Cole W. Camplese

I Feel Like I Should Have This Figured Out

With all the drama around claims that blogging is dead I find myself more confused than ever about content production, sharing, and everything in between. As someone who embraces the whole idea of sharing stuff, you'd think I wouldn't be at such odds with myself over a few basics. I find myself constantly struggling with the notion that this blog can be the home for nearly all of my stuff ... yet I go out and start a photo blog, start pumping content into Tumblr, and ignore posting to the one place that is under my control.

I've been really trying to figure out why I find it so difficult to use my own space right here to post one liners, links to interesting things, pictures I really want to share, and these longer posts. Blogging is not dead in my mind as there should always be a place to track ideas and share thoughts. But as I engage in more and more online communities I wonder why I can't just settle on something instead of continuing to fracture my online identity across Facebook, wordpres.com, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and on and on.

I understand the value of the embedded community, but at the end of the day everything I post here automatically finds its way to Twitter and everything that finds its way to Twitter finds its way into my Facebook profile. Those are probably my two largest sources of visitors and consist of the people I am looking to share stuff with (other than the handful of people who either show up here every now and then or subscribe via RSS). So, I ask myself again and again why can't I see this space as a place to just drop pictures, videos, links, and random short thoughts? I just can't seem to figure this one out. Anyone else in that boat?

Community Question: Identity

After last week's experiment with crowd sourcing the definition for "community" I was curious to see if we could keep the momentum going with a new community question.  This week I am hoping to hear from you as it relates to the concept of "identity."  This is another one of those terms that we all throw around quite a bit -- does it refer to a role you play in a particular social context, is it a mash-up of all the stuff you do on and offline, or is it something all together different?  I've written and struggled with this concept in the context of the web and learning design for quite some time and could use some help. I'd love to hear how you define identity in 30 seconds or under.

Ideally you'd post this as a video comment over at the youtube page the video below is embedded from.  If you need to know how to do that, I've uploaded a screencast showing how to post a video response.  Please help me keep this going and lend your voice to this week's community question!  Thanks in advance.

My Identity. Some New Thoughts

I am seriously conflicted about the state of my own digital identity. On one hand I am thrilled to see the wealth of social sites out there filling specific niches, giving us new ways to share and express ourselves. But, to say that I am a bit underwhelmed by the lack of meta connections these sites afford is an understatement. I have a few thoughts that are really beginning to pull me in new directions.

I'll start with Twitter as an example of my overall frustration. I use it, not as much as some, but I am usually paying attention to the stream and even update a handful of times each day. It is what it is and I know I have written many times in the past about how much I do really like it. One problem is that there are new services that are moving beyond it and people are noticing. Maybe the features it doesn't have is what keeps people there -- there is something to be said about simplicity. But the only thing that keeps me from jumping ship all together are the people. So the community is the only feature of Twitter that really keeps me there. I know it has provided a tangible result in the binding of the learning design community, but it is missing some of the things that could really make it powerful. The second thing that bothers me is that I am investing a lot of 140 character identity pieces on a daily basis. These things disappear and are not long-term artifacts. No matter, the people keep me there.

Flickr is another example of a place I post pieces of my identity on a regular basis. The features are nice and I really like the simplicity of the environment in general. In this case it isn't so much about wanting to leave to try out new environments (only because I still think it is the best social sharing photo space), it is that my established network is there. I would never be able to drag them out. So, again, the people keep me there.

I could go on with other spaces, but I'll spare the review of these other environments. At the end of the day I stay because of the people and the connections.

But, help me envision something that looks a little different. I have a blog -- I am guessing you know that as you are reading this post here. I use my blog to act as a bit of a hub to my online identity, but I am very concerned about where all this leads. I am still willing to pay $25.00 a year for my Flickr Pro account, but when they go, so do my pictures and my network. I found out the hard way that Twitter doesn't keep real historical records of my old Tweets ... I wanted everything I Tweeted during class last Spring to use it as part of my research. The network remains, but the pieces of it that I want are gone -- the evidence of community growth no longer exists. So, what I am proposing is to not abandon the social sites, but to leverage the network while using my own blog (or personal publishing platform) as the place where everything begins and ends.

