Readers' Response

The readers' response to my post Subscribers - Who Are You? was far beyond anything that I had imagined. It really makes me wonder what happened? What should I learn from this? What should I do different going forward?

So here are some initial thoughts ... and a lot of questions ...

Blog Icebreakers

Obviously, I finally asked a question that got a lot of people to comment. I really can't say why this finally got a good response. I should point out that it's still a small percentage of the total audience according to Feedburner. But even still - this might be the most commented post ever.

To me this makes me wonder - Will any of the first timers comment again?

Why did this work? And what should I do the next time if I want to get lots of feedback?

There's also an interesting question of whether I should be doing other icebreakers to better engage with everyone?

Finding My Blog

Google seems to be helping a lot. Seems like this blog is being recommended by Google. I have no idea how this part of Google Reader works, but obviously it's great to have it happening.

Lots of referrals from other blogs (thanks Clive, Karyn, Harold, Jay, Stephen, Cathy, Christy, Cammy, etc.). This is part of the reason that I think sites like eLearning Learning are helpful. They point you to a good set of blogs.

A couple of mentions of Twitter. That's somewhat a surprise to me and I'm not quite sure I get how this really happens. Can someone weigh in on how this dynamic works?

Diversity

There is far greater diversity among my readers than I think about. People who speak English as a second (or third) language. Many readers who are outside of corporate learning.

One important comment on this - the beauty of diversity is different perspectives. But for us to have those different perspectives, I need more active participation from people with different perspectives. I welcome discussion of how your world is different from what I describe. Or how you think I'm wrong or too narrow.

I hope that we've broken the ice here a little bit and that you will contribute more when you have thoughts.

Speaking

Many people mentioned subscribing after hearing a presentation. I often think about the fact that any post will reach quite a large number of people and that a presentation only reaches a small number in comparison. However, it appears that many presentations reach a new audience. So, I may have to rethink the importance of speaking.

It also makes me realize how large the potential audience is and that realistically I'm reaching a very small number.

New Blogs

Several people mentioned relatively new blogs in their comment. I continue to believe in the value of blogging and I do what I can to help grow an audience for new bloggers. Your mention in a comment on my blog is likely very much buried. You might want to look at New Blog for some other ideas.

What Else?

I'm not even sure what I should make of the response. It's really great to make this much of a connection - again argues in favor of presentations.

What else should I have got out of this experience?

Isn't it amazing that I'm still learning how to blog after doing it for more than 3 years?

Subscribers - Who Are You?

For some reason, I've recently seen a whole lot of new subscribers. I would think that it was errors in Feedburner's counting, except that for many of the subscribers are doing it through email and there has definitely been an increase.

I'm thankful, but I really don't quite know the cause.

And, most of the comments come from folks who I've known for a while - but with a few new folks coming in recently. Still, it's a small number as compared to subscribers.

So, if you are a new subscriber (within the past six months) can you this ONE TIME come and leave a comment with:

a. Where you found out about this blog?
b. What you hope to get from subscribing?
c. Are you ever going to leave another comment?

If you've subscribed for a while, feel free to also leave a comment. I'd still like to hear b&c.

Of course, feel free to mention anything else.

Multimedia Storage

Another good question from a reader. This person works in a military environment with some very particular requirements for how multimedia assets are treated during development. Because of that he's in the position of having to determine how much disk space will be needed during development. He's seeking help to answer ...

Are there formulas you use to determine disk space needs during development of multimedia training?

My first reaction was - just buy more disk space. It's cheap. But the context here does quite allow for that. It's pretty interesting to hear about development in a military environment.

Military multimedia development is contracted to 3 or four different companies who put development teams here on the base to research and develop the courseware using government provided computers, software and networks. Under their contracts everything becomes the property of the government once they receive tasking and begin developing a course (and I do literally mean 'everything'). It's pretty much set up so that each contractor has a 'folder' on the development network - they subdivide within that folder as necessary depending on how many courses they're working on, etc.

The govt prefers that while it is ok to work on your local machine, end of work day or finished items should be kept on the development network. At the moment we use VSS to manage assets - it allows check in and check out and tracks file use. We are just about to move to Adobe's Version Cue.

Additionally, once a course is completed and delivered it's not removed from the network storage - the govt takes over the maintenance and any updating of the course - and on top of that we're required to maintain backward versions of the course. So three months from now if a course is revised in some way we're required to keep the old version as well as the new one. so even our backup storage becomes quite complicated! (requirements state we're to keep 3 back)

Unfortunately for us, the military isn't able to simply add X TB to its storage design. They are required to predict growth, show usage and justify that addition.

So, I have to supply them with storage figures and growth predictions.

I've used various approaches and have based things off of prior work. But in most cases, it is definitely pure guesswork.

I should also add that this is mostly a situation applicable to the development side of the house. Once you have a finished product and it's been cleaned up and put in a 'run time' condition for the LMS, size (while still important) does not become that much of a storage issue.

I know that a lot of this have gone through this kind of thing, especially in large development projects. I'm curious what formulas or general rules of thumb that people have for total development storage requirements. For example -

X minutes of finished video * A MB +
Y minutes of finished audio * B MB +
Z minutes total runtime * C MB

Any such formulas out there?

Blogging Jobs Careers

Fantastic post by Michele Martin - Blogging for Personal Branding. I would have titled it as Blogging and Your Career. After reading this, I think you will realize the value that Michele is bringing that I mentioned in Social Job Seeker Resource. While I focus on Tapping the Social Grid as a part of current work. Michele is focusing on using Social Media as part of your Career. They are not mutually exclusive, and in many ways, she's covering the more important topic.

