Anybody who spends any significant time on Twitter is familiar with the concept of trending topics. They’re essentially a taste of what’s on people’s minds and typically revolve around recent news, television events, buzz generating blog posts and of course, memes.

At large conferences like NECC, with hundreds of people using the #NECC09 hashtag in their tweets, some people speculated whether it would become a trending topic or not. The answer was a resounding No.

It has always been a mystery to me as to just how many posts were required to make it into the trending topics list, and recently Buzzgain published their own research of the subject. The results?

Between 12 (midnight) to 6 am PDT: approximately 1200 tweets and about 500 users to be trending

Between 6 am to 12 Noon PDT: 1700 tweets and about 733 users

Between 12 noon to 6 pm: 1500 tweets and about 812 users (this may be because there are more people during this time but they tweet a lot less)

Between 6 pm to 12 midnight: 1900 tweets and about 922 users

So at best, during the overnight hours when traffic is lowest, it would take about 1200 tweets using a given hashtag to become at trending topic. Not only that, considering that according to their research, a trending topic has an average shelf life of about 11 minutes, there would need to be more than 100 tweets per minute for it to attain the ‘weight’ needed.

While there may be 139,665 people in the education directory of Twellow, you have to go several hundred deep just to wade past all the social media junkies obsessed with gaining the most followers.

I don’t know how many ‘real’ educators there are on Twitter, but I do know that there just aren’t enough to make a dent in the Twitterverse on a mass scale. In fact, it’s futile to even put any efforts in trying to effect real change there. It’s wonderful for making connections and sharing ideas, but it’s just not the right place to effect any significant change. No matter how loud the choir sings, it’s just not going to be heard above the clamor about Harry Potter and Michael Jackson (no connection between the two implied).

As popular as Twitter is, as popular as Facebook is, they are both still used by only a fraction of educators, and within that fraction, they only reach the niche audience you have. I’m grateful to have a fairly large audience on Twitter, but even so that’s still less than 5,000 people, and of those I know a large number likely registered and never logged in again.

It isn’t that there isn’t value information being communicated via Twitter. It’s just a shame that it’s only causing small ripples and then disappearing into the ether.

The reality is, ‘old school’ communications are still the most effective for dealing with the masses. Email and newsletters still carry quite a bit of weight, and from my own experience tend to reach much farther than a tweet or blog post.

With that in mind I’m curious to hear your ideas for getting the ‘big ideas’ and key conversations out to the masses. Should we be aggregating them together and creating a “Tales from the Eduverse” mailing list? Sending out a newsletter in print or via email?

The critical question being, if the ‘right’ ideas are being shared in the blogosphere/TwitterPlurkoverse, how do we communicate them out to the rest of the education community?

Related Reading on Teach42

• Building a better Twitter
• Feet on the ground or head in the clouds?
• Life on the cutting edge.
• A life without Twitter
• Why I *heart* Plurk

With only two days to go, I’ve been struggling with how to wrap this challenge up. The closer I get to the end, the more I realize how much more I’d like to share. Part of the dilemma for me is that this challenge has not really discussed the ’spiritual’ side of blogging very much. I’ve tried very hard to make each of these challenges an actionable item, something concrete that you can actually DO to improve your blog, your blogging toolbox, and your skills as a blogger. However, there’s certainly more to blogging than widgets, feeds, links and comments. I was very thankful that the tips shared by other bloggers on Day 27 hit on so many other pieces that I thought ought to be covered. However, there’s just a few points that I wanted to share my own spin on.

For lack of a better way to describe it, today’s challenge is to go out there and be a rock star! What’s the difference between a rock star performing in their garage and a rock star performing in a stadium filled to capacity? Absolutely nothing… in their own mind. A true rock star puts as much effort into every rehearsal and every show, regardless of the size of the audience. They do so because they love performing and they want to share it with anyone and everyone.

Blogging is very similar to this. Every blog starts off with an audience of zero. We all started out talking to ourselves. We all tried to figure out how to draw an audience. We were all thrilled and amazed the first time we realized that a few people had visited our blog. We all get a smile on our face when we see that someone has taken the time to leave a comment, and a scowl if we learn that it was spam! But if you were to compare yesterday’s blog posts to many people’s very first blog posts, I don’t think you’d find them all that different.

So with that in mind, consider this carte blanche to go ahead and blog as though you already have an audience of thousands. Go ahead and promote the blog posts you’re proud of in full confidence that they’re worth sharing with anyone and everyone. Be bold enough to ask other people to participate in your surveys, polls and memes, regardless of whether you feel you’re ‘on the same level’ as them. Rankings be damned, we’re all educators who are linked together by our common desire to share and learn with each other.

