I’ll be at the TIES Technology Leadership Camp tomorrow presenting a full-day session called “Introducing the Read-Write Web: Blogging, Wikis and RSS.” We’re going to explore Bloglines, Furl, del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, PubSub, Blogger.com, Wikipedia, Instiki, podcasting, and who knows what else. (Do you think we’ll get to half of it?)
Category Archives: Blogging
New digs
If you can see this post then my transition to the new Web host is complete. For the record, The Savvy Technology is now hosted at VizaWeb. The hosting plans are very inexpensive and so far, so good. I should now be pretty immune from network outages like Comcast customers in Minnesota experienced recently. Now back to your regular programming.
Podcasting with Audio Hijack Pro
Hugo has found a series of podcasting tutorials published by the creators of Audio Hijack Pro, an all-around great audio tool for the Mac. Making a podcast is on my list of things to do someday, and these tutorials are just in the nick of time.
Blog on the move
I’ve been hosting The Savvy Technologist on my own server in my basement for quite a while now. (Don’t tell Comcast.) But the time has come to move to a new host with a speedier upstream Internet connection. With any luck the transition will go smoothly and no one will notice. *fingers crossed*
The SEAC blog
Few parent communities are more involved with their local schools than the parents of special needs students. Our Special Education Advisory Committee (SEAC) has just started using a blog on our Hopkins server to communicate about upcoming workshops, seminars, camps, and other resources of interest to special needs students and their parents. Like the vast majority of blogs, the conversation is mostly one-sided, but the SEAC bloggers are an enthusiastic bunch, and I suspect that things will get more interactive soon.
This kind of blogging is a great way for a school to engage with its community. The members of the SEAC group are doing all the heavy lifting here. I merely created the blog and gave one of the members a 30-minute WordPress intro.
Science Friday starts podcasting
The old science teacher in me was delighted to discover yesterday that NPR’s Science Friday program has started podcasting its weekly segments. Now if we can only get Fresh Air, This American Life, and the rest of my favorites on board.
Free RSS plug-in for Outlook
Being more of a Mac and Linux guy and a loyal NetNewsWire user, I don’t track the RSS aggregator options for Windows very closely. But if I was stuck using Microsoft Outlook I’d probably use RSS Popper, a free aggregator that plugs into Outlook and makes tracking your favorite blogs as easy as checking your email.
Blogging lunch at the U.
I took some time today to swing by the U. of Minnesota to check out a session on UThink, the U. of MN’s campus-wide blogging project. I posted about UThink recently. Shane Nackerud gave his presentation called “UThink: Blogs at the University of Minnesota Libraries” and it was quite interesting.
UThink was unveiled in April, 2004 and is now the largest academic blogging site in North America with 1,270 blogs, 18,650 posts, and 2,250 individual users. The idea was born in 2003 and Shane published a white paper on the topic that got the ball rolling that September. He talked a bit the hurdles that he had to overcome to get UThink approved. A few University officials and faculty were opposed to the idea initially, expressing concerns about the image of the U. among other things. But in the end, the enthusiasm for the project among the librarians who proposed it overcame the opposition.
The project proposal included a few goals:
- Promote intellectual freedom
- Build communities of interest
- Enhance the traditional academic enterprise
- Retain the cultural memory of the institution
- Change perceptions about the library
At the end of the presentation Shane showed some blogs representing the various types of blogging being done on the system. They have individual blogs, course blogs, and department blogs. Here’s a selection:
- EGAD — Astronomy grad student studying in Israel and writing a lot about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast — Another grad student writing about her dissertation
- Save The General College — An issue blog dedicated to saving the U.’s General College
- Random Thoughts – by Joe — An undergraduate blogging about everday things
- Viking Underground — A fan blog by an adjunct professor in the Pharmacy Dept.
- be silent, my dear — A photoblog.
Interesting session.