This morning I had one of those ‘HAPPY ACCIDENTS’ that sometimes occur in the messy, organic, chaotic and disintermediated world of ‘Web2.0′. I stumbled over a random blog post by an employee of a client of mine that led to a sequence of events that unlocked a puzzle that my brain has been wrestling with for several months. I was moved to write a comment on the post which spontaneously combusted into a rant:
The post with my comment can be found HERE.
Text of my comment for convenience:
Morning Kerry – this post jumped out of my RSS aggregator this morning and really helped to clarify my understanding of the difference between (A) the ‘blog’ functionality of moodle and (B) ‘real blogs’ like this one!
I think this mornings ‘happy accident’ provides a clue to the secret of how edna can really add value in a ‘Web2.0′ sense. Let me try to explain what happened:
1. This post from Tue Oct10 came into my RSS reader because it was posted ‘in public’ and is part of a community (or rss feed) to which I am already subscribed.
2. The personal tone and language of the first sentence caught my eye ‘Mark Tranthim-Fryer and I are delivering the keynote’ – because I care about people more than topics and I know ‘Mark Tranthim-Fryer’ I wondered who the ‘I’ was…
3. That caused me to take the unusual step of opening the post in my browser, and for the first time, something of the context of your sentence was revealed – and education.au blog, Kerrie Smith.
4. That got me interested enough to read the second paragaph which talks about a topic I am interested in – blogs in moodle for edna. Since you provided a link to your moodle blog, I opened it in a new tab, and for the FIRST TIME actually discovered the blog interesting enough to subscribe to from inside the moodle environment.
5. Once I had your edna groups blog open in a browser it was fairly easy to find the RSS feed I want to subscribe to, although its URL is a tad long (do I really need to care which version of php it runs on???) – http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/rss/file.php/1/1/blog/user/26/rss.xml
So what can we learn from this little rant?
- edna group’s new blog functionality from moodle already provides a comfortable and safe place for people who are used to the structure and ‘private by default’ nature of things to begin experimenting with ‘blogging’.
- education.au and edna are in a unique position to provide services that will help such people move into the scary, disintermediated, chaotic and public world of ‘Web2.0′
- education.au and edna are also in a uniqe position to reach a whole new audience by providing some of its fantastic features to citizens of the Web2.0 world.
The trick is to get some discussion going around the types of services that could make this magic happen. Here are two ideas from what happened this morning to get things rolling:
- Promotion / Discovery services for ‘public blogs’ inside the moodle environment.
- RSS feed services for subscribers (short, memorable feed names)
- RSS feed services for publishers (too many great ideas to write here!)
OK thats three things but Im on a roll.
Good post Kerrie, lets try to get some discussion going around this little rant.
Fang – Mike Seyfang
