A lot of discussion on Twitter and edu blogs about this news article. The short version is that a school board has banned teachers from communicating with students via social networking sites. Frankly that seems over the top to me. I do agree that teachers need to be careful about the nature and tones of their communication with students. But if you are going to ban any sort of communication I’d think you’d want to ban communication that doesn’t leave a trail rather than communication that does leave a trail. But no one is going to ban person to person voice communication are they? :-)

My own policy back in the day was to save all email correspondence with students for at least a year after they graduated. Anything they sent me and any thing I sent them. I usually recorded IM conversations as well though not always. I would probably have been better to save it all. I never needed to use these records but it was good to know I had them.

Facebook and MySpace were not issues 5-6 years ago but they are today. My policy with regards to Facebook today is that I accept friend invitations but do not send them to students. I know others who turn down invitations until after graduation. I can understand that but I’m not sure that is what I would do. Lots of students today use the message feature of Facebook more than regular email. I can see value to that. I would however be very careful about leaving comments and Wall Posts. Those I might even completely avoid. I hope it goes without saying that teachers, anyone really, should be very careful about what they post on the Internet and especially where students may see it.

Kathleen Weaver brings up text messaging in her blog. Is texting any different from a voice telephone conversation? On one hand there is more accountability since anything you receive as a text can be shown to other people. There is a trail. That should, in theory, be a good thing. Well unless one texts something stupid. Although the short nature of text messages may mean that some messages are too open to interpretation. But we do expect teachers to be smart about things don’t we?

Kathleen also brings up Twitter. I hadn’t thought much about that. I wouldn’t have a problem with students following me on Twitter but I can see why a teacher would want to avoid following a student. On one hand there is such a thing as too much information. :-) But more importantly I think there is a good reason to let students have some space away from teachers and parents as long as they are being responsible. I never want to be the scary stalker teacher/old man.

In general I think that school boards should avoid making black and white policy decisions about these web 2.0 and social networking tools. Clearly they should not make rules about things they don’t understand and for many of them  that means social networking sites. But how often does not understanding something prevent anyone from making rules about it?

Another thing that Robert talked about in his post on tech blogging failing is that comment systems are pretty poor these days. I don’t think that is a tech blogging problem as much as it is a general blogging problem. I’ve had to sign in and enter a CAPCHA just to leave a comment on a blog that is going to moderate the comment before it appears. Talk about a pain. I have to be really motivated to leave a comment at some blogs. Often I just don’t bother. Other times I decide that if I am going to work that hard I might as well write a complete blog post and link to the original blog. That is probably not completely bad but really how often does one have time for that “solution.”

Of course the reason for those barriers is bad behavior. Spam comments are a regular problem for most bloggers. As painful as it is to leave comments here (sorry abut that) I still get a lot of spam comments. It is a pain to delete them but I do because I worry about the consequences of not doing so. It would be a lot worse if it were easier to leave comments.

The other problem with comments is people who only leave negative comments. Oh I don’t mean people who disagree with the blogger. I mean the people who are just plain disagreeable. Flames, profanity, name calling, and all sorts of things that add nothing to the conversation. Its hard to blame bloggers who get fed up enough to turn off comments completely. Comments could be the best part about blogging but all too often they are the worst part. Its a sad state of affairs.

Every so often Robert Scoble gets a bit melancholy and writes a long, some what rambling post. Frankly these are the posts  I wait for because these are some of the most interesting insightful posts he writes. Today he wrote about how he believes that tech blogging has failed their readership. When Robert started blogging it was all about sharing the latest cool things in technology. I think that for Robert that is still the big thing but for a lot of others there is more (or perhaps less depending on your point of few) to it.

Somewhere along the line people realized that besides fun there was some amount of fame and fortune. Well perhaps the fortune is relative but at least there was/is money to be made in tech blogging. For a blogger to get the fame and fortune (or at least make some money and get tech attention) one needs a lot of readers, access to the best events (product announcements, conferences, tech parties) and a constantly growing amount of attention. One needs to scoop other tech bloggers which sometimes means blogging about things that are not completely vetted for reliability. It means getting the attention of the main stream media which means getting into the business of tech as well as the products.

