Don't Bother with SEO. Did it Ever Work? [www.cincomsmalltalk.com]
Jeff Jarvis says that as Google makes search more personalized, search engine optimization will be less relevant.
"What does that mean to brands? The world gets confusing once more. But I think it means that true relevance becomes more important than SEO tricks"
James Robertson says it has been irrelevant for awhile.
"Trying to "optimize" for Google (et. al.) is a game whose relevance is vanishing."
I agree, it has always been irrelevant if you were actually providing useful content for your visitors.
I attended the National Science Teachers Association conference here in Boston and saw many wonderful things. One thing that puzzled me was a multitude of vendors selling "clickers" for students to key in a multiple choice response to a question. I asked all those vendors if they had competition from people using mobile phones to do the same thing. They all claimed to have never heard of it.
It struck me as pretty easy to build so when I returned home I, of course, checked the wonderful blog From Toy to Tool and sure enough there is a post about a free (for less then 100 responses) service. Liz, you rock!
We love to use pictures in our blogs. My personal favorite is Flickr creative commons search, but thanks to TechSoup we now have a dozen more places we can look for free images.
http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/page5977.cfm
Clickpass, simplified OpenID [www.clickpass.com]
Clickpass is a new service that helps you manage OpenIDs. Once you signup you can use one click login on sites that support it. By default it will generate a unqiue OpenID address for every site you sign up on, so you are anonymous unless you choose to share your information with that site.
In addition they have developer tools to add Clickpass support to your web site. This looks like a good step to making OpenID easier to use.
Distributed Social Networks [opencontent.org]
David Wiley posts about fully distributing the social network. This basically means empowering blogs or other personal Web sites to make the connections directly, without a centralized service such as Facebook. One of the ideas that makes this work is URLs are people, too.
Standards like OpenID, XFN, and hCard can be used to tie all of this together. The DISO-Project is working on the code to make this happen now. They are starting by building on Wordpress, but any Web platform should be able to support these formats.
George Siemens outlined some concrete steps to get started with connectivism/networked learning.
Number 4 is interesting!
"4. To be networked, resources and conversations need a degree of openness. This is one of the drawbacks of an LMS. Learners need to develop comfort with transparency and see the impact. In a recent course on digital literacies, Peter Tittenberger and I found learners can be uncomfortable with posting thoughts in an open public forum. There is something personal (vulnerable?) about learning that certain individuals prefer to keep "secure". To balance openness and privacy, tools exist, such as ELGG, that allow educators to create mini-networks with greater privacy than the open web."
By default, our MEL product configures ELGG as a closed "walled-garden". We made this decision because the target audience includes the 6-12 grade range. One of ELGG's strengths is access control, allowing users to choose to restrict access even within the school community. MEL creates an ELGG community for each Moodle class so students can set blog posts, files, etc. as visible only to one class, or even just for their teacher.
As part of Solution Grove Blog's facelift, we added links to "share" the content to different social web communities. We already have the standard "Digg" and "del.icio.us" links in most of our client sites and we initially thought of putting this in our own blog. However, while browsing other blogs, I came across a niftier implementation. It's a free script provided by ShareThis. All you have to do is 1) register, 2) customize your "Share This" link using their "button builder", and 3) copy the code to your page or site template.
I signed up for FeedBurner on my own blog hosted at Blogger because it was dead easy to do it through the settings page, but what I didn't realize at the time was that FeedBurner is so much more than just an alternative way of serving up feeds. So after being on Feedburner for a while, I came up with my top 5 reasons why Feedburner rocks.
- Hosting for your feeds. In my earlier blogpost I pointed you to a story on how David Airey lost his domain to crackers; however, he noted in the comments that he did not lose his feed subscribers because he was using Feedburner to serve up his feeds.
- Great stats. Feedburner has detailed stats for feeds, too, just like Analytics from Google.
- Make money. Since being acquired by Google, users can now insert relevant ads into the feeds. If you have as many visitors as subscribers, I'm sure that's a pretty penny. Check the Monetize tab of your Feedburner page.
- Settings galore. Feedburner has a lot and I mean a lot of settings. Customize how your feeds are served to your hearts content and find things that you don't even know were possible with just plain rss feeds. Check out the Optimize and Publicize tabs of your Feedburner page.
- It's Free. No arguments there.
Dave is working on hot wiring Blogger to use FeedBurner as I write this post. Go Dave!!!
10 Blogs You Should Be Reading [halfanhour.blogspot.com]
Stephen Downes presents his personal list of 10 blogs worth reading that did not win an Edublogs award. There looks like some very interesting stuff here.
One example is OU Profiles Facebook application. This allows folks to let others know what Open University courses they are studying. This is a good complement to our Open Learning Search Facbook application that allows users find, then share, open learning content.
In this day and age, people write blogs for many reasons: one, to make money out of it; two, to gain popularity; three, to share their thoughts and ideas about what interests them; four, to tell their story, like what you do in a personal journal; or five, as a hobby, to simply destress themselves by expressing their hearts out.
It's interesting the way different people write about different things on the Web. Coming across some very insightful blogs and comments, I realized blogging can also be a way to learn and connect with people. I'm not a blogger myself, though I used to have my personal journal in my teenage years, but learning about some blogging tips, I thought it can be interesting if you only put your heart into it.
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