Blob
>the personal blog of david n wallace
[aka Dave the Lifekludger]

Wordcamp to me was the right un-conference at the right time.

At work we’ve been going through some tough stuff after getting near 50% of our budget cut earlier this year. I’ve been re-evaluating everything we do and trying to gaze into the future and direct the IT side of our frail mothership forward. Slash-and -Burn and re-group kinda thing. We’d been through a few ideas and came to wpmu as a platform to drive us forward.

I wanted to get a feel for where we stood with wpmu and alaso take opportunity to plug my programmer colleague, Trent, into some of the WP network/community and give him some exposure to it.

The trip was definitely worth it. I gained some good strategic ideas and clarfied some of my thinking thanks to the sharing of experiences by those attending and those speaking. It was good to see examples of people actually using wordpress in the different ways I’d been thinking we could use it as well.

Trent got enthused about lots of things, microformats being one , and within a few days had implemented them on his own blog. We also tried to pimp the Flickr Manager Plugin for WordPress he’s written, which allows you to upload and manage and include your Flickr photos in your blog posts all from your wordpress – you can find a copy of Flickr Manager v1.0 Plugin v1.0 here.

So, thanks to all who made the camp happen and made us welcome. Look forward to more sharing in the future.

To top it all off I won a door prize of a iPod Nano.

Photos of me at wordcamp:

Trent n I after a hard days wordcamp and walk home in the wind

Back of my head at the panel

Me looking all serious at Chris Burgess at the Non-Profit roundtable 

Me at yet another round table – not so serious this time  (with @cait on my left)

All photos on flickr tagged wcm07

Videos etc over at Eight Black 

Dave

So, I’m in Melbourne for Wordcamp. [melbourne.wordcamp.org]

Nice apartment, fast, fast net access.

See you there if you’re going…if not stay tuned.

UPDATE: The above graph was created by the broadband test Facebook application.

Sometimes I have troubles deciding where something I write fits. I’m torn between this blog or  lifekludger. There’s so much of  me that overlaps both.

So, for those who might read this blog but not the other, there’s something over on my Lifekludger blog I wrote titled “Isolation kills” you might be interested in.

Isolation kills – Lifekludger

Dave

The latest EELS podcast is up. In it we welcome Kent as a new co-host.

EELS 32 – 24th August 2007 – Introducing kent

Interestingly, Chris Carfi, who we had on show #30, has posed a timely post on one of the topics we talk about on the latest show.

From his full post here :

quote from Debra Aho Williamson: “[Display advertising] is the ‘low-hanging fruit’ and the real potential of social networks has yet to be tapped.”

Dave

[tags]chris carfi, eels032, podcast, advertising[/tags]

“And so the chaotic internet suddenly begins to align into constellations of context”.

Back here somewhere in 2005 I was hung up on the concept of context.

Well, it’s recently been surfacing again and I serendipitously came across a clipping I made back in beginning of 2006 as I was thinking about it back then. Somehow it seemed timely.

“CONSTELLATIONS OF CONTEXT FROM CHAOS”

David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto and author of an [then] upcoming book about tagging called Everything is Miscellaneous, explains that when knowledge was imprisoned on paper, it had to be stored in one place, under one address, usually with the one-dimensional Dewey decimal system. But thanks to the internet and tags, knowledge is now freed from the bonds of paper and can be found from many directions: you could discover this page online via any number of Google searches, or through bloggers’ links, or because somebody tagged it under “tagging” or “blather” or both. Then you could use services like Del.icio.us or Technorati.com to find more, now related content filed under those same tags. And so the chaotic internet suddenly begins to align into constellations of context.

[clipped from www.buzzmachine.com
Guardian column: Tagging; Jeff Jarvis
Monday January 2, 2006
The Guardian]

Emphasis added.

More later maybe.
Dave

As a kind of update to my last post here, Doc, in his usual succinctness, hits the silo nail on the head.

Social Silo Liberation Front
…. I, like Dave, am snowed under by too many requests to join competing social silos.
Social groups to which I belong in the physical world do not compete. They do not carry advertising. They do not have business models. They are not gathered so somebody else can make money. Except maybe at work. Maybe.
….
For all their goodness, these “networks” are silly. They are also as temporary and annoying in their competitive isolation as Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL were, back in the day (or the decade). Those things were Net-unfriendly long before their surviving members became Net-native.

Just like in the real-world, people are in many places, we don’t all need to be in the same place to connect and communication flows two ways.

Dave

[via Kent]

[tags]doc searls, kent newsome, facebook, silo, social[/tags]

Here’s my submission of blogs for Kent’s Swivel feeds experiment.

jp rangaswami – confused of calcutta – http://confusedofcalcutta.com
jp is a kind of information hero of mine. something about how he sees things just clicks with me in totally perpendicular ways. he’s the cio of bt global services.

nick hodge – mungenet – http://www.nickhodge.com/blog/
Uncle Nick is a Munge Brother of Mike‘s (and more recently mine). He’s a smart cookie, all round good guy and professional geek at Microsoft…says so on his business card. likes subverting hierarchies (come to think of it, that seems a Munge trait).

hugo ortega – ubertablet blog – http://ubertablet.blogspot.com/
hugo is a tablet freak but more than that he’s a great guy. he’s also the first and rare person who actually lends me gear to test drive and review on lifekludger. and he was the very first guest on the very first show of our podcast for a reason totally not tech related and for which you’ll have to listen to find out.

beth kanter - beth’s blog – http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/
beth is a one woman non profit technology blog phenomenon who loves Cambodian kids. read her, learn from her, support her, hire her!

father bob – father bob maguire – http://www.fatherbob.com.au/
father bob is a often cantankerous, often quipping, 70-something catholic priest with a heart bigger than kent’s home state, gold as the sun and spot on with care attitude – turned new media denizen. bob appears anywhere he can get his message of helping the poor out including an abc radio show, tv, and a podcast on tpn. even if you don’t subscribe, put a tip in his foundation’s paypal account. a buck a week is good.

