Notes for JP

For a collaborative blog, I'd suggest either a Blogger or Wordpress blog. Though Blogger is getting tangled up with Google+, for students with Gmail accounts already, the single log-in is advantageous. You could be the blog owner, and students could be contributors (co-authors), or, to ease them in, they could have only commenting privileges that you could moderate. However, screening comments in advance can impede interactions and responses among contributors, especially if you're not monitoring the blog 24/7.

I believe students would have to have Diigo installed on their computers to facilitate cooperative bookmarking of Internet sites. You'd probably want to set up (a) Diigo group(s) for them, with recommended tags. For example, I own a Weblogging in Kumamoto (WinK) group, and have an RSS feed for bookmarks tagged "wink_students" in the sidebar on a writing course blog. However, students don't do the bookmarking for that; other teachers and I do. You and other group members can share annotations and highlights publicly or privately (with particular groups).

With a Diigo group, and student invitees, discussion forums also will be available. So course blogs might be unnecessary, if you go the Diigo route. Carefully threaded discussion posts may be better than flat comment threads on target blog posts. (I'm not sure yet, but Blogger may have begun threading replies to particular comments.)

I hope this responds satisfactorily to most if not all of your recent inquiries. If not, please let me know in (a) comment(s) on this post.

Facebook To Share Users' Home Addresses, Phone Numbers With External Sites

Is Facebook's bark (see update at foot of Bosker's post about Facebook) less worse than its bite?

Facebook To Share Users' Home Addresses, Phone Numbers With External Sites 

Bianca Bosker, HuffPost Reporting;

First Posted: 02/28/11 09:04 PM; 

Updated: 03/ 2/11 08:43 PM

(published with Chrome's BlogThis! extension; labeled and revised after posting)

Another century post slips past

I figured it was time again for a human post when I noticed 300 for potpourri on the dashboard, and the month of February gone by without one. The 3ooth was an automated Diigo bookmarks compilation. Does extending the dashboard metaphor mean I was asleep at the wheel?

No, the three such automated posts last month represent about thirty Diigo bookmarks (February 2011). What with categories, highlights, notations, quotations, and tags as options, not to forget [group sharing,] Diigo-to-blog and -to-Delicious output options and other extensions, I'm beginning to think of Diigo as my micro-blogging engine of choice!

As the chart in the graphic and figures below indicate, total numbers of visitors and countries from which they hail continue on modest upward trends.

2010-10-15 79 2338

2010-11-00 n.d. n.d.

2010-12-15 80 2397

2011-01-00 n.d. n.d.

2011-02-15 81 2444

Sayonara, P2 - WinK Core

As noted on Sayonara, P2 - WinK Core, "a Vox Group acts largely independently of the individual blogs of the members of the Group" (2009.09.05, at 11:11). This bears out in endeavours to capture content from Vox prior to its imminent closure (2010.09.30). Although it has been possible to move posts from Vox directly to TypePad (How to move your Vox blog to TypePad, [n.d.]), and indirectly to a WordPress blog (see: Bloxi, in diagram below), such exports capture only posts by a single [blog's] author [or authors?]. Moreover, as almost all of ... [an individual group member's] WinK Core ... posts were private, they became drafts.

[Note: Various WordPress installations offer different options for direct imports (WordPress.com: Support: Tools: Import). If Vox isn't among your site's options, you'll have to improvise.]

Clay Shirky: How social media can make history | Video on TED.com

Clay Shirky: How social media can make history | Video on TED.com

"TED ideas worth spreading" mesh easily with Blogger. With a single click on the Blogger button below a video display on site, it generated a post with an enclosure link to the video on site (now removed) and the linked text that remains above the video here. Code for embedding the video in this post was just two additional clicks away (Share, then Copy).

Posts from pab's ning t'ing

Today's the last day I can say:

[I'm a member of pab's ning t'ing]

Free access to such Ning networking sites is phasing out as I type. As a matter of fact, I wonder how long the badge (gadget) that I've embedded above will last.

I've grabbed a couple of posts from My Blog on that site as keepsakes:

pab's ning t'ing

a microcosm in a nanosecond 

Tweaking RSS Feeds on Main Page

• Posted by pab on February 21, 2008 at 6:02pm

In order to show enough, but not too much, of the posts coming in through RSS feeds on the Main page, I have tweaked the settings on the various feeds:

1. Blogger blog feeds: Titles only - five per blog

The first couple of Blogger feeds, if not all of them, were coming through in full - with embedded videos and all the rest of the media dragging down page loading insufferably. So I trimmed them back to titles only. Then I increased the number of recent posts showing from three to five to show more a bit more content, and make it slightly easier to distinguish one blog feed from the next.

2. Edublogs and Vox blog feeds: Extended views - three per blog

Since RSS feeds from both of these types of blogs seem to limit themselves to several lines of text, I went ahead with the extended view option for all of them. However, I limited each feed display to the three most recent post, so as not to make it necessarily to scroll virtually endlessly to read down through the entire list of posts.

Arranging RSS Feeds on Main Page: Like Herding Cats?

• Posted by pab on February 21, 2008 at 5:00pm

Arranging RSS feeds in the Main page today has taken much more time here in Ning than it does on any page in Pageflakes. That is mainly because when you go to Manage - Features in Ning, you cannot see any content in the modular elements, or edit the titles on them to make them readily identifiable. Moreover, you cannot rearrange the elements directly in Ning page view like you can in Pageflakes.

The Main Page of pab's ning t'ing now contains nine RSS feeds, three from each of three educators in the Weblogging in Kumamoto (WinK) community. I've organized those nine feeds alphabetically: first by authors' family names (unlisted), then by blog titles. I reckon the list will stay in that order for a while, at least.

