Friday, September 12, 2003

Are free weblogs good for the Internet? Are free weblogs good for the Internet?. News.com is reporting that BloggerPro is now free, because Google thinks that weblogs are good for the internet. Of course, I do agree that weblogs are good for the Internet, but I'm not sure that free weblogs are that good. The scenario that seems to come out is that there are two different kind of blogging tools "vendors": companies charging for their tools (such as UserLand or Six Apart) and companies offering free blogs because their core business relies on something else (traffic, advertising, registered users, etc.), so they can afford to offer free service. Now, my doubt is that companies offering free tools are not compelled to improve their offering because they already have a very strong "selling" point: they are free. So far we have seen most of the innovation coming from small players and very often innovation is related to defining new standards. If free tools vendors don't support these new standards, given the huge number of users they have (because they are free), they can stop or significantly delay the adoption of these standards thus slowing down innovation. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 7:01:42 AM  comment []    trackback []     The End of the Beginning of the End of Free (Not Really) The End of the Beginning of the End of Free (Not Really). We finally made the announcement today that we're discontinuing Blogger Pro and folding (most of) the features into free Blogger. (In fact, the folding is done, as well.) We've been working on this for quite a while. It's mostly an aim to simplify our services and get more people blogging. We also want to focus our development efforts on things that have an impact on as many people as possible (despite the fact that we're at a "big" company now, we still just have a few people writing the code -- a couple more than we had before...but there's so much to do!). [evhead] 6:58:53 AM  comment []    trackback []     Allowing for uncertainty in the classroom Allowing for uncertainty in the classroom. Sebastian offers an interesting questioning on how the constraints of formal education settings make it difficult to fruitfully integrate personal webpublishing in student activities. Time is one of the key issues. From my experience it does seem hard to reap the benefits of personal webpublishing within a short timeframe. It easily took me four months to integrate myself into the network - and I spent a lot of that time in the blogosphere, something a time-pressured student is unlikely to be able or willing do. How to seed a learning environment that allows for evolutionary growth?. [...] The way we interpret a problem has many implications on how we will go about solving it. It seems obvious that we have to get away from the mere delivery of neatly packaged, gift-wrapped recipies and tool boxes if our teaching and learning activities are supposed to result in a personally relevant construction of applicable skills and concepts. I think that personal Webpublishing can play a vital role in transforming formal instructional settings in a way that allows for more uncertainty and evolutionary growth instead of micro-managed instructional events and interventions. On of the most critical issues is, of course, time. In most course settings we try to simplify, condense, and accelerate processes and workflows that would often take more time to carry out under "normal" conditions. This creates a difficult environment for the integration of personal Webpublishing practices from my perspective. Most people who kept personal Webpublishing projects (Weblogs, Wikis, etc.) running for months and years can report how certain qualities and benefits only emerged over time. They remember how they were basically talking to themselves at the beginning, how they found a small circle of like -minded authors, how this circle grew through chance meetings and focused search, how their readership grew and got more diverse, and so on. Now, my question is: what parts of this evolutionary growth model could we hope to seed and watch unfold over the period of a semester? ... or will we never be able to touch the "real potential" of personal and collaborative Webpublishing in formal instructional settings because of the usual constraints on time, pace and structure? [Seblogging News] [Seb's Open Research] 6:28:25 AM  comment []    trackback []     Panasonic's DVD-Audio car stereo Panasonic's DVD-Audio car stereo. We know that Delphi already has one of these out, but Panasonic is coming out with it's own DVD-Audio car stereo system for the North American market. Honda's 2004 Acura TL will be the first car to have it as an option. This is a big deal, of course, only to the very small population of people who even have a DVD-Audio collection to play in a car. Read... [Gizmodo] 6:13:54 AM  comment []    trackback []

© Copyright 2003 Harold Gilchrist. Last update: 10/1/2003; 7:04:28 AM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.