Check out Qumana. It seems to offer all the core features a serious blogger would want, using a simple non-geeky interface.

From my perspective, it only has one major drawback…

So far, it’s Windows-only. I’m a Mac and Linux person, so I can’t actually use it right now. I hope they will launch a Mac version before long. I’d really like to try it.

I’m curious about their business model. This appears to be a fairly comprehensive and full-featured application, I’m surprised they’d be offering it for free (not just a time-limited free demo, or a free “lite” version). I expect we’ll hear more about that aspect of Qumana before long.

Anyway, if you’re a Windows user looking for a blogging tool, definitely give Qumana a test drive. Also, I encourage Qumana users to comment below on how you like it. Is it really that easy to use? What are its key strengths and limitations, from a user’s perspective?

(Full disclosure: Qumana CBO Tris Hussey is a friend and colleague of mine. However, that’s not why I’m writing about Qumana. It honestly sounds like a bit of a breakthrough to me. But I do want to independently reality-check it. So I do hope to hear from Qumana users, and to see a Mac version at some point.)

I know many CONTENTIOUS readers are unfamiliar with del.icio.us, so I thought I’d provide a taste of the kinds of items I’ve been posting there lately…

MY 20 MOST RECENTLY RECOMMENDED LINKS

To access these links (and nearly 200 more so far), visit my del.icio.us page…

1. Microsoft Outlook Spam Filter Keywords and Phrases: Avoid Them (Chris Knight)
   – “Awareness is the goal here so that you get a better feeling for which terms and phrases might get your emails blocked.”
2. Online list tips (e-editor)
   – “There are potent cultural assumptions embedded in the reader’s response to any list. The reader will always assume that a list is presented in order of relevance or importance.”
3. DRM: it’s not just ineffective, it’s harmful (librarian.net)
   – The core arguments agains digital rights management (DRM), in a nutshell.
4. A blog, that’s how search engines find you (Tris Hussey)
   – Tris’ excellent point on a recent article by Gerry McGovern: “Interesting article on MarketingProfs (Links — How the Search Engines Find You). Totally behind the times, though.”
5. Yahoo! 360° — A New Model for Online Sharing (Yahoo Search Blog)
   – “These days, as we publicly post more of our opinions, photos, and sensitive information on the net, there’s growing concern about spam and other threats to our privacy.â€?
6. A Swiss Army Knife for Project Management (Enterprise Systems)
   – The bare minimum tools and rules needed for effective project management. Brilliant and eloquent.
7. Topic Hunter Meta Search In Several Different Categories (Research Buzz)
   – Tara Calishain gives Topic Hunter a thumbs up: “Instead Topic Hunter points you to search resources in a variety of topics”
8. Podcast Hotel and Videoblog Festival (Corante)
   – This event sounds incredibly cool and unusual. I think I’ll go…
9. Consumerpedia.org: the information resource everyone can help build
   – Way cool! The wikipedia approach to information about consumer products and services. Just launched.
10. Blog business value survey results (Jack Vinson)
    – “…is based on a worldwide web survey, undertaken by the author, where information professionals and knowledge managers were asked about their usage and value of weblogs as a source of business news and information.”
11. Difference between a weblog and a web site (Rex Hammock)
    – He answers this popular question in plain language. Even your grandma could understand this.
12. ACSD 2005 Annual Conference
    – Good example of a basic but useful conference blog. Every conference should have a blog – before, during, and for at least a little while after.
13. Interview with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (ACSD conference, streaming audio with transcript)
    – One of my favorite authors/researchers in the field of psychology, cognitive science, and learning. He wrote that great book Flow.
14. e-Learning Centre: XML
    – “This is the first of a three-part series that explains how content reuse tools are used in instructional design.”
15. Eduforge Project Info: eXe
    – E-learning XML editor project. “Content generated using eXe can be used by any Learning Management System. It will incoporate tools and CSS.”
16. Enterprise collaboration with blogs and wikis (Michelle Delio, infoWorld)
    – “Infoworld has posted a comprehensive package on the use of blogs/wikis in internal communications as well as for corporate communications/PR.”
17. How important are publishers? (The Intuitive Life Business Blog)
    – “A relationship between the publisher and reader seems like it’s skipping a rung on the publishing ladder, somehow, as if listeners
    want to have a relationship with a performance venue rather than performers.”
18. Controlled and suggested vocabularies: Are tags making us dumb? (Joho the blog)
    – “This is simply how language works. Words and meanings arise from a type of “conformism,” but so what? Meaning itself is a type of conformism, you aging hippie douchebag!”
19. More on Controlled and suggested vocabularies: Are tags making us dumb? (elearningpost)
    – “A bottom-up ‘synonym ring’ which connects all the varying terms used for the same item. For example, PC Forum = pcforum05 = pcf = pcf05 etc.”
20. The new conversations about learning (Ted Marchese)
    – “in making judgments about programs or curricula, about teaching or teachers, the ideas we hold about learning itself will and
    should be decisive.�

