Blog and viewer influence on BBC news agenda

Blog and viewer influence on BBC news agenda: "The BBC's The Editors blog continues to be one of the most interesting and useful media blogs around.

...

He also discusses the strange case of someone being surprised when they discovered that Newsnight editors were reading about them, he sense that people somehow feel that what they write on blogs is somehow, sometimes a private conversation, and not exposed to the all-seeing eyes of Google and Technorati.

Solved

I was researching this problem in a drupal community forum and it turns out that there is a security module which some hosting providers turn on which blocks execution of anything with the string “xmlrpc” in it!

The real solution is to persuade them to unblock it but the temporary answer is to rename that file to something else and use that as the api endpoint

See more progress on: Find out why xmlrpc.php isn't working on my Wordpress Blog

Whitechapel made easier

With Shoreditch station now closed forever, the transfer at Whitechapel is easy in both directions. No longer is it necessary to arrive half way along one platform, walk along then up and over the bridge to cross to the other side since the inward bound train is now the same as the outward. Whitechapel is the terminus, and the key connection between norh east and south east London. Much more so than the mainline terminals of Liverpool Street and London Bridge stations, with an erratic bus journey between the two. I don’t miss the crowds and bothersome departure noticeboards at either of those bottlenecks but I do miss the view of the Thames with the opportunity to walk across the bridge when I feel like it, enjoying a cool(ish) breeze, and watching out for river traffic and cormorants below.

See more progress on: London: avoid travelcard zone one for a month

Day 6 of avoiding zone 1

Yesterday afternoon I caught myself standing absent mindedly on the wrong platform just about to get on the wrong train. I think that means I’ve reached the transition point where the novelty of a changed situation has to some extent worn off, with the tendency to act very consciously waning, while a new habit has not yet established itself deeply enough. This is a dangerous period in some circumstance, like when, after carefully driving around in a foreign country on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, feeling more and more confident, suddenly after a week or so, you might just pull out from a parked spot and set off on the left. Or go round a roundabout anticlockwise.
The lesson here is that takes more than a week to establish new habits deeply, or rather to change old well established ones.

So I had to go back up the steps and cross over to the other side. Only after I had taken my place on the tube train did I discover that some anti social person had discarded half a bag of fish and chips under the seat. That smells horrible, so I got off at Canada Water and experimented with the Jubilee line instead.

The trouble with Jubilee line journeys to the east is that not all of the trains continue all the way to Stratford. Because of Murphy’s law, no matter when I arrive, the first train is always to North Greenwich only – that’s the station which was specially built for the hapless Millenium Dome which is of course long closed, so who would want to get off there? Changing there is not a good idea either, since the terminating train pulls into a different platform to the next onging one, so if you’re going to do that sort of thing, better to do it at Canary Wharf. Once at Canary Wharf, however, I decided to surface and take advantage of the range of goodies available at Waitrose. Back on the jubilee line platform, still well before the full rush hour, but the first train onwards was busy, so I had to stand most of the way. Then at Stratford there was problem with overhead line failure at Brentwood or something so I gave up and caught a bus.

The bus was crowded and had a drunk christian proselytising nutter annoying everybody, and by the time we got to Forest Gate some of the passengers had given up ignoring him and resorted to shouting back. So that was a pretty normal day then, really.

See more progress on: London: avoid travelcard zone one for a month

Hay

Hay
Originally uploaded by Andyrob.

Scattered evidence

In order to gather the feedback from my exhibitions I need to go to many sources.

1) wiki wednesday

• Own notes to be typed up.
• photos, wiki and blogs about the event.

2) Online Exhibition

• comments on the blog page
• direct emails
• responses on mailing lists
• responses in learning set

3) Barn Raising

• edits to the Wiki
• irc
• mailing list
• discussion on other wikis
• blogs
• CP

I’ve probably forgotten something as well.

See more progress on: gather feedback from my exhibitions

Draft 1 of 100word topic proposal

Develop better online communities and improve facilitation through Distributed Action Research (DAR).

