Long Tail Blogging is Dying? : eLearning Technology

Just read an article in the Guardian The long tail of blogging is dying (Found via Donald Clark). 

But recently – over the past six months – a new trend: fewer blogs with links, and fewer with any contextual comment. Some weeks, apart from the splogs, there would be hardly anything. I didn't think we'd suddenly become dull.

He points to backup evidence of this from a NYT article and based on

Technorati's 2008 survey of the state of the blogosphere, which found that only 7.4m out of the 133m blogs it tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. As the New York Times put it, "that translates to 95% of blogs being essentially abandoned".

I don't doubt that a lot of blogs are started and abandoned.  People change their focus.  Lives get busy.  Blogging definitely takes work.

I have a limited view of blogging, but I do get to see quite a bit because of Browse My Stuff.

What about eLearning blogs?

Because of eLearning Learning, I track eLearning blogs closely.

When I go back and look at: More eLearning Bloggers – many of the new bloggers stopped blogging soon after.  They had the experience and then stopped.  This somewhat supports the Technorati numbers.

While there are these abandoned blogs, overall I believe there's been a nice growth of eLearning blogs from a wider variety of sources over the past few years. 

When I first started blogging in 2006, it seemed like all the bloggers were exactly the same people who spoke at conferences.  Now, there are more practitioner blogs .  And there are more good quality vendor blogs.  I remember asking Product Vendor Blogs - Where are They? Now I find quite a few on eLearning Learning.  And the analysts have joined in (Brandon Hall and Bersin have blogs).

I'm sure that this will continue to change, but I would question the notion that long tail blogging is dying.

Possible Reasons for the Guardian Drop Off

Over the past three years, I've certainly noticed that while I read (actually skim dive skim) through a lot of blogs, I find I spend less and less time on mainstream publications.  They simply are too general in most cases.  I used to read the Guardian all the time.  Now, I only saw this article because of Donald Clark's mention. 

I do think that some of the limited kinds of blog posts that are essentially – here's an interesting article – has moved to twitter or other status updates.  It's not worth a blog post if that's all you are going to say.

And, honestly, I'd much rather engage in a discussion with a blogger than with a mainstream publication that will never engage back.

Twitter Not a Good Substitute

I personally don't think that Twitter is a good replacement for blogging as learning tool.   It's great for quick sharing.  And quick, limited conversations.  Deeper discussion requires blogging. 

You can find a lot more thoughts around blogging via my post:

Top Ten Reasons To Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog

When Do Learning Games Make Business Sense? : eLearning Technology

T+D Blog - Serious Gaming in the Workplace asks the question:

Is serious gaming being taken seriously in your workplace?

It is time to change the perception of "gaming" among CEOs and other corporate executives. It is a valuable learning tool that is taking too long to become a mainstream part of everyday learning.

However, I've been wondering for long time about when the added costs of building games really pays off.  Last year in Training Method Trends I showed some data from the eLearning Guild that had games and simulations decreasing as a modality.  My guess is that right now with pressure on training budgets, there's significant pressure on spending on games.

 

The Upside Learning (disclosure) white paper Do You Need Games In Your eLearning Mix? (see also their great blog post - Top 100 Learning Game Resources) of course comes out and tells us that different kinds of games make sense based on different learning needs and that there's a place for them.

I concur that there's pretty significant backing that game-based learning results in better learning transfer rates. 

But transfer does not equal ROI.  I've done some initial search for back-up that the added cost of developing learning games is worth the cost, and I've really not come up with much of anything.  There are some great anecdotal examples, but the real question is up-front:

When is it worth the added cost to turn a learning experience into a game?  And how do we know that going in?

The justification is often a bit hard.  There's an emotional response among some buyers that games equals waste.  But even beyond overcoming that challenge, I see it as a bit hard to go from additional transfer angle.  Couldn't we get transfer using another approach at a lower total cost?  Are we trying to justify in additional seat time that learners would spend if it wasn't a game?  Is it true that seat time is less for the same transfer for games?

This relates to the question of the Business of Learning.  I'm not sure that by creating games you really are going to be able to sell enough additional product or create enough added value that it justifies the additional expenditure.

What's the business rationale for spending on games?

eLearning Hot Lists Moving to eLearning Learning : eLearning Technology

Important announcement: I've moved where I will be creating the eLearning Hot Lists.  So …

Want a weekly list of the best content on eLearning from around the web?  Please read this post and then head over to eLearning Learning and subscribe to the Best Of feed via RSS or eMail.

In Using Social Signals to Find Top eLearning Resources I discussed a particular example of using the social signals capability of Browse My Stuff to find good resources on a particular topic. 

This capability also works for finding the top resources over a given time period.  I've been using eLearning Learning to create Hot Lists for a while now:

• eLearning Initial Hot List
• eLearning Hot List Feb 1-14
• eLearning Hot Last Week
• eLearning Top 9 Posts You May Have Missed
• eLearning Hot List - April 1, 2009 to April 11, 2009
• eLearning Host List February
• eLearning Hot List - Second Half of January
• Google Wave – Social Learning – Business – eLearning Hot List
• Performance - Collaboration - Social Network Analysis - eLearning Hot List
• Collaboration - Knowledge Management - Expert - Hot List
• eLearning Learning - Best of May
• Social Learning - Instructional Design - Free - eLearning Hot Topics
• eLearning - Social Media - Mobile Learning
• Twitter TechSmith LinkedIn Learning Strategy

From now on I will be creating and publishing these hot lists over on the eLearning Learning site.  The first post is up now:

Learning Theory - Enterprise 2.0 - Social Software - eLearning Learning Weekly Hot List

With the recent updates to the site, you can subscribe to the Best Of RSS feed to receive these hotlists or you can visit the site and sign up to receive them via email.