…Again, to access all these links (and nearly 200 more, so far), visit my del.icio.us page.

If my recommended links appeal to you, then from that page you can subscribe to the main webfeed for my recommended links.

Or, if you’re only interested in certain topics, you can get a webfeed for any of my “tags� (categories).

I will occasionally post announcements like this to give you a taste of what I’m recommending elsewhere on the web. However, to make sure you get all my recommended links (or all links in your favorite categories), please either subscribe to the appropriate webfeed or visit my del.icio.us page regularly.

Del.icio.us does not offer e-mail alerts.

NOTE: If you haven’t yet started using webfeeds (RSS or Atom), you really should! It’s not hard, I promise. Feeds are becoming absolutely essential for keeping up with online media efficiently. See my nontechnical primer on feeds.

Enjoy!

One task I’m particularly compulsive about is sharing with CONTENTIOUS readers links to interesting sites, articles, tools, and books. For awhile I’d been presenting these as my “grab bag” articles, but that process was too labor-intensive for me to maintain.

So now I’ve figured out how to use del.icio.us to keep you up to date on all the cool content I’m encouraging you to explore…

Look over at the right-hand column of any page in this weblog. See the section that says Other Goodies? That’s your resource for all my recommended reading.

The first goodie, recommended online reading, takes you to my main del.icio.us page where you can find every link I wanted to share, with the most recent additions listed first.

You’ll see I have an extensive list of categories (tags) which I use to describe each link, and I also include a brief text description or excerpt for each link. Clicking on any tag in my tag list will produce a list of all articles I’ve given that particular tag.

There is also a feed available for each tag, so you can follow just the topics you like. You can also see who else in del.icio.us bookmarked that same link, and check out their lists as well. Very cool!

The next goodie, feeds Amy reads, is the complete list of all the webfeeds to which I currently subscribe. This is an OPML file, which you download and import into a feed reader. I’m warning you, this is a long list. I currently subscribe to about 300-400 feeds. They’re categorized, that helps a bit.

Next, recommended books, takes you directly to a list of books which I’ve read and highly recommend. I tell you why I recommend each book. These are my del.icio.us links bearing the books-read tag.

Next, books I’m currently reading is pretty self-explanatory. This is just what’s in my pile at the moment – everything on my del.icio.us list bearing the books-reading tag. If I end up not liking a book, I’ll say why (if it’s important) or I’ll remove it from my del.icio.us page (if it’s not worth sharing at all).

Books I want also is pretty explanatory. It’s my book wish list, which I maintain via BestWebBuys (not del.icio.us). If you ever feel the urge to be generous toward me, books are always my favorite gift.

On my radar is a list of items I’m checking out or have checked out in the past, not necessarily recommendations. I keep this list in my Furl archive. This used to be where I kept track of items to include in my grab bag, but del.icio.us is a better solution for sharing links. So now, consider my Furl archive a record of my curiousity, sprawling over a wide range of topics.

…Anyway, I hope this explains what happened to my grab bags. I know my grab bags were pretty popular, and I still may do special ones as warranted. I know some people will miss that form of presentation. However, I had to go with a system I could maintain. It’s always a tradeoff. Ultimately, I think del.icio.us offers more benefits for recommending links.

What do you think? Comment below!

I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that my current approach to providing lists of interesting links (via “grab bag” articles) is not sustainable. I’m forever behind. I’m serious. In archive, my CONTENTIOUS-to-do category was up to nearly 225 items!

Also, while it helped simplify presentation to group items into topical lists, that approach also has disadvantages – namely, I could only assign categories to the list as a whole, not to specific items in the list.