Educators are not marketers, and I’ve found that more often than not most budding bloggers are almost embarrassed by their blogs. When they tell me about their blogs, they add to their descriptions phrases like, “well, it’s just a first effort” or “it doesn’t have any readers yet” or “I’m just playing around” or “I’m just trying to catch up to everyone else.” I can’t help but think to myself that anybody who is putting themselves out there and blogging should be nothing but proud of their own efforts! It takes time, commitment and confidence to stand up and share your thoughts with the world, and anybody who does so should be applauded.

With that in mind, I truly think you should take pride in your efforts. Don’t be shy about listing it as your URL on social sites. Add it to your signature in emails. Create yourself a set of Moo cards for when you meet other educators. Let your colleagues at school know about it, as well as your administrators (if you don’t feel comfortable sharing it with them, you might want to spend some time thinking about why). Let your parents, friends and relatives know about it so they can check it out too! Announce your blog posts in places like Twitter, Plurk and Ning. If you think somebody specific ought to see a post, email them a link. Share comments linking back to your blog on pertinent posts from other people.

I truly feel that even if you are the 1,000th person to chime in on a specific topic, your thoughts, ideas and opinions are just as valuable as the first person to chime in. Nobody else has your specific set of experience. The lenses through which you see things are completely unique to you and you may have a spin on things that are pertinent to people. Let’s face it, even if there’s only 2 people out there that would benefit from what you have to say, isn’t that worth the time spent sharing it??

Image by AdamNF via FlickrJust as a concrete example of this, think about this 30 Day Challenge in itself. It’s based on Darren Rowse’s 31 Days to Building a Better Blog challenge. I had the challenge flagged for about a year and a half as something that I was interested in. It took me nearly 18 months to finally be ready to act on it. His challenge has had hundreds of participants along with an immense amount of spin off challenges created from it. I could very easily have just taken his challenge and followed through it step by step and added my name to the list of participants, which was my original intention. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it would be more valuable to ME to create my own mashup of it, focusing on challenges that would be pertinent to educators. There are plenty of other places to get blogging advce or challenges to participate in, but I was hoping that there might be a few people who would get some benefit from joining me for this one. I’ve been stunned by the turnout.

Point being, this could have been a month long fiasco! Some of my other endeavors have been spectacular failures before. But you have to put yourself out there and give yourself a chance at success. It’s all a learning experience, regardless of the result.

When you get right down to it, the best way to be a successful blogger… is to be one. To put yourself out there, to be bold and promote yourself, to be confident in your worth and quite simply to be the Rock Star you truly are.

So today’s challenge is to give yourself the rock star treatment. The details are entirely up to you. Maybe you’ll direct message a few people on Twitter and ask them to take a look at a recent blog post of yours. Maybe you’ll add your blog to your email signature. Maybe you’ll give some friends a call and ask them to check out your blog. Maybe it’ll just be leaving a comment here and asking people to come visit it and leave a comment. Only you can know what kind of Rock Star you are, so do what feels right for you.

Then take the time to share what being a Rock Star means to you.

And tomorrow, we wrap the whole thing up! Anybody else getting misty eyed?

30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

Related Reading on Teach42

• Day 7: Invite Somebody to Be a Guest Blogger
• Day 22: Why do you blog?
• Day 21: Give a comment a promotion
• Day 16: Your Greatest Hits
• Day 30: Choose Your Own Adventure

Well, you knew this was coming. Part one of the challenge was zooming in on the blogroll, assuming that your blogroll was even IN your sidebar of course. Part 2, today’s challenge, is to go through the rest of sidebar with a fine toothed comb and de-clutter it. This is one of the ideas based on ProBlogger’s tips that I knew was going to be included the moment I saw it. One thing to remember here is that de-cluttering does not necessarily mean removing things. It’s a matter of looking at each item you have there, considering whether it belongs in your sidebar or not, whether it is taking up more space than it deserves, whether it’s function is being duplicated elsewhere or could be consolidated, and whether there may be another way to achieve the same goal in a more efficient way.

If you’ve been following this challenge, then you’ve already added a few things to your sidebar. I think having a translate option is important and is going to stay. The Clustrmap is more of a vanity item than anything else, but it does an effective job of demonstrating the reach of your community geographically and I’m choosing to keep. Obviously, that’s a personal choice. I’m not going to preach that you should have a short sidebar or a long one, or what belongs there and what doesn’t. However, I do believe that what’s there should be deliberate and efficient in terms of space and form, especially considering how many options are out there.

