I just went to the Technorati page for Merlot2005, hoping to get a big heaping spoonful of Merlot conference blogging.
Instead, I was greeted by this:
WTF? So, if Alan doesn’t go to a conference, nobody knows to use a shared tag to blog about it? Why wouldn’t the Merlot conference organizers be pimping the tag “merlot2005″ on the conference page?
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Well D’Arcy, if you read my newsletter yesterday you would have seen my link to Little Train’s Brad Carson, who blogged the whole thing.
http://littletrain.blogspot.com/
Tags, of course, are dysfunctional, but you’ve heard this argument from me before.
Tags may be disfunctional, but they do work. And they’re somewhat more automated than having a personal Downes-powered human blog filter
I’d missed your OLDaily post on it – checking out Brad’s blog now…
Why would anyone blog Merlot. Blogs are just “online diaries….”
And remember back to 2003, when us 2.5 Canadian Amigos presented RSS and Learning Objects at Merlot in Vancouver
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/show/merlot03/
Merlot had barely heard of RSS and it took them months more to get around to doing it.
But moreso, it demonstrates our skewed view of connected, tag happy netizens- inside the sphere of folks who blog conference, read conference coverarge from conferences, it seems like an assumed action. This is, amng the general population, a small percentage of the pie of humanity.
Blogging a conference is out there among the extreme ranges of OCD activitiy– there are not enough self motivated folks to do so? On the other hand, I have read references to folks that are paid to blog conferences.
Yeah, but that was 2 YEARS ago! Entire online ecosystems have evolved and died out in that time. I find it hard to believe that the Merlot attendees this year don’t include at least a handful of bloggers.
But, yeah. I guess I do take this stuff for granted. Seems like we’ve been doing this stuff forever…
For whatever it is worth, we’ll be publishing a tag to use for those that may be blogging info about E2005 … we have trackbacks enabled for the site at large too … thinking about making them visible for individual sessions. If you have other ideas, lemme know. Thanks, Matt
Hard to believe it was two years ago, isn’t it? And it’s funny – it seems to me that the gap is widening, the gap between what’s happening on the web and in the blogosphere, and what’s happening in academic.
p.s. I agree, the Downes-powered human blog filter is a poor substitute for a working system. I tried to find the MERLOT posts through the usual aggregators, but Brad Carson’s blog isn’t being picked up yet by any of them. *Normally* though I would have had a nice counterexample to tagging.
But really, the people at MERLOT – at the very least, the presenters, if not the attendees or the conference itself – should have been providing some syndicated content goodness. That they didn’t shows (IMHO) just how far behind the curve they are.
Wasn’t complaining about my Downes-powered blogosphere filter – just concerned about the scalability
Considering we, as a group, brought Merlot up to speed 2 years ago (wow – doesn’t seem that long ago…) I’m more interested/concerned about what that means wrt. momentum of this stuff… If the instigators drop off, will the tools cease to be used? That’s a pretty crappy story to tell about these “enabling and democratizing” online tools – if they only stay alive if a handful of individuals remain active in every community they can…
Here’s hoping the EDUCAUSE crowd groks it better – Matt’s been doing some great stuff there (but again – if he were to leave EDUCAUSE, would the tools wither on the vine as they did at Merlot?)