[retrieved 2010.08.20]

Import from WordPress

Using an export file that WordPress generated in XML format (Dashboard: Tools: Export), and an online, WordPress-to-Blogger converter, I successfully imported a small number of posts from a WordPress blog to this one. Directions for importing posts and comments to Blogger are available here:

• How do I import and export blogs on Blogger? (answer=97416)

Since the number of posts I had on that other blog was small, and around half of them were notes about getting up to speed in a WordPress MU installation; rather than to republish them all automatically on this blog, I opted to republish only a select few by hand.

Though user content in the Blogger Help Forum indicated numerous problems (see, for example: query=import+data+Blogger), I encountered no glitches. The crux of the conversion may be file size; according to a warning on the Wordpress2Blogger conversion utility:

• NOTE: This hosted application [that utility] will only allow downloads smaller than 1MB. 

Photobabble: sample talking pictures

Virus Transmission: Test Drive of WriteToMyBlog

This post represents a couple of mail-related security tips that I gleaned from a Microsoft publication (perhaps a Mactopia Newsletter), and mailed to myself as a reminder in August 2004. I'm posting it now to: a) purge mail archives, and b) test drive WriteToMyBlog (TM). [WriteTo... is a web-based word-processing application that appears to have been superseded or supplemented by SourcedFrom (WriteTo... Blog, 2008.11.07).]

* To prevent virus transmission when attaching documents:
o Save & send Word documents as rich text format (rtf) files.
o Save & send Excel documents as comma separated values (csv) files.

* To prevent automatically opening messages which may contain web-based graphics or executable virus files:
o Disable Outlook preview panes in the view menu after selecting each folder (Deleted items, Drafts, Inbox).

(Microsoft, n.p., c. August 2004)

__________

Notes:

The dialog that opens when you click "Publish" in WriteToMyBlog includes the following warning:
Warning! This website has not registered with Google to establish a secure connection for authorization requests. We recommend that you continue the process only if you trust the following destination: http://writetomyblog.com/action/blogs_publish.cgi

The tags you apply get converted to Technorati tags.

...

The layout got buggy after I'd opened and closed the Publish interface; the entire text of the draft post replicated itself in the word processing window.

When I went back to the publishing routine, after closing it once, and reviewing the explanation of Tags, the WriteToMyBlog interface recognized the fact that I was logged in to my Blogger account, but kept returning "500 Internal Server Error" messages:

Error Code: 564-5
Your Google session token may have expired, click back then [logout] and try again.

/////
I've captured what remained in the WriteTo... word processing window (Mozilla Firefox 3.0.8), and continued in NeoOffice.

Did that, but after logging back in to Google via the WriteTo... interface, no blogs or categories showed up A retry, after logging out again, generated the following garbage characters, but still no blogs or categories to select.

è��v ڻ͋rEÐïŒÕ@³##Öå?˜;±Ž¼«ÿ~��ï]ˆ0æÏóºê#$€VâtQõœ#–#x’Nø'#K7¿r áÆŸ#&€+Òàñš {å¾!æU¹5É_@ûÌÙ#§™z#ÿÇ.ÉWH¼¸�î5��?´¢û©ÔÔ†ÁŸ˜‡�EEKú�^��!�ï¿#Ú¹:\Oš÷è4W„ë-zÐ]ˆ0æÏóºê#åžØ•`2Û]ˆ0æÏóºê‰V
‡£½r’âe_ã�¸<ÿ]ˆ0æÏóºêb#Š2(0#­pdŠn¾¹îïÈlaÆû\@æç7…Mña" />

/////
Gut nut: WriteTo... is definitely a non-starter in Firefox! I'm going back to Flock.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Potpourri's first K visitors

A free NeoCounter Visitor Tracker tucked in the sidebar suggests that pab's potpourri has recently had its 1000th visitor. Though that's hardly indicative of a huge presence in any blogspheres, here's what visitor and country of origin numbers look like, over the past eight months:


The image above is an export from a Google Spreadsheet, based on a chart quickly generated in the spreadsheet; it includes no data from September.

Social media: Is there anything but?

August 7, 2008, Chris Brogan listed ebooks that he'd found available for free, and thought looked worth reading to learn about social media. I've made five quick picks from his list of twenty; my fifth pick (his 19th) is actually a journal article:

1. The Zen of Blogging, by Hunter Nutall (2008);
   
2. A Primer in Social Media: Examining the Phenomenon, Its Relevance, Promise and Risks, by Eric Karjaluoto (2008);
3. Effective Internet Presence, by Ted Demopoulos (2008);
• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/
  
4. Introduction to Good Usability, by peterpixel (2008); and
5. How blogs and social media are changing public relations and the way it is practiced, by Wright and Hinson (2008).

I've made one more tentative selection from Chris' updates:

• The Essential Guide to Social Media, by Brian Solis (2008)
  

IBlogged with the Flock Browser

[Notes: What first caught my eye was Siemens' musing about Brogan's list, "In the sense that all media ... require a producer and consumer, doesn't the notion of media have an inherent social trait?" (elearnspace, 2008.08.21). I'd been wondering the same thing with regard to a local course entitled Social Communication, because even though communication may manifest anti-social characteristics, it is fundamentally social.

Though I've only peeked under the covers of a couple of items on my short list, it seems that my choies differ in concentration on marketing from other items and articles Brogan later added to his list. As a subset of social activity, he may be focusing more on the commercial than the educational. (2008.09.08)]