For example, in my sidebar right now I have a Facebook badge, I have a ShowYourself badge, a Twitter widget, and a FriendFeed widget. The ShowYourself badge has a link to my Facebook profile and my FriendFeed widget displays my Twitter status updates, which seems kind of ridiculous now that I think about it. I’m going to eliminate them all. No, I’m not going to stop linking to those things and displaying my status, but I’m going to take advantage of a tool that Sue Waters (who is the spiritual co-author of this challenge!) recommended to me called Retaggr. It provides a nice clean badge that will give me almost all the functionality that those four items provided, but in one nice and neat package. It’ll have links to all my social sites, like the ShowYourself badge. It includes my headshot, company, and link to Facebook like the Facebook badge did. It will also display my most recent tweet, which is plenty. If people want to see my last 10 tweets, they can visit Twitter. The only thing I’m losing out on is that the FriendFeed badge displayed when I’ve uploaded photos or videos as well, which is pretty sporadic to be honest. Ideally, I’d love it if Retaggr would display my most recent post on Twitter OR Plurk, but that’s ok. I think the benefit far outweighs the few things it lacks.

There are a few widgets that I have that just don’t make the cut. I have a Now Reading plugin that shows what my ‘reading’ status is. However, it only works as well as my maintenance habits, which are poor when it comes to that. I never remember to update it so I have a choice: Change my habits, or just get rid of it. I don’t feel it’s that important, so it’s going bye-bye.

For the widgets that you’ll be keeping, bear in mind that there may be new versions of them available, or third party options that you could swap them out for. For example, check out all of these different Twitter widgets that are available. And that blog post is from a year ago! Many sites also offer you the opportunity to modify the color schemes for a widget, enabling you to try to blend it in a little closer to your chosen theme. You may find it worthwhile to give a few ‘keeper’ widgets a makeover as part of this challenge.

While we’re at it, let’s talk Archives. Typically there are only three ways somebody visiting your blog can find your posts once they’ve scrolled off the front page: 1) Search 2) Categories 3) Archives. I do think they’re important to keep around, but once you’ve been blogging for a few months, they start to take up a HUGE amount of space. However, that’s an easy one to do something about. Most blogging engines now have an option to shrink your archives down to a drop down list. So instead of it taking half the page, it’ll only take up a line or two. Unfortunately, that option is usually relatively hidden. In Wordpress (and EduBlogs), you have to find the archive Widget and click Edit and the option will pop right up. In Blogger, it’s pretty similar. Go to Layout -> Page Elements and choose to edit the Blog Archive gadget. Lots of options there, including changing it to a drop down box. Very very easy thing to do in order to save a lot of real estate in your sidebar.

Finally, there are three things that I think you need to make sure are somewhat obvious in your sidebar: A search bar, a way to contact you and a way to subscribe to your blog. I never understand why some bloggers don’t have a search bar on their blog. It makes me leave their blog and jump through some Google hoops just to find information they’ve written that I know is there! As I mentioned above, there are precious few ways to find your content once it has scrolled off the front page. Don’t make it more difficult for your readers.

Contact information seems like a no-brainer, but I’m always stunned by how many blogs I visit don’t provide any way to make direct contact besides leaving a comment and hoping they see it. Some of you put your contact information in your About Me page. That’s fine, but if you did so, you should also have SOMETHING in your sidebar that clearly states, “This is where you can go to contact me” and then points to the About page. Once again, if somebody reads your blog and wants to communicate with you, you want it to be easy for them to do so.

Same thing goes for subscribing. Now, if you did the Feedburner challenge, then this should be a non-issue. But step back and verify that in your sidebar there is an obvious way for people to subscribe to your blog. Your RSS or Feedburner icon should not be so subtle that people can’t find it. I recently visited a very prominent blogger and was flabbergasted that there was no RSS link available. I had to view his source code in order to find out what his RSS feed. That’s inexcusable on a blog. So double, triple check to make sure that your RSS feed is represented in your sidebar and that it points to the right one if you signed up for Feedburner.

