learndogpup

LearnDog helps ConnectingUP

Last week LearnDog and the LifeKludger helped out with CISA's ConnectingUP conference.  As you may be aware, David and I gave a talk about blogs and podcasts that was extremely well received.  What you may not realise is that we were busy behind the scenes making sure the conference blogs and podcasts happened.

That's why things have been quiet around my blogs lately - still busy recovering from the effort of capturing heaps of audio, post-production, uploading and releasing as podcasts.

Check the conference site for details (find and subscribe to the conference podcasts if you havent already).

Fang - Mike Seyfang - LearnDog

Technorati Tags: cu06

My PLE - Personal Learning Environment

A few posts back I said I would share some piccies of my Personal Learning Environment (PLE). Well, here they are:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeblogs/search/tags:ple/

Fang - Mike Seyfang - LearnDog

Tune into 'Connecting Up' conference podcasts

LearnDog will feature in and be helping out with podcasts from the Connecting Up Conference next week.  So if you want to know what's going on tune into the podcasts now!

The PodCast feed for the Connecting Up 2006 Conference - Hyatt Regency Adelaide, South Australia, May 1-2 2006 - is up and running.

To subscribe to conference podcasts, tune your 'PodCatcher' software to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/cu06podcast

You can expect to hear a couple of pre-conference interviews with CISA CEO Doug Jacquier, at least two sessions from the conference (maybe more if there is enough demand), and some post-conference discussion.  Monday morning's session 'Connecting and Speaking to Communities using WeBLOGS and PodCasts' by David Wallace and Mike Seyfang and Tuesday's plenary session 'Towards a national strategy for developing the ICT capacity for the nfp sector' will be podcast. Full list of sessions, speakers and other information available from the conference website.

Fang - Mike Seyfang - LearnDog

 

Technorati Tags: , community , net2 , cu06, nten

Daylight Savings in Australia

I just had a very 'LearnDog' experience in my personal life that I can't resist sharing with you all.  After 10years I am beginning to get some serious recognition for my expertise in dealing with the pain of making changes to daylight savings transition dates.  This is really good for my mental health in general and my self-esteem in specific. 

If you want to follow the saga from a human angle, check my personal blog post here.

If you are interested from a technical / historical point of view, check my delicious tags here.

Maybe I should try to write this up as a case-study.  We have all the usual ingredients - publishing a digital artefact as evidence of my work in 1996 (blog entries after the fact), peer review (blog entries from friends / colleagues + coffee conversations) and subject matter expert review (Daniel McPherson and Dean Rosenhein's commentry, boing-boing and other hi profile sites picking the story up).

Fang - Mike Seyfang - LearnDog

The LongTailJewel conversation

UPDATE:

Dave points to a PodCast of us talking about this post.

Forgot to post a link to my flickr picture that started all this:

Last week I helped my buddy Dave the LifeKludger clarify and type up some thoughts for a post that he was having some difficulty with.  Dave was keen to follow up on a conversation  with Hugh Macleod over on gapingvoid.  We spent a bunch of time talking on the phone and decided to record a little podcast of our thinking out loud.  Later in the day (after Dave had re-listened) I did some typing into a writely document so Dave could copy/paste into his post.

I then went away for a nice weekend with no internet connectivity and things went a little crazy!

Now we have a bunch of conversations buzzing around similar themes that I will try to pull together here:

Kent's Second Opinion
Doc's Affirmative Traction
Rick Segal's Expanding the Walled Garden

Hugh's post hilights a three card trick based on 'shirky's law: "equality. fairness. opportunity. pick two'.  After some discussion in the comments that tended to slide toward semantics and definitions, Dave composed his post in an attempt to bring some fresh discussion around what we can do to help those without any voice to find one.  If opportunity means something like fame (or google-juice) in the blogosphere, then Dave and I would pick equality and fairness as our 'two'.

