Interview with Mark Fonseca about podcasting for development

Today we had a training on podcasting from Mark Fonseca Rendeiro. A podcast is audio (or video) with an RSS feed so that it allows for easy subscription by readers, it was only invented in 2004! (so hey, we can still be early adopters :)... Listeners can download the new episodes automatically, for instance by using itunes. I really liked his sense of humour, and we had an extremely practical training so it was a fun day. We got lots of tips and made a real podcast in groups of 2. I interviewed Mark about "why should development organizations engage with podcasting?" If you click on the video, you can watch the 3 minutes response. Ironically, the audio is not too good, there is some funny noise...

Mark basically states that people need to know what's happening out there in the
world, and we can't rely on the mainstream media to provide us that information.
Development organizations can use podcasting to get their (non-mediated!)
messages out on the web. The challenge is how to get people to pay attention to
your podcasts.

On the e-collaboration group blog we will lateron post the practical tips and some of the lessons we learned, and hopefully our first podcasts! As a more visually oriented person (I don't even have an MP3 player) it was good to learn about podcasting and the way it may appeal to more audio-oriented persons. I would like to learn how to create the right balance of audio, text and video in design of online interactions. It seems possible to create interaction using audio files by allowing listeners to post feedback to podcasts through blogcomments, phonecall, and/or discussion forums. It was funny to hear that lots of podcasters try to imitate radio programs (including the music and fade ins- and outs) as that is the model they know.

It was easy to see that Mark is very fanatic about (and addicted to) audio podcasting, even more than I am to blogging. I realized that losts of people listen to podcasts, though mostly music. I'm curious to know what numbers of people listen to non-music podcasts. The huge advantage of an audio podcast compared to video or text is that you can listen to a podcast while doing something else (travelling by train, cooking, cycling). Mark has built his online network, as one of the early podcasters. He mentioned that he might go to Japan to visit one of his podcast friends. I think there are many people who don't realize that this is a new way of networking (and a new skill for employees?). For the early adopter podcasters, it was easy to have an audience, because there were few podcasters. But how will that be when the world will be as full of podcasts as it is with blogs? Quality content and finding your 'niche' audience (through networks) may become more important.

What I learned for my own blogging process: it was good to hear Mark confirm that blip.tv is a good choice to host videos. And we used audacity as free audio software, a program I had used before. A practice I will copy from Mark is to reread my blogposts. He mentioned that he relistens twice to his own podcasts. I usually throw my posts in the air. Rereading may be a good way of improving yourself. (also rereading old posts, when I occasionally do, I'm often ashamed..). I also learned that besides linking, choice of blogtitles is good for visibility in search engines.

Best practices for non-profits using web2.0

Though I dislike the word 'best practices' as it seems to close down alternatives, I found a good blogpost by the name of best practices for non-profits using web2.0 by Alexandra Samuel. Thanks to Brice Royer to send it to the members of Non-profit Web 2.0 facebook group.

Some of the best practices mentioned by Alexandra:

1. Focus your site on a particular goal or conversation, rather than a general mandate. For example, the UN Foundation has had a dazzling success with its Nothing But Nets site, which focuses specifically on providing malaria nets to kids in the developing world.
2. Invite your community to make contributions other than money. Non-profits often experience "donor fatigue" because so much of their public interactions hinge on asking for money.
3. Play nicely with other non-profit (and for-profit) organizations. The web is just that: a web of interconnections. Succeeding in an internetworked environment means working effectively with others, colllaborating, and interacting -- it's not just about getting your own message out there.
4. Don't feel that web 2.0 means building your own online community. In fact, it's a lot easier to ease into the web 2.0 culture by making effective use of existing web tools -- whether that means fostering internal collaboration by choosing a common del.icio.us tag to use when storing your favorite web sites, or creating an iGoogle page that lets you constantly see the latest news in your key issue areas, or creating a photo-based petition on Flickr (check out the Oxfam example).
5. Be gentle with yourself, and your colleagues. It's a big challenge for most non-profits to shift from message delivery to conversation, or from approaching your members as donors to seeing them as content contributors.
6. Stay current with how other non-profits are using web 2.0, and learn from their experiences. A great way of doing that is to track the "nptech" tag on del.ici.ous, and NetSquared.

