I'm a visual person so purely from that perspective my preferred format is the Internet Communications Furl List. The web is a visual medium so that appeals immediately rather than the bland presentation of highlighted blue links.
With Web 2.0 applications in place I also get the added advantage of seeing each link rated, how many discussion entries pertain to each link, members and number of views.
This information is provided by my peers, others who have accessed the information and whose evaluation of that information I can reference immediately. I may disagree with their assessments or their comments. I may agree with some or all. Instantly I am part of an activity that is 'shared' and the solo search I may be engaged in is no longer just a solo search. Instead of just being in task-driven mode I am now taken into an asynchronous interaction with strangers who share a common interest with me.
It's like following a well-trodden track in the sand - someone has gone before me and left their mark. Someone will, no doubt, come after me and walk in my footprints. The process is one of unending engagement.
Web 2.0 has taken the old perception that being online is an insular or anti-social pastime and turned it into a vastly social activity. In cyberspace you are not alone!
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Everyone Has An Opinion
Blogs first came on my radar with all the hoo-haa in the media when Arianna Huffington launched The Huffington Post in 2005. I was fascinated by this apparent group blog and the notion that several people could contribute their thoughts to a constantly updating log that wasn't a website. It was a public airing of individual opinion and I thought that sounded fab!
Around the same time I received an email from my ISP telling me I'd been allocated FREE blog space and since I was already engaged in wonderful, lively, opinionated political and social conversations via email with a friend, I suggested he and I use the offer of the blog space and make our own blog.
We never did because really we had no idea how to create a blog or the time to figure it out - we just totally and excitedly loved the concept of having a dedicated space online in which to sprout our thoughts,opinions and theories about our world and our times.
The motivation would seem to have been then that we would have a forum for our views beyond our one-to-one email exchanges but did we consider if anyone else would be at all interested in what we had to say? Probably not. But I think we thought if Arianna Huffington and her celebrity pals could have their say why couldn't we.... pseudo journalism for the ordinary folk?
The Huffington Post stands out for me as a great example of the rise of the blog. In his article in The Washington Post, July 9 2007, "The Blog That Made It Big", Howard Kurtz makes the following observation:
Read the whole article here.
Around the same time I received an email from my ISP telling me I'd been allocated FREE blog space and since I was already engaged in wonderful, lively, opinionated political and social conversations via email with a friend, I suggested he and I use the offer of the blog space and make our own blog.
We never did because really we had no idea how to create a blog or the time to figure it out - we just totally and excitedly loved the concept of having a dedicated space online in which to sprout our thoughts,opinions and theories about our world and our times.
The motivation would seem to have been then that we would have a forum for our views beyond our one-to-one email exchanges but did we consider if anyone else would be at all interested in what we had to say? Probably not. But I think we thought if Arianna Huffington and her celebrity pals could have their say why couldn't we.... pseudo journalism for the ordinary folk?
The Huffington Post stands out for me as a great example of the rise of the blog. In his article in The Washington Post, July 9 2007, "The Blog That Made It Big", Howard Kurtz makes the following observation:
" ...skeptics dismissed it as a vanity outlet for her [Huffington] and her Hollywood friends. But The Huffington Post has become an undeniable success, its evolution offering a roadmap of what works on the Web."
Read the whole article here.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
HTML I love you ... yes I do!
I am so in love with HTML and myself now it's ridiculous.
As a web publisher but not one of the site's content contributors, the CMS and coding on site has always been an imagined labyrinthine mystery world of gobbledygook for me. When I'm asked to have a 'piece of code' or a tag placed on the site by a third party I send it to an IT wizard person without even looking at it. How the contributors' content appears on the site via the magic of our CMS has always been beyond me.
So I followed the tutorial with great trepidation, I stepped into the forbidden world and - guess what? - it SO makes sense! Now any of you who have been following my blog will know that I have struggled with FTP, Telnet, terminology and technology consistently. But HTML - the scariest of the lot? Pffffft ... I am now officially one of those wizard persons.
Well not quite yet but you get the idea.
It's a very logical sequence of codes. It is not at all difficult to grasp how a coded instruction becomes web content. A big window has opened for me now and I'm going through it with gusto. This is the start of me understanding 'the web' in a very real and practical way.
The hardest part of the task was trying to figure out how to take a screenshot, how to save a screenshot and now I'm about to attempt to post those screenshots (thanks everyone on the BB - what an amazing resource your individual and collective contributions are).
I'm not fancy enough to create my own web page just yet so I'm posting the tutorial exercise to back up my wizard claims.
As a web publisher but not one of the site's content contributors, the CMS and coding on site has always been an imagined labyrinthine mystery world of gobbledygook for me. When I'm asked to have a 'piece of code' or a tag placed on the site by a third party I send it to an IT wizard person without even looking at it. How the contributors' content appears on the site via the magic of our CMS has always been beyond me.
So I followed the tutorial with great trepidation, I stepped into the forbidden world and - guess what? - it SO makes sense! Now any of you who have been following my blog will know that I have struggled with FTP, Telnet, terminology and technology consistently. But HTML - the scariest of the lot? Pffffft ... I am now officially one of those wizard persons.
Well not quite yet but you get the idea.
It's a very logical sequence of codes. It is not at all difficult to grasp how a coded instruction becomes web content. A big window has opened for me now and I'm going through it with gusto. This is the start of me understanding 'the web' in a very real and practical way.
The hardest part of the task was trying to figure out how to take a screenshot, how to save a screenshot and now I'm about to attempt to post those screenshots (thanks everyone on the BB - what an amazing resource your individual and collective contributions are).
I'm not fancy enough to create my own web page just yet so I'm posting the tutorial exercise to back up my wizard claims.
Chat is great!
I'm a yapper so chat gets a big tick from me. Thanks to Bee and Ernest for participating on Skype last Sunday. Together we figured out a few Skype-specific options to enhance the chat experience and being able to watch the little pencils move to indicate who was currently writing a reply meant being able to regulate the flow of the chat between three people a little better than if that visual indicator was absent, I think.
I could see if either and/or both were in the process of writing a response and wait my turn.
The discussion via chat had an intimacy and an immediacy that, for me, felt more like a telephone call or a face to face conversation than email or forum posting. Chat is friendly. I'm a fan!
I could see if either and/or both were in the process of writing a response and wait my turn.
The discussion via chat had an intimacy and an immediacy that, for me, felt more like a telephone call or a face to face conversation than email or forum posting. Chat is friendly. I'm a fan!
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