So if I post a picture I do it at my blog and my blog also posts it to Flickr -- it grabs the meta data, uses my post preferences, gives it a title, and all the other things that would happen at Flickr but in this case the photo still lives in my personal space. Same with Twitter, Facebook, status, and so on. What if it started in my space and ended up in those spaces? I could even choose to show or hide that content in my own blog space, but I would have overall ownership of my stuff -- in one place. I'm not asking the network move, I am moving my content from my space to the places where they are. As I want to explore new environments, I can still keep it all flowing from my blog out to those places. It can't be that hard ... who knows how this could help keep our content for the long haul. As I try (and leave) more and more environments I am depositing small identity artifacts that I can no longer track and I am feeling like I am fracturing my it more and more along the way.

Tell me why this is ridiculous and why it won't work. At the moment I can't figure out why we wouldn't want it to work this way.

Life Streaming

About two years ago I was hooked on the idea of building a social life stream application ... I went so far as to email a few of the smart people I know, sharing diagrams, and video chatting with said smart people to see about building something. After I spent hours and hours drawing sketches and driving myself crazy I sort of gave up on the idea. My idea was to not only stream my stuff into one place, but to organize all my friends stuff based on the social network/online spaces they publish in. We'd all have accounts with our own stream in them, but could pull together everyone else in a nicely organized way. FriendFeed was close enough, so I gave up on building something.

That hasn't stopped my intense interest in powerful aggregation and life streaming options. It is so important for so many things. We are all spreading our identity across several sites and having a place to assemble the meta identity seems as though it is still an emerging and powerful need. When you think about teaching the notion of powerful and well organized aggregation gets even more critical. Think of a class where all 350 students have blogs and are writing on a regular basis ... now that we disaggregated the content management by moving outside the LMS/CMS, we need new ways to pull it all back together (sort of ironic). Here is another killer use for a solid life stream style application.

This past spring my colleague, Scott McDonald, and I used Pligg to aggregate all of our students' posts into one place. It worked well, but Pligg was not ready for non-technical folks to administer. It has to be easy.

This morning I came across my next tool du jour ... SweetCron. This life stream application is the first one I've come across that I would use to replace the front of my own site. It is a very slick open source solution that looks great and (so far) works really well. It needs work as it is a pre-one dot zero release, but it is still a breeze to use and great to look at. I took 15 minutes this morning to get it installed and to add a few of my feeds. The admin side is easy enough and with a few tweaks to the css, the end user version looks really nice as well. My own SweetCron powered page is sitting over on my colecamplese.com space.

I will be working to look at this more so we can understand the affordances, but right out of the gate I am impressed. On a professional level, what I am really looking for are several options that could be used for teaching and learning and for events. This seems so much more powerful than simply showing a Twitter stream at a conference -- tags could be subscribed to from all over the web to really a paint a killer picture of what people are saying about an event. As a matter of fact, the TechCrunch 50 conference is using it. So for now, take a look and help me think about how this could be used within a teaching and learning context.

A Day Lost

Not in any real sense, just reacting to the fact that my host, StartLogic, had me down for a full day. I spent the better part of an hour with them on their support line to find out that there was, "an issue with my server." Great insight. They assured me that I would be back up very shortly and that my "datas" were safe. Well let's just say that they were telling half truths. Clearly something big melted down as I was offline for a full day and when I did come back my post from last night was gone. I was able to grab the post from the RSS feed, but the downtime is what bothers me. Even when you think you are working to control your own online identity all sorts of stuff happens. At any rate, it is good to be back.

Life Stream

So its been over a full week since my last post (as a recovering Catholic, that phrase sounds really familiar) ... I have been on the road and have had little time to pull thoughts together in any real sense, but that doesn't mean my head hasn't been working overtime. A while back I was invited to give a talk at the University of South Florida, so I jumped on a plane and headed to Tampa last Thursday to talk to a group of faculty, staff, and students about student expectations and the tools we are looking at to engage them. It was a blast -- right up until I had to come home. Let me put it this way, my plane took a nose dive towards the approach at the tiny State College airport -- that was not fun. We hit a wind sheer that dumped us into a dive that set alarms off in the plane. Ten minutes later and the captain told us we were not going to be landing in State College, but were heading for Baltimore, MD instead. Once in Baltimore we were given the option to get off there or head back to Atlanta. Given my relative expertise in geography I chose to stay in Baltimore because as I saw it, Maryland is closer to Pennsylvania. That's what I thought until they told us they were taking us home in taxi cabs -- long ride, short story, but I made it home around 4:30 AM. It was a mess and has me thinking very seriously about ever traveling in or out of State College in the months of December, January, February, or March. Home is a good thing.