The term DAR has been coined to describe the application of Action Research methodology to the facilitation of distributed Communities of Practice. The traditions and power of reflective, cyclical, systematic yet flexible positive action and qualitative research methods are harnessed and adapted to evolve alongside the rapidly changing landscape of internet communications. In this topic we may discuss:

• Theoretical background
• New thinking, methods and practice
• Implications for the practitioner/researcher
• Online ethics
• Building a pattern repository
• Online research tools for qualitative data analysis
• Fostering a culture of shared findings

See more progress on: Write a 100 word topic proposal on distributed action research

pbwiki

Peanut butter wiki is free, and password protected so you can use it as a prviate space for jotting things down, or share the password with a group for further granularity.





Use Linkedin as an online CV

For the time being I might get around to assembling some CV details on the hosted service Linkedin, which is good enough for the purpose.

https://www.linkedin.com/e/fps/4582108

If you know me, why not get yourself a Linkedin account and connect with me there.

See more progress on: create an online cv website

Meanwhile

I haven’t fixed the interface to the Wordpress blog yet, I’ll probably upgrade the whole thing to v2.0 when I get a chance, but at least I’ve managed to get back to the postion where I can blog from Flickr or 43things direct to my blogger blog again, which is useful. And this is proof of it.

See more progress on: Find out why xmlrpc.php isn't working on my Wordpress Blog

Worth it, but only just

Blogging every day for a period was worth it because:

• it got some stuff done which needed doing


• I learned a few things about tagging, and about what isn’t working


• it gets easier after a few days


• a couple of people told me they enjoyed reading it

On the other hand it wasn’t worth it because:

• no substantial new links were created


• time consuming


• After the period ended, I didn’t blog much and then left a gap of a whole week.

See more progress on: Blog every day

Placa Miracle del Mocadoret 2

Placa Miracle del Mocadoret 2
Originally uploaded by jovike.

photo by jovike

Continuous cruising licence

From a narrowboat live-aboarder on the Flickr canals groups

Reply to new member: "Dirt Water Fox posted a reply:

Hi Andyrob good to hear that you are a potential Boater :o) And yes the continuous cruising licence is indeed still going, though some regulations have been tightened up by british waterways ie, length of stay at any one place. In simple terms this means that one can moor at any place for up to 14 days only, after that you must move a distance of 14 lock miles. Confused ??? Good, cos we were too.:o)
14 lock miles means a distance of 14 miles or 14 locks, which ever comes first. For example if there are 14 locks in the first 2 mile stretch, then you need only move 2 miles, but if there are no locks then you need to travel the full 14 miles. And just to make it more difficult, you may not return to a previous mooring site for at least 45 days. Happy Boating...:-)"

Web 2.0 Wish for 2006 - Peer 2.0!

J. LeRoy puts his finger on something that has been irking me for three years now. All of these new web services, LMSs, blog tag facilitation, aggregators etc etc are just giving us back something we already had, but under somebody else's control instead of our own. It won't hold up in the long run though, because the physical network is primary and the services which run on it are secondary. So as long as the network is freely accessible, then some kind of grassroots peer to peer archicture will keep reappearing as the service of preference. And that's why people persist with blogging despite all of the difficulties.

Web 2.0 Wish for 2006 - Peer 2.0!: "It's a new year and many around the web are making predictions. I don't know if my Web 2.0 prediction for 2006 is an actual prediction or if it is wishful thinking. I do know I sincerely hope it will happen.

There will be a resurgence of Peer to Peer architectures.

Web 2.0's rhetoric is that it supports collaboration and communication - yet web 2.0's main architecture is centralized. It's all centralized.

The masses are rarely well served by central control.

Your site goes down and your mission critical information is lost. With well developed Peer to Peer application, there's always a backup. With well developed Peer to Peer, you aren't held hostage if your company goes down.

RSS, in fact, can be seen as trying to bridge the gap between the flatness of the web and the communication of peer to peer systems.