69 posts tagged “blog”
Earlier today I ran a half-day workshop entitled “Introduction To Blogs And Social Networks For Heritage Organisations“. This workshop was commissioned by ASVA (Association of Scottish Visitor Attractions, following a seminar I gave on “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs And Social Networks” at the Museums and Heritage Show.
The workshop made use of a series of briefing documents which have been developed to support the cultural heritage sector. As well as the documents which have been published the workshop also provided an opportunity to receive feedback on a number of additional documents we have produced, including An Introduction to Twitter and An Introduction to Seesmic (the video micro-blogging tool).
A number of other briefing document were used in two day-long workshops which were commissioned by CyMAL to support staff working in museums, libraries and archives in Wales. These events, entitled Sharing Made Simple: A Practical Approach To Social Software, provided a broader overview of the potential of Web 2.0 in cultural heritage organisations, and also addressed barriers to the take-up of Web 2.0 and strategies for addressing such barriers.
The feedback we receive on the documents (and on the need for additional documents) is an important part of the quality assurance processes for the resources. It should also be noted that we are making these documents available under a Creative Commons licence and encourage their reuse.
This approach to use of Creative Commons for resources I’ve created over the past few years has been taken primarily in order to maximise the impact of the content of the resources. And I would encourage others to do likewise. However, as Scott Leslie has recently described in a blog post on “Planning to Share versus Just Sharing” there is a real danger of encountering “frustration with ineffective institutional collaborations“. The summary of Scott’s post exhorts readers to “grow your network by sharing, not planning to share or deciding who to share with“.
This approach reflects the views expressed by Mike Ellis and myself in a paper entitled “Web 2.0: How to Stop Thinking and Start Doing: Addressing Organisational Barriers” presented at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference. As I described in blog post back in July 2007 back then the cry was “Just do it!“. A year on, despite the economic problems we’re facing, the recent US election result seems to have resulted in a more positive approach to the world and a willingness to makes changes. So perhaps our cry should now be “Set up a blog? Use Creative Commons for our resources? Yes, we can!“
Posted in Blog, opennessIn my post on Openness in HE but not Elsewhere I suggested that requiring users to agree to complex terms and conditions in order to respond to (and, even worse, view) discussions on government policies was counter-productive. A post entitled It’s not a blog if…… on the JISC Access Management Team blog is in agreement with these sentiments.
Mark Williams describes another barrier to the use of blogs for effective dialogue. In his post he complains about his “wasted effort on writing replies on a couple of blogs this week only to find that after a suitable period for much needed moderation (after all IT forums are hardly the place to endorse male vitality products) the sites are clearly not putting any replies / comments up“. Marks feels that “If a an opinion piece doesn’t have scope for comments then that’s what it is - a magazine style opinion piece not a blog“.
I would agree with that. Yes, there may be a cost in deleting inappropriate comments, but this need not be onerous, and I think it is worth spending some effort in allowing users to give their thoughts and comments.
Posted in BlogChris Sexton, Director of Corporate Information and Computing Services at the University of Sheffield, recently announced the first anniversary of her From a Distance blog which she uses to “share her work life with you“.
As Chris described her blog ”started as a way of keeping people in the department in touch with what I was doing, and as an experiment to see if I could keep it up, and whether it was useful“. After a year (and 232 blog posts) Chris concluded that “I haven’t found it a bore to write, I can usually think of something to say ( well, about 4 times a week I can), and I know from google analytics that people are reading it“.
Chris initial posts covered her participation at the Educause 2007 conference and last week Chris wrote about the Educause 2008 conference. Her post on Google Apps and Spiderman I found particularly interesting as it provided a case study of the University of South California’s experience in deploying Google Apps for Education - and in response to the questions “was it quick?”, “was it easy?” and “was in free?” the answer seems to have been no.
Now when people ask me whether staff in IT Service departments should be writing blogs I would point them in the direction of Chris Sexton’s blog as a great example of a senior manager’s blog which is useful and informative, and ensures that the insights she gains through her participation at important international events such as Educause are shared with the wider community (and not just trapped within a closed Computing Services director’s mailing list).