My goal with my grab bags has always been to enable my clients and readers to learn from my never-ending learning process. However, it simply takes too much time to write a blurb on every item I discover that’s worth sharing. If I fall too far behind in noting useful items, some of them lose the value of timeliness.

So here’s my solution: del.icio.us – an amazingly useful online tool I’ve long overlooked…

WHAT IS DEL.ICIO.US?

Here’s how del.icio.us defines itself: “[This tool is] a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.”

In addition, you can add some rudimentary notes for each item. That function is a bit limited, but it’s still useful enough to suffice as my new mega-grab-bag.

CHECK IT OUT: Visit Amy Gahran’s del.icio.us page. You also can subscribe to my del.icio.us feed, if you desire up-to-the-minute updates about recent items I’ve added.

(What’s a feed?)

Items are listed in the order added. Right now I’m working through my considerable backlog. But I should catch up in a couple of weeks, I think.

I will still maintain a Furl archive of all the items I mention in CONTENTIOUS, since del.icio.us does not store a copy of bookmarked pages. But if you want to follow what I’ve been reading and doing online, check out my del.icio.us page.

I plan to offer occasional updates in CONTENTIOUS of new additions to my del.icio.us page. However, that will probably consist of a short item about the best item in a particular category, followed by a link to the del.icio.us page with the rest of the items in that category. Or something like that. I’m still working out that part.

Anyway, I just wanted to give you a heads-up about this change. I know many of you are very fond of my grab-bag articles. I wanted to continue to offer you that value – I just needed to make the process more sustainable and flexible.

Let me know what you think!

TOP OF THIS LIST: D’Arcy Norman’s Feb. 4 audio post on loosely bound metadata. (Right-click that link to download the MP3 audio file. It’s 3.7 MB and run just over nine minutes.) I’ve heard the neologism “folksonomy” floating around in various circles lately. It sounded vaguely interesting to me, but since I’m already suffering from chronic learning overload, I’ve been pushing it off my radar screen.

…Until I listened to what Norman had to say on the subject, that is. Now I’m totally jazzed and motivated to learn more about folksonomies. I even decided it was time to create a new CONTENTIOUS category called labels and metadata (this grab bag is the first entry in that category).

Here’s a brief excerpt from Norman’s audio post which got me all worked up:

“I love that people are really starting to think about loosely defined metadata in addition to (not to replace) the taxonomy-based metadata that librarians use. Most people don’t really want to enter metadata. They have trouble doing it properly. Now they shouldn’t have to enter it properly, that’s the point. Librarians are good at entering structured metadata, so that’s kind of people who should be entering structure metadata. People like you and me and the rest of the world are better at putting labels on things. Labels are tags, they’re keywords. If we can let people do that and then aggregate all of those labels and tags and keywords together, we end with something that approximates (not replaces, but approximates) the kind of structured metadata that librarians use…”

YES! I love the concept of metadata and what it can do, but actually working with formal taxonomies feels like I’m trying to force my brain to act like a computer. That’s not entirely a bad thing, but it just doesn’t feel human or natural. It takes a lot of effort, and it’s very picky, painstaking work. I can’t say I enjoy it, which means I don’t do it as much as I should. I think that informal, loose metadata systems (folksonomies) not only have greater mass appeal, but also a huge untapped potential. Writers and editors especially could benefit from this, since most of us are good at organizing information but bad at thinking like computers.