A slight diversion for a minute. One would think that for a blogger only online attention means anything – links, comments, traffic from Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. At one time that was true but in recent years, as the media discovered blogs and blogging, it seems to have become more and more important to have some main stream media attention to build up credibility and to attract readers who are not themselves serious blog readers/writers. It’s easier for a blogger to get that CxO interview or industry party invitation if they have been quoted in Fortune or Newsweek or the New York Times. Showing off all the new tech toys may get one in the news but being known for knowledgeable about the latest inside news about the business side of tech seems to be a more reliable way to get MSM attention.

 So today we have a lot more people who are as excited about the Fame, fortune, and yes still the fun of tech blogging who are all competing for attention. If they lose their audience they loss it all. If they gain audience they gain in all areas. The stress on some of these people must be intense. That no doubt leads to some of the problems Robert talks about.

I see all this as growing pains. In time it may settle out. The people who really care about the business side will focus more and more on business and the people who just care about the tech will focus on the tech. Chances are good that some of the blogosphere will become part of the main stream media. OH I don’t mean they will move into print, radio or TV as much as I mean that the MSM will move into the Internet and impose some rigor in reporting on bloggers. Access to larger tech companies may start to require some additional credibility and partnership between bloggers and MSM with the rigor that means. Also as blogging becomes more of a real business some sort of corporate structure to support a blogger is necessary so the blogger can focus on the work and not where the money is coming from. The partnership between FastCompany and Scoble may be a model for that. Robert doesn’t need the credibility as much as he probably needs a good corporate structure to support him. In fact Robert helps FastCompany in the Internet where it is not as well known as the big media names. Win win there. Different relationships will have different balances though.

The other thing that is going to settle down is this hopping from one “shiny object” to another. One of the frustrating things for me lately has been Robert blogging less and using other tools. I don’t want to follow him from one shiny object to another. My life is too busy to do that. I like blogs and read a lot of them. I have a Facebook page and while I enjoy it I don’t have time to be there every day so I only use it occasionally. I like Twitter but I keep my use there light. I Twitter a couple of times a day and I follow a reasonable number of people. But I’m not moving to FriendFeed. My social computing time is full and since I am not going to drop something right now I am not going to add something right now. Could that change? Sure. it took me over a year to decide to try Twitter and when I did the time in Facebook dropped.

But what is going to happen is that some people will focus on Twitter, others on Facebook, still others on other “shiny objects.” Those people who want to stay with those objects will get supported by people with a more narrow focus. Lots of us will still follow the Scoble’s of the world to find out about the next shiny object but we’ll not automatically follow them around. We need people with short attention spans to be the early adopters, tell us about new things, and in a sense create the culture around the new things so we feel at home when we move there (if in fact we ever do). The early adopters will have to be patient with use when we don’t see the same value or get as excited as they do though. Sometimes we late adopters may completely skip whole fads. Hopefully that will not hurt too many feelings. :-)

The only way tech blogging will really fail the rest of us though is if the A-list bloggers stop looking through the long tail for shiny items. A Guy Kawasaki can launch something like alltop.com and it will get picked up by the A-list right away. But an Aaron White and friends who launch something like http://icantdeci.de/ (which is fun even if not “important”) and its not as likely to get picked up. There are probably a lot of serious and important things getting announced all the time that are getting the same lack of attention. The long tail is getting really long and it is harder to keep up all the time. Not sure how to fix that problem.

Well tech bloggers are doing their thing. Are they failing the rest of us? I think that is a little harsh. There is a phase that things are going though. It will all be fine in time as long as they all remember to blog about things that are fun and interesting and not worry too much about being relevant. :-)

I guess the posting rate here is slow enough that it may actually look like I am blogging more lately but the opposite is true. This is only one of several places I blog and at my main blog I am really struggling. Usually I post 22 to 24 posts a month there but I am on a rate for fewer than 20 this month. Also I usually have posts ready days in advance but lately I’ve missed days and not had anything until later in the day if at all. A third blog where I post for a very small group I haven’t posted in almost two weeks compared to usually several a week. So what is going on?

