September 2012: TLAs

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Back hame tae Alba for the first half of September, but still managed to squeeze in reviews of a couple of events in my Law Teacher 2.0 series. #slsbristol led to some musing on the role of the backchannel and how people actually use it – how many #slsbristol tweeters actually monitor the hashtag, I wonder, in particular after the event? Suspect most rely on their network, and are primarily selfish conference tweeters. Perhaps more should be made of other media which can better tell a story/capture an event - see for example the story of #TEDxCPH’s 6m graphic recording.

Meanwhile I’m finally getting hands on with social network analysis via Coursera’s #SNAc MOOC. Time sink alert! So far it’s a mix of Gephi, which I don’t find that easy, and network concepts – may need to rein things in a bit and focus on what I want to use SNA for. In the forums there are some study groups for eg SNA use by historians, but how do you find this stuff? Mind you, I don’t know that I’m that bothered about the community angle when it comes down to it, I’m a true isolate. I’ve written a post on my first MOOC, and posts on progress over on my CPD blog.

Nice links:

• 10 new event startups – or four in particular;  Tweet Category allows you to categorise tweets into eg speakers, attendees (PDF reports only), Ex Ordo is aimed at academic conference management (pricey), Hubb.it (Scottish!) is a sort of TripAdvisor for events, and finally Refynr is an event platform with an interface for attendees to check or send tweets directly, with moderation capabilities and media integration
• on the theme of simplifying websites, the Danish tax system is ridiculously complicated, but it can be made understandable – see this case study of Fatskat.dk, a tool for students, which @skattefar would do well to emulate
• Content Strategy Summit – online conference on 27 September of the cool rockstar variety, recordings $179, moving along…650 #cssummit tweets on the day, hurled tag into Strawberryj.am (37 links, 11 popular) which brought up @redcrew’s Storifys, TYVM
• Seven secrets to successful public engagement via social media – contrasts a broadcast vs a conversational approach
• RSS vs the serendipity link engine (and the little orange icon) – drop my feedreader? it’s just not going to happen. And Twitter for links is TM; TR – my PLE is just too diverse!

Lots of acronyms this month, sorry about that!