Chris manages to provide a Twitter feed as well as her wortk blog, although as her Twitter id cloggingchris may indicate, this tends to cover her social interests (clog dancing, sword dancing, folk festivals and drinking real ale). And whene we where first introduced at the UCISA Management Conference in 2004 Chris and I discovered we knew each other from the rapper dancing world - but didn’t recognise each other out of costume!
Posted in BlogGuest Blog Post
The guest blog slot provides an opportunity to include some different voices and views on the UK Web Focus, which can provide a fresh insight in the various topics covered in this blog.
I’m therefore pleased to welcome this guest blog post from Jo Alcock, Academic Information Assistant for the Harrison Learning Centre at the University of Wolverhampton - although perhaps better known in some circles as Joeyanne Libraryanne for her Joeyanne Libraryanne blog. In her post Jo describes a variety of ways in which Web 2.0 services are being used and goes on to highlight some of the challenges which this approach entails. I should also add that Jo is a contributor to the paper on Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends which I’ll be presenting at the Bridging Worlds 2008 Conference.
Setting the Scene
I work at the University of Wolverhampton which has a large proportion of part-time students (some schools are up to 70% part-time). The University is also geographically spread across the region with five campuses in total. This means students do not always come into Learning Centres and often use the closest geographical centre rather than their subject specific centre. We have recently adopted a University-wide Blended Learning strategy to support the changing nature of our students, and the Learning and Information Services department are developing ways to support students from wherever they choose to study. This includes obvious things like e-journals and e-books, as well as virtual reference support and Web 2.0/Library 2.0 initiatives to support students online.
Current Initiatives
Blogs
We currently have five subject blogs (the School of Computing and IT Blog, School of Applied Sciences Blog, School of Engineering and the Built Environment Blog, School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Languages Blog and the Wolverhampton Business School Blog to support students and staff of particular academic schools, along with an University of Wolverhampton Electronic Resources Blog for updates to services. We also have a number of project related blogs and internal communication blogs.
Social Networking
The Learning Centres have a Facebook Page which was established at the end of last year. The page includes links to relevant parts of our Web site, our aggregated RSS feeds (from our blogs) and search applications. One of the most useful features of the page are sending updates to “fans” - another way of letting users know about our services and reaching them where they already are (a quick scan of any communal PCs show numerous Facebook users!).
Wikis
We have started exploring wikis and although we do not currently have a departmental wiki we have a number of small scale wikis for sharing information.
Online calendars
I’ve included this as although it’s not usually included in general “Library 2.0″ initiatives, it’s something that we’ve found really useful. We have been using Google Calendar (see the University of Wolverhampton InfoBites Calendar) to manage our events for a few months now and it’s so much easier than updating numerous places when the timetable changes or a new event is added. Now we just update the calendar on Google and the changes are reflected wherever the calendar is embedded. Users can also subscribe to the calendar or add single events to their own calendar. We’ve also recently used it as a shared calendar for scheduling purposes for our busy induction weeks.
Barriers
There have been a number of barriers to the Library 2.0 developments, some which may have been exclusive to us but many that I imagine are shared with other libraries.
External Hosting and Software
Many of the Web 2.0 products we use are external products, often hosted externally. This has immediate issues when it comes to reliability and stability. Services change over time, which is often a positive thing but may mean that your service no longer functions in the same way you wanted it to. You may find that it suffers “downtime” whilst the software is being upgraded or simply because the servers are not reliable. You may even find that the service ends completely without warning.
This can be a big issue for institutions, and understandably so. An alternative option whilst still utilising the technologies is to use open source software but host it internally therefore passing control back to the institution. Examples of this are using the WordPress.org blogging software (rather than their hosted service at WordPress.com) and the MediaWiki software for wikis. This way, the institution can update when it wants to (and also therefore not when it doesn’t want to!) and also has greater flexibility with the functionality and style of the software.
Staff Awareness
Another issue has been lack of awareness and uncertainty about the technologies utilised. Quite often, I have found that people are pleasantly surprised when they realise how easy it actually is to use. I understand that some of the software is bewildering at first experience though, and getting over that stage if you are uncertain about the fundamentals of the technology (for example, what on earth is a wiki or a blog?!) can be a big hurdle. Something that I think is now being recognised by the profession is that more time needs to be allocated for keeping staff up-to-date and providing training or even just time during work to explore the technologies.
