But I knew there had to be better way. Rather than swapping out videos, wouldn’t it be nice to create something like a Video Channel that played the newest video first and then sequenced through subsequent videos in temporal order?

First, I tried using YouTube playlists, but found the process quite limited and not nearly as intuitive as I would have liked. Plus, the way YouTube playlists display in your blog “on page load” just doesn’t look good.

I figured there had to be some tool out there on the internet that made it easy to publish your own video channel pulling from a variety of video content sources (e.g. YouTube, Google Video, etc.) Finding such a tool wasn’t easy…the fact is after 20 minutes or so of searching, I only found one that actually does what I was looking for.

It’s called Feedbeat and it rocks. Feedbeat is an embedded flash player that allows you to 1) create video playlists from a variety of sources, 2) quickly reorder the videos with an easy to use drag and drop interface 3) add videos either by searching or by entering the URL of the original source 4) choose to have your playlist play back randomly or sequentially 5) choose whether to loop your playlist or not 6) choose whether your playlist begins playing “on page load” or whether the user needs to initiate playback 7) design the look and feel of the embedded player and 8) share the channel embed code with others for wider distribution.

These are great features which allow the user to build an expansive video playlist over time and make changes without having to go in, modify and upload files on the web server each time a video gets added. Just make the changes you need to make in your Feedbeat account and they show up on your site.

The embedded player is customizable and feature rich. If sequential playback is chosen, the video that appears first in the playlist gets played back first (A perfect fit for a sports highlight video channel!) The embedded player also features a skip button that allows the user to easily move back and forth between videos in your playlist.

While the developers claim that it’s still in ALPHA, Feedbeat has been virtually flawless in my experience so far. Once you’ve registered for an account, the process of creating and publishing a video channel is as simple as you could want it. The user interface is extremely visual + drag-and-drop which should make it easy for the average blogger to get up and started quickly. Its ease of use also makes it the perfect tool for group managed video channels – think about the possibilities of several bloggers joining forces to create their own video channel shared and published on each of their websites!

I have run into a few minor problems with Feedbeat so far. First of all, when entering a YouTube link, it only accepts “www” versions of the URL. So if you enter a non-www version of the URL, the system is not flexible enough to make the adjustment on its own. For someone like me who rarely navigates the web in “www” it’s a little annoying. Minor quibble. The other problem is that I’m currently not sure how robust the Feedbeat server infrastructure is. Only one day after signing up for my account, the service went offline for several hours. This will be something to monitor and is hopefully just one of those growing pains that free webapp services usually encounter as they move beyond the early adopter stage.

In the end, Bloggers who are looking to easily integrate video channels into their blogs should seriously consider giving Feedbeat a try. It’s one of the most exciting WebApps I’ve used in a really long time. And at this point in time, I think it’s the only viable solution (thankfully a good one at that!) for running multi-sourced self-created video channels on your blog.

To see Feedbeat in action, visit my blog Philly Sports Net.

The Aviva Directory has a nice beefy article on the Top 25 Web Apps to Grow Your Business. While they market the tools to small business entrepreneurs, there are some great productivity tools on the list for everyone, including bloggers.

One of the great things about Web 2.0 apps is that the good ones introduce new, more effective ways of doing old tasks. From collaboration tools like Campfire and ConceptShare to online office suites like Zoho and ThinkFree, the productive blogger can’t go wrong.

But I have to say that the most innovative idea of all has to be Prosper. Prosper transforms the lending process so that people with good ideas might get hooked up with lenders who believe in their ideas. That sounds pretty awesome to me.

We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users,” Hurley said. “So in the coming months we are going to be opening that up.

How exactly this will be executed is less clear, but speculation has been going around for some time now that Google’s acquisition of YouTube signalled the beginning of widespread ad supported video.

Hurley hopes that the revenue share program will provide incentive for users to produce better content. But if AdSense is any indicator, we’ll soon probably see a spike in spam video (spideo anyone?).

Source

What I want to do over the next few months is explore what it means to be an introverted blogger, how bloggers can use their introvert tendencies to enhance their blogging, and how to overcome the most common stumbling blocks that an introvert faces when writing material for public consumption and comment.

