Social Software Tools in more Detail
An outline of different social software tools follows. However, it is important to note that there is a growing trend for services which combine different features in one package, such as services which enable you to join online communities, set up blogs and wikis and share photographs all via one web site. This type of hybrid service is likely to become increasingly popular, as shown by sites such as Suprglu, which enable you to pick out your favourite social software content and personalise the web as you require.
Blogs
Short for 'weblog', a blog can be most easily described as a web-based diary. The blog-owner regularly posts new entries diary-style, which are usually archived by date. They are designed to be interactive, allowing others to post comments about the blog entries, and usually incorporate links to other blogs of interest. Features such as trackback and 'pinging' facilitate links between blogs, while syndication options enable users to subscribe to blogs and digests. Increasingly, blogs incorporate multimedia, and you can also upload and read them via mobile devices.
Principal's Blog, West Suffolk College
Originally, many blogs placed the emphasis on providing a digest of content from other sites, though more recently, there has been a trend towards 'confessional' blogs, where the owner publishes his or her thoughts, opinions and secrets. Blogs have proved to be a very popular medium, with a new one being created every second, but there is some scepticism as to their value - one rather cynical definition is "published by people with nothing to say and read by people with nothing to do"! Nonetheless, their ease of use, requiring no web publishing expertise or server setup, and the ability to have an instant online showcase for your expertise, as opposed to the laborious and cumbersome traditional academic publishing process, explains their particular appeal to higher education and research communities.
How to do it?
There are a variety of blogging services available, many of which are free. When choosing a service, you must take care to think about the configuration and moderation options available - for example, do you want your blog to be open to all, or just invited guests? Do you want people to log in before posting comments, or are you happy to have a free-for-all? Do you want to host the blog on your local server, or do you want the blogging service to do the hosting? Some of the major blogging services include Blogger, Wordpress, and various services produced by Sixapart. A useful feature comparison chart provides a summary.
Examples
As there are millions of blogs available, increasing exponentially by the second, it is difficult to provide a representative and meaningful list of blogs. However, comprehensive blog search facilities are available at Technorati, Google, and Eatonweb. Blog subscription and syndication services include general ones such as Blogbridge and Metafilter, or specialised services such as Scienceblogs and Nature, while the Institute of Knowledge Transfer provides a newsfeed digest which takes its content from blogs and other sources. It won't take you long to find individual blogs of a particular interest i.e. to the BCE sector, such as the Research Information Network, VentureBlog or this widening participation blog from the Open University.
Furthermore, group blogs, with several contributors, offer an effective way of enabling experts to share their knowledge quickly and informally, such as the Research Information Network and NESTA blogs.
Increasingly, universities are providing blogging facilities to their staff and students, including Warwick, Newcastle and Sunderland.
Members of the JISC infoNet team are now using Blogs to collaborate with the community on issues they wish to address with regards to future work.
See "Records Management future watch".
Benefits and Barriers of Blogs
Potential benefits for users:
The online nature of blogs provides a significant benefit for many users. Users with disabilities can access an online blog using assistive technology (for example text-to-speech tools or voice recognition software) in a way that would be impossible to replicate in paper-based update reports. For some users the inbuilt templates, content management, tracking and searching facilities of a blog system may make the organisation and retrieval of information much simpler than using a process that depended on their own organisational skills.
Potential barriers for users:
There may be social or economic barriers related to extensive use of online content management systems - not everyone has the same access to online systems or the same skill set required to use them. Users with learning difficulties may struggle to acquire the range of skills necessary to effectively keep records via an online system. Different blog systems will have different levels of usability and accessibility, both in the navigation and retrieval of content and their usability with different assistive technologies. Issues surrounding blogs will be especially important for screen reader users and as such the accessibility and usability of tools should be trialled with a wide variety of learners (using a wide variety of assistive technologies) before committing to a significant implementation strategy.
Blogging with images
As noted above, those producing blogs are increasingly incorporating multimedia content such as videos, audio clips, or photographs. Popular blogging software, like Blogger or WordPress, make it fairly easy to insert or link to media content, although sometimes additional plug-ins are required or will make the task easier. For those serious about posting images, it's also possible to obtain specialist 'photoblog' software or hosting services (see Photoblogs).
In addition to inserting one-off images into a standard blog entry, some blog software or plug-ins will facilitate the creation of photo albums or provide close integration with photosharing services such as Flickr (see section e below). Images can sometimes be automatically pulled into a blog from these image sharing sites or alternatively can be pushed out from these sites into a blog. Increasingly image sharing sites are offering their own blogging tools. It's also often possible to 'moblog' images directly from a mobile camera phone to a blog.
Blogs do not only provide a means of sharing images, they can also represent a useful source of images. However, there can be some difficulties in searching for images within blogs, since they are not consistently indexed by image search engines, and there can also be issues of quality and copyright to consider.
TASI has produced a resource with more detail on using images in blogs and on searching for blog images (see Images in Blogs and Wikis).
