UberNoggin

Dear Scoble,

First, let me say. Robert…Mr. Scoble…you’ve been under a lot of heat lately. I don’t want to add to that. You’ve been extremely graceful while under fire. BUT! Wow, do you miss the mark with your latest Kyte video about the “blog of the future.” Let me tell you why.

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If you don’t have time to watch the video, here’s the lowdown. Scoble says that blogs have become cluttered with ads, widgets, sidebar calendars etc. Lots of elements that take attention away from the central content of the blog. Up to this point I agree with Scoble. Then he goes TOTALLY AWRY!

Scoble suggests a blog interface where all of the sidebar bits (Facebook links, Twitter widgets etc) are relegated to “books” that zoom in and out similar to CoverFlow.

If you’ve never seen Coverflow, it looks like this:

How pretty! How very Iphone! How very useless and against the whole concept of a blog! Who are blogs for? Are they for the blogger or the reader? What Scoble describes is the ultimate personal homepage. I’d love to be able to see all my daily goodies on one easy-to-navigate page but this is not a blog. A blog faces outward to an audience. It should be easy to read, easy to navigate, and the text shouldn’t be buried in some snazzy Flash interface. My blog page isn’t perfect; there’s some junk on it but the purpose behind everything on it is to help the reader, not help me.

I know Scoble is brainstorming here and I think he has some good points but not to apply to blogs. I agree with him about the need for simplicity on the page so the content is featured but that’s about where the agreement stops. A blog should be simple, uncluttered and created solely with the reader/audience in mind.

Is it egotistical to think that readers are really dying to see your Facebook profile so easily? Or that they’re dying to be able to see your Flickr page without leaving your blog? There’s nothing wrong with linking to other iterations of your identity to allow your readers t find out more about you. Doing so contributes to your ethos and your trustworthiness but it should be subtle. Not “in your face.”

Blogs are not personal homepages. If we’re going to redefine how a blog would work best we need to keep two things in mind: 1) easy to write 2) easy to read. That’s it.

Back to the whiteboard, Scoble. Give it another shot.

Sincerely,

Intellagirl

“I caked a bake for the party.”

“Everything he says is a lack of pies!”

“Soooooo, ummm….”

We all do it. We hedge, repeat, and delay when we speak as our brains try to catch up to our mouths. We begin sentences, realize we don’t like where they’re going, stop and start over. We use little words like “Ummm” and “Uhhh” to buy time while speaking. Is it a sign that a speaker is less intelligent or less prepared? Or perhaps a sign that we’re thoughtful with our words so we pause to choose the right ones?

A new book, Umm…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders and What They Mean by Michael Erard unpacks our verbal foibles and reveals lots of interesting insights into how and why we misspeak.

Hear a recent interview with Erard here.

After listening to Erard explain a few of his findings on PRI I started thinking about how computer mediated communication might start to change the way we stumble when we speak and how these stumbles might translate into text communications like IM. We know, and Erard would agree, that people who are eloquent in text might be worse at stumbling because they are more careful with their words and might be more likely to pause or hedge as they choose just the right word as they speak. If we’re becoming a world of typers, ie if our communication is becoming more textual, then will we become more careful speakers?

Not necessarily. If I’m text chatting in Second Life or on Skype, I’m probably using a more casual language that doesn’t require me to spell everything exactly right or use all the $5 words I know. Folks I gchat with aren’t expecting flowery metaphors or assonance in my IMs. But we might be effected in another way. Do we not see these speaking blunders in text because: 1) our hands are not as fast as our mouths and we have more time as we type than we do as we speak, 2) we can backup, delete, and edit our text before we hit the Enter key, 3) or perhaps, these verbal blunders are finding other kinds of expression in a hypermediated world.

Every reply to someone in the wrong chat window? Click “reply all” when you only meant to send your message to one person? Type something into the area chat in SL when you meant to type it into the IM window? Then there are the textual blunders of word confusion like “there” and “their” that you can’t hear when you speak but you can see when you type?

How do you think our verbal blunders are changing in a text-based world? Does your speaking style invade your writing, chatting?

Please note that this is no way a finished idea. I’m sort of mulling this over and expressing it here to get feedback.