What resonates with me is the shift in thinking about having one website or building your own site, versus using multiple tools and sites. Yet, it can still be useful to have a space where these distributed things are gathered. (almost like a notice board!)

Shorter meetings as sign of improved collaboration

Photo by Tony van den Boomen

Since October last year I have been working with a facilitator of a community of practice using online media as well as face-to-face meetings. When we planned our first meeting we took more than an hour longer than planned. Yesterday we had a meeting and finished half hour earlier!

We reflected that this is logical, since in the beginning you have to get to know eachother, test ways of working. When you have an idea, you are careful not to impose this idea. Now we are interumpting eachother, or objecting to ideas and comfortable that the other will say what she thinks.

More effective meetings may hence be a sign of a healthy developing collaboration. It's intriguing that we still underestimate this need to develop a new collaborative relationship.

Pimp your blog

This is a joint post together with Christian Kreutz, which we co-created in a google doc. (mine is a little longer though)

1. What is a widget?
According to wikipedia a widget is a third party item that can be embedded in a web page. Widgets are, hence, little blocks of information which can be added to a blog, mostly in the sidebar. Widgets update information, they are not static. For instance, a widget with the latest comments updates its information with every new comment. Almost any kind of information can be widgetized and offered in a blog as an additional feature. Widgets display, for example, through feeds information from external sources.

Here's a fun screencast talking about widgets by Beth Kanter and you can hear my voice in it! (no, I'm not the one with the Australian accent :).


2. Why widgets are important and how they can spice up your blog
Blogs alone are nice, but with widgets you can upgrade your blog to an information portal and stimulate interactivity. Posts, comments, trackbacks and links are the key of blogs. That is how a conversation develops. Widgets extend a blog to a platform and allows to include other -dynamic- sources of information besides the blogposts you write. The variety in widgets is huge and ranges from fundraising, links, photos, videos to books, social networks and of course friends. Widgets let you integrate all the other things you do on the web.

3. Different types of widgets

• The first category of widgets allows you to include information elsewhere on the internet. Your tag cloud, for instance, shows your links that are of interest to you. A flickr badge displays your photos.


• The second category of widgets gives readers of your blog further information from the world wide web.


• The third type of widgets are interactive such as a poll or for fundraising. For example, Chipin is a fundraising widget.


• The fourth category are for advertisement. For example, your online book library with links to a book store.
  

4. The downside of widgets
A disadvantage of widgets is the bandwidth behind them and the fact that they can not be fully customized. Often, they are based on javascript and are updated each time through another server, when someone access your blog. When blogs have hickups, it is often related to a slowly server of one of your widgets. Many widgets include also a brand names such as flickr or feedburner, which are not easily excludable. Widgets inside blogs (e.g. wordpress) work often quicker because their content is loaded directly on your server. These widgets can also be better adjusted to your blog design.

5. Finally: the list of cool widgets

• Wordpress offers a whole variety of widgets for all kind of purposes.


• Offer a clear RSS subscription from feedburner or feeddigest. You can also display the number of people that have subscribed to your blog through your feedreader.


• Offer a subscription to your blog by email. With email subscription capability, subscribers can now receive each blogpost in their email inbox, similar to an e-newsletter. This is very important for users who are not used to RSS readers or have low bandwidth. This is offered by feedburner or feedblitz.com.


• Share your photos via your blog. If you have photos on flickr, you can display them on your blog by using a flickr badge. You can find the steps here. Blogger allows you to show your picasaweb photos. See here.


• If you want to show your photos in combination with a world map, you can use tripper map. It allows you to display your flickr photoset in combination with a world map.


• Display recent comments in the sidebar of your blog. Often, readers may not click on the comment section. By displaying the comments in the sidebar, readers can see where and what people have commented. For blogger, you can find a widget here. For wordpress, you can find the process described here.


• Show your readers by using mybloglog. Readers can sign up and their photos will be displayed.