Part of it is travel. I’ve been away on vacation and a long trip to Texas in the last several weeks. It looks like I’ll be in Phoenix AZ for Synergy 2008 next week for a couple of days. I’ll have a day home before I head out to Redmond for the Research Faculty summit after that. I have a family wedding to go to in August as well. A few months ago I thought the summer would be slow and then it started to fill up. So a lot of energy is going into preparing talks, getting ready for meetings and just plain travel time. I lose pretty much a while day on a coast to coast trip – each way. Lots of that travel is not conducive to work because I am burned out. So I sleep or read for fun. And then there is catching up with email and other tasks that build up while I am away. I’m not complaining BTW – I love the travel. But it can make blogging more difficult.

Part of it is that things are slow in the tech field. This is especially true in education technology. People try to announce things in the fall so that schools and teachers can start thinking about it while they are thinking about course changes for the following school year. I didn’t see many new things at NECC for example. Maybe they were their but not for computer science. Without external things to blog about it gets harder to fill up the posting schedule.

But I wonder if I am getting blogger burn out as well. I still get excited about some things and rush off to blog them. But it doesn’t happen as often as it used to. I also have to force the excitement sometimes. “oh no I have nothing to blog about. Think think think” Really though that doesn’t do anyone any good.

I need to make sure that I do things right. Earlier I came up with a blog post idea. As I thought about it I realized that it would take more work to do right then I have tonight. Trying to have it ready for morning would result in a fairly worthless post that was little more than noise for the sake of filling the schedule. I decided to put the idea aside until I had time to do it right. Ultimately it is, or should be, about quality rather than quantity. If I need a break for a bit to bring the quality back up that is what I will do. I’m going to try to stress less the next few weeks. If I don’t get a lot of posts in July so be it. I need to concentrate on doing other things well.

For now, I have to go proof read a document my wife brought home. It’s on paper believe it or not. :-)

I’ve been reading all sorts of “blogging is dead” or “blogging is not dead” sort of posts lately. I’m not going to link to them because they all miss the point. Blogging was never part of the main stream to begin with. OH for sure it is at the center of some people’s lives but main stream? Not hardly.

Most people I know have heard of blogging but very few of them actually read blogs and fewer still write them. And even those who do blog (what ever that means to them) few of them do it often.

Take my wife for example (but don’t take her away - I need her). She is a very tech savvy person. She is one of the real “go to” people in her school district for technology issues. She is helping other teachers integrate technology into the curriculum across the board. She understands a lot more technology than the average teacher or member of the public for that matter. Heck, the woman was an outstanding machine language programmer in the early years of our marriage. But she doesn’t blog. She doesn’t read blogs, she doesn’t write blogs and she keeps telling me that she doesn’t understand why people blog at all. She’s a very smart woman but blogging just doesn’t fit her world view. She’s not alone in that! And she’s not wrong. If she is missing anything she is probably making up for it in ways that may not make as much sense to me.

I work for a serious technical computer software company filled with lots of people much smarter than I am. There are literally thousands of employees who blog. There are tens of thousands of employees who do not blog though. For many of them the only time they read blogs at all is likely to be when someone sends them a link and a request to read something or when a search engine search returns a blog.

Most of the people in my family and in my non-geek circle of friends (I have lots of non-geek friends – really I do) don’t know any more about blogging then they read in the newspapers. Blogging is not now and never has been a part of their lives. That doesn’t mean they are not on the Internet though.

Lots of people get tunnel vision especially with the Internet. It’s like the story of the blind men touching different parts of the elephant and describing it as if they part they were touching was the whole of it. The world wide web is just part of the Internet. Email is part. Blogging is part. Twitter is part. Facebook is part. AOL is part. Search engines are part. Instant message is part. Blogs are a part. YouTube and Flickr are parts. The balance between parts of what make up the Internet that each individual takes advantage of varies greatly. For individuals that balance may change over time. Email may go up and IM may go down. Newsgroup usage may go up or down. It may fade out completely or increase to take up ones whole day. But just because the balance changes for one person or even one group of people doesn’t mean that part of the Internet dies.

But people see the world through filters. If an individual and all of their friends move from Twitter to FriendFeed then in their eyes Twitter dies. At the same time many other people might be discovering Twitter and its total usage might go up. (Or not who knows? This is an example.) Facebook has not killed MySpace and yet if you ask some avid Facebook users they might wonder out loud if MySpace even exists while other people will explain that they are on MySpace because they don’t know anyone on Facebook. People define the world based on the people they know. It’s like the people who were surprised that Bush won because they didn’t personally know anyone who would vote for them.