The other thing that is tormenting me are the god damn voices in my head. I am dealing with all sorts of thoughts related to identity management at the moment. A lot of it is coming from conversations I have been having with colleagues at work, but some of it is emerging from the online space. Talk of the PLE and more recently, David Wiley's posts about his blog as the center to it all have pulled old thinking out into the front of my head. I am struggling with owning/shaping/building identity in ways that I haven't in quite some time. I have been thinking about how we go about creating new identities all over the web all the while rebuilding our social networks and profiles in an attempt to get them all up to our expectations. What I mean is that each time I want to investigate a new environment I have to beg others to join me just to see how the social structure works ... this makes me uncomfortable. What I prefer is to have one identity that I assert into new spaces and when I do, my netowrk and profile rolls along for the ride. I think as we move further and further down the social web path we'll need to figure out what it really means to own our online identity. My thinking has not yet jelled (but that voice keeps talking to me), but I do think there is an opportunity here to ignore the need to recreate one's self over and over again in multiple environments and instead just really focus in on honing it in one place. Is that too flaky? Is it to needy? Is it too much to ask?

I have been spending a lot of time recently talking about meta identity -- you know, all these small pieces of identity add up to a real identity. FLickr, del.icio.us, my blogs, twitter, and all the other little places I express myself online create my meta self. I'm not sure anymore. It feels very unsophisticated to me ... why not let me craft my identity and simply assert that credential into all the new spaces online. When that happens I simply gain a new attribute in my identity keychain (or whatever) that says something to the effect of, colecamplese can now log into Pownce and bring his whole network along for the ride (if they so choose)? Does that make any sense?

I have been watching a lot of these social "life stream" apps hit the web 2.0 space and am wondering why I have to actively add yet another account only to bring my identity back together. Why am I disaggregating myself only to maintain yet another profile to bring it all back together? I'm not sure of the answer, but I could sure use some help in thinking about it. Maybe the voices are really the just voice of the terrible winter we've had, or maybe the voices are right ... I'm not sure. What do you think?

Who the Hell am I?

No, I am not in the midst of a real-world identity crisis, but I have been spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about my real vs. online persona. Here's the issue -- those of us who are part of the (WTF do you call this) participatory culture of web 2.0 are mostly transparent in our approach to ourselves. If we agree on the simple tenant that if you spend time writing, bookmarking, photo sharing, and other like things in the open then you classify as someone who on one level or another embraces transparency. To get this straight I am going to probably have to use more words than necessary, but that is how it goes the first time you try to articulate thoughts that are hard to grab a hold of ... so try to bear with me and please let me know how you are seeing this.

Back in the day, the only way you could really know what was up with a person was either through total happenstance or via very carefully planned interactions. The example looks something like this ... let's say you are walking down the street back in the mid-80's and you bumped into an old high school buddy you haven't seen in years. You would probably have engaged them in some level of conversation -- maybe talking about what they were up to lately, what they are doing professionally, where they are going on vacation, how big the kids are, the kinds of things they are reading, and other common questions that help you manage that individual's identity ... and obviously the same would hold true as they asked you a similar collection of questions. If it didn't happen on the street, it would happen at a planned event where you would have to invite your friend over to catch up and re-establish the sense of connection with the individual before you.

These days, if I take that same set of questions, I can know that well before I need to run into someone ... Twitter tells me what my friend is up to, their blog lets me know what they are doing professionally, their Flickr account lets me know where they went on vacation and how big the kids are, del.icio.us and Amazon tell me what they are reading, and so on. If I want to know who they've been dissing me for, all I have to do is check their friend list at FaceBook, LinkedIn, or any of the other social spaces they belong to. In other words, identity is being managed in a way that it never has before. BTW, this is not an indictment on face to face vs online ... it is just an exploration into how all this gets managed in new ways these days.

In the original example, when I run into someone and they ask me, "what is up?" I have little time to think, little time to engineer a response, and even less time to really listen to their responses. I am spending all of the fleeting seconds working to create the answers and the identity I want to present to them. I'm not talking about massive social engineering or "fake-ness" here, I am talking about human nature and our desire to help control the perceptions people have of us.