Read the rest of this list…

1. Wikipedia on Folksonomy. Excerpt: “a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. This feature began appearing in a variety of social software in 2004. Some examples of online folksonomies being social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Jots (http://jots.com/) which are bookmark sharing sites, Flickr, for photo sharing, 43 Things (recently revealed – secretly funded by amazon), for goal sharing, and Tagsurf (http://tagsurf.com/), for tag-based discussions. Gmail’s labeling system is somewhat similar to the use of tags, but it is not a folksonomy as users cannot share their categorizations.”
2. Folksonomies: Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata, an academic paper (like you’d never guess from that title) by Adam Mathes. Once you get past the stodgy introduction, this is a remarkably clear exploration of folksonomy and where it fits into the spectrum of categorization strategies.
3. Wikipedia on Faceted Classification. For context, faceted classification represents the formal end of the labeling spectrum. It’s a practice of library science that has applications for information technology, content management, science, and many other fields.
4. Pros and Cons of Folksonomy. Athough I’m very jazzed about folksonomy, I realized that it does have some drawbacks. It should exist to complement more formal categorization schemes. Together, formal and informal-collective categorization yield significant benefits. Nova Spivack explored this in his Jan. 26 Minding the Planet article, Folktologies — Beyond the Folksonomy vs. Ontology Distinction. Beyond that rather leaden title lies cutting insight. Excerpt: “Folksonomies (at least present-day ones) suffer from having too little formal structure — tagging systems easily result in metadata soup. Ontologies are on the other end of the spectrum – they are particulary useful for accurately modeling the actual structure of the world, or of conceptual domains – but admittedly in some cases their formal structure can be overly rigid and specific. The benefit of tagging is primarily the adaptive nature of the resulting taxonomies. The benefit of ontologies is the rich, and unambiguous, semantics they define.”
5. Wikipedia on Ontology. Useful context for this whole discussion. While the concept of ontology comes from philosophy, it directly relates to science and other disciplines which use categorization as a key tool for understanding. (More about ontology…)
6. Steal This Bookmark! Feb. 8, Salon, by Katharine Mieszkowski. This is an excellent, plain-language introduction to the concepts and uses of keyword tagging, with lots of real-world examples. Excerpt: “Tagging …is launching a revolution of self-organization on the Internet. You could call it the latest twist in the ongoing evolution of social networking software. Except there’s a difference: On social networking sites like Orkut or Friendster, people join, and then declare their alliances to each other explicitly. On sites that employ tagging, the networks emerge, implicitly, out of the shared interests of users. Order isn’t proclaimed, it just happens.”
7. Folksonomies Tap People Power, by Daniel Terdiman, Wired News, Feb. 1. Another good introductory article in plain language.
8. Folksonomies are big business, but that business may be a bit sneaky. One popular web startup which focuses on taxonomies is 43 Things – where you can list up to 43 things you wish to accomplish in your life, share your list, and report on your progress. This paints an intriguing collective portrait about what people want and what they value. On Feb. 8, Salon.com revealed that this startup is secretly funded by Amazon.com. Personally, I’m neither surprised nor appalled by this – although my opinion would depend on how that information gets used. In aggregate, I think it represents no privacy threat. But if that information can be tied to specific individuals with their contact info, and that gets sold to marketers, that could be a problem. Guess I’ll have to give the 43 Things privacy policy a close read…
9. More on the pros and cons of folksonomy, from Random Walk in E-Learning, Jan. 8, by Albert Ip. Also, see Lous Rosenfeld (Jan. 6), Anil Dash (Jan. 17), and Nancy White (Jan. 28).
10. Many-to-Many on Folksonomy: The Corante group weblog Many-to-Many Is an excellent resource for a variety of expert perspectives on the emerging field of folksonomy and how it’s being applied, especially to online content. Here are some articles there which caught my attention today:
    • Jan 7: folksonomies + controlled vocabularies, by Clay Shirky
    • Jan 13: Technorati Takes Tags Global, by Ross Mayfield
    • Jan. 20: It’s the social network, stupid! By Liz Lawley
    • Jan. 20: Social consequences of social tagging, by Liz Lawley
    • Jan. 22: Folksonomies are a forced move: A response to Liz, by Clay Shirky
11. Steve Rubel on folksonomy. In his weblog Micropersuasion, PR maven Steve Rubel has been posting a steady stream of useful and interesting links on this topic.
12. Technorati Tags. I’m just learning how to use this fantastic tool – but it’s something every online publisher (especially bloggers) should know about. Here’s Technorati’s explanation of tags: “Think of a tag as a simple category name. Bloggers categorize their posts, photos, and links with any tag that makes sense. Where do they come from? You! If you’re a blogger and would like to contribute, all you have to do is link to any tag page with rel=”tag” and it will automatically be included here.”
13. Technorati Tag Drawbacks: On Jan. 18, Rebecca Blood discussed in detail some problems she spotted, and Technorati’s response. (More on this from Foe Romeo, Jan. 18.)
14. Technorati tag page: Folksonomy. A great way to keep up on developments in this field. Bummer I can’t get a custom webfeed on this yet, but maybe they’re working on that…
15. WordPress plug-in for Technorati tags. If, like me, you use the popular free open-source blog software WordPress, and if you’re into tagging, you might want to install this tag plug-in to simplify the process a bit. Here are some excellent instructions from the WordPress support forum.
16. Feeding Tags into a Wiki? HELP!. Tagging isn’t just for weblogs and services like Furl. You can do it for wikis, too. The comments in response to this Jan. 28 blog posting by Nancy White offer some options. However, as with most things related to wikis, it isn’t terribly easy, especially for nontechnical folks.
17. Folksonomy and wikis, Mundane Essays, Jan. 6. This is rather technical, but well worth reading if you’re interesting in tagging for wikis. Excerpt: “In a wiki, tagging can be substantially more useful than tagging under other contexts (e.g. email, bookmarks or photos). A del.icio.us tag is merely a grouping of bookmarks. Categories, that Jon mentions are no more. In the implementation I’ve done, a tag is a wiki entry (providing definitions, details) and it may itself be tagged further.”

