Writingmatrix Update

I have recently returned from a brief holiday in France and Spain after delivering a series of lectures which I documented at http://www.vancestevens.com/writing.htm. There you can find links to Elluminate recordings of the lectures, links to the slide shows, and texts of the lectures I gave (more or less) illustrated with the graphics from the slide shows. Eventually Bobbi and I will link photos from our trip from there.

Meanwhile, the Writingmatrix project is getting interesting. This morning, Webheads held their usual chat at noon GMT this morning (each Sunday noon GMT for the past 8 years) in Tapped In http://www.tappedin.org . This morning some of the chat was about Writingmatrix. Webheads are bloggers and are very interested in this project. Some said they would like to join us at a live chat to be held later this evening (in the USA; Monday a.m. in Europe/Middle East, Asia).

Now, why am I writing all of this here? The reason is I wish to conduct an experiment. I am going to TAG this post writingmatrix and webheads. Then it should appear in the Technorati searches on those tags at the following URLs:

• http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix
• http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/webheads

In this way, anyone who is already in the project and who has put the RSS feed of the output from those searches in the aggregator (like Bloglines) will be able to find this post.

The second part of the experiment is to acknowledge the work of one of the students, Matias Basilico, who has left some interesting posts on the concepts that make Writingmatrix effective in helping students in different parts of the world find each other's writing and collaborate on it.

• http://mbasilico.blogspot.com/2007/07/pingback-tracking-distributed.html
• http://mbasilico.blogspot.com/2007/06/rss-organize-and-update-your-content.html

The concept being experimented here is that of Pingback. By linking to Matias's posts in this way he should be alerted in his blog. There should be a link in his blog back to this posting.

And there is! Have a look below his posts. So it works!

And also I want to see what this code does. Technorati says: See your posts here
To contribute to this page, include this code in your blog post:

writingmatrix

Preparing to give a series of lectures in Spain

In preparation for my upcoming lecture series in Spain, http://www.vancestevens.com/writing.htm, I have been working hard on the side lately trying to figure out how aggregation works throughout the blogosphere (see my wiki collaborations at http://beevance.wikispaces.com and http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com). Time is at a premium but I took a moment the other day to accept an invitation from Robin Good, who offered to show me how to aggregate content through http://www.mysyndicaat.com. Robin had made a zany keynote for us at http://wiaoc.org in which he introduced us to http://www.operator11.com and ended by packing up his video streaming equipment and riding off with it on his motorcycle through the streets of Rome.

Robin made clear at the outset that I could make any kind of use of his presentation that I wished, so I made a Camtasia recording. Unfortunately, in the time we had to get set up and under way I was unable to do sound checks or troubleshoot and whereas my own audio was clear in the recording, Robin's came out on my recording garbled and barely comprehensible (problem on my side apparently, not his).

So I made Snaggit screen shots of the presentation and produced a 60-slide ppt show with annotations. This process helped me to consolidate what I had learned and was also done with intent to share. I then tried to upload my slides to http://www.slideshare.net but for some reason it wasn't working, so I used http://www.zoho.com instead. I was not perfectly pleased with the output. There were truncations in some of the slides; e.g. corruption of footer in all of them. But I'm at the end of time available on this effort and so without further ado, here's Robin (wait, further adooooo0000, I managed to upload to Slideshare and have replaced the file here and what I like better about Slideshare is that the links WORK - happy clicking):