments can provide an indication of the effectiveness of this aspects of the blog’s role.

Numbers of inward links: As with conventional Web sites, the number of links to the blog can provide an indication of the quality of the content. (It should be noted that this is one of the main features of the rating scheme used by Technorati).

Geographical distribution of users: If a blog is meant to have an impact at a national or international level, then the geographical distribution of the readers will be an indicator to be recorded.

Numbers of feed readers: Unlike conventional Web sites, blogs normally allow their content to be syndicated using RSS or Atom. Since users of RSS readers will not normally be included in the blog site usage statistics, then will be a need to record the numbers of access to the blog’s feed.

Numbers of aggregators: Since a blog’s feed may be harvested once and cached, with subsequent reads accessing the cached content, such usage statistics will not be available to the provider of the original blog. In such circumstances, an analysis of the aggregator services may provide an indication of secondary accesses to the blog.

This is Flawed!

I am aware that these metrics have their limitations. However it is still true that blogs may be successful or be failures, and may provide a valuable return on investment or may be a waste of money. And may organisations will be asking how the effectiveness of blogs can be measured. Indeed I recently came across the International Museum Blog Survey 2007 in which the responses to the question “How do you measure the success of your blog?” were:

• Number of visitors (33 out of 54)
• Geographical spread of blog visitors (15 out of 54)
• Numbers of comments posted to blog per day/week/month (20 out of 54)
• Quality/relevance of comments (27 out of 54)
• Number of links to blog from other sites (25 out of 54)
• Number of media mentions (10 out of 54)

We will need metrics, I suggest. We will therefore need to collect the statistics and the qualitative data. But we will also need to ensure that the limitations of such approaches and well-understood and the potential dangers of  wasting time and effort in collecting flawed data. Perhaps most importantly, though, will be the need to develop more sophisticated approaches for measuring the effectiveness of blog services.

Theme of the Week: Evaluation of Blogs

This week I thought I’d give some thoughts on the evaluation of the effectiveness of blogs .

The song which accompanies this theme is “Push To Test” by J. Scott Bergman (and note that I’ve tweaked the layout of the sidebar widget to one that it suitable for use in the sidebar.

Note for readers using an RSS viewer or an blog aggregator, the song is available in the sidebar on the blog web site.

Meebo - A Follow-Up

I recently described my experiments with the Meebo chat widget. I’ve just had a chat with one of my blog readers (at 3 pm on Thursday, 25 January 2007).

I’m including, with permission, an (unedited) transcript of the chat I had (with Anna Hvass e-librarian at Teesside University Library) and a link to Teesside University Library’s chat service.

[15:03] anna: Hi Brian - do you have time for a quick chat?
[15:03] lisbk: Fine.. Who’s that?
[15:04] anna: Anna Hvass e-librarian at Teesside University Library
[15:04] lisbk: Hi. Where you at the MLA-NE do?
[15:05] anna: Was at your presentation on web 2.0
[15:05] lisbk:
[15:05] anna: lol - yep
[15:05] lisbk: Fire away
[15:06] anna: Was just looking at your post about meebo and wanted to share that we are using it for Chat Reference, and we just recently put a meebome widget on too
[15:06] anna: http://www.tees.ac.uk/depts/lis/chat/default.cfm
[15:07] anna: you mention using it that way so though I would share that we are - its going well slow at the moment but hope to advertise….
[15:09] lisbk: Thanks for that info.
[15:10] lisbk: Just looked at your page
[15:10] lisbk: Roddy McLeod had a similar interest
[15:10] lisbk: BTW do you keep a record of the chats?
[15:11] anna: yep - so that we can have a look back and see how we are doing
[15:11] lisbk: That’s great. Thanks for sharing that with me ….
[15:11] lisbk: Would you mind if I published this discussion?
[15:12] anna: your welcome - no that would be fine
[15:12] lisbk: Ta. And would you mind it I linked to your http://www.tees.ac.uk/depts/lis/chat/default.cfm page
[15:12] anna: nope thats fine too - its all advertising
[15:13] anna: Im all for helping people find out how to use these free services to make the best service possible for our users

I suspect that if I hadn’t provided the chat tool, Anna would not have got in touch to let me know about the developments at Teesside Something she confirmed in an email message). So for me, the Meebo experiment is proving useful in this respect.

Experiments With Meebo

I mentioned previously that I’d installed the Meebo sidebar widget in order to experiment in providing a real-time chat facility on this blog. I’ve now made use of it and can report on the findings.