• Tell your readers what you are doing right now by inserting a twitter widget. If you are already twittering, you can display your twitters on your blog.


• Show the blogs that you are reading yourself. That may give people an impression of the kind of topics you like, and may point them to new blogs they may not know. If you are using bloglines, it is possible to display your public bloglist on your blog (called blogroll, see sidebar). Grazr is an interesting tool that allows you to show lists with categories.


• Insert any interesting RSS feed. You may produce a feed yourself using a unique tag and you can display it on your blog by using services like feedostyle; feedzilla; or this. Superglu will allow you to gather content from various places and combine it.


• Display your top tags used on your blog with the Top Tags Widget. It will display your tags in a beautiful cloud formation (or the top tags of any blog.) By showing this, readers will know what you are writing about, and can click on one of the tags to access a category of readings. Blogger allows you to display your categories in the sidebar, which has a similar function, even though it is not displayed in a tagcloud.


• Or display your del.icio.us tags on your blog.


• Ask readers for feedback on your blog or any important issue by using a poll.


• Ask readers to TELL you what they think by using an Odeo widget (via Beth Kanter)


• In case you have a you tube channel, you can use a widget to display your videos.


• Raise funds with a widget using ChipIn. (also via Beth Kanter)


• Or display your LinkedIn profile.

6. Further resources on (blog) widgets
One big resource is widgipedia
More blogosphere widgets
Technorati list of blog widgets
Typepad widgets
Go here for more blogger widgets or wordpress widgets

Other resources
Library clips blogpost talking about expliciting the informal social networks or distributed online social networks by means of blog widgets.
Beth Kanter's fundraising widget story
Beth Kanter's Let's go widget shopping
RSS widgets for your blog

Blogging is like...

painting by webmetricsguru

As a fanatic blogger (about to start my second blog!) I liked this problogger blogpost with a list of people writing about blogging is like.. I discovered it through Tim's blog. Sex wins in terms of frequency :) but not in terms of how it resonates with me. I enjoyed the blogging is like expressionistic art. My blogstyle matches my painting style - fast.

Personally I thing blogging is like Zomergasten - a television programme in which guests shows his/her favorite television or film moments and explains why it touched him/her. Through this pieces you get to know him/her through a different angle as compared to 'regular' interview... A blog is a space where everyone can be a Zomergast, and point out to what he/she thinks is great and explain why. And reading blogs is compelling because you slowly get to know a person at a level that would be hard to even during a personal face-to-face encounter. Sometimes I think a blogs make thinking processes explicit and accessible (though that depends on the type of blogger of course). I think reading blogs is compelling because the style is often conversational but at the same time deep- people write about what keeps them thinking.

I enjoy it when I read blogposts from people with children. I realize that in my friend's network there is much more uniformity in thinking about children's education than in my blognetwork. - so it can expand your horizon-.

Diving in the deep to learn

I often wonder whether there is a certain type of person who is attracted to learning in communities of practice, and whether there are people who may have some adversary feelings towards being part of communities of practice. If so, it will probably have to do with learning styles and learning preferences. Ruijters and Simons wrote an article in Dutch titled: 'Ook van in het diepe springen kun je leren'. It's a very good article about the lack of language to make choices about appropriate workforms. When does an action-learning trajectory work? When does a community of practice make sense, or when does a training do the trick? I noticed that that there is indeed a lot of confusion about the differences between these (facilitated) forms of learning.

They wrote about the 'learning architecture' which is the combination of implicit and explicit learning in an organisation and all interventions aimed at stimulating learning in organizations.

'Learning' is used in many different ways, to talk about what happens in a classroom, for a training, for the result of a conversation. People learn in different ways, but preferences may change. It would be best to choose for appropriate learning interventions that match learning preferences. They mention 5:

• Learning by copying


• Learning by participation


• Learning by knowledge acquisition (facts)


• Learning by practising


• Learning by discovery

When we pay more attention to preferences of learning at individual, team and organizational level, we can improve the effectivity of learning interventions and for instance determine which preferences can be supported by online learning. Learning profiles can be developed for people, or teams. The example is given of a management trainee. He is a fast learner and trainings often irritate him. He dislikes learning by practising. He does not like learning by reading books either, but has high preferences for learning by copying. To support his learning process, he needs challenges and sparring partners, rather than training and coaching.

