Presentation for the live Elluminate session for week two of the BGI (Bainbridge Graduate Institute) course "Using the Social Web for Social Change". Topics included Opening Circle, Tagging, Conversation, Collaborative Filtering, Aggregation using Google Reader, Blogs, Blogosphere & Blogsourcing, Blogging Worklife and Blogging Tools

1. Using the
Social Web
for Social Change
Week 2 – Elluminate Session B
September 28, 2009: 7pm PT

2. Week 2: Blogs, RSS & Collaborative
Filtering
Opening Circle
Review of Week 1
Pre-Elluminate checklist
What are we tagging?
Agenda
Conversation
Collaborative Filtering
Aggregation using Google Reader
Other aggregation tools
Blogs, Blogosphere & Blogsourcing
Before you start to blog
Blogging Worklife
Blogging Tools

3. Type a sentence into the
chat window about:
Opening Circle how you are feeling
tonight
a topic you are excited to
learn about this quarter
something you learned
this week
a concern

4. Week 1 – Required Readings
TOPIC: Social Web Shared Language
Allen, Christopher. "Creating Shared Language and Share
Artifacts"
TOPIC: New ways of learning
Wesch, Michael + Students "A Vision of Students Today."
TOPIC: Social Bookmarking
Welsh, Michael + Students "Information R/evolution."
Lamas, Cyprien P. "Seven Things You Should Know About
Social Bookmarking."
Lefever, Lee. "Social Bookmarking in Plain English"
Rheingold, Harold. "A (re)Slice of Life Online, Part
Three: Social Bookmarking."
SinhaA, Rashmi "Social Analysis of Tagging"
TOPIC: Ontology/Taxonomy vs Folksonomy
Shirky, Clay "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links,
and Tags."
Weinburg, David "The New Order of Order.".

5. Week 1 – Suggested Readings
TOPIC: Social Web Shared Language
Allen, Christopher "Tracing the Evolution of Social
Software."
Pinker, Steven "Book Excerpt: Steven Pinker: Words Don't
Mean What They Mean"
TOPIC: Advanced Delicious
Admin "Several Habits of Wildly Success del.icio.us users"
Sohn, Judi "Become a Del.icio.us Power User"
Wong, Jonathan "Top 10 Tagging Best Practices for Anything
Web 2.0"
Beck, Ian "A Singular Question"
TOPIC: Why is Delicious Successful?
Porter, Joshua "The Del.icio.us Lesson."
Mathes, Adam "Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification
and Communication Through Shared Metadata"
Raine, Lee. "Pew Internet Report on Tagging"
TOPIC: Ontology/Taxonomy vs Folksonomy
Merholz, Peter. "Clay Shirky's Viewpoints are Overrated"
Kroski, Ellyssa "The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-
Based Tagging."

6. Week 1 – Activities
ACTIVITY: Social Bookmarking
Use 'Post to Delicious' bookmarklet to bookmark at least 5 links of interest
In Notes field either add [comments] about the bookmark or "quote"
something
Tag your bookmarks
Review your tags, rename those that are not specific enough
ACTIVITY: Collaborative Discovery
Add 'christophera' to your Delicious network, and send at least one bookmark
about yourself
Add your fellow students to your Delicious network.
Send a bookmark to fellow students with the 'for:username' tag.
Look at your Delicious inbox and bookmark items that other students have
forwarded to you, and add your own tags and [commentary] in the notes.
Review your bookmarks that to see who else have bookmarked them
ACTIVITY: Google Reader
Create a Google Reader account, Follow ChristopherA
ACTIVITY: Google Profile
Create a google profile for yourself:
Add your photo to your profile
Add your Google Reader profile to "My Links"
Once your google profile works, add a link to it in Delicious
ACTIVITY: Personal Learning Journal
Now create an Personal Learning Journal in Blogger.
Invite ChristopherA@gmail.com
Try posting for the upcoming Elluminate B session an example, a question, or
suggestion for class discussion.