In order to use Meebo I need to go to the Meebo Web site and log in. This provides me with a Web-based client for accessing a variety of instant messaging services, such as MSN and Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, etc. It addition it provides me with an environment for talking to readers of this blog’s Web site. Interestingly the first think I notice in my Meebo window in my Web browser is a list of the current viewers of the blog, as illustrated. However as I just see a random user name I don’t know who the users are (although I guess I could type in “Boo!” - which might cause readers to jump).

Normally a reader of my blog would type something in to the Meebo sidebar widget, which would case my PC to beep, and the Meebo window task bar to flash, indicating that I’d received a message. I can then chat to the remote users (and if they’ve given their name, I’ll know whom I’m chatting with - as long as they’ve been honest, of course).

My first experiment was with Phil Wilson, a colleague at the University of Bath. Phil pointed out some of the usability problems with the small sidebar widget. Our discussion, which is illustrated, then moved on to talk about some of the possible dangers in using third party messaging tools (how do we know the third party isn’t harvesting our content, for example).

The chat with Phil was staged in order to get feedback on his views on the interface. Shortly afterwards I had a discussion with a reader of my blog whom I did not know. As can be seen, the tool can be used to receive user feedback.

The third chat I had was with Roddy MacLeod, a librarian at Heriot-Watt University and editor of the Internet Resources Newsletter. A suggestion which Roddy made
was that a chat service like this could be used to provide an ask-a-library type service. With academic libraries seeming to should greater interests in providing blog services for their user communities, it might be timely to explore use of such a chat service within the content of a library blog.

Unfortunately my discussion with Roddy was abruptly terminated, I suspect due to the Meebo widget:-( There are still issues to be addressed related to use of real-time chat services. As most of the time I won’t be around to respond to queries (and even if I am online, I may be busy with other work) it is not necessarily desirable to have the chat widget available, which most of the time is unsuccessfully attempting to see if I am online. Perhaps, for me, it might be more appropriate for me to provide the chat widget if I am particularly keen on engaging in discussions with blog readers. For a wider blogging service, such as a library service blog, for example, the Meebo widget may prove useful - although I should mention that there are similar tools available, such as Koolim which Steve commented on in response to my initial post on this topic.

Third Party or Institutional Provision of Blogs?

Scott Wilson (a blogging pioneer at CETIS) reviewed his blog using a matrix developed by Lilia Efimova on the personal versus business dimensions to blogging. Lilia has developed a matrix which aims to characterise personal and business use of blogs. She subsequently cited the experiences of Alex Barnett, a blogger at Microsoft, who moved his blog from his work environment to his own server.

What are the implications of this discussion within the higher/further education sector? I’ve suggested previously that an approach to overcoming organisational inertia and conservatism is to seek forgiveness (if things subsequently go wrong) rather than waiting for permission. And setting up a blog on a remote service (such as WordPress, Blogger, etc.) enables this to be done by anyone, with little technical expertise required. The aim of this approach might be to demonstrate the benefits and to be able to justify the effort. Once this has been done there would often be an assumption that the service could be moved to an institutionally hosted service, which can provide a managed, supported environment, with an expectation that the service will be more sustainable.

But are such assumptions valid? Let’s look at the counter-arguments.

Dangers of losing citation rankings; broken links, etc.: If you’ve established a mature, sustainable blog, moving the content to another location would probably mean having to start from scratch in building up citation ranking in tools such as Technorati.

In the top 300,000 blogs!

Technical complexities in migration.: How easy is it to export the contents of a blog and import into a new system? Will links continue to work? Will embedded object continue to work?

Staff and students who are at the institution for a short period: Mature students and short term visitors to an institution may have little to gain from setting up a blog on an institutional server (unless the blog is intended for use directly related to the work or study activity). This might also apply to staff appointed on short term contracts. We can see parallels here with decisions regarding the selection of an institutional or a third party (such as GMail) email address.

Losing one’s community: Established bloggers who make use of a community-focussed blogging or social networking environment, may not wish to lose their community.

Losing functionality: Established bloggers may not wish to lose functionality they find useful in their blogging environment (although they may wish to migrate if the institution provides a blogging environment with richer functionality).

Policies on content: This is the area which relates directly to my introduction to this posting. Will there be problems if blog postings cover both professional and personal interests? What will happen if a posting does not comply with the party line? What will happen if criticisms are made of the organisation (the university administration, the IT services department, the Library, etc)? What will happen if blog posting include swear words?

A minority of users are likely to follow the example described above and host their own server (although this may be the preferred option such for bloggers with the expertise to manage their own server, such as Phil Wilson, a colleague of mine at Bath University). However the option for most users will be whether to use an institutional blogging service or a third party service. I don’t think there is a best solution. Rather I feel this is an area in which we’ll have to observe patterns of usage, and ensure that we can be flexible if an institutional blogging is not used to the extent envisaged. This may be due to a reluctance to engage in blogging activities, but equally it could be be a result of decisions by bloggers to have the flexibility which may be provided by a neutral service provider.

