ASIST K-Blog Panel

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Das E-Business Weblog: Published my BlogTalk Paper

I linked to this paper earlier, but one of Roell's responses to my comments struck me worthy of posting again.
I left out privacy for simplicity. At the moment, "channeling" in blogs, that is: publishing for specific audience is not well developed yet, and as most people who read the paper will not know much about weblogs in the first place I did not want to make things complicated and introduce the dimension of "publishin [sic] channels" (which could cope with privacy issues).
Help understanding this? Are you all avoiding the city (and work) this week? Maybe this is my niche for the panel -- KM and levels of access and software and ... Has blogging for specific audiences really not been covered? J, you talk about blogging by a group of people... but for the public, right?

3 Comments:

  • I'm not sure what he means by "channeling" and that it's not well developed yet. Isn't part of the whole point of having a blog or reading a blog is to channel information to a particular audience or from a particular source? Or is he talking about the ability to restrict or flag specific posts to certain readers/reader groups? In blogs with categories, it's already possible to only selectively subscribe to a feed of posts about a particular category. Shimon Rura's developed some code that does the reverse: skips posts with certain categories.

    The group blogs I blog on are public blogs, but when people post, they have a specific audience in mind. Like this one, when we post, we think about the three other people who are likely to read what we're writing or that we're making a specific note about a resource for ourselves. Like Christina had me specifically in mind for part of her questions, otherwise, she wouldn't have written J in one of the questions. For the Special Libraries Association News Division blog, we write about things of note to the division or its members. It includes professional development resources, like those related to the Democratic National Convention, as well as division-related notices and activities, like that we need a new editor for our newsletter. If the public reads it, more power to them, but we aren't writing for the general public.

    By Blogger j, at 5:37 PM  

  • "Or is he talking about the ability to restrict or flag specific posts to certain readers/reader groups?"That's what I meant, yes. Even in the same organisation, people will want to share some information only with specific other people - their team, their department or simply with the colleagues they trust. There are some things that can be published publicly but some that people want to publish only to specific others and keep private otherwise. That is something that needs to be coped for in future personal publishing tools.

    By Blogger Martin Roell, at 6:30 PM  

  • I agree with Martin. We discussed this during the BlogWalk meeting in Vienna early July, where Lee Bryant also introduced the observation that we need to be able to make distinctions between the black and white of totally public or passwordprotected/behind the firewall. We are in need of shades of grey.

    By Blogger Ton, at 6:47 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home