Lately I’ve been intrigued by wikis – online content repositories that users can freely modify (expand, change, link, or delete entries). These can be published on the Web, or on an intranet or other network.
Wikis are most commonly used as community-created resources for reference (like Wikipedia) or collaboration. I’ve been getting interested in them mainly for their e-learning potential. I’m starting to like them immensely, even though they’re generally rather ugly.
Sometimes we learn the most from our mistakes. Along that line, I just read an excellent piece about what one educator learned from a wiki that didn’t work so well…
(Full story, with links and resources…)
Can actions really speak louder than words, when speech is the realm of words?
The words we choose to describe actions play a key role in shaping perspectives, opinions, and responses. When it comes to the great evils of this world – torture, genocide, war, and so on – it seems to me that muted words often are selected to publicly describe and discuss what happened – and what should be done in response.
This is not always a deliberate propaganda tactic. Indeed, some words, like “torture,” are inherently loaded. Avoiding loaded language often reflects an effort to avoid sensationalizing an issue before the facts are in. However, in some cases muted word choices may reflect an attempt to avoid running disastrously afoul of public opinion or even international law.
Case in point: Abu Ghraib…
(Full story, with links to many examples…
Yesterday I wrote about how the nickname “webfeed” is starting to become part of the online vocabulary. If you’d like to track this over time yourself, Feedster makes that easy with keyword-based custom webfeeds. Just subscribe to either of these URLs in your feed reader:
More about this cool trick…
(Read more…)
Yesterday I wrote about how customer relationship management (CRM) vendor Coravue announced that it’s adding personalized webfeed capability to its CRM package – which I think is a great idea. However, I took issue with Coravue’s promotional claims of tracking webfeed usage, which to me did not seem to be anything special.
Today I heard from [...]
If you’ve ever had to slog through a document written in dense legalese, the old joke “What do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!” may come to mind.
However, several lawyers now are demonstrating, through their weblogs, that they indeed are willing and able to communicate quite well. Most lawyers create weblogs as marketing for their practices.
For instance…
(Full story, with links…)
Yesterday I reluctantly decided that, due to massive levels of comment spam and the inadequacy of my present blogging software to combat this plague, I’m temporarily suspending comments on CONTENTIOUS.
Well, I’m not the only blogger who’s had to take this unfortunate step.
Recently, many bloggers have announced that they are shutting down their comments function, either temporarily or permanently. I truly hate to see this happen because it diminishes public discourse. Also, bloggers are fleeing in droves those weblogging tools and services which fail to offer easy and effective comment spam protection. (As I mentioned yesterday, that’s the main reason why I’m switching away from Movable Type).
Here’s a quick rundown of various webloggers’ frustrations on the comment-spam front, and what some of the experts (like David Sifry and Mark Pilgrim) have to say…
(Full story, with links…)
For a while now, customer relationship management (CRM) technology has been all the rage in all sorts of organizations. The general idea is to efficiently and effectively manage what you know about your customers in order to communicate with them better and thus strengthen their connection to your company. Ideally, this leads to increased sales and lower cost of service.
The problem is, most CRM systems are implemented abysmally. They often end up harming customer relationships en masse, rather than helping them individually – mostly due to hamhanded automated communication goofs.
Consequently, I’m often skeptical about claims of great new CRM tools. However, today I heard about one approach that I think holds considerable potential, as long as it’s implemented thoughtfully: using CRM technology to generate personalized webfeeds for individual customers.
More on this…
(Full story, with links…)
I hope – and I dearly pray – that somewhere there is a very special hell for spammers – especially the virulent sleazoids who post comment spam to weblogs. (I am not alone in this wish, I know.)
Over the last week, CONTENTIOUS has been “crapflooded” with pornographic comment spam. Several times daily, some nasty little cretin has been using an automated script to post hundreds of comment spams to this weblog within minutes. Removing this detritus isn’t quite as hard as scraping grafitti off walls, but it’s damn tedious and extremely annoying.
For now, I’m tired of fighting the comment spammers. Although I truly hate to curtail public discussion, I’ve decided to temporarily suspend the comment function of CONTENTIOUS, while I switch to a different weblog software package that allows me to fend off such abuses easily.
More about this decision…
(Full story, with links…)
The term “webfeed,” which won the recent CONTENTIOUS RSS feed nickname contest, has been showing up in some interesting places. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly catching on like wildfire, but so far it does seem to offer some attraction in various parts of the online world. We’ll see how this unfolds over time.
Here’s a quick list of some examples of “webfeed” being used in recent online discourse, as well as some opinions both favoring and criticizing the nickname, plus a bit about how people are getting exposed to this term…
(Full story, with links to examples…)
If you’re looking for a good book, and if your taste runs toward the classics, and if you’re into getting great free stuff, you might have heard of Project Gutenberg – a volunteer effort to digitize, archive, and distribute out-of-copyright cultural works.
Fairly recently, Project Gutenberg began publishing its own webfeed (RSS format) with daily updates of newly added or changed e-books. However, something’s funky about the way they formatted the link to that feed on their site. If you have trouble subscribing, here’s the URL for it that you should save in your feed reader: http://www.gutenberg.net/browse/recent/today.rdf
I subscribe to this feed, mainly because I need to consciously remind myself to read about topics other than technology, media, psychology, and communication. Consequently, I just downloaded Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I love the Web!
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