It is a very useful model. With this model in mind, it is clear to see that people with a preference for learning by copying and learning by participation would thrive in communities of practice. People with a preference for learning by practising in a safe environment may not always feel at home, unless the communities offers opportunities to practise new skills or behaviours. Since communities also have different learning modalities, the model could also be used to analyze learning in a community of practice.

5 Ways to Continue Tagging

So here we go, January first, and I'm starting superfresh to read blogs and crossblog what I think is important (without thinking that it's a waste to pump around information). Marshall Kirkpatrick blogged about 5 ways you can fall in love with tagging again.

Though I've never falling out of love with tagging, it gives a good overview of the diverse applications of tagging to share resources. I'm still as ever fanaticly tagging webresources with my delicious account. Always when I find resources that I don't think I can read now, but sound like topics I may need in future, I tag them. For instance I tagged resources with the name 'widgets' and now I'm preparing an overview of blogwidgets and my delicious account is just a wealth of information. But I also tag resources I read that are powerful and mark them with top10 as a way to find good resources when I need them. I contribute to the collective NPK4dev tag (knowledge management for development resources) and I tag freelance resources (tagged with 'van_start') and feed their RSS feed our Ning forum for freelancers. Marshall also talks about his move from delicious to magnolia, something we are contemplating too.

Here are the 5 reasons Marshall wrote down (I shortened it a little, so if you want read the full blogpost):

1. Re-enforce your learning at the end of year
The inspiration for this post came from social media aficionado Tim Bonnemann's practice of tagging all the words he looks up online with the tag "dictionary." At the end of the year, he posted the full list of links to his blog. What a great way to deepen recall of the things you've learned!

2. Build a collaborative tag stream for a community of practice
One of the best things about tagging URLs is that all kinds of RSS feeds become available. One community of practice, a loose group of nonprofit technologists, uses the tag "nptech" to mark items of interest in del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, flickr, youtube and elsewhere. The feeds for nptech items in all of these services are then combined into one NPtech metafeed.

3. Create a shared items feed and put it on your web page
Many of our readers probably use the shared items feature in Google Reader. That service continues to grow more sophisticated - last week it added any shared items feeds from your Gmail contacts to your list of subscribed feeds, for example.
While that's pretty hot - there's something to be said for baking your own, too. If you tag items something like "toshare" in a service like del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia then you can share URLs that you find outside of Google Reader and you can switch feed readers/tagging services without loosing all your shared items subscribers. I did this on my personal blog this year by taking the feed from my items tagged "toshare" in del.icio.us and running it through the service FeedDigest. There I got a PHP snippet to display my links and notes on the sidebar of my blog

4. Tag into a mobile reader
In addition to tagging things "toshare" I've also taken recently to tagging items "toread" and pulling that feed into Netvibes. Adding my toread tag to Netvibes has made it easy for me to catch up on things I want to read while traveling around town. Sometimes I'll just read the most widely popular items from my toread feed, by running that feed through AideRSS and getting a new feed of the 20% of those items that were most tagged, Dugg, commented on and linked to. AideRSS can be applied on top of all of the methods on this list.

5. Tag your microblog posts
I know I'm not alone in finding it much easier to share information over Twitter than by blogging or tagging in a social bookmarking app. Enter Hashtags. Like tagging for Twitter, hashtags are terms you put after a # in a post. Hashtags.org then aggregates all the tweets using a given tag and publishes an RSS feed. Reading a feed of short messages sent from the #sandiegofires was very interesting, for example. Though you can certainly just subscribe to a search feed through a service like Terraminds - Hashtags let you do all the things in microblogging that you can do using the methods described in numbers 1 through 4 above. See also Dave Sifry's new project Hoosgot - a service he calls the Lazyweb for the age of Twitter.

A colourful 2008!