TOP OF THIS LIST: Out of the Rubble, A Public Housing Drama Rises, a three-part video feature from the Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2004. First-rate storytelling that works well on a very small screen.

Now that we’re entering the age of TV programming delivered to mobile phones, I hope more news organizations start producing and deliver more of this kind of content.

Read the rest of this list…

1. EPIC 2014: A truly thought-provoking and eminently controversial Flash presentation of a possible dystopian media future. By Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson. This is intended not as a prediction, but as a starting point for discussion. It begins with this challenging vision: “In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned. What happened to the news?”
2. More on EPIC 2014: Listen to the Jan. 15 edition of Web Talk Radio, which features a fabulous interview with Robin Sloan, one of the EPIC 2014 creators. Sloan discusses how journalists and others reacted to the scenario when it was initially presented to small groups, and how that shaped the final presentation. Yet another example of why it’s important to ask, “What if?” Click to download the MP3 audio file, or get the streaming version (Real Audio or Windows Media).
3. The Future Of The New York Times, Business Week cover story by Anthony Bianco, John Rossant and Lauren Gard, Jan. 17 (free registration required). Speaking of the Gray Lady’s fortunes… What caught my attention in this feature was the wrap-up: “The New York Times, like all print publications, faces a quandary. A majority of the paper’s readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering. ‘The business model that seems to justify the expense of producing quality journalism is the one that isn’t growing, and the one that is growing – the Internet – isn’t producing enough revenue to produce journalism of the same quality,’ says John Battelle, a co-founder of Wired and other magazines and web sites.” It’s worth also reading Joi Ito’s commentary on this feature story. Food for thought.
4. Wave of Destruction: Photos and videos from the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Yet another example of how the internet can surpass, or at least complement, traditional news media – even in terms of delivering multimedia content. This is a personal project by Geoffrey Huntley. Bandwidth and hosting generously provided by OzForces. (Thanks to For Immediate Release for this link.)
5. Anatomy of news waves: Check out Airline Fare News Boom, Web Pro News, Jan. 9. This article offers intriguing advice: “How do you know a news wave when you see one? Frequent Google News.” I don’t 100% agree with this strategy, but it can be a useful indicator.
6. A Tidal Wave of Sleaze, News Hounds (“We watch FOX so you don’t have to,” Dec. 28, 2004. Granted, FOX wasn’t the only US news organization that seemed to have screwy priorities in the initial days of tsunami coverage, but this is a great roundup of how screwy those priorities could get.
7. Indiana Gazette, Dec. 29, 3004 reprint of the AP story “Asia Rushes to Bury 67,000 Tsunami Victims.” You know, news organizations that litter their site with waaaaaayyyyyy too much cheesy advertising should really think twice about running such weighty stories online. Here, the jarring contrast between the story and all the ads was frankly creepy and insensitive.

TOP OF THIS LIST:
Mind mapping: See what you’re thinking, by Dave Pollard, How to Save the World, Jan. 5. Lately I’ve grown to adore mind mapping tools. This article is perhaps the best introduction to the topic, with no hype.

Excerpt: “Recently I’ve started playing with mind maps as a personal thinking out loud tool, to organize my thoughts and think creatively all by myself. I’ve always learned best by writing, synthesizing and distilling books and other voluminous materials down to their essence: the message, the meaning, and the necessary actions. So perhaps this learning by writing down style is the reason I find mind maps useful.”

