A quick introduction to my weblog

Welcome to my personal weblog. Not all people who visit here might be familiar with weblogs, so here's a quick explanation and a run-down of what you will find here.

This weblog primarily serves two purposes:

1. It is your interface to me, and my interface to you. By visiting it, you instantly learn what I'm interested in at the moment, and what I have been interested in in the past. The site gives you many more "hooks" that you can use to start a conversation in which we hopefully will both learn something. If you want to start a public conversation with me, you can post comments (including hyperlinks) to the site. Other readers may join in, if we're interesting enough. If you want to converse in private, use the email button at the bottom left to send me e-mail. In any case, don't hesitate to contact me. I'll write back.
2. It is a continually updated source of information. By reading a page's worth of news and ideas, you will probably be able to decide whether you find the content original and interesting enough to come back regularly.

Now let me explain the structure of this weblog.

Like other weblogs, this is a frequently updated website that features commentary and hyperlinks, usually to content that is somewhere else on the Web. The main content of a weblog is made up of posts that are presented in reverse chronological order, so that the freshest content is at the top and the page changes every time something is posted. A post is like a short newspaper story. The posts that you'll find here are related to my interests. You'll mostly find items that relate to the evolution of scholarly communication, but I'm also interested in communication in general.

Each post begins with a title that is also a link, so you can bookmark it or reference it in your own webpage or weblog if you find it interesting. Then you have the content of the post. I usually quote something I've read, then comment on it. The content that I'm quoting is in dark blue; my commentary is black. Sometimes, in between the two, you'll find a link [inside square brackets]. This is a link to my source for the post, so you can look it up for yourself. These links are a good way to find interesting new people or sources.

Posts end with a link to the comments that were posted by fellow readers; a timestamp; and a link to the post itself (the # sign), that is called a permalink because it remains valid even after the post has disappeared from the main page and gone to the archive.

In the left-hand column of the main page, you'll find:

• A link to keywords that roughly summarize what I'm interested in.
• A link to a list of my stories and articles. Stories are longer features that I write from time to time.
• Ecosystem data that tells you who I currently read and who currently reads me.
• Referers for today. These are web pages that were used by visitors to reach this site.
• A link to my static home page.
• A link that lets you send me e-mail.
• My "web of trust", consisting of links to communities, individual people, and resources that I believe provide informative content. Take those links as personal recommendations.
• Syndication buttons that you can use to include my weblog as a news feed in your personal news aggregator, if you have one. If you don't, I recommend you get one. It's a great way to personalize and speed up your news gathering activities.

On the right you'll find a calendar that lets you view my past posts.

I manage this particular weblog with the Radio UserLand software application, and so far find that it works pretty well. You can learn more about weblogs on Know-how Wiki and in my article on personal knowledge publishing.

Feel free to reuse this page's contents for your own weblog; A link back to it would be appreciated but is not mandatory.

Copyleft 2006 Sebastien Paquet. Last update: 4/22/2006; 12:26:21 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.