Culture Change
This is something I am particularly aware of, probably because I am part of the so-called “net generation”. I like to share experiences and work collaboratively, but I know this can be quite a culture change to many who are used to working in isolation and keeping their work to themselves. When you have a shared calendar for example, or a shared blog, it can take some getting used to. Clear definition of roles and expectations from the beginning can help alleviate this.
User Needs and Experience
This is one of the main issues for me - although I am a keen user of many new technologies and use a lot in my own life, I only want to adopt them at work if they make sense from a user point of view - whether this is other staff when we are thinking about a shared resource like a wiki, or our community when it is a development for users.
Over the summer we have thought a lot about the future of the blogs; whether to merge the subject blogs or keep them separate, and what the actual purpose of each blog is. There are many issues around merging the blogs - such as whether to include all subjects (not all currently have a blog) and the logistics of subscribing to your subject only. The main issue for me was to look at it from a user point of view. With many subjects all on one blog, you can use categories to create separate RSS feeds for each subject. This initially seemed like a feasible way of merging the blogs whilst still allowing users to subscribe to only their subject. However, from examining our blog stats, most of our users subscribe by e-mail, suggesting that many of them do not currently use RSS feeds. I considered having a guide on the blog and holding training sessions, but in the end decided it was too much to expect of our users and would likely put them off subscribing if it was too confusing.
Ultimately, we are here for our users and if something doesn’t make sense or isn’t of use to them, there is little point us investing time in it. For example, if Facebook fell dramatically in popularity, it would make no sense to continue to develop our Facebook page and we should instead concentrate our efforts on whatever else our users are familiar with.
This is a fundamental part of the Web 2.0 philosophy for me; have a go - if it works, great, if it doesn’t, there’s no big loss. I like to invest a small amount of time trying something and assess whether or not it is worth pursuing after you’ve given it a chance. If it isn’t or the barriers are too great, just scrap it or try something else.
How about you? What barriers have you experienced with Library 2.0 Initiatives and how do you overcome them? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Jo Alcock, University of Wolverhampton
Posted in Blog Tagged: Guest-post
So I thought I would document the date at which the blog had reached 100,000 page views. This happened on Saturday 6th September 2008, 1 year and 10 months after the blog was launched.
Months and Years
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | 4 | 1,238 | 2,067 | 3,309 | |||||||||
| 2007 | 2,528 | 3,055 | 4,059 | 4,387 | 4,321 | 4,389 | 5,876 | 4,063 | 4,181 | 4,675 | 6,607 | 4,514 | 52,655 |
| 2008 | 4,713 | 5,350 | 4,522 | 5,414 | 5,025 | 4,856 | 6,388 | 6,314 | 1,458 | 44,040 |
As can be seen the busiest month was November 2007, and this was primarily due to the popularity of a blog post on UK Universities On Facebook. This has been the third most popular post, following the post on The ‘Cities Visited’ Facebook Application and, in scond place, one on TokBox - A Useful Video-Conferencing Tool Or Something Sinister?.
It’s also pleasing to note that after an extended period of stability the numbers of visits to the blog has started to increase again over the past two months, as is shown in the following graph.
Of course, we still need to remember that there are lies, dammed lies and blog statistics.
A tweet from joeyanne alerted me that today is Blog Day 2008. As I only found out about this at 6.30 pm today I will have to be brief in my list of blogs that I find interesting.
The instructions for contributing to Blog Day are:
- Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
- Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2008
- Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs
- Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st)
My blogs, which may not necessarily be new to many readers of this blog, I’m afraid are:
- The Ed Techie blog by Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University - and someone I have had valuable Twitter discussions with.
- The unspun Electronic Museum blog, in which Mike Ellis argues passionately for the adoption of light weight Web 2.0 approaches within the museum community.
- The Digital Curation blog in which Chris Rusbridge, in particular, provides a remarkably refreshing insights into preservation issues, even going as far to ask whether the “‘Digital Preservation’ term [should be] considered harmful?“.
- The JISC Access Management Team blog, probably the liveliest of the blogs published by JISC programme managers.
- I mentioned Tony Hirst’s Ouseful blog in a previous list of my favourite blogs, but as that referred to an old version of the blog I feel I’m allowed to mention this blog again, which Tony uses to write copious summaries of his prolific development activities.