Technorai tags: blogs

A Team Or An Individual’s Blog?

If you are thinking about providing a blog service for your project, your department or your service should you set up a team blog or should the information be provided by an individual or group of individuals, each with the own blog?

If the blog is intended for formal announcements or as a news service, then possibly an anonymous blog would be sensible. Similarly if the task of creating content is to shared across a group, then a team blog would seem desirable.

However a team blog may lack a ‘voice’ or personality and can be difficult to maintain a dialogue and ongoing discussions with the readers of a blog if there are multiple authors. Also asking all team members of a group contribute to a blog could well be counter-productive as writing a blog is not necessarily a skills that everyone will have or will feel comfortable with.

The approach taken at the JISC-CETIS service is to provide a blog environment for CETIS team members to use in ways which reflects their personal preferences and also the areas of work they are involved in and the needs and preferences related to those areas of work. In addition postings which are felt to be of wider interest can be aggregated by the CETIS editor.

Another approach to the aggregation of postings from a number of individual blogs would be to make use of a blog aggregation service, such as Planet, which enables individuals to blog according to their own preferences and for their particular target audience, whilst allowing readers to subscribe to either an individual’s blog or the service’s aggregated blog.

A sensible compromise?

SiteMeter Added To Blog

Something I should have done when I launched this blog was to add a stats counter. I’ve now added a Sitemeter stats counter - and you can view the statistics.

Note that as I can’t include JavaScript code in the hosted version of WordPress, I can’t get details such as referrer fields or on client-side details (colour depth, browser plugins, etc.).

One feature of SiteMeter which I hadn’t noticed before was the mashup showing the location of visitors to the blog (or, more correctly, the location of where a clever piece of software thinks the visitor’s PC is located).

Having an additional usage counter will enable comparisons to be made with the usage statistics provided by WordPress - and will enable visitors to see the statistics, too.

Note that SiteMeter is a externally hosted service, and there are no formal contractual agreements covering their continued provision of their service. However I’ve been using SiteMeter for several years (I wrote an article about the software in the Exploit Interactive e-journal in October 2000), so I’m hopeful it will continue to be around for some time. This posting, by the way, will provide a record of when the software was installed (I installed the code on Sunday 21 January 2007).

Song Of The Week To Accompany The “Blog” Theme

Song Of the Week

My song of the week is “100,000 Miles” by June Tabor. This will be available during the week. And this week I’ll be continuing last week’s theme of “blogs” for the content of my postings.

The Sonific Sidebar Widget

Puzzled? My continued blog experimentation and discussions continues with a look at another of the sidebar widgets provided in the WordPress.com hosted service -I’ve added the Sonific tool to the blog’s sidebar, as illustrated.

I’ve registered with the Sonific service and chosen a song which can be played using the Sonific widget.

Discussion

Why would one want to add a music-playing widget to a blog’s sidebar? And what are the possible problems and implications in doing this? In particular what are the broader implications which may be relevant to those considering the deployment of a large-scale blogging service? These are some of the issues I’d like to discuss.

From one perspective I could argue that this is my blog, and I can personalise it to reflect my personal preferences, just as I may choose to personalise my desktop with screen savers, etc. And one could argue that a blog which has the voice and opinions of an individual would benefit from allowing readers to gain a better understanding of the personaility behind the blog. For many potential blog authors (and we may see a growth in the numbers of authors if institutional blog services start to be deployed more widely) this may be how many regard their blog space (remember the discussions we had about personal home pages during the mid to late 1990s).

On the other hand this blog is intended as a means to inform, discuss and engage with the Web development community. The deployment of widgets which I may like can possibly cause problems for the intended audience of the blog. For example, the Web interface to the blog may be becoming too cluttered and possibly causing usability problems, particularly for browsers with flawed CSS support and the dependencies on Flash to deliver various application services in the sidecar widgets will not be available to browsers which do not support Flash. And who am I to impose my musical preferences on you, dear reader :-)

There are various responses to such concerns. Readers of this blog who use a dedicated RSS reader and view the blog in an aggregated blog will not have such concerns, as they will only see the contents of this posting (plus any embedded objects) but not the widgets on the blog site. So I could argue that if you just want to access the content or the blog, and possibly add your own preferred application environment, then a personalised and customisable RSS reader such as Netvibes or PageFlakes would satisfy your needs. However, as others have pointed out recently, RSS readers still seem to be not widely used. This blog, which is aimed at the Web development community, may be an exception (there does seem to be a high proportion of access to the RSS feeds). However even which such a specialist community, when posting are referenced by others, readers following such links will arrive at the blog Web site.

