PowerBloghers get ready to roll
.30.7 | 2 Comments »
July 30th, 2005 by Alex
We’re going to show folks a few tricks that can help them make beautiful, earth-changing blogs while they sleep. So please bring us your powerblogging questions — visit http://advancedtools.blogspot.com.
Wanted: RSS calendaring
.27.7 | 7 Comments »
July 27th, 2005 by Alex
At the top of my wishlist: a good RSS calendaring tool that would let me share my whereabouts with friends, family and well-wishers. (If anyone has a technology that can specifically exclude ill-wishers, so much the better.) The absolute minimum that I need is something that outputs my upcoming travels and conferences as an RSS feed that I can stick in a “where’s Alex?” section of my sidebar.
That’s what I thought I’d get from RSSCalendar.com. (Hell, they’ve got the URL right, and that’s a start.) RSS Calendar is what it says it is: a calendar that lets you add events, share them with friends (it lets you set different privacy levels for different events — good idea!) and then (so the site promises) add the resulting RSS output to your web site via a single line of code.
But I never got that far because I reached the point of exasperation way before then.
No, it wasn’t when I realized that the site was based on categories instead of tags (d’oh!). Here’s one place I’d think tagging would be a no-brainer: after all, I don’t want to have to put BlogHer in either conferences OR travel OR technology: I want it in all three. But RSS Calendar lets you pick only one — not a great move, but believe it or not I actually found it within myself to pardon this shortcoming and plow ahead.
Which is how I had the opportunity to discover that RSS Calendar limits events to a single day! That’s just madness. I want to mark down our upcoming two-week trip to San Francisco as a single event — not as fourteen day-long events. So that’s when I gave up.
The upside of that downside is that it now leaves me free to troll for a better option. What would RSS calendaring look like if it were done right? Well ideally it would include:
- multiple privacy levels, customizable by event
- option of e-mailing people to invite them to events if they’re not RSS users (even I have yet to break off social relations with the non-RSS world)
- integration with (cough cough) Entourage or Outlook for those of us who are weak-minded followers of the leading desktop calendaring options
- tagging of events (including options for multiple tags)
- RSS feeds for all scheduled events or for specific tags (so that I could post on my blog only events I tag “public”)
- inbound aggregation of other RSS feeds so I can subscribe to my husband’s, colleagues’, and friends’ calendars and see when we can potentially intersect.
Does anyone have a tool or tools to nominate that could — singly or in combination — do the job? Other candidates I’m investigating: PHP iCalendar (which works with iCal) and Upcoming.org (which turns out to be for scheduling public events, not tracking personal whereabouts.)
I’m also going to poke into some of the options listed on the evnt wiki. Trumba looks promising but is non-free.
Amping up for BlogHer
.27.7 | 3 Comments »
July 27th, 2005 by Alex
I’m not just the t-shirt girl: I’m going to be live and in person at BlogHer this weekend, facilitating a fantabulous advanced tools session with Marnie Webb and George Oates. Marnie has set up an Advanced Tools blog just for our session.
We hope that BlogHer attendees will contribute their own blog posts, Flickr photos, del.icio.us links and other goodies by tagging them powerbloghers. Don’t worry about whether your links are specifically about power blogging; start by adding your own blog, your photo, or anything else you think is interesting that other people might want to check out.
And while I’m on the BlogHer theme, here’s another challenge to BlogHer attendees: it’s a Technorati world….and I for one am OBSESSED with my Technorati ranking. So how about us all giving each other a boost up ye olde Technorati rank ladder by blogging as many of our fellow BlogHer attendees as possible…and not just the talking heads.
I’m starting right now my sending greets to Ashley Richards, the lovely Lassa, Marian Douglas and Marti. You sound like interesting women and I am looking forward to meeting all of you!
H2O Playlist
.27.7 | 2 Comments »
July 27th, 2005 by Alex
The latest tool I’m exploring is H2O Playlist, a project of the Berkman Center. What is H20?
An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.
What this seems to boil down to is an inteface for creating a thoughtfully structured, annotated, nice-looking topical set of web links. Given the never-ending stream of social bookmarking tools that are now available to help me manage my web links, what are the circumstances under which I’d want to hive off a subset and turn them into an H20 Playlist?
The first thing to realize is that H20 Playlist doesn’t replace your primary tool for bookmark management. It still makes sense to use something like del.icio.us or Furl to manage your overall bookmark collection. (And it would sure be nice if H20 had an import mechanism that worked with these, perhaps by allowing import from a standard mozilla bookmark file….I don’t want to have to manually move over all the bookmarks for the particular tags I want represented in a playlist.)