Kent's 'second opinion' idea is a good one (and hey, he took the time to listen to our little podcast) and it seems to resonate (or gain traction) with Doc Searls.  But both seem to have chosen 'opportunity' as one of their two 'cards' - the idea of digging deep into the long tail and bringing interesting (jewels?) to share with the 'rest of us'.  It is the 'rest of us' idea which is central to Ricks 'expanding the walled garden' post that runs counter to the 'equality and fairness' that Dave and I want to promote.

So, I guess my point is that if you have chosen equality and fairness as your two cards, come and join the conversation.  What are some smart things we can do to bring more people into the blogosphere, get them posting and make sure that they find at least one interested subscriber before they stop posting?

Fang - Mike Seyfang - LearnDog

Technorati Tags: longtailjewel , second opinion

Use existing Recognition services where ever possible

While I have not been able to find any explicitly named services, it is clear that we can begin with existing services. For example, a simple blog post by a reviewer that links to a piece of content by a creator.

Track emerging Recognition services

Over time we plan to evolve to more structured representations of recognition and to more explicitly targeted services for both creators and recognizers.

The most likely source of emerging services in the first instance is the work being done by the attentiontrust.org and those contributing to attention.xml.

links: <<<look for prior post on attention >>>

If organizations other than LearnDog start addressing recognition explicitly we want to help them thrive.

Provide Recognition services only if absolutely necessary

Unless someone else does the hard work first LearnDog will need to provide initial (or ‘bootstrap’) instances of new explicit recognition services.

These services will probably evolve, over time, out of existing and emerging work in other areas. For example, the ‘simple blog post’ by a reviewer example given above might evolve to a ‘structured blog post’ and finally to a formal, standards based XML representation of a ‘recognition object’.

Likewise storage and retrieval services will need to embed strong principles of trust (in a similar way to the four principles of attentiontrust.org – property, mobility, economy, transparency)

Use existing Media services wherever possible

Any web based service that lets content creators publish digital works of text, images, audio, video or animation. Services that allow free access outside any ‘walled garden’, preferably via RSS will work best. Any blogging, podcasting services, flickr, google video etc.

Track emerging Media services

Since the cost of storage is very low, many new media services are emerging.

Because bandwidth is still relatively expensive there are very few services that handle sudden spikes in popularity very well. podshow.com promises to be one of the first to address this for audio. There will be more.

Provide media services only if absolutely necessary

Until the cost of bandwidth falls significantly, we may need to find creative ways of providing industrial strength storage and bandwidth to handle sudden growth in popularity of a content creator.

Identity Services (Infrastructure Blueprint 1/3)

RECAP: this is the first of three posts around Infrastructure Blueprint.

See if you can spot a pattern in the way LearnDog wants to hook content creators up with reviewers (or recognizers).

Use existing Identity services wherever possible

- federate to the ‘Top N’ existing identity services. If a person already has a google, yahoo, passport, del.icio.us, edublogs etc account, use their nominated favorite whenever possible.

Track emerging ‘Identity2.0 and Self Identification’ services

as they evolve and use them when it makes sense. Things like Sxip, mIDm etc.

Provide Identity services only if absolutely necessary

Because (too) many Identity services exist we shouldn’t have to provide any.

Infrastructure Blueprint - All part of the Master Plan

If you remember back to the 'Master Plan' series of posts on this blog, you will remember I said there would be more detail in a picture I call the 'Infrastructure Blueprint'. Well here it is, literally straight out of the LearnDog notebook (from 7/9/2005).

And if you wanna be freaked out - revisit the post from Dave the LifeKludger, where he drew an outline of this picture having only glanced at it once!

  Infrastructure Blueprint 
  .

Download LearnDogArchitectureBluePrint.jpg (1851.6K)

LearnDog gets LongTail

LongTailLearnDog-Does My TAIL look LONG in this
Originally uploaded by MikeBlogs.

LearnDog is a Web2.0 kinda hound. Born in the LongTail. Thought the LongTailCampMelbourne was fancy dress. Seen trying on Kangaroo suit.

Artwork by Josh