Ideally the blog would provide the readers with the option to change their display preferences. I have seen this approach taken in a number of blogs (I had some input into developments to the Auricle blog, which enable PDA users to select an interface suitable for viewing on a device with a small screen). I don’t have the options for doing this in the hosted WordPress.com service as I can’t make use of JavaScript. However maybe this is a non-issue if you install WordPress locally - and perhaps other blogging tools provide the end user with the ability to change their display?

The Wider Issues

If you’ve installed WordPress MU (Multi-User) you’ll have a wide range of WordPress plugins you can install, which will then be available for bloggers to select from when they set up a blog on your service. Which widgets should you provide? Should you install every plugin which may be available (or would this be an administrative nightmare and cause problems for your bloggers in trying to identify what they do)? Should you respond to requests from your blogging community? Should you have a policy on plugins which may not be acceptable? But how might this affect legitimate exerimentation? Or perhaps we should encourage our community(developers in our institutions, JISC development projects and related development bodies) to engage in development work and we provide access to the services provided by such widgets. Perhaps, reflecting on Sonific’s role in providing access to a sound resource, rather than a widget providing access to a single music track selected by me, a widget which provided access to a variety of Podcasts related to the blogs’ subject area, would be useful?

Returning To My Song Of The Week Experiment

And I thought it was difficult choosing my song of the week (should I go for a fashionable contemporary song, a retro song, a gentle classical piece which may be conducive to reading the blog, a more obscure and pretentious piece - or perhaps something I like!).

However use of the Sonific widget is an experiment, aimed at opening a discussion not just on the use and usability of this particular widget but on the more general issues related to a blog administrator’s provision of widget tools.

Your feedback on the specific and general issues are welcomed.

Windows LiveWriter

There was a recent posting on the JISC Involve Blog which commented favourably on the Windows LiveWriter blogging tool. I would agree with this sentiment. Windows LiverWriter is a desktop application which can be used to compose blog posting (if, for example, you are offline). One might expect Microsoft software such as this to be usable only with a Microsoft blog. However this is not the case, and it is very simple to configure the software to post to blogs such as WordPress (as I am doing here), Blogger, LiveJournal, etc.

Such tools sometimes have limitations, such as not being able to make use of the complete set of posting options. I’ve found that Windows LiveWriter allows me to select the categories I have set up for my blog, although it doesn’t seem to allow me to do this with Blogger.

Some time ago I looked at a couple of other desktop blogging tools, but they were restricted to posting to a single blogging application. As I have multiple blogs on different platforms I need something like Windows LiveWriter. I’m happy with it. Can anyone suggest any alternatives?

PS After composing this post, I remembered that some time ago I had installed the Performancing Firefox extension which seems to provide similar functionality to LiveWriter. I’ll try it out and report back on my experiences.

Comment Spam Sent To This Blog

The WordPress.com com blogger service has an automated filter for spam sent to blog comments. I’ve looked at the records for the first time. Akismet has blocked 271 spam comments since the blog was set up (about 11 weeks ago). I’ve checked the records for the last 15 days (after this period, the spam comments are automatically deleted) and found only one legitimate comment which was treated as spam (which I’ve restored).

So thank you, Askimet - this is a very valuable tool. I guess such tools will be needed for all blogs with well-know APIs and which are open to comments. Note that the sofwtare can be installed on a range of blog applications, and there is a discount for education institutions (although it might be expensive for large numbers of blogs).

I don’t think I’ll have time to check through the records looking for legitimate comments, so I think the responsibility will be on anyone commenting, to ensure the posting gets through the spam filter - and to contact me if the comment doesn’t appear. (Note that if you give an email address, the comment should be posted straight away, whereas if you don’t include an email address, I’ll need to manually approve the submission).

What Can We Learn From Facebook?

Background

Before Christmas I received an email from someone wanting advice on social networking services to support a project. Initially I thought I was being asked for my opinions on blogging or wiki applications. However a phone call clarified the requirements, which was advice on the merits of different social networking services such as My Space and Facebook.

I had to confess that I have only limited experience of either of these environments. The question did make me reflect on who should provide such advice within an institution? If such services can be used to support the teaching and learning or research activities in an institution, shouldn’t there be some provision of advice and support? And even if such services are used for social purposes (which, of course, they are) why should that be a factor in ruling out a level of support? After all, email and the Web, in general, is used for social purposes.