Where H20 comes in handy is if you’re actually trying to turn your playlist into something…prototypically, a syllabus or some sort of guide. For example I could see H20 being a nice way of organizing and annotating my list of RSS resources. Or if I were going to teach my Internet & Politics course again, I might use it to structure the online readings.
But where H20 should really be useful is when it comes to groups of people collaborating in developing curricula or other learning resources. H20 doesn’t yet facilitate that kind of collaboration, as far as I can see; you can spin somebody else’s playlist into a version of your own, but you can’t invite someone else to add to or directly annotate a playlist.
If H20’s future iterations include true group collaboration on playlists, some serious import tools — or better yet, integration or mirroring of other social bookmarking systems so one can synch playlists with del.icio.us linklists — it could prove to be a very handy tool in the social bookmarking toolbox.
Become an online engagement pro
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July 20th, 2005 by Alex
This fall I’m teaching two e-engagement programs through Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. One of the programs is a TeleForum (a series of conference calls) so it’s accessible to participants anywhere in the world.
Please let your colleagues and friends know about this chance to learn about online engagement and dialogue:
Do you need to build relationships with new stakeholder groups? Are you managing complex issues and relationships with limited resources? Is information management and information sharing crucial to your stakeholder engagement work?
Online tools can help you manage all of these stakeholder engagement challenges. Engagement leaders have recognized that tools like online discussions, resource libraries and surveys can increase the reach and effectiveness of almost any stakeholder engagement program.
Beginning in September 2005, the Collaborative Learning & Innovation program at Simon Fraser University is offering two opportunities to learn more about the values, tools and approaches that drive successful online stakeholder engagement.
The Online Stakeholder Engagement Teleforum (http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/online_engagement_teleforum.htm) is a series of six monthly conference calls for engagement practitioners. These monthly discussions will focus on collaborative knowledge-building among participants in order to create a learning community that is useful to the work of its members. Participants will develop the field knowledge and analytic framework to assess e-engagement options and to plan for effective online engagement with key stakeholders. The first session will be held on September 14; calls will be held from 10 am – noon PST, and international participation is welcomed.
The Online Stakeholder Engagement Workshop (http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/online_workshop.htm) will be held on October 17 in Vancouver, Canada. This one-day workshop will provide an intensive introduction to online engagement work, emphasizing online engagement as a catalyst for increasing the depth and value of public involvement work. Participants will get hands-on experience with a range of online engagement tools, and will develop their own perspective on the opportunities for online participation through discussion and group exercises.
Both the Teleforum and the in-person workshop will be co-taught be Alexandra Samuel and Ann Svendsen. For further information please visit the CLI web site at http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/executive_programs.htm, or e-mail Alexandra (alex_at_alexandrasamuel_dot_com) or Ann (svendsen_at_sfu_dot_ca).
The perfect event blogging tool?
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July 14th, 2005 by Alex
I met a really amazing group of people at AdvocacyDev, some of whom I expect to see again at Web of Change. Within the amazing group were a number of bloggers, and I’m looking forward to checking out their blogs.
So here’s an idea: event-specific blogrolls. I’d love to find (or create) a tool that would allow event organizers to create blogrolls of event participants, and allow participants to temporarily rotate their blogrolls to reflect the blogroll of whatever even they’re at. Right now I use bloglines to generate my blogroll; but I’d love it if it were SUPER easy to switch that blogroll to temporary alternatives, to rotate my blogroll periodically, and to create a blogroll that is separate from my public list of blog subscriptions. That last item is a little to-do for Bloglines, since I often refer people to my list of Bloglines public subscriptions as a set of starter RSS feeds, but feel irritated that my list excludes a bunch of feeds that would be useful to RSS newbies but that I don’t feel like advertising on my blogroll (e.g. the CBC and the Globe and Mail).
But back to the event-specific blogroll idea. I think what would work great is a tool that integrates with event registration, so that it asks people for their blog URLs (if available) as part of the event registration process, and then (at the option of the user) adds that URL to a conference blogroll. The blogroll could be available on the conference website, along with a little snippet of code (or a link to the code snippet) that conference participants could put in their sidebar for the duration of the conference.
The ugly workaround approach would be to do something like creating a Bloglines account for the conference, and manually or automatically adding each registrant’s blog URL to the event’s Bloglines blogroll. Then participants could insert the code that Bloglines generates to replace (or supplement) their blog with the conference blogroll, and delete the code when the conference ends.
