My dilemma with communicating to folks is not that I don't like communicating - actually the opposite is true.

But I do like efficiency and relevance. When our son was born in 2001 I would add news articles to our website with simple categories. I discovered blogs in 2005 and thought that they were a better way to capture chronological and category based media pieces.

Blogging came with easy ways to tag entries and easy ways for people to follow the topics they were interested in by using RSSfeeds and Google loves blogs from a search point of view as they are filled with changing content, that is indexed (tagged) and appears chronologically by groups or sub groups. The move to blogs for me occurred in 2006 and as recently as mid 2010 I was still questioning the validity of twitter as a tool I could use.

I have three blogs because family, work and aviation are three major parts of my life where sharing information is something I want to do. Because they have very different audiences and subscribers to a flying club blog didn't want to receive emails about my son's last basketball game, I have kept these three separate.

I write blogs not to be contentious, but to record events in the case of family, to share in the case of this blog and to communicate and promote in the case of the flying club. Because bloggers do make the effort to write, of course they would like as big an audience as possible. This is the thrust of this article...

Two friends of mine who are very comfortable with the whole twitter thing have said to me that they wanted to start a blog, but it took too much time and that Facebook and Twitter allowed you to communicate a story in a fraction of the time. For me, when I see the twitterfeeds scrolling down the side of a conference website, it reminds of the green characters pouring down the screen in the movie "The Matrix".

My take on things is that I need to live life and not spend all of it blogging, tweeting, yammering or facebooking about it. Some of you may suggest that I appear to be doing that already.

This is where I need to explain a few tricks. I prefer to write articles - blog entries rather than just tweet a line here and there. By connecting feeds from my blog into Facebook and Twitter, I can give the appearance that I am writing articles for many destinations, but all I am doing is writing it once an serving it up automatically in a format that people like to consume.

Some folks folks prefer to spend time on Facebook, which to me is like hanging out in the mall in a small town where everyone knows everyone and they can engage in some people watching as they sit in a cafe having a coffee. The tweeters are like those stockbrokers watching the ever changing scroll of numbers on the screen, interpreting and making decisions on the fly. Other folks hang out in their private clubs, on their intranet or maybe a Ning or Huddle.

Because today's internet audience has so much choice and life is too short, if you have a message to transmit, write it once, write it well and then RSS it to the destinations of your choice. From the conversation prism below (click for a bigger picture) you can see there are a lot of destinations.

http://www.theconversationprism.com/size1024/

 

How? I use twitterfeed to feed (push) this and other blogs to Facebook and Twitter. On our intranet which is SharePoint 2007 I embed (pull) an RSS feed from this blog. Once set up, every time you post on your blog, the same entry will simultaneously appear on Twitter and Facebook without you having to lift a finger.

From an educator's perspective, we need to engage with our students on their terms not ours. Email doesn't cut it although most of you who I know personally will receive this post via email. My nieces and nephews will read this on Facebook - and probably ignore it :-) but they will see it.

Another cool thing about distributing this kind of information in this way is that if you have applied metatags to your articles you "push" or "pull" just the articles that have that tag. For example, if I had a section on our intranet dedicated to support material on Adobe Connect (which with have) I can simply include the feed that has that phrase tagged. The following tow links demonstrate how it would look as an RSS feed and as a link to just the Adobe Connect articles in this blog.

http://www.xsymetrix.com.au/Share/index.cfm/Adobe-Connect - Normal Webpage

http://www.xsymetrix.com.au/Share/rss.cfm?mode=full&mode2=cat&catid=533AC844-C297-F929-2707D3AA144BB1B7  - RSS Feed

 

 

 

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