Bloggers of NOSM Unite

Well, are we having fun yet? We did discuss using the blog itself to discuss how we could use these tools, what challenges there might be, what opportunities that they open up etc etc…but there has not been much discussion yet. Remember that this is just a small group who are aware of NOSMeLD so far. Lurking might be fine most of the time on most topics but if we are to get this going, we do need to be active participants on this particular topic/post.

Apologies to those of you who have no idea what I am talking about. For the past several weeks, NOSMeLD has been ticking along with just the occasional posted message or piece. We were waiting to get our act together on the internal (closed) NOSM blog before we really started to push this concept as a tool. Well now the cat is out of the bag and we need to generate some momentum – a critical mass of contributors and posts so that it is worthwhile for potential readers to actually watch this site.

The nice things about the blogging approach is that it is much easier than the old web site paradigm (gasp, cliche alert!). It is easier for consumers of the content (readers, lurkers, customers…ya know what I mean) because there are so many ways in which they can grab the material from NOSMeLD. They don’t have to remember to keep coming back to check out our web site on a periodic basis – they can grab an RSS feed and plug that into a tool of their own that will automatically pull the material off the NOSMeLD blog without them having to do anything. Kinda like the “push content” web sites from a few years ago but less pushy (sorry). More on this later.

It is also easier for creators of content. You don’t need to fire up FrontPage, Dreamweaver or some other web site design program. You don’t have to know anything about web publishing, worry about ftp uploads, html coding etc. There are lots of simple, free (or really cheap) mini-programs that make it really easy to post material to a blog. So you can type something from scratch, like I’m doing just now…or you can do it the lazy way – see an article on another web site, or another blog, that you think is interesting or might be interesting to the readers of NOSMeLD? Simply use one of these mini-programs like BlogJet or BlogThis to grab the link to the article, add a couple of cogent comments (if you want) and then post it to the NOSMeLD blog. You can do all this with just 3 clicks of the mouse if you want to keep it really simple.

This last part sounds like pure plagiarism…and in a way, it is. But it seems to be an accepted fact of life that blog material will be copied from one site to another. The upside to this is that the original material gets much wider exposure than it would have done just sitting on its own little site. Not much downside really. It is not nice to try and pretend that the original material is really yours, but the little BlogJet-type applets make it so that the original link is retained and you can see where the material came from – a kind of simple attribution. It is this simple sharing of material across many blogs that makes this so powerful. A blog like ours can act as a condenser for a whole bunch of sites and other blogs, bringing a pre-selected “best of” material that should appeal to the faculty and students at NOSM.

There are many articles and blogs out there that explain the process of blogging, its advantages etc much better than I just did. The previous post gives you some overview info on RSS feeds (the lingua franca of the blogging world, kinda like HTML for web sites). But what we need to do now as a group of contributors is get our heads around some of the people logistics – a good blog is dependent on the cooperative input from a small group. It is too much work for just one person – but easy for half a dozen. Only 1–2 posts per week from each of us (not exactly a huge time demand) will be plenty to keep the blog full of interesting material.

And then once we start to get too active or there is too much stuff, it is really simple to set up other blogs that cater to other interests here at NOSM.So let’s get our teeth into this one, get some enthusiasm going and see how things go from there.