Using a Weblogger at Ricci Street's Gizmos, Inc.Toolkit: PC Workshop

What happens in a library? You remember libraries, those big rooms full of lots of books. You probably remember books, too. Convenient but fairly useless. Ink squirted on dead trees that are so acidic they're slowing burning as you hold them. Long before they burn up, they mildew or you toss them. Their biggest problem is that they can only be in one place at a time. Their next biggest problem is that their production and distribution systems are inefficient and unnecessary. And doomed.

Remember what you did in a library? You found a book or article, copied the citation (publisher, date, etc.) by hand, copied a short quotation by hand, and xeroxed pages that you want to reread. Eventually you had to re-type the citations and quotations and proofread them for errors.

Instead, you can keep a Web log and post it to your web site as you go along. It's the same thing as library research except the Web is much larger and the harvesting process is more accurate, efficient, and useful.

A weblog, or blog, is a regularly updated list of links and commentary to interesting material on the Web. Because the majority are self-published, precise numbers are difficult to gauge. Observers, however, agree that weblogging is growing like never before.

If you want to see what other folks' web logs look like, UberSearch will take your keywords and return only web logs. (Click << Go >> on the left to go to the one you choose.) For example, I entered "copyright" (without the quotation marks) and got hundreds of returns, among them the web log of Dan Bricklin, who "invented" the spreadsheet twenty years ago. By the way, I think that the UberSearch page has a very attractive visual design.

The power of weblogs is that they allow millions of people to easily publish their ideas, and millions more to comment on them. Blogs are a fluid, dynamic medium, more akin to a 'conversation' than to a library — which is how the Web has often been described in the past. With an increasing number of people reading, writing, and commenting on blogs, the way we use the Web is shifting in a fundamental way. Instead of being passive consumers of information, more and more Internet users are becoming active participants. Weblogs let everyone have a voice.

Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs.

Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs

The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months

It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago

On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day

19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created

Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

For senior level technology, media, investors and communications professionals eager to understand the ins and outs of social media. ...

Social media aggregate interaction between people, both in the room and across the internet. We'll show you how your use of social media enters these conversations, is tracked, and others see you and respond to your activities so that you can respond back. In addition to hands-on experience with the fundamental tools of social media, you'll also see first-hand demonstrations of moblogging, video and audio blogging, as well as examples of blogs used for knowledge management applications, a business-customer relationships, and public relations.

In the second half of the session, you'll learn how these components of social media come together into new marketable products.

Traditional publishing creates value in two ways. The first is intrinsic: it takes real work to publish anything in print, and more work to store, ship, and sell it. Because the up-front costs are large, and because each additional copy generates some additional cost, the number of potential publishers is limited to organizations prepared to support these costs. (These are barriers to entry.) And since it's most efficient to distribute those costs over the widest possible audience, big publishers will outperform little ones. (These are economies of scale.) The cost of print insures that there will be a small number of publishers, and of those, the big ones will have a disproportionately large market share.

Weblogs destroy this intrinsic value, because they are a platform for the unlimited reproduction and distribution of the written word, for a low and fixed cost. No barriers to entry, no economies of scale, no limits on supply.

Print publishing also creates extrinsic value, as an indicator of quality. A book's physical presence says "Someone thought this was worth risking money on." Because large-scale print publishing costs so much, anyone who wants to be a published author has to convince a professionally skeptical system to take that risk. You can see how much we rely on this signal of value by reflecting on our attitudes towards vanity press publications.

Weblogs destroy this extrinsic value as well.

A site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects. You will find here lots of examples of business blogs, as well as resources to help you learn more about the topic.

The latest rage is moblogging, pronounced mo-blogging with a long o, as in mobile blogging. You update your blogs while on the move because your phone is now equipped with GPRS, 3G, GPS and CDMA cameras. It's especially effective for snapping a picture of whatever's in front of you and publishing it to the world within moments while you get to go on the prowl for more pictures to take.

What's the latest phenomenon on the Internet? Is it downloading music? No, that's so yesterday. Wireless webcams? Nope, nobody wants to put up with those annoying pop-up ads. How about video-on-demand over broadband? Nah, it still can't beat the television experience.

The latest buzz on the Net stems from the simplest of ideas: Provide the easiest way for people to express themselves. Well, isn't that what homepages are for? Yes, indeed. But most people avoid HTML tags like the plague and have neither the time nor the money to use fancy Web page creation software.

Blogger gives users a Web-based editing template - or, for power users, an FTP-based tool - to publish blogs.