Just for the sake of an example, I’m going to leave my blog’s sidebar as-is for the rest of the day, and then will fix it up as I’ve outlined here tonight. Enjoy the mess for now, it’ll be a leaner, meaner sidebar soon

I have to admit, the comments on these posts have been phenomenal. So don’t be shy here, did I miss anything? Is there anything you consider a ‘must-have’ for your sidebar, or that you think is a faux pas that bloggers often commit? Got a great widget that you think would add value or make people’s sidebar content more efficient? Share some of your favorites as well as the ones you hope to never see again! Also, if you’d like to get some feedback on your sidebar, share a link to your blog and I”m sure people would be willing to take a look.

Related Reading on Teach42

• Blogging Pro Theme
• Be a Better Blogger in just 30 Days
• Day 9: Burn Baby Burn! Your Feed, That Is
• Day 5: Globalize Your Blog
• Day 12: Declutter Your Sidebar Part I – Blogroll Audit

Recently I began to feel that my blogging has been slipping. By that, I mean that I haven’t been giving it much attention, and have been more prone to letting little things slide. For example, I know that the images in my Twitter badge aren’t showing up right and I haven’t done anything about it. Nor have I added a Plurk badge, which is way overdue. My Blogroll is stale, I’ve gotten lazy about linking to other sites, and so on… SO, it’s time to do a full makeover, top to bottom. With that in mind, I pulled up a link that I had bookmarked about a year ago that I had always intended to try out for myself. It was Pro-Blogger’s, 31 Days to Building a Better Blog. Some of the tips fit me, some of them didn’t. However, I always thought about spinning my own version of it, specifically for teacher/educator bloggers. After mentioning it on both Twitter and Plurk and getting some very positive responses, I decided to move forward with the idea.

I’ve sketched out 30 ideas for Being a Better Blogger. These are not tips like “Make it personal” or “Focus on quality”, these are ideas for doing things to improve your blog and address all the little details people generally forget about, ignore, or never knew to do in the first place. Every day I will post a new tip/challenge for you to try. Whether you’re a new blogger or tenured, I encourage you to join along with me and use the month of November to be a better blogger.

This is a personal challenge, so whether you follow one tip or all thirty is entirely up to you. I’ve created a badge (as seen above) to let people know that you’re participating in the challenge and will provide you a means to embed it in and link it up soon.

If you’d like to join in, leave a comment below so we can follow you back and help support you in your endeavors!

The challenge begins on Saturday November 1st!

Related Reading on Teach42

• Day 13: Declutter Your Sidebar Part 2
• Why I *heart* Plurk
• Day 30: Choose Your Own Adventure
• Day 3: Write a thank you note
• Day 11: Introduce Yourself to Another Blogger

What does your avatar say about you? Do you secretly desire to be taller, thinner, or younger? Do you see yourself as a canine, a cartoon character, or a jedi knight? Do you feel a desire to change your race or gender? It’s not always clear exactly what our avatars say about ourselves, but clearly they do mean something. After all, consider how much time we spend customizing physical characteristics for entirely virtual identities. Considering how quick and easy it is to change them, it’s surprising how few people actually do. Regardless of what they say about ourselves, our avatars are certainly a statement that we make to the world.

With that being said, I put out a Tweet and Plurk asking people to share photos of themselves with their avatars. Here’s what people shared.

Steve Dembo (and Demb Oh)

Lisa Lane

Adrian Bruce

Michael Walker

Wendy Sigele


Liana Iaea-Honda


Jennifer Kraft

Dan Gross

Kristin Hokanson

Do you have your own image of yourself with your avatar? Share a link!

Related Reading on Teach42

• What I learned from Twitter today
• Curse you Amir Dembo!
• Map of the EduPlurkiverse
• Why I *heart* Plurk
• Blah-g

Are you on it yet? If you’re using Plurk already, go add yourself by copying it to your saved maps and then saving a pushpin to it.

If you aren’t, isn’t it time you gave Plurk a try? Based on at least one study, it’s neck and neck (and NECC?) with Twitter. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a fan, but you can judge for yourself.

View Larger Map

Related Reading on Teach42

• Google Maps keeps getting cooler
• A modern version of X marks the spot
• Why I *heart* Plurk
• Sightseeing, the Google way.
• Twitter v. Jaiku, first impressions

While it may seem like I’m always high on a new tool or site, I really do think I’m pretty choosy about the ones that I wind up sharing. And I wouldn’t blog about it, if I didn’t feel there was merit to it and it was worth exploring. Which is why I wanted to mention Plurk here.

I’ve been using Plurk extensively over the past few days and have started to think that it really could be a better Twitter than Twitter. And after seeing some really neat things happening there, I thought I’d share some of the ‘highlights’ of my Plurk explorations. And while I’m not ready to leave Twitter completely, let me share why I’m digging on Plurk.