YES!!!! That’s exactly why I love mind mapping tools, too.

Read the rest of this list…

1. Furl instead of blog, by George Siemens, elearnspace, Dec. 15, 2004. Yet another cool way to use Furl. Excerpt: “Imagine a group of 25 students subscribing to each others online topics of interest (Furl folders can be public or private)…gaining insight into what other classmates found interesting enough to keep.” Obviously, that’s something that any group of people could find useful. Oh, and if you’re interested, here’s my Furl archive. (Thanks to Weblogg-ed for this link.)
2. Best and Worst of Social Media 2004, by Scott Allen, Online Business Networks Blogs, Jan. 4. A great rundown of some popular tools to help people connect and collaborate online. Best part: “The truth is simply people don’t know how to use social networking sites. Pundits can say all they want to that they should be intuitive, but the issue is not the use of the site – it’s the social practices online. The typical 40-something professional has around 200,000 hours of experience interacting with people face-to-face, and less than 5,000 hours interacting online. As the human race, we have tens of thousands of years of face-to-face interaction, and barely 30 online – 20, really. What do you expect? It’s we who need to learn how to interact online effectively – the social networking sites can’t do that for us. They’re a tool – nothing more, nothing less. And most of us can even learn to use a hammer more effectively.” (Thanks to Jack Vinson for this link.)
3. The Humble FAQ, by Denham Grey, Knowledge-at-Work, Jan. 3. Great insight on how FAQs can be used and what they can achieve. Also, I didn’t know until I read this article that there are specific FAQ-generation tools. Cool!
4. Google Search: Sponsored Links. From ResearchBuzz, Dec. 28, 2004: “Wondering what ads Google has for a particular keyword? [Search here and] you’ll get JUST sponsored results. For interesting search results, try a keyword that’s heavily in the news at the moment, like, say, Celebrex. You’ll get interesting results that reflect the news stories about Celebrex in different ways.”
5. Extisp.icio.us: Charting the tags of del.icio.us users. Del.icio.us is a very popular social bookmarking tool. The extisp.icio.us charting tool delivers an interactive graphic which communicates at a glance which topics are of most and least interest to a particular del.icio.us user. Check out this result for the username entropy. (Thanks to Random Bytes for this link.)
6. Search Looks at the Big Picture, by John Gartner, Wired News, Jan. 6. Excerpt: “Searching the internet for images or videos often leads down a blind alley or worse – to deceitful advertisers or unsuitable content. Researchers are developing visualization technologies that can “see” inside images, reducing search engines’ reliance on text-based image tags that are easily manipulated.”
7. RSS Zeitgeist: Charts trends in search queries for Feedster – one of the most popular search engines for webfeeds. (Thanks to Nicole Simon for this link.)
8. GigaDial. This free web-based service appears to be a kind of Bloglines for podcasting (online audio shows delivered by feed). I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but it looks interesting. (Thanks again to Nicole Simon for this link.)
9. Traffic on Yahoo! Maps: “Get real-time traffic, driving directions, incident reports and more.” This is a neat idea, but so far I’ve found it rather spotty. Still, I’m mentioning it because maybe it’s more useful for drivers in other areas.

TOP OF THIS LIST: Experiencing knowledge to succeed, by Michael Jones, Yafle.com, Dec. 13, 2004. Excerpt: “Many in education – and especially many in e-learning – forget a simple truth. It’s not what you learn, it’s the process by and environment in which you learn it…

“Those who attempt to boil down information to a set of standardized learning objects that can be consumed interchangeably and acontextually risk losing sight of the contextual and collaborative elements of learning. Now, for some types of learning (e.g., procedural training), it’s perfectly correct and efficient to simply transfer information from A to B. This is simple knowledge transfer and acquisition. More complex learning, however, is essentially experiential and deeply contextual.”