Businesses are starting to use weblogs as powerful tools for knowledge management and communications. ...

Like PCs, instant messaging, and handheld computers, your company's first blogs may well sneak in under the radar of IT, set up by enterprising employees who just want to get something done. This revolution may not be televised, but it will be blogged.

Internet search company Google has agreed to acquire Pyra Labs, the handful of Web developers who helped jump-start the personal publishing phenomenon known as blogging, Pyra's founder said on Sunday. ...

Weblogs, or blogs, are a form of grass-roots online diary publishing that give ordinary people with limited technical knowledge the ability to update personal Web sites. A blog consists of short, frequently updated postings arranged chronologically, highlighting the latest material.

A company's decision whether or not to deploy Weblogs may hinge more on policy than on technical issues related to software deployment. More conservative companies may see Weblogs as too informal and too uncontrolled to justify the risk.

There's a new breed of combat personnel at the war front: soldier "bloggers." ...

The U.S. military has adopted an open stance towards blogging, and to soldiers' access to electronic communications in general.

"All the kids on ships have email. Every single one has an account. It's the main mode of communication today. These kids are sending email two or three times a day," said a retired U.S. military officer.

Skills

Tools

roll your own with a text editor and web page editor

blogware organized, automated software

How-to ...

Harvest information

Blogware

Let the software do it for you. Do web logging, called blogging, in an organized, automated manner, and have your web log always available on a web page. Most use the Blogger publishing system; sites that use Manila, Pitas, and Greymatter are increasingly popular.

Movable Type

A decentralized, web-based personal publishing system designed to ease maintenance of regularly updated news or journal sites, like weblogs.

After you have your blog set up, you can use software like Bloggar to make using it a little easier. I also use Paessler's IE Booster to save time copying and pasting URLs.

Flash Mobs

The craze for "flash mobs" -- where jokers gather en masse at a moment's notice, perform an inane activity and then disperse quickly -- is spreading across Europe.

Arranged via Web sites and e-mails, flash mob members voluntarily and simultaneously converge to the venue mentioned in a general e-mail and then collect detailed instructions for the event. They partake in a silly and harmless activity and then disperse at a given time.

Blogger.com set-up

In this example, Ann Geiger, who has a web at http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/plaza/geiger/ is setting up a blog at Blogger.com that she will give the filename testblog.htm.

She needs to give the server at Blogger.com enough information to know where to FTP her blog entries. Then she will be able to go to Blogger.com and make new entries or updates to her blog without having to FTP.

to begin

Create an account and log in at Blogger.com. You need to create an account only once. Enter a username and password. After that, you need to just log in.

You need to go through steps 1 through 4 below only once for every blog you want to create and host on your own site.

You need to go through steps 1 ande 2 only once for every blog you want to create and host at BlogSpot.com.

After that, you need to just log in, which will display the titles of all the blogs you have created. Click on the title of the blog you want to update.

step 1

If you clicked on create a new blog, you should see this screen. It is a form that asks you for three bits of information that will make your blog unique. Remember that you need to do this only once in order to set up the blog.

If you don't see this screen, you're probably best off opening a new browser and returning to Blogger.com, where you can begin again.

Type in a Title and Description. They will appear on your blog page, so they should be in regular English -- caps and spaces are ok. You can change it all later, so don't obsess on it now.

Public Blog = Yes if you want others to be able to view your blog. No if you want to make it private. For class purposes, you want Yes.

step 2

Host it at BlogSpot

On the next page, give it a name. For both that and your username a couple of pages back, you need to have a name unique to Blogger, so you may have to give it a few tries.

On the next page, pick a template. You can change it all later. You will have to wait a minute while the script does its thing.

On the next page, you should be ready to post and you can stop following these directions.

step 3

This is the geekiest step. In this form, you will tell Blogger.com where to FTP your blog's new entries and edits. If the process gets hopelessly messed up around step 3, try backtracking or re-doing up to step 2 above and choose Host it at BlogSpot. After you mental model is more accurate, you can return here to step 3.

FTP Path = your lastname folder on Ricci Street. Ann wanted this blog in her geiger folder. If she wanted a special folder for her blogs, she could have made a blog/ folder within her gieger folder. Then she would type geiger/blog/ here where you see <your riccistreet folder>/ on the screen shot above.

Blog Filename = your blog file name. To create a blog with the filename testblog.htm, Ann would type testblog.htm where you see <blog filename> on the screen shot above.