Why I *heart* Plurk:

• Conversations are threaded together. When you reply to someone, it STAYS with the original post. On Twitter you have to click from page to page to page to try to follow a conversation. Which is tedious at best. On Plurk, you have one hyperlink to the entire conversation. For example, here is a single link to a live blog/backchannel for Ian Juke’s presentation today. 199 posts, one thread with one link. Don’t want to see those posts? You have one conversation to ignore, or you can even mute it.
• If you link to a video or image, it creates a thumbnail. Yes, that’s kind of fluffy, but it’s a very nice touch.
• While there aren’t many tools out there yet, there are a few that are pretty darn creative. For example, Pollk, which allows you to create polls on Plurk and embed them in. It gives you code to paste in, and as people vote, the thumbnail in your original post changes to reflect the current state of voting. VERY slick. Check out this post and click on the thumbnail to see it in action.

I think I’m going to leave it at those three for right now. There’s more, but I don’t think I need to make a giant list. Of course, there are things that I don’t like about Plurk. For one thing, the timeline is hard to get used to. Maybe if I’d seen it before Twitter, it’d be easier, but I’m so used to seeing things from the top down. Discovering that you can use the arrow keys to scroll though helps tremendously. I’m also not a huge fan of the whole karma thing. I’m pretty competitive, and when I saw that there’s a karma score, I wanted to rack up points. It’s shallow, it’s silly, but to be 100% truthful, I just can’t help myself. You get points for posting, replying and recruiting friends through your unique code. For example, this link would give me credit for you joining, while this one would not. Build Karma, earn things like new emoticons and the ability to change your background. Personally, I think it should be an opt in sort of ‘game’, but that’s part of their schtick I guess. If you have more will power than I do, you could always just ignore it.

Why I’m getting down on Twitter:

• It’s as Twitter as…. well, there’s nothing to compare it to. I’ve never seen a popular site have as many technical issues as Twitter does. Nobody is surprised when it goes down. It’s flaky enough that their error page has even earned itself a fan club. That’s just wrong. Plurk is only a couple months old, so it’s possible it’ll run into these issues when it grows too. Hopefully they’ve learned from Twitter’s mistakes though. Crossing my fingers.
• I’m tired of depending on third party sites to make Twitter manageable. I’m one of the people that actually goes to Twitter.com regularly. For about a week, replies were dead. I follow a pretty high number of people. If I can’t see who’s talking to me, I might as well not even use the tool. So I started keeping Summize open as well so I could see if anyone replied to my Tweets. That meant I was keeping two tabs open to get basic functionality out of a single site. Feh. Also, things like the built in Tiny URL converter has always been flaky. I’ve gotten into the habit of using third party URL shorteners any time I want to link to something. Not a huge deal, but it’s extra steps that should be unnecessary.
• Go look at the Twitter Status Blog. You know why that’s there? Because there’s always something wrong. In the month of June, there were only four days that they didn’t have to put something up there, letting people know what the status was of broken features. That’s just sad. And on the subject of broken features, have you ever tried to nudge somebody? Does that mysterious link actually do anything? Not so far as I’ve been able to see. And I’ve flagged many people to have their tweets sent to my cell phone and have never received a single message. However, Direct messages arrive just fine. Love for somebody to explain that one to me.

The best thing about Twitter is… well, it’s the network. It’s where people are at right now. That’s the number one thing that Twitter has and that Plurk doesn’t. That’s also why I’m not going to give up on Twitter just yet. But I find I’m visiting Plurk first thing in the morning, and only checking out Twitter when I’m done. As much as I’ve liked Twitter over the past year or so, I feel like they’ve done their very best to drive me away. And while alternatives have been available (Pownce, Jaiku), Plurk is the first one that actually feels ‘right’ to me. I’m not saying this because it’s shiny, or because it’s new. I’m saying it because after spending some time there, it feels like Twitter, but a step or two up the evolutionary chain.

While I would never ask anybody to leave their well-established community, I do suggest that you visit Plurk and give it a try for yourself. And give it a day or two, when you have some time. It feels very awkward at first and takes some getting used to. After being doubters, many people have come to change their mind. Hope to see you there!

Related Reading on Teach42

• Be a Better Blogger in just 30 Days
• Day 3: Write a thank you note
• Map of the EduPlurkiverse
• Self-promotion: Where do you draw the line?
• Building a better Twitter