Recently a friend asked me why I don’t video blog. She said that she missed the enthusiasm of my face-to-face delivery in my blog. She likes my excitement and thinks that if I video blogged I would be better heard and folks would “know who amazing you are!” This got me thinking. I have a web cam, a good connection etc and certainly videocasting would be quicker than writing because I could just talk through an idea and post it. So why don’t I do it?

Quite simply, I hate the way I look on camera. Is this a stereotypical “girl thing”? I don’t know.  But it got me wondering if, in an increasingly visual culture with high speed connections to make audio and video so much easier, if I’m not holding myself back and if people who are more comfortable with their physical image have an advantage over people like me who are a bit more hesitant (beyond the fact that most of the time I’m at my desk I’m in PJs with bed head. Who wants to get cleaned up to sit at their desk?) So I started looking around at the better trafficked blogs to see if, in fact, posting more videos and pics of oneself results in increased traffic.

It’s certain that lots of prominent bloggers are moving toward including more video and images. But I’m stuck in the “chicken and egg” conundrum wondering if we move toward images when we get busy or when our traffic is so high that we need to spice it up, OR do these folks do more video and pics because of who they are. They’re charismatic and interesting so posting rich media is just an extension of how they express themselves.

So I’m generating questions that I want to try to answer

• Does including video and pics increase blog traffic?
• Do people with better self-image have an advantage in the web 2.0 world when it comes to self-branding and promotion?
• We used to say that the net was the great equalizer because you could express your ideas and get to be known for your brain rather than your credentials or your looks. Is this age over? Is it changing?

What do you think? Have any experiences with self-image and web 2.0? Any good examples of folks who are succeeding using these methods?

This poster was created to advertise a talk I’m giving at Notre Dame in September. It’s the ass-kickingest poster anyone has ever made for one of my talks. I love it!

In other surreal news, I found out yesterday I was nominated for Faculty/Staff Homecoming Queen. Ha!

This pic is from the Masquerade Ball. Thanks to Aline Click for the pic.

Left: AJ Kelton (sorry_afk), me, and Mark “Typewriter” Bell

I just got back from the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC) and I’m absolutely buzzing with big ideas! Don’t stop reading if you’re a SL naysayer. There’s more to this than meets the eye. If you’re at all interested in how Web 2.0 concepts are changing the internet and how we work, socialize, and think you should be paying attention to the SL phenomenon.

I gave a talk about education in SL at the convention and managed to stir up some big ideas from folks I talked to afterwards who have my brain bouncing around to big big things. First, let me point out that SL is very much a web 2.0 space. Let me go back to my 4 traits of web 2.0:

1. Off-site data: Yes. Your avatar, its inventory, and the rest of the SL world lives on remote servers so no matter what machine you’re on when you log in the world looks and works the same.
2. API: Yes. SL is becoming more open by the day but there are already significant API opportunities for porting data in and out of the space.
3. Prosumer: Oh Yes! Everything in SL is user generated. EVERYTHING! You don’t get much more prosumer than that.
4. Social: For sure! SL is people. Without the people who use the platform, who build and create, and who host events SL would be as empty and dead as the press claims it to be.

So what’s the big deal about SL being web 2.0? Integration. There are lots of 2.0 apps that let you pull info from other services you use but none that has such huge potential as SL. I’m on a constant search for a web 2.0 space where all of my other info feeds and social networks are easily integrated and accessed. But for that to be truly practical you need a space where folks are eager to spend their time, a central “space” that people can call home and pull all of their relevant info to them. In my mind, SL has the greatest potential. If I could sit in my house in SL and edit a rich text doc, see friend notices from other systems such as Facebook, listen to music, and peruse my RSS feeds I’d be a very happy girl. So why do all this in an immersive environment? Why not just a mashup website? Because SL offers tools that are not available on the 2D web. I can’t bring easy 3D modeling of ideas, spatial understanding, custom visuals etc into a 2D mashup site but I CAN bring all of the 2D functions into the 3D space (or at least I hope we’ll be able to soon).

