Tag Archive for ‘blogging’ at dougbelshaw.com

Tag Archive for 'blogging'

Digital Permanence: Death & Data

Published

on 19 October 2008

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$Doug\'s gravestone?$ I’m worried about dying. No, not in terms of my mortal flesh and immortal soul; I’m worried about what will happen to my data when I die.

That may sound a little, shall we say, geeky, so let me explain. There’s two ways you can ‘live for ever’ in this world. The first is to become so famous that people talk about you until the end of time. As that’s difficult for most of us, the second way is more likely. All you’ve got to do with the second way is to pass on your genes (and your surname) to your offspring. I’m doing well with the latter: my son Benjamin Belshaw was born 20 months ago and will, I hope, continue the illustrious Belshaw line. With the first method, however, I’m still struggling.

My problem is this:

Most of my ideas are in the form of writing in the digital landscape (i.e. on this blog or others on the Internet)
Books and other printed matter in the physical realm are a lot more ‘permanent’ at present that writing in the digital realm.
When I die dougbelshaw.com will cease to exist.
Ergo, unless my ideas are so amazing that they become ubiquitous during my lifetime, they will have little impact after my death.

So I’m left with a problem. Should I start writing a book? Is all I’m writing here ultimately futile? Should I be creating static HTML pages so archive.org can index them?

Does this even matter?

I’ll tell you this for free…

Published

Doug Belshaw

on 16 September 2008

in Everything Else

…put yer money away!*

This post was prompted, in part, by a wonderful recent presentation by Merlin Mann’s entitled How To Blog and its horror-inducing first few slides.

I’ve been contacted in the past week by two separate individuals who wanted to place paid advertisements on my sites. The first offered $150 for 6 text-link ads at the end of blog posts on the now-defunct teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk. I presume this is because these appear near the top of Google search rankings for certain keywords. The second was simply exploring the possibility of paid adverts on this blog.

I said no to both on principle. You may find that strange, as I’ve had Google and iTunes ads on my sites before.** Well, yes, but I’ve realised the error of my ways! As has been pointed out to me by several people, adverts on a personal blog make people question your impartiality and just don’t look very professional. I’ve taken these points on board. The only advertising on my sites now can be found at historyshareforum.com to help cover hosting and bandwidth costs.

So you can be sure that when I recommend certain products and services, I’m not being paid the individuals or companies behind them. Transparency is key.

The only thing I’m now struggling with now is revealing which school I work at. In the past I’ve made sure I don’t say where I work to keep the professional and personal completely separate. In a connected online world, however, this is becoming increasingly difficult. Take elearnr, for example. This is a blog I’ve set up to share links, resources and guides I create in my new role as E-Learning Staff Tutor. Whilst I mention names of members of staff on there, I haven’t - as yet - said which school I’m talking about. I’m torn between what it will mean for this blog, and being completely transparent with the other.

I’d appreciate your thoughts and comments.

*Watch this YouTube video clip of Peter Kay if you don’t get what I’m talking about…

** I apologise you can see an iTunes ad in the sidebar, I’ve tried several times to get rid of it using K2’s sidebar manager, but it just won’t budge!

(image by Joseph Robertson @ Flickr)

The feature that will make Posterous better than Edublogs is…

Published

Doug Belshaw

on 6 August 2008

in Education and Technology

…themes! Or at least backgrounds and the ability to change the colours on your blog home page - à la Twitter.

<<< Rewind! For those who haven’t come across Posterous, it’s a great blogging platform that just works. You can blog by logging into your account as with normal platforms, but the real power of Posterous comes through it’s ability to ‘intelligently’ deal with anything you send to post@posterous.com.

In fact, sending an email is all you need to do to set up a blog in the first place. I love how straightforward it is to use - it certainly sticks to the 7 Essential Guidelines for Functional Design as far as I’m concerned! Text formatting from your email is retained on the blog post, links to YouTube become embedded videos, PDFs and text files become Flashpaper-like previews, and images become galleries. Check out my test posts here and here!

As far as next year and my E-Learning Staff Tutor role, this is perfect for recommending for classroom teacher blogs. It’s just so easy to get stuff up there and online! For students, however, a Twitter-like ability to change colours, backgrounds, etc. needs to be there before they’re likely to be sold on it…

Thanks to @tombarrett and @johnjohnston for making me aware of Posterous!

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