As always, I would welcome input, ideas, etc. on eLearning Learning and Browse My Stuff.

New Learning Solutions : eLearning Technology

For the past 15 years, I've spent a lot of time working on start-ups both inside and outside the world of eLearning.  As I mentioned in Blogger Outreach, I'm now getting quite a few emails that are announcements of new services, products, events, etc.  One thing that really surprises me is the number of new products that constantly appear that leave me scratching my head.  Why am I scratching my head?  Because I'm not sure that they've really done any market research, competitor analysis and have come up with a unique value proposition.

In some cases, I'll connect back to the vendor to ask how it's different than some of the other products in the market.  In most cases, they will mention some neat new feature that makes their product marginally better.

A marginally better new product is not going to do anything in the market.

You only need to read a few marketing books to understand why that is.  You won't be able to get above the noise.

And this isn't just me. Stephen Downes – What Not to Build.  Notice how a lot of the solutions he suggests not to build falls into the category of marginally better.  The places he sees opportunity are significantly different.  I don't necessarily agree with him on some of his suggestions – too bleeding edge.  We'd need a lot more market research before I invested much time and money.  But the point is to make sure you are not a "me too" solution.

What's going to make a new learning solution interesting?

Addresses Real Pain Point

Tell me the pain that customers are feeling that will make them pay for your solution – or adopt your free solution.  Even if you are free, you still have to have enough pain with how they are doing things today to get them to adopt.

A corollary to this is to make sure you tell me who your customers are.  It's surprising how many times I run into new products where it's not clear who they think will be using it.

Different Type of Solution

I'm going to be more interested when you tell me about a new solution that doesn't fit into the existing categorizations of tools.  Actually, this is the same thing as differentiating a solution.  For example, let's say that you are building a web conferencing solution that includes an easy to use 2.5D representation and avatars.  You would categorize the space from faceless (WebEx) to 3D/complex (Second Life) and your solution is this new category of approachable 3D.  You get the feeling of presence and personality, without the complexities of Second Life.

Integrates in Interesting Ways

Another way to get my attention and possibly get the market's attention is to have a solution that integrates with existing, already adopted solutions.  For example, if you build something that integrates with Facebook, Twitter, etc. that can take advantage of an existing audience in order to help you solve particular issues.  Or maybe it's a product that lives on top of SharePoint.  Or integrates with all the major LMS products.

Islands have a hard time making it.

Interesting Market Entry

This somewhat relates to the integration issue.  If you can integrate with Facebook, Twitter, or similar products and you have some kind of viral aspect, then that could make you more interesting.  For example, create a business simulation that integrates with those products.  Or a learning tool that leverages those products to help aggregate activity. 

But interesting market entry can also be things like the strategy that Yammer took.  They allow you to set up a corporate twitter that is based on your email domain without ever asking permission from IT.  It's a similar idea to the original groups that Facebook had where you couldn't be part of it unless you had an email with the appropriate domain.  Yammer thus provides a very interesting market entry model that can effectively beat out competitors who need to go through a full IT sales cycle.

An Example – New Survey Tool

What sparked this post was an email I received that was a new survey tool.  I'm not going to mention the specific tool because they didn't provide any of the information I would need to assess whether it's an interesting offering or a me too. 

On the surface, the tool looks very similar to many other survey tools on the market.  Actually, in terms of reporting and some other aspects, other tools look like they are way ahead.  This new survey tool appears to have additional multimedia question types, but I was not clear on why that's any better than providing some media or a small embedded captivate piece and having the question there.

Some thoughts and questions I would have for this company -

Customers?  Pain Point?

Who do they perceive to be their customers?  What is the pain point?

From my experience using survey products, there are definite pain points that are encountered in specific situations.  You want to create a survey with a particular purpose, but the reporting doesn't seem to work out for you quite right.  Or you want to create surveys that need to have reporting done in specific ways.  Or maybe these surveys are aimed at employee satisfaction and the goal is to feed it back into the LMS?  Maybe there's a unique roll-up of results?  Or unique aspects of sending it out to the right people and tracking who's completed it?

Integration

Notice how several of the above pain points relate to integration.  Quite often integration is the barrier to adoption of tools.  If this survey creates something that can feed back into the LMS, then it might be able to get traction in the market.

Of course, most survey tools today really are aimed more at integrating with social platforms.  If you could create a survey and have it work seamlessly with Twitter, as a widget on your blog, with Facebook, with your LinkedIn connections, etc., that represents a pretty interesting offering.  Or maybe there's something about being able to report back out through these same tools?

You need to be a little careful that you still find customers and pain points.

Market Entry

Survey tools can have a very nice viral aspect to them.  You see someone use the tool and then you want to use it.  It's a bit like hotmail in the early days.  And if you are able to use it with twitter, Facebook, etc. it will be that much more viral.

Maybe this tool could be bundled with other authoring tools?

ISA Participating - Future of the Business of Learning : eLearning Technology

I just finished a great conversation with Pam Schmidt, the Executive Director of ISA.

I've been in the training industry since the early 90s and only recently ran into ISA. I'm curious if readers here already know about this organization?

They describe themselves as "the executive connection for training industry leaders." The membership seems to be a who's-who of training company CEOs.

Pam and ISA will be helping me to pull together the event that focuses on the issues raised in Business of Learning. ISA recently looked at some of these issues that were beautifully captured as Graphic Illustrations (PDF). I'm looking forward to more conversations with ISA members and in the conversation on July 23.

You can sign up for the online, free event through Learn Trends at: Future of the Business of Learning.

Welcome aboard Pam and ISA.