Blog URL = the full url to the blog. Not all of what Ann typed appears on the screen shot above. She typed http://www.riccistreet.net/dwares/plaza/geiger/testblog.htm. If your Plaza folder was named nfitzpatrick and your blog was named nickasee.htm and you wanted it in the mba504 folder, you would type http://www.riccistreet.net/dwares/plaza/nfitzpatrick/mba504/nickasee.htm.

step 4

What do you want your blog to look like? At Blogger.com, they call this a template. Later, you can change it completely. For now, pick one to get started with.

step 5

Clicking Finish in step 4 above should should take you to the very complicated-looking web page below that will fill your whole browser window. This is your main blog workspace.

To make a new entry, type or paste it into the wide right form box under Post to Ricci Street Weblog. When you're finished, click Post & Publish. To edit a previous entry, click the blue edit directly beneath the entry.

Reading from left to right along the top in the screen shot above, you're looking at Posts screen. Click Settings. You should see this form:

All the information that you typed in steps 1 through 4 should be here. So is a bunch of other information. Now you can review everything and from now on you can change anything.

Note in the screen shot above that the Blog URL and FTP server are for blogs on RicciStreet.net. If you're using ParksidePlaza.net, you settings will be different:

Instead of RicciStreet.net, you put ParksidePlaza.net/lastname/. If everything reads correctly, then you need to add only things.

FTP Password = Ask me or a fellow student. It is the same one you use when you FTP.

It will be a while before you need an archive, so leave that part blank. To avoid having to type in Blogger.com every time you want to update or edit your blog, you can use one or both of the browser shortcuts provided at the bottom of the form.

The question marks will get you an explanation of each line. I recommend that you read them all repeatedly until you know how they relate to what your readers will see on their screens when they're reading your blog.

Note | The file testblog.htm or tatime.htm will be in Ann's geiger/ folder online but will not be on her personal computer. She will make all changes to the content or look-and-feel via Blogger.com -- the two screen shots above.

Click Template. You will see a form that has the HTML code of the template you choose in step 4 above. I have already edited the one you see below to make it look more like a Ricci Street page. I titled it Ricci Street Weblog. How original, huh?

Don't change anything with a <$ and $>, such as <$BlogTitle$>. These are variables for the script that drive this blog content management system.

Other than those variables, feel free to edit, copy and paste, link to your personal style sheet, add images, etc. Not included in this screen shot is the extensive help information below the Save changes and Cancel buttons.

Roll your own web log

Let's say I am researching gizmos for the office of the future. I run across a site that's selling a nifty computerized highlighter. I open NoteTab to a new page. Into it, I copy and paste (select passage, CTRL-C, CTRL-V) the largest words on the page (in yellow below but not in NoteTab). Then from the browser's address or location window, I copy and paste the URL (in green). The most interesting short paragraph summarizes the whole page, so I copy and paste that (in blue), adding quotation marks. Finally, I make a couple of personal notes (in gray).

The C-Pen: How does it work?

www.cpen.com/product/cpen.shtml

"This is how C-Pen works. You hold it in your hand like a highlighter and mark the text you want to save. The digital camera then captures the text and saves it in C-Pen's memory. The text is transferred to your PC using infrared (IR) communication technique. Place C-Pen close to the infrared (IR) receiver of your PC, utilizing C-Pen as a normal drive. Cordless, with only a few buttons and a straightforward menu, C-Pen is simple to use."

note: Good pix on this page of CPen in action. Some material on the page also applies to category 4. Also, I don't like the page's background color.

Then I pull down the File menu and choose Save As .. I navigate to the directory file:///c:/Windows/Desktop/rsthoods/gizmos/office/. I name the NoteTab text file highlighter.txt. Then I click save and return to the Web to look for more interesting things to harvest.

If you want to harvest in a more organized manner and have your web log always available on a web page, check out Blogger (short for Weblogger).

Please note that I am also describing the basic structure of most Ricci Street pages. For example, the page about Internet Searching is largely a list of annotated links. The part in yellow above is the red hot phrase. The part in green is the URL -- the a href in your HTML code -- that the red hot phrase will take you to. The part in blue is the excerpt that I put in a box

rather than in quotation marks. The part in gray is the text that I sometimes use to stitch the links together.





Showroom information design	Playroom interactivity design	Research Lab usability design
Workbench web design applications	Kiln digital development process	Toolkit digital technology guide


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modified: March 23, 2003 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/gizmos/toolkit/webmaking/weblog.htm

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