As I'll be busy tomorrow travelling to Vught where we'll celebrate new year's eve with friends, I'd like to share my new years card and wish you all a Great 2008 (in English - it rhyms :). I've sent the card by snail mail to Dutch friends, you can call it either old-fashioned or you can call it a multi-media strategy.

I'll be starting a Dutch blog as soon as I get Wordpress up my domain... That will be one my first things to do in 2008. And I'll open a separate bank account for my consultancy (Joitske Hulsebosch Consultancy). That will make everything very serious. Not to forget a business card.

I have plans for this blog too, I hope to do more linking and commenting on other blogs. When I read blogs, I sometimes feel like crossblogging, but often think I'm late in reacting (at times I read it two weeks late). So I'll try to keep up with reading other blogs, because I really enjoy reading them and always pick up something new, or they make me thinking. Happy new year!

'Design' versus 'emergent'

In a previous blogpost I wrote about the three myths about communities of practice. The second myth is that communities of practice are self-emergent. I'm currently reading a lot of articles to include relevant parts into an article I'm writing with Sibrenne Wagenaar about facilitating in communities of practice. I haven't really found good parts that describe how you can facilitate in communities.

Our ice-skating in front of our house last week offers a good example. Because of the ice-skating, lot of neighbours came outside and skated/slided and chatted. I got to know a few neighbours a little better, and talked for the first time with some others. Unfortunately this was the first time in the seven years that our street exists that ice-skating was possible.

Suppose you are someone with an interest in fostering relationships in our neighbourhood. Would you wait for another seven year so that more of these opportunities emerge? I believe you can learn from what happens naturally (the emergent) and use it to facilitate (design). For instance, you could organize a trip to a artificial skating place. Or rather organize a different event, because you observed that this event attracted mostly parents with children. Nothing dirty about facilitating a community of practice!

Designed for ice-skating

We live in a relatively new neighbourhood (8 years old). A few weeks ago the school facilitated a traffic situation investigation and one of the identified problems was that the bridges in our area are high, hence make it hard for people (especially children) footing to school to safely cross the road and see all traffic coming over the bridge.

Today the area looks beautiful because all water is frozen. This is how I learned from neighbours that the design was optimised for ice-skating. The bridges are high enough so that you can skate under them. Unfortunately so far, in the past seven years, people have not skated since the winters are not that cold anymore!

Another example of design flaws. I still believe in interactive design, whether it is for irrigation systems, bridges or toolsets. But I am always surprised that the designers makes certain decisions without really discussing them with the future users of the system they are designing. And often they don't even know they are making those assumptions!

Beth's vlogging resource

I knew Beth Kanter did a vlogging training in Cambodja and just found a great resource that she developed for the occasion. I'm a little ashamed, I thought I had developed quite something when I developed a 12 step guide for vlogging a meeting or presentation. But this is slightly... uhm more developed with screencasts and everything.

Christian Kreutz and myself are currently working on a blog widget guide as a blogpost. Maybe we should rather develop a blog widget guide in a wiki?

Introductions and requests improve likelihood of responses in an online community

I wrote in an earlier blogpost about the participant-observation analysis of Swedish music fan's interactions on the internet. The analysis shows that interactions take place at multiple levels, at different online platforms. So you can't assume that people interact neatly within the boundaries of one online platform.

Library Clips refered to it and wrote about the blogosphere as a distributed social network. "To make this type of network explicit you would have to get all these people to join the same network eg. MyBlogLog (blogs), FeedEachOther (RSS Readers), Ziki (Lifestreams). I’ve posted in the past and recently on how much benefit we could get out of blogs we read and interact with if we were directly connected in a social network." He (or she?) lists what you can do with your blog in terms of widgets to make this kind of networking more explicit.

At the same time, I read an article in the train by Burke et al called Introductions and Requests: Rhetorical strategies that elicit reponse in online communities. I must say that I travel less by train and that reduces the number of articles I read. So unfortunately I found this article of less practical use than I had thought. The main point of the article is that the way a person introduces a message in an online community matters for the response. If a person includes a self-disclosing introduction it increases the chances of reply. Saying 'I've been lurking in this online forum for a while' almost doubles the chances of replies. Putting a request forward, also increases the chances for replies.