The way cooler approach would be something that integrates with event calendaring or personal calendaring. I’d love a service that keeps track of events I’m planning to attend and lets me share my calendar or a specific event with a trusted list of contacts or the general public (in fact, I need to start using something that does that anyhow). And I want that same service to offer blogroll management to all the events and conferences I participate in. Then I want the service to accept the URL or OPML file that corresponds to my default blogroll (i.e. my Bloglines blogroll) and to automatically swap out or supplement my default blogroll, replacing it (or appending to it) with the blogroll for whatever event I’m at at the moment. And last but not least the same system could add MY blog to the list of blogs to be aggregated into the event blog during the event’s duration, if those posts have been tagged with a designated conference tag.
To offer a use scenario, here’s how that might work with an event like AdvocacyDev. I register for the conference on the Aspiration website, at which time I am prompted to enter my blog URL (and perhaps asked about whether I wanted it added to the conference blogroll). My blog URL would then be added to a blogroll on the conference wiki and/or Asipiration blog (at least for the week). And anything I post to my blog with the tag “advocacydev” gets aggregated into the conference blog (so you have an easy, automatic, collaborative conference blog).
Meanwhile on my personal blog I have a sidebar that includes a little snippet of code generated by the calendaring app. This app knows the URL for my default Bloglines blogroll, and most of the time what appears in my blog’s sidebar is that Bloglines blogroll, passed through to my blog via the event app. But the morning that AdvocacyDev gets rolling, the event app tells my blog that I’m now at AdvocacyDev (which the event app knows b/c it’s gotten updated by the AdvocacyDev event registration system) and so from July 11-13, my blog’s sidebar shows a blogroll made up of my fellow AdvocacyDev participants, either instead of or in addition to my usual blogroll (depending on my preference settings).
The appeal of this idea is that it extends and inverts the logic of an aggregator-based event blog. Aggregation is all about taking these little individual nodes (individual participant/bloggers) and collecting them up in a hub (the conference site). But every individual is a hub for his/her own personal network, with her/his own usual readers and subscribers. By pushing the blogroll for an event out into the individual blogrolls for each conference participant, we could turn the community of conference participants into a broader community of like-minded friends and colleagues.
Anyone care to take this as a LazyWeb request?
From AdvocacyDev
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July 13th, 2005 by Alex
Today is the last day of AdvocacyDev II, a gathering of people using technology to support nonprofit and social change work. As promised by Mark Surman, it’s been a truly mind-blowing experience.
A big part of what’s amazing is the event organizing and facilitation methodology used by Katrin and Gunner of Aspiration, who organized the conference. Their approach is to bring a whole bunch of interesting people together and let them drive and structure discussions. No talking head panels here: session topics have emerged out of the interests and needs of the people in the room, and each discussion has been a mix of brainstorming, case sharing, strategy sharing, putting questions out for feedback, and coming up with really concrete ideas for projects and next steps.
The wiki helps set things on fire becuase it creates a concrete collective output from each discussion. While a room full of geeks are particularly well-positioned to make good use of the wiki dimension (if only because everyone here has a laptop), the wiki is easy enough to use for non-geek events. And while the wiki is great and useful I don’t think it’s essential to the chemistry of the event (though I’d be curious to hear what Gunner and Katrin think).
Anyone who is involved in planning or organizing a conference or event would learn a lot from participating in an Aspiration event. And if you organize events for people in the tech or nonprofit worlds, it’s a must: make sure to put one of Aspiration’s upcoming events on your calendar.
Grad school advice
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July 2nd, 2005 by Alex
From time to time people ask me for advice about whether and how to apply to graduate school. I completed a PhD in political science at Harvard in 2004 and have thought a lot about whether, when and how people might want to apply to graduate school. Over time I’ve built up a standard set of advice that may be useful to other applicants, especially to people considering PhD programs and/or considering the Harvard program in particular.
I’ve now set up a little mini-site with my advice on applying to graduate school. These pages include:
Who I am: my faux qualifications for dispensing grad school advice
My story: how I survived the application process
My results: where I got in, and how I got funding
Questions to ask yourself: things to think about when applying
Questions to ask departments: things you need to find out for your applications
Acing the application: my tips for winning at the application game
I’d be delighted to hear from people who have found this information useful, or have suggestions on how to improve the information offered here; please submit your comments via e-mail (to alex [at] alexandrasamuel [dot] com).
Please note that I am not an admissions advisor, and can not provide advice about individual applications or programs. I do not speak for Harvard, nor am I able to help prospective students with their applications. These pages are based purely on my own personal experiences and observations. I will not respond to individual e-mails asking for personal assistance with applications.