And as today is Blog Day I thought this would provide an opportunity to launch the first of a series of brief video blog posts entitled Video blog 1: Why I Blog which I am publishing in order to support a workshop on “Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Library” which my colleagues Marieke Guy and Ann Chapman will be facilitating at the ILI 2008 conference.
If you are a blogger and want to give the reasons why you blog why not sign up to Seesmic and respond to my post, explaining why you blog. You never know, you might get mentioned when Marieke and Ann run the workshop. There’s a marketing opportunity for you, especially if you are a blogging librarian.
Technorati tag: BlogDay2008
On the second day of the IWMW 2008 event Michael Nolan made the comment “If people are saying we need to communicate what we’re doing better, why do so few Web Services depts have a blog?” on the event’s live blog.
Shortly after getting back from the event Michael, a Web developer at Edge Hill University sent a message to the website-info-mgt JISCMail list in which he raised this issue with a wider audience:
At the risk of opening myself up to (probably deserved) flaming and accusations of blatant self promotion, I’ve posted to the Edge Hill Web Services blog questioning why so few other university web teams have a blog:
http://blogs.edgehill.ac.uk/webservices/2008/07/28/blogging-web-teams/
Comments and feedback welcome!
This led to a discussion on the list - and also responses to Michael’s blog post on the Edge Hill University Web Service’s team blog.
On the mailing list various reasons were suggested for the lack of blogs by members of Web teams :
- I find it hard keeping up with blogging - reading and writing, [because] I’m too damn busy with other projects.
- … our workload is so great that this sort of activity tends to sink to the bottom of the list.
Does anyone think that such blogs would add any value over and above resources such as this list? … So, to turn the question on its head, who thinks that they could benefit from reading another web team’s blog? - If every one of us blogged about our work, it would be very hard to sort out the chaff.
Other replied arguing the benefits of blogging suggesting the benefits of the ‘long tail’ (an obscure blog post on the intricacies of XSLT coding is likely to be of interest to perhaps small numbers of others) and how use of filtering tools should help such nuggets to be found by interested parties. Janet McNight at the University of Oxford also suggested that:
I think there’s a feeling that a ‘blog’ has to involve sustained pieces of writing, well-crafted prose, etc; when really all it needs to be is “I was wrestling with [some problem] and found [some neat
solution]: [lines of code, config, whatever]” — or “we’ve been looking into [some new technology] and these are a few of the thoughts we’ve had so far”.
I would very much agree with Janet’s comment. I feel there is a need to regard a blog as a communication rather than a publication medium. After all, many members of Web team who may be reluctant to blog are willing to make use of email lists for advice on often obscure problems - and, ironically, mailing lists tend not to have the richer structure content and software tools which can help people to filter out content which is of no interest and find the material which is.
The comments on Michael Nolan’s blog were, perhaps unsurprisingly, somewhat critical of the failures of institutional Web teams to embrace blogging (Michael has found only 4-5 examples of such blogs). Matt Machell, for example, commented that:
it often surprises me how insular the HE web development world is. It seems to talk to itself, but not to the wider web professional community
Alison Wildish responded on both the Edge Hill blog and the website-info-mgt mailing list with some considered views on the matter. She identified some of the barriers to blogging (and note that I will link to her comments on the blog as this is both easier to read, more navigable and has more easily cited URIs than the JISCMail archive) but she still felt that “there aren’t enough of us [blogging] for people to see the real value - yet! If more of us used blogs then we’d be able to gain a real picture of the work going on across all Universities“. Alison went on to list the benefits University of Bath Web Services blog are providing.
But although I would agree with Alison’s views I think there are dangers in forcing people or teams to blog (I should hasten to add that I’m not suggesting that Alison is saying this). I still feel there is a need to discuss the benefits and to gain a better understanding of best practices - and the associated dangers. And I did wonder whether, as many members of institutional Web teams are happy to contribute to mailing lists whether an email blog service, such as Posterous, might provide a lightweight approach to blogging - with this service you simplky send an email to create a blog post, which, of course, has the ‘cool uris’ and usable RSS feeds which JISCMailo lists fail to provide.