However useful this may be to know for newcomers in established online communities, the research is an example of a research that ignores the distribution of communications. It does not pay any attention to the 'culture' of the online community (inward-looking, outward-looking, welcoming or not, etc) Neither does it to the other interactions that may have preceded the message. For instance, I posted a request in an online yahoo group, but that was stimulated by email introductions and exchanges by the group facilitator or initiator. This interaction would be invisible to the researchers. (you see why I haven't become a researcher..) I think that knowing the language (jargon) of the group may matter a lot too. So you may say that you've been lurking but if that doesn't show through the way you 'talk' in your message, it may not improve the response rate.

Communities of practice at Rabobank New Zealand and Australia

Brad Hinton wrote a paper about his experiences with communities of practice at the Rabobank Australia. You can download the paper here.

He explains that knowledge and information transfer have become important ingredients for an organization's competitive advantage. Learning organizations look at enabling and encouraging knowledge (creation) and its use throughout the organization. Communities of practice can be an important component of a knowledge management strategy. People in communities share their experiences and knowledge in a free-flowing, creative way.

The Rabobank Australia and New Zealand wanted to leverage the knowledge of the rural account managers and financial officers, with better information provision and business solutions to clients as the desired outcome. They started communities of practice under the name 'pubs'. The pubs are dairy product based eg. beef, cotton, dairy, oilseeds etc. The first pub was created opportunistically, after a Roundtable event. Unfortunately the pub was not successful because there was insufficient input into its development.

Then more research was undertaken into the knowledge management and communities of practice literature and also into the information use patterns of the relationship managers. Preferred communication methods were interpersonal, and e-mail.

A group e-mail system was then chosen over more sophisticated technological options because of its ease of use and familiarity to facilitate early adoption and activity. Some key success factors included personal visits to explain the concept of communities of practice. The name pub generated also a lot of interest. The 'pubs' now provide a vehicle for ideas and discussions that can lead to innovation and improved work performance. Benefits have been helping staff to work smarter, encourage thought and put that into action by helping clients.

I liked the approach of going for simple technology. That's what I usually do too, a short inventory of what people use and then choose the best, most familiar option. What I noticed though is that when organizations have invested in an online forum, the urge to use that forum is quite big, and group e-mail is no longer an option. Maybe this is an option to bring back into focus, even when there is a 'more sophisticated' forum? And how to combine a toolset? And how to stimulate people who are used to other forums and may feel the simple technology is not appealing? I would be interested to know more about the facilitation of the later pubs. Brad states that the first failed because of little facilitation, but what kind of facilitation was offered to the later pubs?

Aid is a knowledge industry?

picture: Mariette Heres

In the Broker you can find an article called Aid is a knowledge industry in which Mariette Heres argues that "although NGOs are taking more interest in knowledge management, they have so far failed to recognize that they are part of a knowledge industry, of which the delivery of goods and services is only a part."

I think it is interesting to put up such a statement, which makes people think. Unfortunately she does not define what a knowledge industry is, which makes the argumentation weaker. And there is no definition to be found on wikipedia. It made me think about what a knowledge industry is, compared to a service/product industry. The knowledge worker is a term I use myself at times. Anecdote wrote that the word knowledge worker is now meaningless in developed countries because the shift from manual labour to job requiring knowledge work is now complete. If you look at it from that angle, all professionals are knowledge workers, and the term becomes obsolete. Is a farmer not a knowledge worker?

Mariette explains the 'stock and flow' approaches to knowledge. (by the way an article from 2002 by Dick Stenmark that I still like very much for its explanation of the two approaches can be found here). He states that supporters of the flow view of knowledge:

"may thus understand knowledge management systems not as an IT artefact but as an environment of people, organizational processes, business strategies and IT, where the objective is to leverage and advance the knowledge of those people."

And states that: "the ICCO alliance is one of the few NGOs to have taken a step towards adopting the flow approach to knowledge." I think it is a bit tricky to use the approaches to label one or the other organization. It might be better to use the distinction between the two approaches to point out where some approaches may be flawed or to understand a difference in thinking about the best knowledge management intervention in a certain situation.

