Month: February 2009

Hot List from the Communities & Networks Connection

Rachel's Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies from cc Flickr photoLast week Tony Karrer and I launched the Communities and Network Connection, a place to bring together and surface good stuff about communities, networks and all the juicy stuff around them. Tony continues to tweak the code behind it and one of the outputs is a hot list of the posts that got the most “social juice.” Tony explains how it works for one of the other aggregated sites he stewards, the eLearning Technology site.  Check out Hot List : eLearning Technology

Tony explains:

In other words, we are using what is happening:

  • with the content out in the network
  • on the eLearning Learning
  • searches that land on us and that occur on the site,
  • and various other kinds of behaviors.

Together these social signals indicate that the content is likely of higher quality (or at least of higher interest). Thus it belongs in both a best of list and a hot list. This is going to take some work to get it right, but we believe it will help to highlight various hot list content.

We are particularly excited that this capability will soon allow us to have a weekly post that highlights hot list for the week. This will be something like:

Posts: 

  1. Branding in the age of social media
  2. Clay Shirky: nonprofits must become new-style convenors – or lose their members
  3. Assessing the health of a community of practice using net promoter score
  4. Mathemagenic ” PhD conclusions in a thousand words: blogging practices of knowledge workers
  5. From Command and Control to Collaboration and Teamwork – Preparing Business Leaders for the Knowledge Economy
  6. Knowledge Retention will no longer be an explicit strategy
  7. Co-operatives: The Feeling is Mutual
  8. Avoid Profile Potpourri
  9. MicroGuilds Musings on Scrum and Team Integration
  10. Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities

 Other Items:

  1.  Online Community Success and ROI | Will Pate’s Blog
  2. Facebook | Community Manager, Advocate, and Evangelist
  3. Facebook | Should Brands Join or Build Their Own Social Network

 Keywords: 

Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies photo by rachel is coconut&lime


Welcome back, Seb

Photo by Stephen DownesSeb is back blogging! I was happy to hear Seb Paquet has restarted his blog. So I have to welcome him back. He was one of the first people to welcome me to the blogosphere in 2005 and I adopted his welcomeing practice. You can read about it waaaay back:

Seb Paquet taught me my first explicit blogging community indicator: welcoming. When Seb noticed a new person blogging who he knew or was interested in, he blogged a welcome post, linking to that person’s blog and, if available, a picture. Immediately Seb connected me to his community and expanded mine. I now follow that practice, which has been labeled by one of those I’ve welcomed as “kindness.” I like that!

Photo by Stephen Downes

Penmachine’s Pictures of the Graphic Recording Session

Nice photos Derek, aka,  Penmachine!You really captured the energy and the vibrancy of the people and the beautiful images people made together today at Northern Voice. Yes we CAN draw! And express ideas, tap into different thinking and have FUN!

Search results for visual_thinking…

Hanging Out at Northern Voice

I”m happy to be back for my 5th 2009 Northern Voice. We are well into the afternoon of day 1 or “moosecamp.” I’m always overwhelmed by the variety of offerings. I spent the morning in conversations, not sessions, then after lunch decided to hang  out in the room where I was doing a session on Graphic Recording 101 at 2pm. That meant learning about all kinds of interesting browser plugins from the amazing Scott Leslie, then pondering on gender in blogging with Laura Blankenship and Leslie Madsen-Brooks. A half hour is a tough constraint to get to play with many plugins or begin to dive into gender issues, but both were thought provoking.

On the plugin side, I’m playing with Zemanta and Feedly. I want to check out Ubiquity and Instapaper. Alexandra Samuels turned me on to Evernote and it looks really useful for keeping track of text notes and all the flip chart images I use in work.  I’ll keep you posted on these toys.  I have nothing profound to share from the gender conversation other than I sense gender reveals itself in any media, but I don’t really understand it.

Then at 2 I hosted a rapid 45 minute “Graphic recording 101” session where we jammed about 10 people on paper on the chalk board and another ten on tables to take a quick dive into the space between the pen, the paper and the wall.  My SD card reader is fritzing, so I can’t upload the photos to Flickr, but I’ll get them up as soon as I can.  In the meantime, here is a picture from the glorious Barbara Ganley! She, Laura and I are doing a session on “the spaces in between” tomorrow. I’ll also be graphically recording Rob Cottingham’s keynote and doing a little tech experiment with Alan Levine later in the day with his new recording/annotation toy. More on that tomorrow.


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Community Orientations Podcast with Shawn Callahan

Our friend Shawn Callahan has been following the work on the book – for years! He has been privy to various drafts and has recently been using the Community Orientations in his work with communities.

Recently he realized he wasn’t so clear on orientations 7, 8 and 9 so this past weekend we hooked up on Skype and talked through them. Here is Shawn’s post and the podcast.

As we talked, I was interested to hear about the exercise he did with the orientations, and see how it compared to how I’ve been using them. Here is what Shawn wrote:

BTW the community orientation exercise simply involved getting the participants of the workshop to plot on a radar chart, which I’d drawn on a whiteboard, where they thought the community was currently and then do this again for where they would like to see the community of 12 months time. It generated a terrific conversation and a feel of mutual purpose. Here is what the result looked like.

I had not thought about using the orientations for community plans or aspirations. I had been using them as a diagnostic for technology stewards to a) become aware of key community orientations and b) then use that to plan or tweak the community’s technology configuration. But both make a lot of sense to me.

Thanks, Shawn!