Read the rest of this list…

1. Learning Times: “An open community for education and training professionals. Members have free access to a wide range of opportunities to interact and network with peers from across the globe. Member activities include live webcasts and interviews with industry leaders, online debates and discussions, live coverage of industry conferences, and international working groups… Also features free group collaboration tools.” I joined this community not too long ago. I haven’t had a chance to explore it thoroughly, but so far it seems pretty useful. (Thanks to Croncast for this link.)
2. Corporate E-Learning, by Michael Specht, Dec. 23, 2004. Expanding upon my Dec. 10, 2004 article, Corporate E-Learning: Focus on Tasks, Specht notes, “What struck me about it is Amy is almost talking about a sophisticated RSS environment for learning objects.” Quite intriguing…
3. Backwards chaining in corporate training, by Rebecca Thomas, Education Niche, Dec. 21, 2004. An interesting explanation of a learning technique in which people learn a process by first learning how to finish it. Then they proceed backwards through each step until they master the whole process.
4. Learning from the Fourth Grade, Incremental Blogger, Dec. 19, 2004. A look at why PowerPoint has become a common presentation tool among grade-school students.
5. M-Learning: European mobile learning program. “Aimed at young adults, aged 16 to 24, who are most at risk of social exclusion in Europe. They have not succeeded in the education system, cannot read and write adequately and have problems with simple calculations except in familiar contexts. They are not currently involved in any education or training and may be unemployed, under employed, or even homeless. What do many of these young people have in common? A mobile phone.”
6. News from the Neurosciences, a collection of scholarly articles from New Horizons for Learning. “How would it affect educational systems if everyone truly believed that the human brain could change structurally and functionally as a result of learning and experience–for better or worse? How would it affect how we teach and how students learn if everyone believed that the kinds of environments we create for learning, how we teach, and the learning strategies we offer students could result in better mental equipment they will use throughout life? In News from the Neurosciences, you will find articles that support the validity of this concept, as well as articles of current interest on various other aspects of brain research and its implications for education.” (Thanks to Stephen Harlow for this link.)

TOP OF THIS LIST: Any fool can learn to write for an audience, e-editor, Nov. 29, 2004. I’ve worked on a lot of style guide projects, and this article nails precisely a key point which is wholly omitted in most conventional in-house style guides: The first duty of the author is to write for the audience. A skilled editor is needed to handle the rest. Editing (real editing, not just proofreading) is not optional! It’s a mistake, usually, to expect most writers to be their own editors.

Excerpt: “Producing business text to suit a particular audience is a thoroughly misunderstood process. Getting the content right for the reader is the responsibility of the author. And in 99 cases out of 100, that is exactly where the limits of the author’s responsibility should be set. Presenting that content to the reader in its most accessible and striking form – honouring every nuance, but striking out every windy cliché and cavalier contradiction – is the other half of the exercise. That depends on editorial skill and judgement, and on the editor having the humility and stamina to check all those names, facts, details and dates the author couldn’t be bothered to question.”

Also, don’t miss e-editor’s Dec. 9, 2004 followup article. Excerpt: “Even after the skilled e-editor has done his or her worst, cutting and polishing like some dedicated craftsman in an Antwerp diamond house, the shorter, clearer, stronger piece that emerges should still have something of the author in it.”

Read the rest of this list…

1. Please, Please, Please Write Informative Headlines, by Steffen Fjærvik, Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, Jan. 21. He’s talking about news story headlines, but this can apply to any kind of headlines published online. Excerpt: “What do I do with headlines like ‘Dramatic change’ (which turned out to be about a change in the government’s attitude toward immigrants) or ‘An unfinished story’ (this deals with the U.S. inauguration). And these are just a couple of random picks from a Norwegian feed I read last night. Both those headlines belong in a newspaper or on a website, where there is room for a picture and a blurb. They have no place in my RSS reader. Or in my mobile phone’s WAP reader. Because I can’t even make up my mind if I’m interested.”
2. Write in the Language of Your Readers, by Nick Usborne, Jan. 3. Short and two the point. Shows the power of a well-chosen example. Also from Usborne: Include Relevant Keywords in Your Text Links, Jan. 10. Why click here links suck. This is a good complement to my February 2004 article, Link Text Tips
3. Writing Optimized Press Releases for Search Engines, Room 2Blog, Jan. 18. Excellent, practical advice. If you liked my series Online Media Outreach series, this article is a good complement. Plus a succinct but brilliant point: “Search engines are media.” Yes! I’ll be writing on that theme later…
4. Freelance Writing Success. This online resource offers advice collected by Nick Usborne. It’s a must-read for any freelance writing profressional. It’s geared mostly toward marketing/PR writing rather than journalism, but it’s good advice across the board. Recommended article: Press Releases Transformed from So-So to Sizzling, by Marcia Yudkin
5. Let’s talk turkey. We’re here for the money. So is everyone else we work with, from the boardroom to the basement., e-editor, Oct. 17, 2004. A clear explanation about what all professional writers and editors can learn from advertising copywriting.
6. Memorandum of Law on the Name, published in USA the Republic. On Jan. 25 I posted an audio show in which I railed against legalese. One aspect of legalese writing which particularly annoys me is rampant unnecessary capitalization, especially of names. This article dissects that practice and demonstrates in about 50 different ways that there’s no legal basis for it. So don’t do it!
7. Eschew, Evade, and/or Eradicate Legalese. Excellent, specific advice on using plain language from Prof. Eugene Volokh, UCLA Law School.