Wenger furthermore talks about a third wave of knowledge management:

" The third wave is now starting to focus on strategic capabilities. It reflects a view of knowledge as strategic asset and places the emphasis on the strategic stewardship of knowledge domains. The promise of knowledge management now lies in a systematic knowledge strategy and in the potential of communities of practice as a vehicle for engaging
practitioners in the required strategic conversation."

Maybe organizations should learn how to manage knowledge as a strategic asset?

Let me finish by trying to formulate my opinion about the statement made by the article: I think the development sector can indeed benefit from improved knowledge management interventions. Nevertheless, I think I disagree that knowledge was never a concern. Lots of organizations started out with 'knowledge transfer' strategies. For instance, it is a sector where evaluation is really institutionalized and embedded.

It would be good to see a better knowledge systems analysis of the development sector and where knowledge creation and innovate is hampered. I see the gap mainly in separate learning circles in the south and in the north that do not sufficiently merge. And Dick Stenmark gives a hint to why this gap may exist: 'only individuals who have a requisite level of shared background can truly exchange knowledge. Tradition, profession and organizational belonging all carry their own assumptions. The more overlapping these tacit assumptions and experiences the better (eg. if all three realms overlap likelihood of understanding will increase.'

Mail is for the elderly

In the newspaper here there was a good article by Theo Stielstra called 'mailen is voor oudjes'. Henk Blanken also blogged about it. Stielstra states that mail is for the elderly (in this case 25+!). Students communicate via MSN, SMS and Hyves. A 15-year old is quoted who says that she uses email at times when she has to send files to fellow students for school. Another had the experience that she thought she wasn't invited to a party - but hadn't checked her mail for a long time! Another example (as I blogged before) of exclusion through choice of technology.

So why don't they use mail? Mail is old-fashioned and slow. Writing mail ressembles work.

I must say I recognise the way mail for me is the baseline, if a forum doesn't have alert, at times I forget to check it. I participate in Facebook through mails. Our babysit (17 years) complained once her friends don't reply to her mails frequently (this article explains why!). That shows that even amongst the youngsters, there are huge differences.

Conclusion: communication is getting easier, and getting harder.

Free online Forums

I am looking for free online forums where you can set up group communication, for informal exchange and learning with the ability for parallel threads. I think it is good for groups that don't want to invest heavily in customized forums in the initial group stages, or are not sponsored by an organisation. The fact that the forum is free and easy to set up and delete can make the online experience for participants more experimental. You avoid the fact that people feel that they now have to communicate online because their organisation built such a forum and invested this amount in building and hosting it.

For email-based discussion forums there is yahoo groups en google groups, but there you have to follow all messages or nothing (not completely true, you can follow it by RSS too, but you can't ignore certain threads)...

I am quite a big fan of NING, but I think it might seem chaotic for some. The advantage is the flexibility (you can insert element, or leave out elements) and the option to insert RSS feeds.
So far I've come across the following alternative: collectivex. Josien pointed to Bryght and Barnraiser. Oscar mentioned Goingon, Mugshot and Peopleaggregator. In my delicious I further have Razoo, Grou.ps and Onlinegroups. And there is the alternative of starting a group on a site where people are already active, eg. facebook.

On what basis should you choose one or the other? Is there a way to avoid that the preference of the initiator is the only factor guiding the choose of a certain platform?

The difference between consonents and vowels

Both my children are in mixed classes at school. The youngest in group 3/4, the eldest in group 4/5. At times the youngest overhears what is being taught to the other group. So she heard that they learned about consonents and vowels (in her class, they just start reading!). So at home she wanted to know what the difference is between consonents and vowels. Try to explain!

Though I could mention them (B = consonent, O= vowel), I found it hard to explain why a consonent is a consonent and why a vowel is a vowel. For my eldest daughter, this was easy. Since she had learned it in school a year ago, it was very easy for her to explain.

This shows that at times it is easier to learn from a person who has recently gone through the same process. The experienced person may have internalized the use and may not be able to explain how he/she makes certain distinctions or decisions.

