I usually cherish these moments of the night, doing things such as random surfing on the net. It is seldom that I work or do serious stuff at this hour. After much procrastination, I decided to do the reflection for Day 2.
The day started with an introduction into blogging using commoncraft.com. When blogging first begins its popularity, I use to blog often especially the 7 months that I had spent in a military school (was super bored). I learnt 3 "ground rules" to have a blog that is more attractive for "viewership"
a. have a focus area (e.g. on people, hobby, places, babies, food etc)
b. useful recommendations on related topics
c. pictures!! pictures still speak a thousand words
After today's lessons, think I will pick up blogging again (nowadays, get so tired after handling 3 kids at night, that my mind just want to be a blank after they sleep).
The rest of the afternoon was spent doing a mini collaborative project using applications such as delicious.com, google sites and wiki. The main takeaway is that information are just too much, and it is necessary to scope our search when collaborative work is required. This will prevent time wastage on unreliable information. In any case, depending on the security concerns for the contents, I feel wiki is the least protected while google allows more privacy settings to be adjusted accordingly. Thus if you have a more sensitive contents to be shared, using google may be a much safer bet. Delicious.com is good too, its strong point would be the "tagging" function to allow easier search among the network. I haven't been using all these for my own work. Hopefully one day I get to use them for my own needs or interests!
The last thing I would like to mention is the use of appropriate search engine. Dr Szuiker shared on the use of a blog search engine www. technorati.com. Although there are not much success in finding a blog through this website that is closely related to our work, Dr Szuiker is able to highlight some good pointers on blogging. This is refreshing to me as I always think of blogging as just "rattling" about the daily affairs. A few takeaways in additional to those that I have earlier mentioned:
a. technorati authority rules take into account of the different users that commented on your links i.e. it is good to reach out to more ppl. this could be done through having more links in your site or register yourself to be "found" in search engine.
b. Tagging. not too sure how we could tag our own blog but he did shared about the importance of tagging to make searching more meaningful and accurate.
That's all!
The day started with an introduction into blogging using commoncraft.com. When blogging first begins its popularity, I use to blog often especially the 7 months that I had spent in a military school (was super bored). I learnt 3 "ground rules" to have a blog that is more attractive for "viewership"
a. have a focus area (e.g. on people, hobby, places, babies, food etc)
b. useful recommendations on related topics
c. pictures!! pictures still speak a thousand words
After today's lessons, think I will pick up blogging again (nowadays, get so tired after handling 3 kids at night, that my mind just want to be a blank after they sleep).
The rest of the afternoon was spent doing a mini collaborative project using applications such as delicious.com, google sites and wiki. The main takeaway is that information are just too much, and it is necessary to scope our search when collaborative work is required. This will prevent time wastage on unreliable information. In any case, depending on the security concerns for the contents, I feel wiki is the least protected while google allows more privacy settings to be adjusted accordingly. Thus if you have a more sensitive contents to be shared, using google may be a much safer bet. Delicious.com is good too, its strong point would be the "tagging" function to allow easier search among the network. I haven't been using all these for my own work. Hopefully one day I get to use them for my own needs or interests!
The last thing I would like to mention is the use of appropriate search engine. Dr Szuiker shared on the use of a blog search engine www. technorati.com. Although there are not much success in finding a blog through this website that is closely related to our work, Dr Szuiker is able to highlight some good pointers on blogging. This is refreshing to me as I always think of blogging as just "rattling" about the daily affairs. A few takeaways in additional to those that I have earlier mentioned:
a. technorati authority rules take into account of the different users that commented on your links i.e. it is good to reach out to more ppl. this could be done through having more links in your site or register yourself to be "found" in search engine.
b. Tagging. not too sure how we could tag our own blog but he did shared about the importance of tagging to make searching more meaningful and accurate.
That's all!
Wow! Working late after the kids are asleep : ) Nice points on blogging - good that we have an experienced blogger in our ranks. I agree about images/photos. They can convey a lot about a post. Technorati is an interesting tool too. There are a lot of different types of search goals from traditional information to real-time trends and technorai is an example of how tools can be tailored to take advantage of the new layers of knowledge that users build into the website. Like Wesch's video "The Machine is Us/Using Us", the internet has separated form and content so that social networks can re-organize information for our specific purposes. As you also allude to, the military does not benefit from this layer as long as it is public.
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