Month: July 2010

Bundling Feeds

Bundles in Google Reader provide a simple way to combine multiple feeds into a single feed.

Earlier this week, thanks to Joe Dale I discovered Google Reader Bundles.  In the past I have used Yahoo Pipes to combine feeds.  For example this M25 Bloggers pipe combines several individual blog feeds into one stream. I think Yahoo Pipes is great but it’s a bit daunting for the uninitiated.

Creating Bundles is much easier, especially if you are already using Google Reader. I’ve created a Bundle of a selection of Ed Tech blogs.  If like me you’re new to Bundles there’s an explanation from Shelly Terrell below.

I’ll be using this to create a bundle of the ‘official’ ALT-C 2010 bloggers which will feed into the ALT-C conference website.

Power of the Retweet

It’s easy to forget how things are changing. Today I showed a great diagram I’d found to thousands of people!  3 years ago I might have emailed that diagram to a handful of people that I work directly with.

It all began yesterday afternoon when I came across a picture in a report:

There were a couple of retweets immediately  (the re-posting of another person’s tweet to share it with your own Twitter followers).  Then this morning, a retweet by @josiefraser (who has 6000+ followers) initiated several further retweets.

The final results according tweetreach were that a potential 19, 207 people had seen the tweet which compares with the potential 821 followers of my account.  It’s important to stress the potentially here as many tweets pass by in the stream unseen, plus the Twittersphere is full of abandoned accounts & so on. Even so, it’s very different from an email to a closed network.

Tweetreach screengrab (Graph of Tweet 'Exposure')

Looking at the reach of the retweets I was surprised to see how little overlap there is between the networks of those involved.  Of the 19000+ who might have seen one of the 24 tweets only 3285 saw it multiple times.  I’d wrongly assumed that there would be a much larger overlap between the followers of the likes of @josiefraser & @timbuckteeth

Web2.0: the LSE Experience

A presentation reviewing the use of blogging, social media / networking since 2007 by the LSE Careers Service

I gave this presentation with Judith Baines, an LSE Careers Adviser at the AGCAS Careers Information and Employer Liaison Conference at Warwick University, July 2010. It described their different uses of Web2.0over the last four years, focussing on what has & hasn’t worked.  It concluded with a discussion on whether careers services needed to have a web2.0 strategy and policies.

List of links to the websites we mentioned in our talk.

Feeding The Web

I drew this picture to  show how the LSE Law Careers blog takes advantage of feeds to automatically publish to multiple locations and how feeds from elsewhere are added to it.  One of the great advantages of  using a blog for ‘news’ is that it can easily be syndicated elsewhere with very little effort.

I originally produced it  for a presentation I gave with Judith Baines (the LSE Law Careers blogger) at the Graduate Careers Ireland biennial conference in Dublin last month. We used it again earlier this week at the AGCAS CIEL 2010 conference. Our talk was a lessons learnt by the LSE Careers Service’s use of Web2.0 stuff over the last 3 years or so.

In the talk I also highlighted Hootsuite as a useful tool for both ‘feeding the web’ automatically and for writing updates for multiple social networking sites at once.  As this screenshot shows you can send one update to multiple places including Twitter, Facebook (including Pages), LinkedIn, WordPress & Foursquare.

Another feature of  Hootsuite is the ability for multiple people to manage the same account, for example the @A_L_T tweets are written by several people logging in to their own Hootsuite accounts. We do this because Hootsuite also offers statistics so it’s useful to have all tweets originating from one source.

Writing for the Web

KeyboardWriting for the web is different to writing for print.  Key guidelines:

1) Users don’t read

People use websites; they don’t read them. Web users are focused on a specific goal, they want a piece of information or to complete a task e.g. book an appointment. They do not want to “settle down with a good website”.

2) Important stuff first

The most important information (to the user, not to the editor!) must be given priority.  The top of the page, the area visible without scrolling, should be reserved for the most important information, with the less important stuff & the detail relegated down the page.

Headings & paragraphs should start with information carrying words not blah-blah.

3) Easy on the eye

Most web users scan and web pages need to be structured to help with this.  Long paragraphs of dense text are difficult to scan.  Web pages need headings, sub-headings, bullets, short paragraphs and space to make it easier for users to find the information they want.

When emphasising text use bold or a colour (not colours!).  Underlining & ALL CAPS should not be used and italics can be difficult to read. Links are another form of emphasis that draw the eye.  They should state what they link to and never “Click here”. Emphasis within the main text should be limited as too much is distracting to users scanning the page.

4) Remove redundancy

Unnecessary words should be removed.  Web users are looking for specific information, they are not visiting to read prose. Avoid padding; remove repetition & waffle.

5) Mind your language

Keep it simple, use plain English. Avoid jargon, slang & clichés.  Limit your use of similes, metaphors & humour. Web writing should be conversational rather than formal. Use the active voice (“Actor does X to Object”) in sentences rather than the passive voice (“Object has X done to it by Actor”).

Finally, know your users and always have them in mind when writing.  A website must meet the needs of its users and to achieve this web editors must understand what their audience(s) want.

If you want to know more about writing for the web then I recommend the following:

Image: Keyboard 2 by spadgy on Flickr

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