My blog in Arabic

Somebody in Egypt is reading my blogposts in Arabic! I found an Egyptian interested in my Carnaval and Aquasan blogposts; by following a referral link to my blog. It looks really great. So if you ever end up in an Egyptian carnaval you know where they picked up the idea.

We often encounter the question of working across different languages. It depends on the importance of the exchange whether you invest heavily in translations or not - by employing a certified translator.

An alternative could be to offer quick and dirty online translation services like:

• Prompt (upto 500 characters for free, thanks to Riny Heijdendael for showing me the tool)
• Babblefish
• Google translation (used in this case)
• To a blog you can add a translator widget

Wouter tipped me about two resources explaining how to add translation services to your blog:

• How to add google translators to blogger
• Add language translation flags to your blog

Britt Bravo showed me her blogpost explaining the Worldwide Lexicon project. Using open source, this project stimulates readers of website or blogs who are bilangual to translate parts of the website in other languages. It is somewhere in the middle of the machine translations mentioned above (weakness: mechanical translations) and professional translations (weakness: costly).

What's the best tool at the moment?

Find Sinterklaas on his boat

Last Sunday we went to the 'intocht' = arrival of Sinterklaas. Almost every town in the Netherlands has its own 'intocht', the official arrival of Sinterklaas, preferably by boat. Old readers of my blog know I'm a big fan of Sinterklaas.. Every year I write about Sinterklaas and never get any comment, so it must be really boring for you. Nevertheless, this year, a short movie of the Sinterklaas intocht of Den Bosch. Try and find Sinterklaas amongst all the Pieten... It is weird because the one in Den Bosch is the only 'intocht' that I know of that has a kind of carnaval atmosphere. A mixture of the Sinterklaas tradition and the carnaval traditions of Den Bosch.

Click to Play

The 'intocht' van Sinterklaas in Den Bosch, 18 november 2007

This year, the intocht made me think about our own traditions around the Sinterklaas tradition. With some friends, we gather at around 11 in the morning at the same spot in Den Bosch and wait for Sinterklaas to pass by in his boat (see video clip). Then we go to the market square, to the pub, to wait till he arrives by horse, where he is welcomed by the mayor of the town. The program there is the same every year. The mothers have to sing songs, the fathers have to sing a song and the children have to judge whether the fathers sung better than the mothers (but they never do). Even though,the number of friends joining our group varies (as children grow up) we always stick to the same routine. You could think of a millions other ways, but somehow, it is easy to do the same old things. What could be reasons to change these routines?

The new shape of online community

Sometimes (or rather frequently!) you read an article and you think.. uhm, well I already knew that. In that case, it still comes in handy to have something written by others that support your views (let alone the fact that it's nice to see your views confirmed too :)). Nancy Baym wrote an article called the new shape of online community: the example of Swedish independent music fandom. I know Abba, but didn't know Sweden is so important as a music hub...She uses a participant-observation analysis of Swedish music fan's interactions on the internet to show that sites are interlinked at multiple levels. Online communities have taken new forms between the site-based online group and the egocentric network.

She illustrates her point with the examples of the REM fan base, which started with a mailing list in the late 80s. Today, there are many other fan-created websites that co-exist. Plus there has been a rise in fan-authored MP3 blogs too. "Many of the bloggers link to one another through blog rolls, creating a multi-sited community of like-minded bloggers who interact through their posts and comments." With new incarnation of online fandom, the previous forms have not disappeared.

Mapping the boundaries becomes a challenge though. The Swedish indie fan community, for instance, is distributed throughout many places on the internet and off. Over time, active fans will bump into each other, and a sense of community may be formed, which has a lot of similarity with physical places. Few people visit every place in town, but in regular places, the same people may bump into eachother (school, sport clubs, restaurants, etc).

Apparently, it has been the norm for scientists to study an online space (as one URL) and study it. But that's a limited approach, given the interconnectedness of the various sites.
For developers it has consequences too; the challenge is to make sure site can serve as location of activity, and im- and export from other sites.

Ning is a good, positive example, I was able to feed my blog into my personal page on the forum, and to set up an delicious feed within 2 minutes.