7. Pre-Elluminate Readings & Media
TOPIC: Blogging & RSS
Blogs in Plain English, by CommonCraft
RSS in Plain English, by Commoncraft
Using Google Reader Screencasts
TOPIC: Collaborative Discovery
Shirky, Clay "It's Not Information Overload.
It's Filter Failure" Web 2.0 Expo
KEYQUOTE: "What we're dealing with
now is not the problem of information
overload, because we're always dealing
(and always have been dealing) with
information overload...Thinking about
information overload isn't accurately
describing the problem; thinking about

8. Pre-Elluminate Activities
ACTIVITY: Personal Learning Journal
If your personal learning journal is private, confirm that you
have set the faculty to be able to read it.
Before the Elluminate session, create a new blog post in
your personal learning journal with one or more of the
following:
List any words or terms that were new to you this week;
look up and write your definition.
Write in one or a few sentences your version of something
important new that you learned last week that is relevant
to the topic of the upcoming Elluminate session.
List two or three websites in your delicious bookmarks
relevant to the
Pose a question from one of your readings that would lead
to fruitful class discussion — a discussion you are prepared
to lead, if called upon.
Your should finish your post at least two hours before the
Elluminate session so that the faculty can read it in
advance.

9. Some comments and questions from Personal
Learning Journals
“How on earth do people keep up with items in their
Reader”
“So if it's not your job to read stuff on the internet, how do
you keep up?”
“Is this just another illustration of humans trying to organize
the chaos and, as a consequence of those efforts, bring about
more chaos?”
“What are the pros and cons of utilizing one's name as the
blog brand versus using a different name/description”
“co-create: The word has taken on a technicolor
kaleidoscope multidimensional shift for me as I reflect on
the key concepts thus far.”
“With all of the information out there will companies and
government be forced to be transparent?”

10. Some comments and questions from Personal
Learning Journals
“What I learned from the reading is no matter what you do be
authentic and passionate, otherwise you are just taking up
unnecessary room in cyber space.”
“One of the major driving forces in my life is joy.”
“As change agents, why are we discounting the millions of
people who haven't embraced technology or managed to keep
up with it?”
“Well we have this power, why aren’t we using it?”
“I've been doing some thinking this week about this online vs.
offline life. Friends and I have had some debate about the value
of a virtual life.”
“I am curious as to what social media will be like in 10 years?”
“True to the spirit of the school, the course is pushing my
personal envelope, and I am enjoying it.”

11. What have we tagged?
There are 20 students:
Tagging 301 new bookmarks in our
network
Average 22 bookmarks per
student, led by Justin
Fenwick, Elyn Hyn & Karen
Goat
Average 39 unique
keywords, led by Justin
Fenwick, Melissa Dingmon,
Mauri Parks & Tomas Amodio
I have 1331 bookmarks, and
3461 unique tags — I
started May 2004

12. What are we tagging?

13. Common Issues
Some use of punctuation, e.g.
Tagging Problems ski_sites, ski_tuninig, ski_services
digital-storytelling, digital.storytelling,
digital_storytelling;
better to use separate
words
Some use of caps
Delicious treats them
separately
Be careful with plurals, e.g. hfc’s
Better singular if any question
Some mgt566sx tags
mea culpa ;-)
May want add a ‘bgimgt’ or
‘bgimba’ tag for all classes

14. Week 2 + Intensive
Lots of reading this week
Some associated with followup on
this Elluminate
Most are Pre-Intensive readings
Light load of activities
Try more with your Personal
Learning Journal
Prepare yourself to think about
blogging after Intensive

15. Joining the I’m going to say this over
and over again:
Conversation
“There is only one way to
manage the future:
Find others to help you!
Join the
Conversation!”