But if an email blog tool is still to heavyweight, perhaps another approach might be microblogging. We are, after all, seeing such conversational use of Twitter being used to discuss the pros and cons of team blogging, with the advantage that posts have to be kept to the limit of 140 characters - in this case, as partly illustrated, Michael Nolan raised the issue on Twitter initially, Paul Walk suggested some of the possible difficulties, Mike Ellis, with tongue in cheek, questioned whether Web managers had anything to say and Michael Nolan delivered the punch line :-)
In the screen shot shown above there are six tweets, ~ 6*140 bytes and three twitterers discussing the issue (there are only 5 active blogs, reasons why this may be, a challenge to the reasons and a witty riposte). Short and sweet :-)
But more seriously I think there are roles for a diversity of communications tools including email lists, blogs and micro-blogging tools: each will have its own strengths and weaknesses, but we need to experiment and gain experiences in order to find out what the strengths may be. And to revisit Michael’s original reflection on the need for members of Web teams “to communicate what we’re doing better” can it be really suggested that email lists are sufficient?
But it’s quite clear that without the spam filter it would be a very time-consuming task for me to manually delete spam comments. And if I didn’t do this the effectiveness of the blog as a forum for discussions would be severely reduced.
I could change the blog settings and require comments to require approval before they are published - but this would also be time-consuming for me.
Or comments could be restricted to registered users - but this would add a barrier to those who wished to comment, especially those who aren’t regular visits to the blog.
I could also disable comments on posts after a certain period of time, which should reduce the amount of spam comment - but just because a post was made some time ago doesn’t mean that comments would not be useful.
I’m happy with the policy of allowing comments , complemented by use of Akismet to automatically capture spam (although, I should add, sometimes Akismet traps legitimate comments). But if you’re setting up a blog and are thinking about your policy on comments you’ll need to bear in mind the need to manage spam comments. And remember that Akismet is licensed software - although Akismet state that “We love non-profits. We have half-off and free pricing for registered non-profits, please see the link above.”.
In a recent blog post on the Cultural Interpretation & Creative Education blog Bridget McKenzie summarised the MLA and HLF views on 21st C Curation which were presented at a seminar given at UCL on 30 mApril 2008.
Carole Souter, CEO of the HLF informed the audience that “‘We’re getting tough with people” and went on to say that “If you tell us that 200,000 more people are going to look at your website because of it, well, so what? How do you know they have really been engaged?“. The importance of user engagement was echoed by Roy Clare, CEO of MLA. In a comment on a project funded by the NOF-digitse programme he asked: “How they [the users] would engage with it?“.
I am really pleased that such views are being expressed so clearly by senior managers of public sector bodies. In the past I’ve been concerned an an emphasis on blunt usage statistics. But now the emphasis in the museums sector is on the quality of the user experience and user engaement. And, as Bridget observed, Carole Souter’s “suggestion was that if you are going to include digitisation into an HLF bid, it would have to involve people in specific thematic projects of local interest“.
If funding will only be available for digitisation projects which enable users to actively engage with the digitised content, then this, to me, seems to be sending strong signals that a Web 2.0 approach should be taken.
And one approach to enable users to be able to engage with the content is through the provision of blogs as, in a UK context, Ingrid Beazley demonstrated at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference with a session entitled “Reach new audiences, increase numbers of visitors, and become a major part of the local community by using online social networking sites and blogs“. As described in her abstract Dulwich Picture Gallery has “experienced marked successes with our user driven, dialogue friendly Facebook and Flickr sites” and “there is considerable buzz around our plans for 2008, including the launch of our online magazine blog with which we are building a Gallery associated community“.
But how should museums go about establishing and sustaining their blogs - and also exploiting the potential of social networking services? Well I’m pleased to say that this is a topic I will be talking about at the Museum Heritage 2008 show at London Olympia on Wednesday 7thM May 2008. If any readers of this blog from the museus sector are planning to attend this event, I’d love to chat with you. But if you can’t attend, then my slides are available on Slideshare - and are also embedded in this blog post.
Your feedback is welcome.
The Repositories Debate
Andy Powell recently wrote a post on the eFoundations blog about his opening plenary talk at the VALA 2008 conference.
His post generated interesting discussions and debate amongst those involved in repository activities in the UK and the wider community. Paul Miller was in agreement with Andy’s comments in his post on the Panlibus blog entitled “Andy Powell is Spot On” with Paul feeling that “Our current approach, fundamentally, is totally, completely, utterly wrong, isn’t it?”.