So there you have it. My reads for Kent’s swivel feed experiment. An eclectic mix. Hope you enjoy something from there.

Dave

Technorati Tags: nick hodge, kent newsome, jp rangaswami, ubertablet, hugo ortega, bethkanter, munge, fbmf, father bob

That’s one of my chief guiding principals. If something does the job, go with it until it doesn’t.

So, turns out there was something I wanted to do on this blog that my ole WordPress v1.5 install wouldn’t support, so I’ve just upgraded it to v2.

It went fairly painless. I disabled plugins, copied the directory over to a backup spot, dumped out the database as a backup and hit the upgrade via Fantastico (I use Bluehost which supports it).

After that it was just a matter of seeing what wasn’t there and filling in the blanks by copy/pasting from backup styles and my heavily modified theme.

There’s a couple little things I’ll need to follow up re sxore comments but generally everything seems to be going fine.

Now, on with the show.

Dave

Kent asks a genuine question on his blog about the popularity of things like Facebook and Myspace.

What is so much better about Facebook (and MySpace and other similar platforms) than an ordinary blog on a popular platform- say WordPress?

Maybe it’s just that the likes of Facebook, Myspace are seen as a ‘place’ to go, a ‘place’ to belong, to identify with, whereas blogs are seen as distributed individual spaces.

I wrote something about my own experiences of that phenomenon back here – neo community.

It’s easier to forge cross connections (technologically and socially) in a place where everyone is in the same bucket. Much of the connecting is done by the blog bucket machine. With individual blog platforms it’s more on the individual to form them. Who was it that said ‘freedom is hard’.

I remember hearing something in a youth leadership meeting that the question “who’s gonna be there” is more important than “what will we do there?”

Maybe that’s true no matter what age we are.

Well, to some.

Maybe some for whom freedom is too hard.

Maybe it’s just that the pull to belong is stronger than we realise and we’ll put up with anything to get it.

Dave

PS: I think the ‘freedom is hard’ bit came from a statement about a book on the state of Iraq.

[tags]facebook, myspace, kent newsome, blogging, social, belonging, freedom[/tags]

Update: Tools and more tips here and here.

Well, I got a signal in the ether from Beth Kanter about Alison Lowndes asking how Ali could best promote the AVIF Volunteers blog to get the message out about her work with children in Kenya.

I’m no A-list blogger but have been pleased about connections my blogging has afforded me. Here’s my tips, for what they’re worth.

I can summarise them as the Four Ps

• Participate
• Plug-in
• Play
• Persist

.Participate
This could be called partake but participate is more fitting because it’s about giving. The first thing I think that anyone seeking in getting something because of blogging is to give to it. Notice I said ‘because’…that’s due to the fact that blogging is about giving, contributing…the fruit of your blogging comes because you share. (due kudos to Doc Searls’ because effect)

Get a reader and read, read, read what others write. Of course you’ll read what interests you, but read widely, assimilate the wisdom of others into your endeavours. Get rss working for you. Set up some searches on keywords about your interests and put the rss in your reader. As you get more advanced, get smart in your reading with filtering using something like Yahoo pipes.

Give your eyeballs to others and you’ll receive eyeballs.

.Plug-in
This is about immersing yourself and your blog in the culture. It’s about making connections.

Connections happen when stories overlap. So share your story openly and find other’s stories that overlap yours. The power of blogs is in their ability to connect and links are the wiring of the connection. So link, a lot. Link to people’s blogs or sites as you speak about them, give them due credit. Use trackbacks. Quotes. Provide a context in why you are using the link.

Be part of the blogging community (network). Look for stories and comment on them. Keep track of your comments. Always answer any comments you may get on your blog or anybody responding to comments you leave. Always respond to email enquiries you get from your blogging.

Better still, write a blog post rather than a comment if it’s a long comment about the article and put it in your context. Look for and write about similarities/differences etc – make sure to link to the post.

Have a consistent sign-off and name you use on comments. Try and make it unique. Build familiarity with that name. Track it with searches plugged into your rss reader.

To promote your blog, promote others.

.Play
Blogging should be enjoyable. This is a creative, digital medium, not a newspaper. The same rules don’t apply. Play with digital tools and toys.

Do mashups and blog about them. Snip bits of audio out you hear that’s relevant and put them on your blog and write about them. Snip up audio and video to convey a point or feeling. If you get an inkling of an idea, pursue it.

Follow your heart and others will too.

.Persevere
This is a building process that happens over time (unless you are a celebrity…don’t get me started)

Above all else, just keep going. Perseverance is 90% of success.

To help, set yourself short term, achievable goals. Like read x posts per week. Post x times in a given time you determine. But in the end, don’t beat yourself up about it if you don’t meet them. Remember point 3!

Know that what you write and give and contribute will last. Notwithstanding any catastrophe, what you write, create will be here indefinitely. There’s something about longevity and the possibilities and opportunities it can bring into the future by its permanence.

Track records bring rewards.

Dave