So what exactly is an introvert? Being an introvert involves many of the following characteristics:

1. you prefer to be alone, rather than in groups
2. you are extremely sensitive to criticism
3. you have a lower than average self-esteem, and strong feelings of incompetence (may feel like a fraud)
4. you feel cautious at sharing ideas (a big stumbling block for bloggers!)
5. you prefer a concise/precise writing style
6. you rarely feel confident in your knowledge, even of topics on which you are legitimately an expert
7. you need coercion to offer opinions or make contributions
8. you hate small talk, but desire serious & in depth discussions
9. you pursue opportunities to work in isolation
10. you respect the opinions of others and consider them carefully
11. you use the internet as a comfort/buffer zone to explore how ideas are received
12. you tend to think at length before speaking
13. you notice yourself entering and exiting periods of low energy levels, which, when severe enough, can paralyze your productivity

Many of these characteristics have negative connotations, and this has a lot do with the fact that the majority of people, the people who set the norms of society, tend to be extroverted. One of the keys to dealing with introversion is to differentiate the positive attributes from the negative attributes. Once we’ve done this, we can then embrace and leverage the positive qualities while working to overcome the negative qualities.

Let’s begin by considering an obvious example of the negative characteristics of introverts in the context of blogging. Sensitivity to criticism can obviously have paralyzing effects and lead to avoidance behavior. It might cause you to stop blogging for several days or even weeks. It may also cause you to blog only on certain, non-controversial topics. Some introverts that I’ve known have even turned off comments altogether, or at least ignored them.

To overcome this negative characteristic, you might remind yourself of certain facts (much in the same way that you might remind your child that “it’s just a movie, no need to be scared!”). For example, you can tell yourself things like “rabid, vitriolic criticism is beneath me, and I need not be affected by it” or “good criticism gives me an opportunity to improve, and I need not take it offensively.”

In future articles, we’ll dive into more depth on how to overcome negative introverted qualities.

So what does an introvert have to contribute as a blogger? Introverts usually bring a long term vision to their blogging. They tend to plan things out meticulously and speak only when they have something important to say. Introverts tend to think twice before blogging an idea, and this can be a filter against junk. Introverts also tend to offer positive feedback to other bloggers, something our community certainly needs more of. None of these positive attributes are bad in themselves, though they can be overdone. Too much discrimination and too much planning can also be paralyzing and result in terrible productivity. Eventually, the planning and discriminating need to come to an end, and the implementation and execution need to occur. Nothing is perfect, no one is a perfect expert minus mistakes, so the introvert needs to find balance and be willing to make mistakes.

To conclude this article, I’d like to give you a sense of where future articles will be going. For the most part, I will lay heavy emphasis on overcoming introvert-specific roadblocks to blogging. We’ll look at ways to motivate, ways to increase your energy level, ways to overcome psychological defects like hyper-sensitivity and a lack of boldness. But we’ll also discuss, in more detail, how blogging is a great fit for the introvert, whether because blogging provides an ideal opportunity to work in (physical) isolation or because it provides an outlet for all those brilliant pent-up thoughts that you’ve been holding onto for years.

(oh, and by the way, no criticism on this post;-)

So far, the news is that many 4-6 month old sites are showing PR in the toolbar for the first time, but also that many older sites have dropped down to PR 0.

The consensus seems to be that the drop to PR0 is not a penalty, but actually part of an ongoing data push for the current update. Let’s hope so!

The best way to get a picture of your forthcoming pagerank is to use this tool called LivePR which allows you to see Toolbar PageRank across a sampling of many Google datacenters.

Students in higher education come to college to learn, but there are many things competing for their attention, besides what goes on in the classroom. The competition includes the Internet, social networking, email, online chatting, etc. As our students’ world changes, so too must the methods by which we teach and engage our students. In this article, we propose one way that teaching can be significantly enhanced by the integration of blogging. Our plans are to implement this proposal in the coming semester and to report back on its success or lack thereof.