16. Conversation
Above all, the Social Web is all about
conversations:
They are personal and authentic
They are vibrant and emergent
They are two-way — you must listen
then respond
They can’t be controlled or
organized without losing their value

17. Conversation
Five Rules of Conversation
The purpose of conversation People in conversations
is to create and improve don’t repeat the same thing
understanding — not to over and over — they move
“deliver messages” on
Conversations are about
There is no “audience” in listening and talking, not
conversation, only partners announcing
Conversation is live, and
constantly moving and
changing

18. The Cluetrain Manifesto
Markets are conversations
...real people, not numbers—all with a
human voice
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy
...and individuals with blogs are well linked
and can be feared
Networks create a more informed market
...markets are getting smarter, individuals
are connecting
Organizations entering the marketplace
...will be more successful if they
understand conversation

19. Cluetrain Management

20. Conversations on the Social
Web are changing everything!
Conversation
Are you ready?
If you are then:
Visit
Engage
Share

21. Visit
Sign up for Google Reader
The Social Web using your favorite web
browser.

22. Dig Deeper
Use Google BlogSearch &
The Social Web Technorati to find blogs
and news feeds about
subjects you care about.
Add them to Google
Reader, tag them
appropriately for their
topics, (i.e. “colleague” “read-
daily”, “close-first-degree”,
“innovation”, etc.)

23. Investigate
Add the Google Reader
The Social Web Bookmarklet to your
menu bar.
Look on the websites you
already visit for the RSS
icon, add them to
Google Reader.

24. The Social Web
So how do I manage all that
the Social Web has to offer?
I’m overwhelmed now!
Learn to “aggregate” by
using RSS!

25. Optimize your Browsing
by Aggregating

26. Converts links found in twitter feeds into a nicely
Readtwit formatted feed for reading in Google Reader

27. Reads feeds and extracts manipulates and mashes up
Yahoo Pipes RSS content them into a single feed. Useful for
finding useful info amidst very noisy topics.

28. Focus
Learn to be brutal with
The Social Web your reading.
Don’t read anything that
you don’t think is
interesting.
Scan first, then read.
Delete feeds not useful to
you.

29. Don’t read them all — Scan!

30. Blogging
Essential Concepts
Blogs
The Blog Feed
Nature of the Blog
The Blogosphere
The Blog Feed

31. Blogs
What is a “Blog”?
Short for “weblog”
“A frequent and chronological
publication of personal thoughts,
pictures and weblinks”
Frequently updated
Dated entries arranged in reverse
chronological order
e.g. most recent post appear at the
top

32. Blogs
What is a “Blog”?
Content is available in a machine-
parsable format, known as a blog feed
sometimes called XML, RSS or Atom
May be read on a web page, or
though dedicated blog reading
software or online service

33. Kinds of Blogs
Examples of the genre exist on a continuum from
confessional, online diaries to logs tracking specific
topics or activities through links and commentary
Great variety in the quality, content, and ambition
of blogs
October 2008 – over 133 million blogs tracked, vs
57 million blogs in 2006
A blog may have anywhere from a handful to tens
of thousands of daily readers
Don’t assume that the quantity of readers per blog is
that important

34. The Blog as a Medium
Historically, blogs were first published by
individuals, and most blogs still are
thus are often more personal and informal
Blogs are serial and cumulative
thus readers tend to read small amounts at a time,
returning hours, days, or weeks later to read entries
written since their last visit.
Unlike a diary, blogs are open-ended
finishing only when the writer tires of writing

35. Blog as a Narrative Form
Blogs are typically non-fictional
though some are explicitly or implicitly fiction
Most blog entries are shaped as brief,
independent narratives
Some weblogs create a larger frame for the
micro-narratives of individual posts by using a
consistent rule to constrain their structure or
themes
Other weblogs connect frequent but dissimilar
entries by making a larger narrative explicit

36. Other kinds of blogs
Blogs are primarily textual
However, adding photos and graphics can be very powerful
Some blogs are primarily images
the “photoblog”
Some blogs are experimenting with sound
the “audioblog” or “podcast”
The latest are experimenting video
the “videoblog” or “vlog”
However, audio and video blogs suffer
too “immersive”
not “transparent”

37. Arriving at a blog
Readers may start at any point of a weblog
thus seeing the most recent entry first, or arriving at
an older post via a search engine or a link from
another site, often another weblog.
Once at a weblog, readers can read on in various
orders
chronologically, thematically, by following links between
entries or by searching for keywords.