Google and the rest of the eWorld can be viewed as a reputation engine and a place to create and manage identity in ways we couldn't before. It is an amazing place where we can know so much about people we've never met and yet not really know them ... the flip side holds true as well. I have several friends I know only in a single way -- a way that doesn't give me insight into the depths of their professional, personal, or other dimensions. It all makes me appreciate how hard it is to be truly transparent -- how hard it is to make sure that the engineering is kept to a minimum and an individual's ability to maintain a knowledge of who the hell they are. It is interesting and it is driving me crazy as I am trying to make sense of it all. Anyone else?

Something is Changing

I say that only because it is true ... last night after reading about the horrific behavior aimed at Kathy Sierra my wife and I had a long conversation about this whole transparent life thing.

Let me set this up just a bit ... I have been blogging since sometime in early 2003 in one form or another. I didn't really get into it until 2004 with the launch of Learning and Innovation, but I had been writing here and there for a year until I really got committed to it a few years ago. My wife has also been a blogger for several years ... she spent about a year on a blog that focused on how women (Mother's particularly) are often caught in the middle of their careers, families, political beliefs, and just about everything else. She got big traffic for the year or so she kept it alive. After the Bush/Kerry election she lost her energy to fight that fight -- that was coupled and compounded with some particularly nasty comments from one person. A few months later she launched another blog that has grown in popularity and has made a significant impact to many people. She is a great writer who is funny and passionate ... it is a good voice in the blogosphere. Both of us enjoy doing what we do, but things are changing ... having a voice that is heard is a good thing even if it is not as loud or as popular as Kathy Sierra -- it can still provide impact.

You'll remember that a couple of months ago we decided to pull our pictures from the public eye at Flickr. What I thought was a small decision spurred a lot of email and comments from people asking me deeper questions. Some of the more interesting comments focused on me never thinking about giving my children a say in how I was shaping their public identity through my open use of Flickr. Really got me thinking. I very rarely write here about my children in any real way -- I mention them, but rarely do I air thoughts and observations about their development or actions. I know there are sites like the wildly popular Dooce where it is all chronicled with minuet detail. I don't point at Heather Armstrong and say anything negative at all. Hell I read Dooce and find it very entertaining. But, I made the choice early on that this space was for the things I think about in my work space. The identity I am working to create for myself online is based on that environment -- not home. The thinking hasn't stopped with regard to creating online identity and what it means ... if nothing else, the Kathy Sierra story pulled the thoughts back into focus a bit.

Back to the conversation with my wife ... we talked about a lot of things. One of them was how both of our use of RSS has dipped way down on the charts. It is funny how all of a sudden I am back at reading a couple of sites for "real." I visit the NY Times, ESPN, and a few other sites everyday ... I have only ten or so that I am spending time at in my RSS reader ... a far cry from the 150 subscriptions I have. Just strange. Both of us have noticed it and expressed feeling overwhelmed or even bored by the whole thing. Problem is that there is great stuff out there that neither of us are taking part in for some reason. No idea why (Twitter maybe).

Also, we both sort of came around to the idea that this whole writing thing in the open is largely for us. Don't get me wrong, the comments, emails, and all the other stuff we both get from readers is amazing. In many ways the few comments I get drive me forward -- but they drive me to really to think more clearly about the things I write, not to write more. We both sort of looked at each other and said that we didn't care about the rules of blogging -- you know, post everyday as many times as you can, comment at a ton of blogs, and link to all sorts of people and stories ... it just doesn't matter to me. I love writing, sharing my thoughts, and getting the occasional feedback from those who do read. But at the end of the day my thoughts towards why and how I blog are changing. This is all sort of new stuff in my head, but I thought I would throw it out there and see what others are thinking. Are we all just sort of changing our perspective on this stuff or is there really something changing in the space that makes us refocus? I'm not sure. Would I be a hypocrite to ask for feedback?

Google Co-op

I've added a new search field that I want to test out for a couple of weeks here at the site. It is powered by Google Co-op ... no sense in going through the commentary of how Google seems to be running everything on the web ... at any rate the Co-op is nice as I can add what sites I want to be searched. Gives me the ability to cast my search results here just a little wider. I write in several places online and this search pulls results from all of them -- right from here. I'm not thrilled with the ads it also returns, but features come at a cost. I wonder if they are tied to my ad sense account (I don't run ads on this site) ... Try it out and let me know what you think.