Bachelor Degree Online

Wednesday, 7 March 2007

Important Notice to Blogger Blog Owners

Amazingly, I only recently found out that in transitioning from the old to new Blogger versions, Google was nice enough to add something to my blog:

meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"

This tells the search engine spiders to ignore your page. So, no search engine traffic and Google's blog search didn't work for me.

And it isn't just me. It appears that lots of blogs have this. Looking just in my Favorite eLearning Blogs: Big Dog, Little Dog is also afflicted by this same problem.

To get rid of it, I edited my template and removed the:

<$BlogMetaData$>

Nice of them to do this for me. I really didn't want search engines finding my content. :)

Monday, 5 March 2007

Open Source Business Model

A recent spate of posts on the challenges of running an open source business is interesting (Tosh, Siemens, Downes, Tosh 2, ). Dave Tosh laments -

Elgg is the most popular white label social networking platform in the world powering over 2000 networks. However, Elgg could power 100,000 networks and it would make no difference - there is no revenue stream as we give everything away under a GPL license.

I understand his frustration. You create something that has value and gets traction and yet you've created it in a way that the software is considered "free." Thus, you may starve working on your labor of love.

However, there are lots of companies that are making money from open source and freemium models. A friend of mine has a company that builds open source applications in spaces that are a bit less innovative than Elgg, but they do very well financially through the packaging and support models. One of his companies - Gluecode - was sold to IBM for a pretty good price.

Common revenue streams are consulting, training, support, customization, upgraded versions for corporate applications, etc. The fact that Dave says that there's "no revenue stream" and that he's getting good traction suggests he must be missing something.

One thing I would point out is that it is highly likely (and in fact happening) that open source will begin to become increasingly important in the eLearning world. Especially as things become less revolutionary and more standardized. Think Moodle as an LMS. Something I discussed briefly before: Innovators' Dilemma in Learning/eLearning, Where are open source learning applications?

The discussions on the posts are quite interesting - and heated. Luckily Harold Jarche pointed us to:

Content Search Use Cases

Ray Sims has been doing great stuff on his blog. He does a great job of breaking down topics into smaller pieces. A recent example - Content Search: Use Cases - which explores some of the different ways we search for things and helps us think about when Google might be a good answer and when it's likely not.

Learning Circuits - A Spam Blog?

Over the weekend, I heard from Dave Lee that the Learning Circuits Blog - home of the monthly big question - had been labelled a spam blog. Here is Dave's note taken for the side bar:

I'm writing to you through the sidebar because Google has frozen LCB because they believe it is a spam blog.

What's a spam blog? Here's Google's definition:

As with many powerful tools, blogging services can be both used and abused. The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site. Spam blogs cause various problems, beyond simply wasting a few seconds of your time when you happen to come across one. They can clog up search engines, making it difficult to find real content on the subjects that interest you. They may scrape content from other sites on the web, using other people's writing to make it look as though they have useful information of their own. And if an automated system is creating spam posts at an extremely high rate, it can impact the speed and quality of the service for other, legitimate users.

So best as i can tell, because The Big Question has been such a great success resulting in a large number of links to and from LCB we are a threat to clog up Google's search engines. I've tried to dissuade the Blog Team from engaging in irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text in their posts. But did they listen to me!!!

Seriously, spam is a very serious issue for any blog platform and we'll have to give Google time to realize that LCB is legit. So for the time being, enjoy the 382 posts from the past two years.

We'll be back up and running with March's Big Question - "Do you really exist if Google says you don't?" as soon as we can.

Dave Lee
your exasperated blogmeister

As the person who originated idea of The Big Question - I feel somewhat responsible for getting Dave into this mess. It also points out how fragile life is in the Web 2.0 world.

I'm not sure what we are going to do with this month's big question. We'll likely wait a few days and see if Google realizes that Learning Circuits really isn't a spam blog.

Thursday, 1 March 2007

Happiness - Must Watch Video

Found via Tony O'Driscoll. I guess Dan Gilbert - author of Stumbling on Happiness was the keynote at Training 2007. Tony was nice enough to point us to a video from a Ted talk:

You really should watch this. It contains a bunch of things that completely make sense now that you know and raises some interesting questions:

Natural happiness is a result of "good results" - happy that you won the lottery
Synthesized happiness is a result of adjusting to your situation - being paralyzed and adjusting to your new life
While we may believe that natural happiness is somehow better than synthesized happiness, there really is no difference - people just are happy.
People who won the lottery and people who are paralyzed are equally happy one year after the event.
The brain is amazingly good at synthesizing happiness. The 3 moving to two and 4 moving to 5 in the video is great stuff.
Freedom (lots of choices) is the enemy of synthesized happiness. If you are stuck, you will be happier than if you have lots of choices.

This explains to me why it's hard to buy when there are so many choices. I don't want buyers remorse. Heaven forbid I have the option to return something so I can continue to fret about my decision. Having someone buy it for me or make a strong recommendation that locks me in - makes me happier with the choice. And, if I'm truly locked into the choice, then my brain will continually adjust to make me even happier.

I can't wait to hear what Stephen Downes, Jay Cross and the rest of the "freedom is good" - "control is bad" has to say about this. :)

Wednesday, 28 February 2007

New Meme - Media I Consume - How about a change?

I got tagged by Luis Suarez around a new meme going around that focuses on "Media I Consume"... I'm sure you all remember the Five Things Meme that struck the blogosphere a few months ago. My initial reaction was - "Not another one." Then I took a look at the information contained in his post and saw that Nancy White had done one as well.

I'm personally not that interested in music, movies, magazines, but I was very interested how people were using the web. For example - Luis mentions:

Well, to start with, about 100 news sites from all sorts of different places, including TechMeme, TailRank, Megite, Findory, Blogniscient, diggdot.us, Topix, Google News, etc. and then a few other general related news. I guess just the usual stuff. One thing for sure is that whenever I need to get information on a particular subject the Web is one of the first resources I check.

This made me think about the recent DIY discussions and some prior posts around PKM and Personal Learning:

This made me realize that I would love it if this meme were actually how we have come to use the web to support personal / DIY learning. Of course we are all using Google / Yahoo to search for information on an as-needed basis. But, what else are we doing? Do you do something now that you didn't do a year ago?

I'm trying to figure out if I believe that this is a better Meme? Any thoughts?