At some point Michele and I will have to come up with how you can:

• Always be Learning
• Always be Networking
• Always be Helping Your Career

Now go over to Michele's blog and subscribe.

Communities and Networks Connection

This is a great week for content communities. And there's a very interesting effect and a realization (aha moment) I've had about all of this that I describe near the bottom.

Yesterday, I was able to announce that I've been working with Judy Brown to launch the Mobile Learning Content Community.

Today I get to announcement that I've been working with Nancy White to launch the:

Communities and Networks Connection

For those of you who don't know Nancy ... She has been my go to person for all things Community for years. She helped me launch Work Literacy. And I'm very happy to have worked with her to get this site going. And have learned a few things along the way.

Nancy has posted a wonderful announcement of the launch. Some thoughts from her post:

This isn’t a community, and not as loose and open as a network. It is in that juicy place in between communities and networks that helps to collect and organize useful content from blogs and other web sites, from people who care about, and are passionate to understand these phenomenon we call “communities” and “networks.” The goal of this page is to create a place where it’s easy to find current and highly relevant content. And perhaps to stimulate a new connection between you and these brilliant people.

One of the wonderful things about the site is that Nancy is collecting content from sources outside of those that are Featured bloggers. I don't have time to go look at all the things that Nancy is finding. It's good to have a flow of them through the site. It's also good to know that I can easily get back and find interesting things.

If you go to my blog’s content page, Full Circle, the page shows on the left the keywords that I write about a fair amount. Keywords like Online Interaction, Technology Stewardship, Catalysts are all pretty good indicators. These same keywords are listed in the new widget in my sidebar provided by the site.

There’s also a page that shows the Best Content from Full Circle based on social signals.

The best part of this is this is not just about my content. In fact, I’m just a drop in the bucket. I’m not alone. There is quite a network that is participating in the launch - from people who are close friends and trusted colleagues, to interesting people I try and follow.

To me the inverse of this is true. It surfaces the best content from Nancy White and her network around these topics.

It’s fun to look at some of the differences in keywords for some of my fellow participants. For example:

• Ken Thompson is laser focused on virtual teams. One key word like an arrow in the center of a bullseye.
• Shawn Callahan of Anecdote covers collaboration and communities of practice.
• Eva Schiffer bridges networks and knowledge sharing, while Valdis Krebs is clearly a social network analysis and networks maven.
• Jessica Lipnack is a network networker, often hovering towards the center of virtual work and teams.

Another interesting announcement post comes from John Tropea - Library Clips - Communities and Networks Connection Blog Aggregator.

.... newbies to the blogosphere sometimes haven’t go time to immerse themselves and build a subscription of blogs they trust, this takes time, but it’s well worth it for personal experience. This also happens to me, I haven’t got time to find and build a list of sources for topics I’m slightly interested in, as I’m too busy on the topics I am interested in.

Anyway, for newbies and others, there has been a movement where this stage of finding and reading blogs on a topic has been made a whole lot easier. The blogosphere has matured and blogs on a topic have proved their worthiness (blogosphere self regulates reputation) and coalesced into one convenient space.

This is very true. It's hard to understand a single blog. I've been exploring exactly that in my recent post: Index Page. It's even harder when you try to understand a network of bloggers. I don't necessarily claim that content communities solve that problem, but they at least help to some degree.

Basically, it’s a convenient one stop shop daily read on what a bunch of bloggers are saying about Communities and Networks.

That's a pretty good summary - with the addition that it does help to surface content on specific topics within the space that have high social signals indicating that it's good stuff.

John then provides one of the better explanations of how it all works that I've seen:

How does it work?

Visit the website and in the middle is a stream of the latest posts from all sources. If you like reading content from the comfort of your own home then you can grab the feed.

On the right sidebar is a list of sources, clicking a source will display content from just that source.

Clicking on Library clips will show my latest posts (click for more), and if you scroll down it will show my “best” posts (click for more) based on social signals (kind of like PostRank I guess)

On the left sidebar we have a way to filter posts from all blogs by concept, tools, type, and year (a bigger picture is available on a page)

For those who want to just see posts about a tool like Twitter, or a concept like Collaboration, can filter to just these pages, or grab the feed.

And then you can filter some more, this page here is filtering to see all posts on Twitter, then filter again to see posts on Twitter and Communities of Practice, and you can keep filtering.

Now I’m not sure how these keywords/categorising work, but it’s a handy way to filter the content.

A really cool thing is that I can see all these keywords based around one source, so here’s a keyword page for just my blog.

Great stuff John!

Evolution and Effect of Content Communities

This has been an interesting evolution for me. Originally, Browse My Stuff (which is the current name of the underlying technology) was created to help me organize my own blog's content. It was so effective that I found myself wanting to organize all the content that I read - so I created eLearning Learning. In the process, it created something of real value to the blogging community as well as to people who encounter it from outside.

Then I realized that there were people like me in other domains: Judy Brown - Mobile Learning, Jay Cross - Informal Learning, Nancy White - Communities and Networks - they could do a similar thing to help their network and help someone like me who is outside the network, but interested in it. I have these three resources that I can get a regular stream of and can easily navigate to find good stuff when I need it. Thanks, Jay, Nancy and Judy.

Who's next?