Facebook

In light of these musing, I decided I would try out Facebook - and, fortunately, the University of Bath has subscribed to Facebook, with currently 8,685 subscribers from the institution. (Note that, unlike many similar social networks, the institution, rather than an individual, needs to subscribe to the service - and the authentication is based on one’s email address). And a particularly note-worthy feature of Facebook is the integration across networks - there are many examples of friends spanning across universities (possibly friends from school or friends met at inter-collegiate activities, for example).

My profile page is illustrated. This has details of my friends together with a record of the date on which were selected (this struck me as rather cheesy - 9 Jan: “Brian and Pete Cliff are now friends“. And has for the double entendres of “Brian pokes Pete“. Ugh.)

A potentially very useful feature of the Mini-feed page is the ability to import RSS feeds, from blogs, for example.

The two key aspects of Facebook appear to be the network of people (friends) and participation in groups. Facebook users can join existing groups or set up a new group. The list of areas covered by the groups shows that Facebook is focussing on social aspects (with the possible exceptions of Business and Internet & Technology, none of the groupings covers academic disciplines.

Exploring the Internet & Technology section for the Bath network I discovered one use the service provides is to provide a forum for disgruntled users, with one group entitled “We All Hate BUCS” (BUCS being the Bath University Computing Services).

How should departments respond to such criticisms? Clearly it is not possible (not even desirable) to ban such discussions. Rather, I would argue, support services (in particular) may wish to visit Facebook (if their institution has subscribed to the service) and explore what students are talking about.

I would also argue that if students are spending significant amount of time using Facebook, then it is in the instution’s interest to ensure that they are using the service effectively. Perhaps advising students on a course how the RSS feeds related to the course can be embedded in Facebook would be a sensible approach to take.

A Radical Suggestion

Wikipedia has a comprehensive article on Facebook. The article claims that in April 2006 it was claimed that Facebook was making over $1 million per week in advertising revenue. If this is the case, we might ask ourselves whether institutions should spend tax-payer’s money in seeking to develop social networking services as part of an e-learning environment. Wouldn’t it be more cost-effective to explore the possibilities of using services such as Facebook to support e-learning, rather than trying to compete with such a successful and profitable existing service?

Such a suggestion is slightly tongue-in-cheek (Facebook is lacking various features which would be desirable in a system used in a more formal learning context). But if students are making intensive use of Facebook, don’t we have to ask ourselves such questions?

MyBlogLog

I recently added this blog to the MyBlogLog service. From my personalised MyBlogLog page I can access manage the information about my blog and subscribe to other blog services. I’ve subscribed to a number of blogs of interest to me (including Mashable and Read/Write Web).

Why have I done this? For several reasons:

• To provide greater exposure to the contents of my blog.
• To exploring the community aspect of such blog aggregation services.
• To gain a better understanding of the ways in which blog content can be reused and the implications.

We used to think that information should be held in one location. The information could then be managed by the owner, ensuring, for example, that a consistent and approved look-and-feel was provided.

Many people, no doubt, still subscribe to this view. My preference, though, is that access to my information is maximised by allowing it to be reused in a variety of contexts. Some of these contexts may be very specialised; others, however, may be locations where there are many users who, potentially, may benefit from, serendipitously, finding my blog postings.

The statistics page for my MyWebLog account show that on 8^th January, there were 59 views of the blog by 34 readers. This is 34 readers who would probably not have found the blog otherwise, so this has been a useful exercise.

MyWebLog does provide access to statistics, although the free version only gives me access to statistics for the last 7 days and the top 10 visited pages.

My main interest in the service, however, was how it could be used to support the development of a distributed blogging community. What I would like would be for a community blog which aggregated content from a variety of related blogs (e.g. blogs from JISC development projects; blogs from members of institutional Web management teams; blogs from museums; etc.) Obviously I could do this within my personal RSS aggregator - but that would (normally) be available just to me. In some RSS aggregators I could share my feeds (e.g. PageFlakes). However I’m not convinced that this provides the sense of community you get from MyBlogLog, which provides a view of people who have read postings recently. (I’m aware, though, that some people may find this intrusive and an invasion of privacy - so it should be possible to view postings anonymously). As an experiment in this community aspect of MyBlogLog I have switched on the MyBlogLog widget in my sidebar.

Is anyone aware of services which will satisfy my requirements? I’ve noticed that the OSS Watch’s planet OSS Watch provides an RSS aggregation service using the Planet open source software, which provides a’ river of news’ feed reader’. But this doesn’t address the community angle. I do need to ask whether this is likely to be a service which people would find useful. Perhaps we’ll only find out through use.

Why WordPress?

A while ago Roddy MacLeod asked me why I’d chosen the WordPress to host my blog. After having used WordPress for over 10 weeks I ‘m now in a position to give my thoughts on it.