TOP OF THIS LIST: E-mail v RSS, let us move on… by Alex Barnett (Online Customer Experience Manager with Microsoft UK), May 22. Useful matrix, with links, which demonstrates why the now-perennial debate over whether e-mail publishing is dead should be laid to rest. Bottom line: E-mail and webfeeds are complementary.

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1. Your Online Paperboy, by Heather Green, BusinessWeek, Dec. 20, 2004. Need to explain webfeeds to your parents? To your grandparents? This article will probably do the trick. (Thanks to Social media for this link.)
2. Newspapers with RSS: A List, The Media Drop, Dec. 10, 2004. it’s not comprehensive, but it’s a good start.
3. Feeds: Not just for blogs. The Seattle Public Library is rolling out a slew of new webfeed-based services. you can now generate a feed based on searches of the library’s catalog, and get a feed reminding you to return borrowed items. Listen to the Jan. 21 episode of Future Tense for more details.
4. Feed Me: A toy for bloggers could disrupt real Web businesses, by Peter Kafka and David Whelan, Forbes, Jan. 10. Excerpt: “Much hype has swirled around RSS’ presumed ability to allow blogs to subvert big media. That’s a romantic presumption. The likelier disruption will come in areas such as classifieds, search and e-commerce. RSS lets big companies increase their reach-Amazon.com now streams catalog updates to its Web resellers-while letting little guys into the game.” (Thanks to Social Media for this link.) Of course, Forbes’ reportorial record on feeds has been spotty, so take what you find there on that topic with a grain of salt.
5. Feed Submitter: This cool, free web-based tool by Thomas Korte is a great way to attract a larger online audience. Enter the URL of your webfeed and your e-mail address, and it will submit your feed to be listed in 15 major feed aggregators (Feedster, etc.).
6. Webfeed Fetishizing, New Media Hack, Dec. 24, 2004. Excerpt: “I’m getting the feeling that webfeed aggregation is in for a big hype bubble this upcoming year. Vacuous buzzphrases like the network is the blog and personalized information hypermarkets are starting to get traction. Besides there’s now a conference providing, awareness, clarity, education, deal-making and strategic business opportunities surrounding the emergence of online media syndication. Uh, yeah…”
7. The Role of RSS in Science Publishing, by Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, and Ben Lund, D-Lib Magazine, December 2004. Excerpt: “Beyond providing a basic alerting service, we note that science publishers are also offering RSS feeds for a whole range of other news services – jobs, product data, events, etc. But it is not just news of the moment that RSS is suited for. Another important use case is to build up and maintain an archive of RSS feeds that constitute a repository of structured data. Why is this useful? Simply that RSS provides an open means of structuring or packaging metadata, and many code libraries are available to applications to parse this data transparently. But RSS is not just for syndicating textual information, it is also being used to transmit complete scientific data sets…” (Thanks to Lockergnome for this link.)
8. IceRocket debuts a free feed builder. I haven’t tried it yet, but a Search Engine Journal seems enamored with it. Worth a look.
9. RSS Feeds Hunger for More Ads , by Cyrus Farivar, Wired News, Oct. 15, 2004. Brief overview of the efforts of several online ad companies which are pioneering this field.
10. News Headlines at the Denver Public Library: The home page of the Denver Public Library web site now features news headlines from Reuters and other major news outlets. Such syndication is a great example of how libraries can leverage webfeeds. Steve Outing discussed this in a Nov. 11 E-Media Tidbits posting.