Over on his blog my colleague Paul Walk has given his thoughts on Andy’s post expressing agreement in several areas but disagreeing with Andy’s view that “we need to focus on building and/or using global scholarly social networks based on global repository services“. Paul (W) responds by asking “Why can’t we “focus on building and/or using global scholarly social networks” (which I support) based on institutional repository services? We don’t have a problem with institutional web sites do we? Or institutional library OPACs?”. My former colleague Rachel Heery has responded in a similar vein to Paul in a response to Andy’s post: “I don’t really see that there is conflict between encouraging more content going into institutional repositories and ambitions to provide more Web 2.0 type services on top of aggregated IR content. Surely these things go together?“.
Meanwhile over on his Overdue Ideas blog Owen Stephens gives his thoughts from the perspective of a practitioner involved in setting up the Spir@l institutional repository at Imperial College with a wittily-titled post “R.I.Positories“. Owen concludes “we need is a system that helps us administer the workflow around the delivery of digital objects in a corporate environment, but that is invisible to those not involved in the administration - and that’s what I want out of a ‘repository’ - so, for me, the Repository is dead, long live the repository“.
And a few minutes ago I noticed a pop-up alert informing me of a blog post entitled “RESTful Repositories?“. An intriguing title, I thought, so I viewed the post and came across Stu Weibel’s contribution which suggested that “One way to think about repositories is as the bookshelves of the digital library“. Stu went on to point out that “We don’t ask scholars, having just published an article or book, to ‘go to the library to find the most appropriate place for it… and don’t come back until you do!’“ This sounds reasonable to me - there’s a need for the physical library and the infrastructure that is associated with it, but the researchers don’t need to know how it works. This might be an approach to be taken with institutional repositories - so let’s not scare them off with the ins and outs of the metadata schemas.
Engaging With A Distributed Debate
There’s clearly an interesting debate taking place around the approaches which should be taken to maximising access to the UK’s research papers. But if you have an interest in institutional repositories how do you find out where the debate is taking place and how do you participate?
I have had discussions with colleagues who feel that such debates should be centralised and should use a ubiquitous communications channel - namely email. From this perspective the debate about institutional repositories within the UK higher education community should take place on the JISC-Repositories JISCMail list. However I feel that this will result in the debate being marginalised to those with a particularly strong interest in repositories, will tend to focus on the nitty-gritty details which email tends to encourage and, in the case of JISCMail, the debate will be trapped within the JISCMail Web site, not only because the JISCMail archives are not exposed to search engines such as Google, but also because of the ‘uncool’ URIs for messages in the archive.
And, of course, email discussions fragment, in any case, and I suspect the Australian participants at the VALA 2008 conference will be having their own discussions about repositories on their own mailing lists.
An alternative view is that the debate with take place via scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed journals. This may be the case in many areas of research, but man in the digital library community would be frustrated by the lengthy timescales that process would entail.
Like it or not, the debate is taking place using a variety of communications tools, including the blogosphere.
So, if you wish to engage with such discussions, how do you find out what is happening? In my case my RSS reader (Feedreader) will automatically inform me of new posts for the blogs I’ve subscribed to. This includes the eFoundations blog, although in the case of Andy’s post I was alerted to its publication a couple of hours after it had been published via a tweet on Twitter.
The distributed nature of such debates has benefit, such as allowing the discussions to be brought to the attention of different communities. When doing this, there is an expectation that bloggers will link to the original post. And if blogs allow trackbacks, it will be possible to follow links from an original post to blogs which have commented on it.
Returning to Andy’s original post, Paul Walk noticed that the eFoundation’s blog hadn’t included a trackback to Paul’s post. This is probably a technical glitch - but this incident made me think about the importance of trackbacks in the integration of distributed discussions. Owen Stephen’s R.I.P.ositories post included a link to a post on The importance of being open the eFoundation blog dating back to October 2006. But comments to such old posts are disabled - I assume to minimise the effort in deleting spam comments. But this is breaking the linkages to related discussions. How, then, should we balance the benefits of allowing such tracebacks versus the maintenance costs of managing misuse? Or do you disagree with blogs being used for this type of discussion and debate?
