Interview with Blogger Trish Snyder

Over at Net Squared I just posted an interesting interview I did with Trish Snyder, whose Bloggingforacause.com is one of my favorite topic-specific, non-tech blogs. Trish is a networker amongst bloggers and blog readers fighting cancer. As I’m sure everyone knows but may not think about right away, cancer comes in many forms and there’s a large community of people relating to the issue from different vantage points. Trish’s blog is very well done and she has some interesting advice for new bloggers.

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The Mapspace Takes on Podcasts Plus Upgrade Updates All Around

Podcastdirectory.com is a new discovery for me and looks quite good. Via ProgrammableWeb/mashups I discovered that this directory has a feature that the otherwise excellent Podcast Alley and Podcast Pickle don’t appear to offer: a Google Map of podcasters’ locations! Both of these other big directories have good forums and interesting classification systems, but the combination of local connection and visualization offered by PodcastDirecotry.com is really nice.

I like the idea of knowing what podcasts are produced in my area, I don’t want to lose all connection to my bioregion for goodness sake. Other purposes I can imagine using this map for include knowing who’s podcasting in a city you’re going to visit if you want to try and meet them, finding another mulitmedia source for research on a local issue anywhere and finding good promo possibilities for geographically inclined campaigns.

Call me a web-goober, but I had no idea that there were several podcasts produced right here in my home town. I like it.

Related: The very nice google maps tool Community Walk has undergone its much awaited site redesign, performed by IdeaCodes (half of which is Emily Chang of eHub fame.) The site looks great and appears to have many new features.

Furthermore: The awesome RSS to IM service immedi.at has also upgraded its site and it looks great. I wrote about Peter Brown’s tool as the bleeding edge of RSS awhile ago and I stand by that opinion. It’s a great way to either impress or horrify your friends by consistently knowing right away when they add new content to their sites. There’s also lots of important things you could do with this system, of course. I interviewed Brown some time ago as well. I would put immedi.at on my top 5 list of tools I’d tell anybody about who really wanted to leverage the heck out of Web2.0. (ooh, there’s a blog post waiting to happen, huh?)

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Interview with John Smith on Learning and Communities of Practice

John Smith is the community liaison for CPSquare, a community of practice about communities of practice. The group brings people together from around the world through online, telephone and face to face meetings to share their knowledge and learn together about how communities of practice can best function and learn in any field.

The following is a summary with key excerpts from a recent interview we did together. Discussion included John’s thoughts on group learning and new technologies and those are what I’ve focused on here. You can click the "excerpt" link next to any of the summary points to hear John in his own words.

Click here to go to the interview or continue below for discussion of technical struggles I had with this interview, specifically using the Gizmo Project VOIP system.
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Proposed Mashup Presentation

So next week I’m going to facilitate a discussion over at CPSquare‘s Web 2.0 online conference about mashups. CPSquared is a community of practice about communities of practice.

I’m not going to pretend that mashups are something I know a whole lot about, but degrees of knowledge are relative and I think I’ll be able to show some people some things they hadn’t seen before and inspire them to do some things they might not have done otherwise. That’s the plan anyway.

I wanted to post an outline of my intro here and get some feedback. Plus I imagine there are readers here who would enjoy seeing these resources as well. So let me know what you think:
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Web Readers Act Fast; Design Key

A new study described in Nature magazine indicates that web readers may be more fickle than some of us would like to think. Key findings:

  • Site quality impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.
  • “Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny. “
  • “People enjoy being right, so continuing to use a website that gave a good first impression helps to ‘prove’ to themselves that they made a good initial decision.”
  • These days, enlightened web users want to see a “puritan” approach, Caudron adds. It’s about getting information across in the quickest, simplest way possible. For this reason, many commercial websites now follow a fairly regular set of rules. For example, westerners tend to look at the top-left corner of a page first, so that’s where the company logo should go. And most users also expect to see a search function in the top right.

This article has made me look over my site again; some changes will be appearing over the next couple of days.

Related: I go back and forth all the time about whether sidebars look and work best on the left of right hand side of a blog. This “visual attention heat map” from Eyetools Research indicates that blog viewers tend to ignore content in the middle of the right hand side. But it’s hard to know whether that’s indication that the pictured blog is mistaken to put its advertising there or whether the location is ignored because that’s where the advertising is!

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Interview with Barb Dybwad

I just posted an interview with Barb Dybwad over at Net Squared. Barb is the associate editor of Weblogs Inc. and blogs on the Social Software Weblog there. We had a long conversation about everything from Flickr to future applications she’s dreaming of to tips for new bloggers and blog readers. It’s such a long interview (done via IM) that I created a tag cloud to let readers skip around. The larger the text, the more accessible/less technical the section of the interview.


Huge thanks to Barb for taking the time to this interview.

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Adding an Audio Site Tour

Half for kicks and half to make this blog a more user friendly experience for folks new to the medium, I’ve recorded a 4 minute audio tour of the various features and resources on this site. I’ll be putting it on top of the sidebar for awhile to see how it works for folks.

Play Site Tour

The idea is that visitors can click the play button and listen without leaving the site. I think this kind of thing has a lot of potential, even if not in this particular context. I honestly don’t know if this is a good idea or not – but part of what I like to do with my own site is experiment with ideas before I recommend them to clients! In this case it may be a problem that if you click on any of the links discussed in the tour, a new page will load and the audio will stop. That’s not ideal.

I recorded the intro in Garage Band on my Mac, then transferred it over to iTunes and converted it to MP3. I put music in the background from the Podsafe Music Network. This song is Bill DeRome’s The ending before the beginning – instrumental.

I then uploaded it onto my webspace and created the play button link using the code I wrote about at Mp3 Blogs and Playing Sound Within Your Site.

If you feel inclined to give it a click and listen while you bop around the site here, let me know what you think.