I have to confess that I didn’t carry out a thorough evaluation of the wide range of blogging services. Rather I wanted to use a hosted service (to avoid the inevitable delays in carrying out a evaluation and then having the software installed and tested). I wanted to use a free service, so there would be no costs (in case I decided that the blogging service was flawed or that I wouldn’t have the time or inclination to post consistently). I also wanted to use a mainstream blogging service - one that was widely used and likely to be used by members of my community (so that I could advise others based on my experiences and learn from others).

I looked at (and still use) Blogger and LiveJournal. Blogger was fairly basic (although new subscribers will now get an updated service which provides an AJAX interface). And LiveJournal is more suited to a intdividual’s personal blog (you can choose an icon representing your mood when you post an item).

As TypePad is a subscription service that left WordPress as the service to look at. After about 60 postings over the past 10 weeks, I can say that I am happy with the service. There are a range of attractive looking designs I can choose from and a small number of sidebar widgets I can use (I’m using the text and RSS widgets to include static text and RSS feeds, together with the Meebo widget which provides a realtime chat service). The service also allows me to assign categories to my post - something I think is important and will return to. And as WordPress is a popular service, there are various third party tools which support it.

What I’d really like, though, is to be able to use the WordPress MultiUser service. This is software you need to install locally. This would enable me to embed JavaScript in posts and sidebar widgets. Also a wide range of sidebar widgets are available. I’d particularly like to have the opportunity to explore the extensibility which that would provide.

RSS Readers Used To View This Blog

I commented recently that this blog had received 4,000 visits since it was launched. It should be pointed out that this is (probably) visits to the Web site. The contents of the Web site can, of course, be read without needed to visit this Web site, through use of RSS readers or RSS aggregators.

WordPress provides details of the feed statistics, as shown below.

In addition details of the RSS readers are also available.

From this we can see that the most popular reader is the Web-based Bloglines service. I suspect that the ‘Web browser’ reference refers to RSS readers such as dynamic bookmarks in the latest version of FireFox and Internet Explorer and/or browser based RSS plugins such as Sage, InfoRSS and RSS Ticker. I’m not surprised by the popularity of Netvibes (I use this personalised Web-based RSS aggregator myself). I’ve also used the BlogBridge desktop RSS reader (which Michael Webb has recommended for use at Newport College).

As I write today (12 January 2007) there have been 118 visits to the blog’s Web site and 23 reads of the blog content using a feed reader. I would expect to see the proportion of RSS readers to grow, as greater use is made of the RSS capabilities in FireFox and IE, as more organisations start to provide access to RSS readers and Web-based RSS aggregators provide access to RSS feeds with end users not realising that the content they are viewing comes from an RSS feed. This may well lead to a challenge in writing blog posts which are usable in an environment in which the full content may not be displayed - a topic raised recently by Danny Sullivan in his self-confessed public rant on Google’s failure to provide descriptive titles for their posts.

The other comment I should make is that my blog postings may well have been aggregated elsewhere. I’ve added the RSS feed to my Facebook account, for example. Facebook appears to have cached the contents of my blog - so any views of the contents by Facebook readers will not appear on blog statistics, with the exception (I assume) of a single access by the Facebook aggregator for each article. I guess we can say there are lies, dammned lies and Blog statistics :-)

Blogs - Theme Of The Week

As an ongoing experiment on ways of approaching use of this blog, this week I’ll be publishing articles on the theme of ‘blogs’.

Tomorrow (Tuesday 16 January 2006) I’ll give an update on the statistics for this blog, with a summary of the RSS readers which some users are using to read this blog.

On Wednesday I’ll describe why I chose WordPress to host this blog.

On Thursday I will ask, What Can We Learn From Facebook?

And on Friday I’ll probably talk about offline blog authoring tools, although I might instead review any feedback I’ve received and outline plans for further activities in the support of best practices for blogs within the community.

Shared Approaches to Use of del.icio.us

I commented previously about a number of blogs which have been published by JISC services (and I should have included the CETIS blogs in my summary). I suggested that it would be useful to give some thought to ways in which JISC services (and also JISC-funded projects) could share best practices and explore ways of maximising the impact of their blogging services. This is a topic I’ll return to shortly.

On a related area, looking at the referrer logs for this blog I noticed a couple of visits from a del.icio.us bookmark. Following the link back I found a link from CCuran’s del.icio.us bookmarks. I then noticed that Randy Metcalfe of OSS Watch was included on CCuran’s network. I work closely with Randy (we gave a joint talk on What Does Openness Mean to the Web Manager? at last year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop, and we’ve recently been working on a joint paper on openness)  so I suspected his bookmarked resources would overlap with some of my areas of interest. One of his tags Randy used to bookmark resources which are also of interest to me is “communications_strategy“. His del.icio.us page for this tag is shown below.