I’m not going to try to predict the future on blogging except to say that it will change. Should be a safe prediction. :-) I’m also not going to change what I do based on the predictions or laments of others. Blogging works for me so I’m going to keep doing it. If that means I get left behind while to “cool kids” move on to the next shiny object so be it. One day maybe something else will work better for me and I’ll move on as well. But that will not mean blogging is dead.

I suppose that if I were really committed to disconnecting from the Internet I would leave my laptop at home. But of course I seldom do and this vacation is not the exception. The first few years I cam to this camp in the middle of the Adirondack mountains they didn’t have any real Internet connection. There was dial up but it was a toll call and complicated to set up. To say nothing of slow. Still I tended to use it several times during the week. Several years ago they got a broadband connection but one had to do to a specific room that was a walk in a direction I didn’t often go. Still it was near the bookstore where my wife went so I would tag along. But still most years I didn’t use it much.

This year there is wi-fi very close to the cabin where I am staying. I have to walk but not far. It’s very tempting. But mostly I have avoided it. Sunday I used it because I thought I had forgotten to submit an end of fiscal year report. Tuesday I used it, well, I guess because I could and I was bored. But in doing so I learned some things. One is that most of the email that comes to me is easily ignored. I use filters and large amounts of my email come from a number of distribution lists that are automatically sent to specific folders. I can, and in fact did, delete those messages without reading them. In two easy moves I went from 250 unread messages to 27.

Secondly I learned that most of the messages I do have to read don’t actually require me to do anything. I should know the information in them and reading them is a good idea. But in the short term nothing is added to my task list. Thirdly those things that require action can often wait. I drag them to my task bar and set them to remind me to handle them on Monday.

Another major lesson I have learned this week is that email is only a small part of the distraction the Internet causes me. There is Twitter – which apparently goes on as well without me as it did before I started using it. And there are blogs. As I write this, with four days before I expect the pay blogs any attention and 4 days since I paid them any attention, there are some 450 unread blog posts in RSS Bandit. I think it will get worse before it gets better. I will probably only read a small fraction of them too!

And in spite of missing all those blog posts, deleting unread all that email, ignoring all those Twits to say nothing of not paying attention to Facebook, or MSNBC, or any of the several online forums I normally read on a regular basis life is going on. I’m spending time with family, I’m getting a daily paddle around the lake in my kayak, I’ve finished one book (one of those old fashioned paper ones) and well through a second. I’ll almost surely finish all three that I brought with me. And there is fresh air, sunlight, fires in the fire pit, and lots of conversation. I could live a life without the Internet I think. In fact I am starting to wonder if it might be a better life. Though to be honest I am not ready to give up computers completely. There is no way I am going back to writing by hand or even using a typewriter.

I started writing this several days ago but didn’t finish it or post it at that time. I was writing while offline. Since then I confess to a couple of short Internet connections but nothing like my usual activity. I have close to a thousand unread blog posts. I have deleted many more email messages but have several more queued up on my todo list. I made a couple of work related phone calls on the drive home from the mountains – cell phones keep us too connected sometimes.

I did finish a second book and started a third while I was away. I got in some extra reading as well. I realized that I missed other reading – novels, longer magazine pieces, stuff like that. The Internet seems all too often to break things into bite sized (byte sized?) pieces. Sure you can find long pieces but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. I think that writing longer pieces, something that is on my todo list as well, may require me to stay off the Internet for a time. The Internet is an almost irresistible magnet to what ever ADD I may have. It sucks me away from longer projects with its “hey this will just take a minute to read/write/do.” My mind wanders or I just decide I “need” some piece of information right now and the next thing I know I’ve lost hours of time. I should probably accept the blame for it but I am human.

I think this once a year trip where the Internet is hard to reach is a good thing. How to make it happen more and to take more advantage of it will be a chore though as the Internet seems to follow me to more and more places all the time. So do you feel the need or even see a value in unplugging? Do you do it? How’s that working for you?