38. The Blogosphere
The “blogosphere” collectively encompasses all
blogs and all their interconnections.
It is the perception that blogs exist together as a
connected community
or as a collection of connected communities
or as a social network
It is also refers all the extended software tools,
machine-parsable data, and services that are
associated with blogs

39. Blog Linking
The blogosphere is make up of links
Most blogs use links generously
allowing readers to follow conversations between
weblogs by following links between entries on related
topics
Backlinks are a particularly powerful form of
linking
either explicitly through trackback or through blog
search engines
Weblogs often include a blogroll
a list of links to other weblogs the author recommends.

40. Blog Feedback
Many blogs allow readers to enter their own
comments to individual posts
More important are posts in other blogs
referring back to originator
Giving credit and proper attribution is important
There is a life cycle of how ideas are passed
around in the blogosphere

41. Blogsourcing
Blogsourcing
Initial Idea is posted to blog

42. Blogsourcing
Blogsourcing
Initial Idea is posted to blog
The idea is discussed, questioned,
debated, and ideated upon by a
networked community through
comments, referrals, and discussions
happening in other areas of the network

43. Blogsourcing
Blogsourcing
Initial Idea is posted to blog
The idea is discussed, questioned,
debated, and ideated upon by a
networked community through
comments, referrals, and discussions
happening in other areas of the network
Initial idea is influenced, evolved and
iterated upon based off surrounding
discussions and extended ideation

44. Blogsourcing
Blogsourcing
Initial Idea is posted to blog
The idea is discussed, questioned,
debated, and ideated upon by a
networked community through
comments, referrals, and discussions
happening in other areas of the network
Initial idea is influenced, evolved and
iterated upon based off surrounding
discussions and extended ideation
This process can be repeated as needed

45. Life Cycle of a Post

46. Life Cycle of a Post

47. The Blog Feed
The Blog Feed
• An XML-based file linked to a blog
• Machine-parsable
• Updated by blog hosting software
• Designed to “syndicate” the blog
• for further distribution on the web
• for search engines
• for blog analysis services
• The XML is structured in number of different
formats.
• RSS 0.9, 1.0 vs Atom vs RSS 2.0
• Labeled as

48. The Blog Feed
Software Enabled by Feed
• The machine-parsable blog feeds were original
intended for news
• Because of the popularity of these feeds, there
are many other services that use them
• Status updates
• Search results
• Links to websites
• Lists of photos
• Presence and attention data
• Other lists
• A“Life Stream” is the sum of an individuals
feeds.

49. My blog “Life With Alacrity”

50. Trackbacks and Trackback URL

51. Another reader blogs

52. Technorati finds others

53. As does Feedster

54. and Google

55. How? Through my RSS link

56. An RSS file using XML

57. Before You Start
Things to do before you start blogging,
essential techniques and skills

58. Before you start blogging
Start with Google Blog Search & Technorati to find
interesting blogs about your field.
Visit the blogs. Find ones that interest you. Comment
when you have something to say.
Establish Google Reader and then feed new posts from
those blogs to it. Use the Reader instead of going to
each site.
Save useful websites in Delicious. Tag them with words
that make sense to you.
Share your Delicious favorites with your network. Get
their favorites. Then visit those sites and add to your
Reader using RSS feeds.