Myself and colleagues at UKOLN are looking at further developing our communications and marketing strategy - so Randy’s resources should prove useful to us.

The more general issue of sharing of bookmarks, using services such as del.icio.us, is an area I would like to develop further.  A few months ago I  realised that it would be useful for me to  bookmark  details of  venues I’ve used for events (or venues I have attended) and also good hotels I’ve stayed at.  So I’ve created a tag for recommended hotels (to remind me of the great, privately-run hotel in Edinburgh with free WiFi in bedrooms) and similarly for recommended venues.

With the JISC community many of us have an interest in finding good venues for events - and good hotels to stay in.  So rather than keeping a private copy of such information,  I think that del.icio.us would be a good, simple way of sharing such information.  There will obviously be a need to think about some of the limitations (e.g. the subjectivity of such preferences and concerns that one may be sued if negative comments are given) - but I think the reservations are minor and out-weighed by the benefits.

We’ll need to agree on the tags, I think.  But is this an idea worth pursuing?

Four Thousand Views and Counting

According the the WordPress statistics, today saw the 4,000^th visit to this blog since it was launched at the beginning of November 2006, 10 weeks ago.

On 6^th November I described how I claimed my blog in Technorati, in order to observe how new blogs would be found, without any announcement. On 11 November I reported how this had helped the numbers of visitors leap to over 100.

The mantra that there are lies, dammed lies and Web statistics can also be applied to blogs, of course (although as blog pages are dynamic the usage statistics should not be skewed by cached pages). However it terms of being able to monitor usage, identify impact and evaluate the effeciveness of dissemination strategies, there will probably be a need to collect such statistics. As with general Web usage statistics, however, there will be a need to interpret such statistics carefully - a blog intended for reflective purposes, for example, would not expect to gain as many hits as a blog which aims to provide a news and informational resource to a large community.

I’ll return to the issue of maximising awareness of a blog in a future posting. For now, my advice is ‘claim your blog‘.

IWMW 2007 - Call for Proposals

My colleague Marieke Guy has announced the call for proposals for talks, workshop sessions and other suggestions for this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2007) which will be held at the University of York on 16-18^th July.

I established the IWMW series of workshops back in 1997 and last year, when Marieke took over responsibility as the workshop chair, it celebrated its 10^th anniversary. Last year workshop was successful in attracting the largest ever audience (with almost 200 participants) and, judging by the workshop evaluation, probably the most successful event.

The theme for this year’s event is “Next steps for the Web management community”. The event will explore how we can build on the successes of the first ten years of the institutional Web management community. An innovation that has been introduced this year is the call for proposals for working group session based on collaborative working in areas of interest to the Web management community which may have started prior to the workshop or for which the event aims to provide a starting point for collaborative working which will continue afterwards.

Proposals for talks, workshop and working group sessions should be sent to Marieke by 26^th February.

Technorati Tags: IWMW

Avoiding Broken Links In Blogs

From time to time I come across broken links in blogs. I often find that these are due to errors when pasting URLs into an Insert/edit Link box (you may notice this if you come across links beginning with http://http://www...

I have to admit that I was rather surprised to discover than there don’t appear to be any link checking tools which can be used prior to posting an article in WordPress. In order to minimise the numbers of broken links in my blog, I’ve therefore decided to make use of the Check Page Links FireFox extension, after published posts from now one (if I’m using a PC which has this software installed).

Use of this tool is illustrated below …

… and as can be seen, the tool did spot a broken link in one of my previous postings (which I have now fixed).

And for those occasions when I’m using a computer which doesn’t have this extension, I’ve added a link to a link checking service to my sidebar widgets.

Real Time Chat on my Blog

I have been experimenting with the Meebo chat widget in this blog’s sidebar. The widget, which is illustrated below, provides a realtime chat facility within the blog.

I’ve not yet established a systematic process for making use of this chat facility - or, indeed, had an opportunity to explore its strengths and weaknesses. When I first tried it, in conjunction with the Meebo Web site and the Meebo FireFox plugin, I either missed people who were chatting (as I was looking at the wrong window) or failed to switch off the chat service when I left my office (and note that the image shown above is a simulation of a chat, and not a proper dialogue).

As well as those issues of process, I also need to explore whether this can be a useful services, or will simply be distracting. As part of that process I will carry out a simple experiment. I’ll try to log on to the Meebo service after I post a blog article, if I feel I am in a position to respond to any queries or discussions. And I’ll try to ensure that I log off from the service if I am busy, wish to concentrate or other work or am unavailable.