SL could be the most powerful virtual global village around. Imagine dragging a headline onto a friend so he could read the same blog you’re looking at. Or even better, dragging the headline onto a wall so you could read it at the same time. I dream of websites that look more like groups of rooms with doors and teleports to other rooms where I can “surf” along with other people who are in the space and we can talk about what we’re seeing and then add those ideas back to the sites we’re visiting together.

Why can’t the future be here faster!?

I love how quickly an idea can pass around the net. From blog to video to IM to microblog…bouncy ideas abound. The latest is Bacn. According to Lifehacker (a blog you should read if you’re not) Bacn is:

“Email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.”

The term came about last week and has already spread across the webosphere. Here are just a few links to follow to learn more:

• The Official Bacn2 Blog
• Bacn on BuzzFeed
• Technorati hits on Bacn
• IJustine’s video of the original Podcamp discussion that spawned the term

Beyond the amazing meme-speed of the internet, there are other important implications of the Bacn fad. First, it’s a symptom of info overload created by “pull.” All of the updates, notices, and feeds that we love and laud as being time savers might just be overwhelming us. I get about 30 emails a day from a couple of mailing lists I’m a member of, about 5 Facebook notices, about 10 Twitter notices, and a few other random updates from Slideshare, Google alerts etc. All in all this adds up to about 80+ emails a day that I don’t have to open but might not want to delete either. We all knew what Bacn was before the meme started because we’ve all shuffled emails into a “read later” folder or somehow marked them to be worth saving but not worth reading right away. It seems we’re working toward a balance between “push” and “pull” that will be important to watch as new kinds of info filtering apps come along.

Second, Bacn is interesting as a phenomenon because once a problem/issue is given a name there are sure to be apps developed to help us all deal with it. I, for one, use labels on my gmail to help me know which emails are vital and which can be shuffled into the “later” pile but I’m sure it won’t be a week before there is a “Bacn filter” or a “KrspyBacn” app to help us stratify bacn into different types. Will there be “Canadian Bacn”, “Turkey Bacn”, “FaknBacn”?

Over and over I have the “Wikipedia encourages careful source evaluation” argument with educators and administrators. Over and over I tell them that we need to teach students that no source is without bias and that all sources (even the holy Britanica) need to be evaluated. But a recent spew of supposed “research” announcements in business has me thinking that it’s not students we need to worry about but journalists and business publishers.

Take this story for example.  Apparently using Facebook at work causes companies BILLIONS! And who did this research? A company that sells filtering software. That’s right. A company whose software is made to help companies block undesirable sites. Is this research or advertising? And why can’t Reuters tell the difference?

Why aren’t companies held to the same high standards as academia. If I were to release the results of a study I would have to mention who my subjects were, how data was gathered and what my personal biases might be related to who funded the study, where the study was conducted etc. Apparently big business is not subject to such rules or expectations. I say we all start peppering the media with insane “research studies.”

Midwestern Researcher Finds ‘Most’ People stop at red lights:  Could cost insurance companies millions$

Indiana resident Sarah Robbins lives at a busy intersection. Over time she noticed accidents in front of her house and began to get curious about their cause. After a few hours of extensive research (read: watching traffic while drinking coffee), Robbins discovered that some cars do not stop when the light turns red. Apparently, says Robbins, some drivers think that yellow means speed up. This results in many cars being in the intersection when the light turns red thus, causing accidents. Robbins estimates that most car accidents result in claims of at least $500 to auto insurance companies (based on a friend of a friend who was in an accident last month). Says Robbins “If this many people cause this many accidents at every stop light in the US, it could cost the auto insurance companies millions!.”

Your turn! What “Oh so obvious” research could you publish?

Not only is it right on but it’s a beautiful interface. Go check it out!

Getting tired of the Learning Management System on your campus? Ever look to see how infrequently your students actually log in to see their assignments etc? Let me tell you, it’s pretty darn infrequently. So why not create a course site on a social network where they already live? Facebook now has several apps that make a near perfect course management system. Use “Courses”, a file sharing app, and a chat app and you’ve got every tool in Blackboard on a site that doesn’t go down, isn’t so bland that it puts you and your students asleep, and actually offers collaborative resources that BB can’t provide (oh and you’re not supporting a company which caters to administrators rather than instructors and students but that’s my personal grudge).

Give it a try and come back to tell us all what you think.