As you know, blogs provide the functionality that enables people to easily publish their thoughts and ideas online. One of the primary reasons for the rapid adoption of blogs is that they are quick to setup and easy to use, requiring absolutely no programming knowledge or HTML skills (although such skills can be used to enhance the blog). In fact, writing in a blog is very much like, if not easier than, writing in a standard word processor such as Microsoft Word, which almost all students are familiar with.

A Specific Problem

We teach a logic course at the university level called Logic of Everyday Reasoning (LER). In this course, students learn logical reasoning skills to better understand and support their views, and recognize when their views need additional support. Specifically students learn about arguments – what they are, how to identify and analyze them, and how to evaluate and construct them.

A challenge in teaching LER is to make the course relevant to the students. Unfortunately, the types of arguments that are typically presented in logic texts are rarely, if ever, interesting for students, because they are either made-up arguments or are presented with little context.

One creative technique that we have used in the past to increase the relevancy of their assignments is to have students write letters to a newspaper editor in response to an editorial of their own choosing. The students are required to identify at least one weak argument in their chosen editorials and explain why they think it is weak. We have found that many students become more engaged when they examine a real issue. They approach the assignment with added motivation and care when the quality of their work may determine whether or not their letters are published.

Two limitations with this technique are that many students are not that well-informed about the current events discussed in newspapers and most do not read newspapers. So, while this assignment is more interesting to students, it is still questionable if the editorials students choose to reply to are that meaningful to them.

How then do teachers help LER students to become genuinely interested in a topic as well as to approach assignments with the motivation and care that comes from knowing that what they write might be published?

The Solution: Blogging on the Internet

We’ve noticed that more and more students in our classes are very technologically savvy, showing proficiency with using the Internet. On this basis, we plan to have students write a blog on the Internet. This will help them learn and sharpen their logical reasoning skills, while this novel approach to teaching will spark students’ interest.

Under this proposal, each student would develop a blog by picking a topic and writing about it throughout the semester. We would guide this writing process by instructing students to apply the logical reasoning concepts that they’ve learned. We would also edit and grade their posts.

The learning process could be further enhanced by requiring students to address each other’s arguments on a regular basis. Students would then be given the chance to learn and develop the skills necessary to 1) articulate their ideas in writing, 2) defend their ideas against criticism, and 3) critically analyze the arguments of others.

The advantages of having students write in a blog format include:

1) Students may care more about their work, knowing that it will be read by others. Students will hopefully put more effort towards the class and more likely master the critical thinking skills that we’re trying to impart.

2) Students will belong to a larger community than their class, a community where they can share and develop ideas. They may enjoy having readers submit questions and comments to their blogs.

3) Students will learn real-world technical skills. They could include these skills on their resumes.

A Proposal for Implementation

There are three main requirements for implementing this project. First, student blogs need to be easy to setup and run for non-tech-savvy students and professors. Second, for the sake of management and grading simplicity, the blogs need to be located at a single URL and distinguished by a username-based directory structure. This will prevent the burden of tracking down dozens of random blogs all over the net. Third, there should be at most a single software installation per course to minimize technical troubles and installation/setup time.

There are a variety of ways to resolve these issues. We discuss two possibilities, one for the tech-savvy professor and another for the non-tech-savvy professor. In the former, the professor is hosting and maintaining his or her own website and database, whereas in the second option, the professor is taking advantage of a free, shared blog. The tech-savvy option has the advantages of 1) easier tracking of individual student blogs when a dedicated site is used, as opposed to a third-party site; and 2) easier customization of the teaching site and the ability to add extra functionality.

The option for tech-savvy professors requires the following broadly construed steps:

1. Purchase a domain at a registrar such as GoDaddy.

2. Purchase web hosting at a web host such as Colorteck.

3. Install a copy of either WordPress or Drupal.

4. Dedicate a class to show students how to create an account and post a blog. Have each student turn in his or her username for grading purposes.

The option for non-tech-savvy professor requires these steps:

1. Have students sign up for accounts at a free, shared, multi-blog site like Learner Blogs.

2. Dedicate a class to show students how to create an account and post a blog. Have each student turn in his or her username for grading purposes.

We would like to thank Sarah Whitman for her helpful suggestions for this article.

Abe & Micah