59. Password Management
Have at least two passwords
Create a “non-secure” password for non-financial
websites
Pick a memorable long word or short phrase,
e.g.““amber waves”, “perspicacious”
Shorten it to 7 characters
“ambrwvs”, “prspccus”
Convert a letter other then first to number
O=0, L=1, E=3, S=5 e.g. “ambrwv5” or “pr5pccus”
Use letter from domain name for last char, and
capitalize it
e.g. second o from google “ambrwv5O” or “pr5pccusO”
Same technique but longer word for financial
or use supergenpass bookmarklet

60. Blogging Worklife
Discussion and demonstrations
regarding managing time for a
reasonable worklife while learning and
growing your blog.

61. Building Blog Content
Writing Purposeful Content
consistent with continuity
keyword rich
remember to link and attribute
Your content labels your blog
be careful about names, tags, and keywords
Build upon your body of work
Write timeless content
Blog passionately
Give readers a reason to return
Give readers a reason to blog about your blog

62. Blog on a schedule
When you are beginning, ideally two-three posts
a week
Only one a week needs to be “serious”
At least one a week should be a response to
someone else’s blog

63. Finding Topics
Search through your outbox
Every friday, reuse something you’ve already written
Google Reader
Read through the titles of posts
Look for trends
Star those that you want to read first
Read stars
Add labels
Search Blogs
Look for blogs using your keywords
Comment or Trackback

64. Know your keywords
Make sure every page has the important ones
Make a list for yourself
Look at your competitors
Look at search logs to see which are searched
See which keywords are indexed more
Use noun, adverb, adjective forms if possible
Know the synonyms
Be particularly careful with keywords in titles

65. When to Post
Post just before your readers are ready
Highest traffic is Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday, and
Saturday, between 6am–11am EST
Most comments are Monday,Tuesday & Wednesday,
between 7a–11am EST
Be prepared after
Schedule yourself time to promote
Respond to comments swiftly
Monitor your trackbacks and technorati

66. Blogging Tools
Some tools

67. Google Mail

68. Google Reader

69. Very easy to setup, works with email, has a good
Posterous iPhone app. Not very sophisticated, but is one of the
few to allow you use on your own domain address.

70. Also one of the easiest blogging websites, free and
Tumblr one of few that allows you to use your own domain
address for your blog. Great for photo blogs.

71. Granddaddy free blogging site hosted by Google,
Blogger medium complexity, one of few free sites offering
you to use your domain address

72. Commercial & supported version of the
TypePad
sophisticated Movable Type blogging platform

73. Commercial & supported version of the
WordPress
sophisticated WordPress blogging platform

74. Flickr

75. Flickr Advanced Search for Creative Commons

76. Flickr Search

77. iStockPhoto

78. Feedburner

79. Converse
Find ways to get to know
The Social Web those who know the
most about topics you
care about.
Tell them about yourself,
but never send anything
without personalizing it.
Don’t ask for a mention
in their blog or a link —
instead, you link to them!

80. Network
Discover your social
The Social Web network.
Your friends and colleagues
may already be blogging, or
sharing bookmarks, photos
or other media.
Ask!

81. Network
Grow your network.
The Social Web
Join LinkedIn or Twitter —
enter your profile.
Find colleagues already on
the network.
Be careful, only invite those
that are important to you.
Quality not quantity.

82. Share
Cajole your colleagues
The Social Web into participating.
The more people you
have sharing the
responsibility to read and
engage, the more
effective your network
will be.

83. Share
Get them involved by
The Social Web sharing with them what
you like.

84. Share
... and what you don’t like.
The Social Web

85. Share
Share your experience in
The Social Web learning to use the Social
Web.
Help others over the
hurdles you’ve already
learned how to handle.

86. Share
Share your Passion!
The Social Web

87. Learn
Look for signposts into
The Social Web the future.

88. Act
Use what you’ve learned
The Social Web to make better decisions.

89. Act
The Social Web can give
The Social Web you the prize.

90. Act
...and we can change the
The Social Web world!

91. Questions?
Feedback?
ChristopherA@LifeWithAlacrity.com
NO Elluminate Next Week!
Next is Elluminate Session C
October 12, 2009: 7pm PT