electro-textual

i’ve really appreciated the use of tr.im as a “URL-shortening” service. Great when you want to email a very long web address (eg those elluminate sessions).. tr.im was definitely my favourite. But then they joined the ranks of the web2 dead. Because there was no way to “monetise” their service, and twitter wouldn’t buy them, and twitter wouldn’t refer to them.. that was it, they’d had enough.

So here’s a lesson for people who upload their data to all those web2 services: when they shut down, they decided not to let anyone in to get a backup of all the URL’s we’ve sent out. Within a couple of days they had opened their doors again, “overwhelmed by messages of support”. Guess they were feeling lonely and unappreciated as well as insufficiently remunerated.

The lesson remains however.. web2 and cloud computing shares some qualities with our cumulus and cirrus weather friends.. they can dissolve into thin air. You need to back everything up. Keep copies of all your social computing on your own machine as well (if it’s worth keeping that is).

On the other hand, while free hosted web apps (such as flickr, youtube, tr.im, blogger etc) can give you indefinite free access, open source projects leave you more in charge over the long term.. if you have the source code running on your own server, you can keep going even if the company goes down. If the community is strong enough, someone else can take over the code.

i’d be interested to hear what you think about the difference between free hosted web apps and their open source counterparts. Maybe this makes no sense and you’d rather i write about something different? Tell me. Drop me a line here in the comment box  ;-]

Alan Levine started a list of Dearly Departed web2 apps (was it the web2 graveyard?).. but i can’t find it right now.

Relevant Links:

• this good article by Danny Sullivan at search engine land gives an overview, plenty of technical detail and a comparative rating for many of the url-shorteners. Danny’s the man when it comes to search engine background and knowledge.
• tighturl is a bit of open source software you can run on your own server. The drawback is you probably don’t have a short-sized domain name. Or you use their server, which has an alter-site, http://2tu.us/
• How do you know you can trust that shrunk-down URL? There’s a plugin for firefox which expands the shortened.
• Aleene over at microContent wonders how to do the shortening thing manually, using URI redirect (technical!).

photo credit: (creative commons at flickr) Thanks: Hiking Artist.

The other thing people in the blogging world do is link to each other. People wanted to know how they read and then link to each other’s blogs. Of course there’s always a million ways to do any one thing, isn’t there!

You could:

• subscribe via an RSS reader (eg google reader) – more complicated.
• add a “friend connection” (via google friend connect) – easy enough.
• add links in your page via the Layout > Add a Gadget tool – direct on the page.

We went for the 3rd option, “add a Gadget”.. dived in and tried to find one. i chose “Link List”, while Soheir chose “Blog list”. Soheir made the better choice, as her gadget draws in the latest post from each blog, as well as links to the sites. You can see the difference between the two down the right hand side of this blog.

Sue Waters has an explanation of her “blogroll” over at her site. (Sue is a prominent edublogger from WA, and an aquaculture tech educator.)

Ancy, Soheir and Megan all valiantly posted their first blog messages to the world. Well done all three of you !! After nearly 40 minutes of michael talking about this mythical “Web2″ experience.. it was truly time for some hands-on activity.

Interesting to read people’s first impressions of blogging:

• Ancy said she could see they might be useful in some professions for communication,
• Soheir said she would need to explore the tool before deciding if it could be useful,
• Megan’s first impression says the blog wouldn’t measure up to email or the e-learning place, but she’ll take a closer look.

Not only posting their own thoughts, but also adding comments to the others’ sites. This is a crucial part of building community around the blog as a communication tool. Comments really help people to feel valued, and also to foster the discussion.

So many good questions came up:

• What is web2? (Often called web 2.0 or social software)
• What are the risks in posting publicly?
• How do we subscribe to each other’s blogs?
• How exactly is blogging a social activity?

Also new terms (as well as “web2″), such as: blogosphere, edublogger.

You can find notes for the session over on the course wiki, including links to a range of bloggers and some introductory videos. Thanks everyone for joining in !!

kind regards, michael