Are you burying your content?

I need a few weeks off to get caught up with everything that’s been happening in the last 90 days.

I know that sounds pretty silly, but hear me out. In the past week, I’ve started blogging again, podcasting again, listening to podcasts, reading blogs, and attended a conference where the main topic is blogs (with a law spin, but blogs are blogs). Here’s a very brief list of things that I’ve missed:

SuperGlu
Frappr
Updates to Feedburner
FeedBlitz (this one is huge for those who don’t like Kool-Aid)
3D Weather Globe
Persuasion Map
PhotoStory3
Updates to Flickr (you can print now!)
NVU
Google blog search engine
Yahoo’s podcast directory
Edublogs.org (and it’s relatives learnerblogs.org, uniblogs.org)
James getting engaged.
Google RSS Reader
Podomatic
WikiNotes
LOTS of news about the $100 laptop

Ok, that’s the abbreviated list. Seriously. For those of you who don’t know how an ADD person surfs, let know fill you in. I open up bloglines in Firefox. Then I start scrolling through articles. Every time I see something that seems remotely interesting, I open it in a new tab. I go through about 50-60 feeds that way, and then I start going through each of the tabs one by one and reading them in depth. It may sound chaotic, but it’s normally very manageable and works well for me. It also helps make some interesting connections at times. If I don’t make it through all the tabs, that’s ok, I’ll just come back to them.

Heh, the ‘problem’ right now is that I have SO many tabs open that it’s just overwhelming! Yes, it’s a great problem to have.

What’s astonishing to me is that all of those tools, sites, news, and other such items occurred within the last 90 days. And that’s the abbreviated list. All of them have some impact or application to education as well. It really impresses upon me the need for good EduBloggers to not only continue informing people about what’s out there, but that we also need some way to index this information so that people who aren’t on the cutting edge are able to find this information and discover it for themselves. I’ve used del.icio.us for quite a while. I’ve created a podcast about it. At this point, it’s really nothing new to me or many of my readers. However, my readers (and listeners) only represent a tiny little fraction of the educational world out there. The vast majority of teachers have never heard of social bookmarking, much less a specific tool like del.icio.us.

So where am I going with this? Quite simply, blogs are fantastic for getting the latest and greatest news. They’re amazing for getting information out easily and quickly. However, they haven’t quite eliminated the need for static pages. Personally, I’ve really been quite lax about creating a static side of Teach42 that has an archive of Teach42 shows, links to software reviews, and other such things. Someone coming to visit the site for the first time will most likely visit the last few posts on my main page, but not even see the posts or shows that I created months ago. That information may be a year old, but that doesn’t make it any less valid or worthwhile to someone that isn’t familiar with the content.

Something to think about, eh? Will someone who visits your site for the first time be likely to find the information that would be valuable to them?

7 Comments

John Pederson
11/12/2005

I’ve been thinking about the exact same problem over the past few weeks. With so many new people coming on board, how do we get them to the good stuff quickly. It’s overwhelming for even the seasoned blogger to see 500+ new feeds and understand what is important.

Here’s how I tried to handle it over on my website. I grabbed Chris Metcalf’s WordPress plugin. I made up two tags…”mustread” and “pd”…in my del.icio.us account. Using the WordPress del.icio.us plugin, I created a sidebar category for “mustread” posts that I think all edubloggers should pay attention to. Anything I tag “mustread” in del.icio.us goes into this category. Same story for the tag “pd”, but this is just a collection of my own own favorite posts tagged in del.icio.us.

Does that make sense? There are probably simpler ways to do it…link lists in WordPress, TypePad, etc…I just wanted a way to incorportate Del.icio.us into the workflow.

Wesley Fryer
11/12/2005

Good suggestion John, I will have to try that method out myself. I find I sometimes save a blog post I want to read in my browser toolbar and come back to it, but that isn’t efficient for large numbers of posts I want to read later (scalable), nor does it permit social sharing like your method does. So thanks for the ideas.

You are absolutely right on this post, Steve, the rate and quantity at which new technologies and resources are coming out is astounding. If people are not connected to the blogosphere and participating in the read/write web, I don’t see any way people can be aware of even a fraction of what is available and going on. At the TechForum this past week, I was surprised by how many people had never heard of Creative Commons. Almost no one I meet here in Lubbock has heard of WikiPedia. I take both these things for granted basically. So something is going on here that really needs to be addressed.

I think part of the answer is getting educators involved in participating in the read/write web. This needs to be required for professional development, teacher certification, and continuing education. Of course we want people to voluntarily participate, but I think participation needs to be required for many to give it more than a second glance.

So many people are overloaded and overwhelmed with information and tasks today, that many (if not most) would see read/write web participation as something they can’t physically do. I think it is safe to say there is a new digital divide emerging, which is not hardware based. Even for people who have the hardware and other things required to connect them to the web, the vast majority of educators out there are are not engaged in the read/write web. I think I may do an upcoming podcast or article on this topic. It is really important.

Thanks for the post, and good luck catching up on the last 90 days!

Amy Hendrickson
11/13/2005

Hello Steve (and everyone):

I am very new to reading educational stuff written in blog form; I have been investigating / reading for about 3 months only. I agree that there’s some really good stuff out there that is “buried” under everything new. For someone new to it all, it really is hard to sometimes find the “good stuff”, especially if you’re searching for something pretty specific. John Pederson’s “Blogs I’m Reading” posts have been a very helpful launching point for me. (I’m so new to this I’m not even sure how to make a link to that list! Sorry!)

As a high school science teacher, I’m also trying to figure out how to get this “new internet” into my classes. I’ve been considering a blog, but I am unsure about giving up my “static” homepage – as it is something that I can alreaqdy update easily everyday. (It is built on a hosting template.)
I’d like to get the students writing / contributing, but I don’t want my class information to get
lost or “buried”. I think that I am going to keep my webpage, but have a link to our class blog from there. On that blog I’ll try to get more student input / writing.

Last suggestion from a new blog reader – Appropriate titles, labeling, and indexing are real time savers and really do help get new readers into your writings.

Thanks – Amy Hendrickson, Northern Minnesota

Brian Mull
11/13/2005

This is probably my biggest problem from my blog to del.icio.us to flickr… effective tagging.

I wish I could easily solve this one, but tagging is killing me. Part of me wants to use as few tags as possible while another part of me wants to make my tags as specific as possible. Being too specific, however will leave me with too many tags.

Unfortunately, my frustration with tagging has left me with not tagging much in my blogs at all lately. I’m open to any and all input on this one.

wakemp
11/14/2005

I hadn’t seen most of those either, and I thought I was paying attention. I think I need to add Session Saver to my copy of Firefox so I can get back to these sites on a regular basis.

I am also trying Za href= “http://www.ethomaz.com/onlife/”> Onlife to archive my web crawling to try and keep track of the stuff I find that I can never seem to get back to.

Wesley Fryer
11/14/2005

Amy, you can a free service like RSS-to-Javascript to dynamically include recent posts from your blog on your static webpage / website. That is what I have done on my main homepage to make the content there dynamic. This is a slick way to “tie” the two web-based technologies together.

Teach42 - Education and Technology, brought to you by Steve Dembo » Blog Archive » Tag the good stuff. Duh.
11/21/2005

[...] olitices, News and Warlick

Tag the good stuff. Duh.

Re: Are you burying your content? Ever feel really dumb when you have the tools to make what seems like a comp [...]

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