Teach42

Jack has been dropping some not so subtle hints that I should post some reflections about Blogwalk beyond just the Podcast. I’ve been intending to, it’s just a matter of finding the time (an oh so precious commoditity). But he’s absolutely right, if I don’t get some of these thoughts down now, I probably never will.

First of all, let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It was a distinct pleasure to be able to engage such thought provoking discussions with people face to face. There really is such a different dynamic when you’re having a conversation with people, versus reading a blog post and commenting on it. Like I said in my closing remarks at the ‘walk, oftentimes we forgot that as social an activity blogging is, there’s no substitute for authentic real world interaction.

AKMA has a couple of posts with some details, so I’m not going to bother with a full recap. Check out his summaries, they’re pretty solid.

One conversation I really got into revolved around what exactly we mean by Social Software (fairly topical since Social Software in the Organizational Setting was the theme of the Blogwalk!). I was suprised to find out that most people thought of social software as things like Discussion Boards, Skype, Instant Messaging, IRC, even Email. It’s funny because even though those are truly social tools, I never really considered them to fall in that same category. I guess I just thought of those as communication tools. When I think of social software, I think of tools like del.icio.us, 43 Things, and even Bloglines. Interestingly enough, the way I think of social software requires almost no social interaction at all. So perhaps I really am way off base. I think of social software as tools that connect people to other like minded people. For example, if I subscribe to Weblogg-ed on Bloglines and I enjoy reading it, I can click on a link to see who else subscribes to it. Now, if those people are interested in reading about Educational Technology, it stands to reason that they may be subscribing to other blogs that may be interesting to me. Additionally, by visiting Will’s site, I can check out his blogroll and see whose pages he happens to be reading. Coincidently, Will has a post about this aspect today.

So, we’ve established (haven’t we?) that reading what people write is now only half of the fun on the Read/Write Web. Even more importantly, it’s only half of the learning. The other half is reading what people read.

If I like what you write, it stands to reason that I might like what you read. This is the ’social’ piece that I was thinking about it. Through things like blogrolls, subscriber lists and listings of who else bookmarked a specific page, I am able to be connected with other like minded people.

This discussion brought up an interesting division amongst people about whether they liked people having blogrolls or not. Tom pointed out that Blogrolls oftentimes get out of control. “What I’d like to see is blogrolls that are specifically relevant to context; in other words, category-specific blogrolls.” I agree with this wholeheartedly, and should probalby work on reorganizing my subscriptions. I try to just post blogs to my blogroll that i think my readers will enjoy, but I know there is some dead weight in there. Also, if I break the categories down a bit further, I can make sure that what people choose to click on is more pertinent to them. Definitely something to keep in mind and stay on top of. I really like the iidea of having the categories for the blogroll match the categories for the blog. If someone is only interested in my podcasting posts, they can check out my podcasting blogroll. It’s a neat idea. The funny thing is that I don’t even use categories right now. pMachine only lets you put posts in a single category, and my mind doesn’t work like that.

Ok, this was just looking back upon one piece of one small part of a discussion. There was so much more good stuff to write about. I’ll keep revisiting the discussions throughout the week as I reflect more upon them.

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