Measures of the Ubiquity of Blogging?

Certainly some of the tests to check for the ubiquity of blogging might be to see if there exist:

• conferences (Blog World Expo),
• subspeciality conferences (God Blog Conference-"Helping Christians Engage New Media"),
• awards (The Best of the Blogs Award, The Weblog Awards),
• professional associations (International Blogging and New Media Association--although just in its infancy),
• a journal (Blogger & Podcasting),
• a related research organization/thinktank (Society for New Communications Research), or
• a $10,000 scholarship for college student bloggers (The Blogging Scholarship)

My point--blogging is here. And not a fringe activity; it's an integrated part of the communication patterns for many people. And we're seeing structure develop around blogging as it becomes even more prominent.

Here are some interesting statistics from the Blog World Expo website:

• Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog.
• More than 147 million Americans use the Internet.
• Over 57 million Americns read blogs.
• 1.7 million American adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog.
• 89% of companies surveyed say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years.
• 9% of internet users say they have created blogs .
• 6% of the entire US adult population has created a blog .
• Technorati is currently tracking over 70 million blogs .
• over 120 thousand blogs are created every day .
• There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day .
• 22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs .
• 120,000 new blogs are created every day .
• 37% of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006 .
• 51% of blog readers shop online .
• Blog readers average 23 hours online each week .

Jing (I'm really excited about this)

I admit I'm a big fan of the company TechSmith. I've used two of their products, SnagIt (screen captures) and Camtasia (video capturing + narration of anything that is happening on your computer screen) for years. They have a new "project," ProjectJing, that I want to mention for two reasons:

(1) it's a great example of a company taking advantage of the collaborative web in a alpha product state. As you can see, they're using collective knowledge to understand how to use this tool, why to use this tool, to determine bugs & enhancements to the tool, as well as anything else they can think of.

(2) I haven't played around with it much but I'm VERY excited about the tool itself. Take a look at the video at ProjectJing to get an idea of what the product it about. It looks like a combination of SnagIt & Camtasia (screen capture and screen video) plus the ability to quickly/easily share with others. Particularly, but not exclusively, for those of you who train people on info on the computer screen, it could be amazing. Take a look!

Three other things:

• First, the documents are stored on screencast.com so you'll need to register with them in order to save your Jing docs.
• Second, TechSmith has arranged for FREE memberships to screencast.com (there is usually a membership fee), so this means you have 200MB of free online storage you can use for anything.
• Finally, at some point TechSmith will likely turn this into a product and shut down the FREE access; so enjoy it while you can!

Images on Wikipedia

In light of our conversation this weekend on copyright, I thought you might be interested in Ten things you may not know about images on Wikipedia (from Wikipedia).

Several of the items have to do with the copyright issues related to using their images (#10: "You can use (free) images from Wikipedia on your own site, or anywhere you like..." but don't forget to read the rest of the numbers too!)

Using Photos as Your Blog Background

I'm not sure if any of you are reading the blogger.com blog, but here's a post on how to modify your blog template to include your own picture in the background.

Robin's Note: Since the whole point of your blog is to have people read what you have to say, please consider readability as you think about which pictures to put in the background of your blog! (and remember, you can change the color of the various fonts if that would help.)

A few new collaborative sites & tools

Here are a few interesting things I picked up over the last few days from the Mashable blog (blog on social networking, and one of my personal daily "must read" blogs).

Here's a blog post from Mashable on how companies (HP is described here) are using wikis to gather data for market research.

Following in the spirit of our class (all our applications are free), the Mashable blog has a post listing LOTS of no-cost graphic software and a post on a new-ish (free) web-based photo editor.

I also recently read one of their posts on Ask500people. It's a mashup site where users can submit questions and poll the subscribers. Although not really useful (to me, anyway), I did spend a few minutes looking through the old/live questions. (FYI: most people voting believe the egg came before the chicken.) It took me a few minutes to figure out the layout: the questions in the center of the screen are questions that are queued up to be voted on, they don't contain any data yet.

Thanks for a good (and full!) weekend. (good thing we had chocolate! :-)

Here are the dates we agreed on for the OPTIONAL sessions:

• Thursday, Nov 1, 5:00p-7:00-ish: audio working session in the computer lab
• Monday, Nov 5, 7:30p-9:30-ish: audio working session in the computer lab

***NOTE: if no one is here after 45 minutes I'm going home. So if you're going to be late call me!

• Tuesday, Nov 6, 7:30-9:30-ish: Bonus Learning Session(including: Google documents, creating narrated powerpoint slideshows, delicious, skype)
  

Homework recap:

• Podcast (audio file) posted to your blog: DUE Nov 11
• Final paper or other final project: DUE Dec 2(Other project needs to be approved by me)
• Post class assessment (I'll send the link to you Dec 3): DUE Dec 10

Of course, feel free to call me with questions.

New Feature in Blogger

Blogger has implemented a new feature that I thought I'd pass on.


The first, is the ability to sign up to get email notification of additional comments on a particular blog post. Here's a blog post describing it. Basically, when you go to comment, you now have the option to click a box and have all the subsequent comments on this post emailed to you. (it's like following the conversation without having to keep checking back to the blog (see left).