Perhaps a chat service like this isn’t ideal for a individual’s blog like this (as the individual is likely to be unavailable for significant periods)- but possibly could be more useful as mechanism for engaging in discussions when used in a multi-user blog with several contributors.

Other Blogs By JISC Services

Following my recent comments on the TASI Lightbox blog I noticed an incoming link from the JISC involve blog. A posting giving a number of links to resources contained an announcement of the OSS Watch team blog. The first posting to the blog was made just before Christmas and OSS Watch team members have begun posting to the blog since the start of the new year.

I think we can expect to see greater use of blogging tools across JISC and JISC Services this year, and possibly blogs set up to support JISC-funded development projects.

It might be useful, therefore, to explore some best practises across this development environment, including issues such as selection of software; purposes of the service; policies covering use of such services; interoperability and searching across related blog services; maximising impact and measuring success.

I wonder if much work has been carried out in this area? Have there been, for example, reports and studies on use of blogs across IT development programmes in other countries?

Technorati Tags: JISC

Writing Conventions For This Blog

Is this a Blog or a blog? Am I Blogging or blogging? And is the question “Wiki or wiki?” rather than “Wiki or won’t he?”? After over two months of blogging it’s time for me to start to document policies relating to this blog.

From now on I’ll use the lower case version of the word blog: I’m a blogger who blogs on the UK Web Focus blog (and I’ll avoid the Weblog word which hasn’t really caught on).

The title of blog posting will normally be capitalised (for example see the recent The TASI Blog posting). As WordPress converts uppers case words into lower case - such as http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2007/01/05/the-tasi-blog/ - this avoids URIs having mixed case).

Similarly I’ll use wiki in lower case - e.g. I use the MediaWiki wiki software. I’ll probably avoid using the word in other forms (so although I may be a blogger who blogs at events, I’m not a wikier who will wiki at an event!)

On the subject of writing conventions I always try to ensure that hyperlinked phrases make it clear what is being linked to. For example I would write “I helped to establish the website-info-mgt JISCMail list. A recent posting on the list talked about the First Company Law Amendment Directive.” - the former link goes to the home page of the website-info-mgt JISCMail archive while the latter links directly to the relevant posting (or thread, if I wanted to include a group of postings).

The TASI Blog

I’ve just re-discovered the TASI Lighthouse Blog. TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images) is a JISC-funded advisory service which provides advice on, as its name suggests, best practices related to digital images. TASI is based at ILRT (the Institute for Learning and Research Technology), University of Bristol. During my 10 years at UKOLN I have worked closely with TASI (and other groups in ILRT). TASI were the UKOLN’s initial partners in the JISC-funded QA Focus project.

The TASI Lighthouse Blog has now been running for almost a year and they clearly demonstrated the sustainability of the service, with over 300 postings since it was launched.

The Blog has a nice, friendly interface and the use of categories provides a quick way of finding useful resources. Wouldn’t it be great if other JISC Services followed this example.

Phong - it’s awful, isn’t it?

Lawrie Phipps (now working at the JISC but formerly of the JISC TechDis service) have worked together for several years and have published several peer-reviewed papers in which we have developed a model for addressing Web accessibility issues, which builds on the WAI WCAG approach, but seeks to address some of its limitations.

A while ago Lawrie emailed me the URL of the Phong Web site. He suggested that this would be a good replacement for the Flash King Web site, which we had used on a number of occasions to illustrate some of the problems with Web sites based on Flash (note the Flash King Web site is still available, but the links to the various projects we used in demonstrations are now disabled.)

Confusing? Poor usability, bad for accessibility? Yes. And when you get to a page, the interface is similarly flawed. But, OTOH, might this not be fun as a game? Mind this not be entertaining for children? Might not an interface in which animated links move as you try and chase them be fun for some people?

Or to put it another way, isn’t the goal of universal accessibility a pipe dream? In some cases (e.g. informational resources) this approach may be an appropriate one, but in others, it may result in pleasing solutions being discarded, even if, ironically, particular audiences may prefer them. The Peepo Web site provides an example of a very graphical user interface with interactive features - and this has been designed in this way by Jonathan Chetwynd, an accessibility consultant with an interest in accessibility for people with learning. At a CETIS Accessibility SIG meeting in 2004 he described the Web site as “a portal for people with learning difficulties, who were unable to read“. However commentators have reported that his interests have not been appreciated within WAI.

So if such sites can be accessible, usable and pleasurable to certain groups (I’m not saying Phoing is, BTW) , doesn’t this devalue an automated approach to accessibility checking. What then are the boundaries to automated checking? How should we go about developing or commissioning Web sites for such groups? And when is it legitimate to discard WAI guidelines?