1. Introduction
- Who
- What
- Why
- Successes
- Failures
- Point of View
- Voices
- The Way Forward
- Aggregators
2. Who
- The OSS Watch Team
- Ross and Stuart main authors
3. What
- Short articles
- Open source relevant
- Not necessarily directly OSS Watch relevant
- An article every week
- Explicit ban on "me too" articles
- Tags
- ~ 100 articles + some in queue
- Non-exclusive
4. Why
To communicate with the wider JISC community
- What kinds of things OSS Watch does
- What kinds of things happen in open source contexts
- What's happening right now
- Aggregation
5. Successes
- Feedback suggests people are reading the blog
- A number of posts have had comments from "the right person"
- The RSS is independently repurposed by a number of websites
- High visibility (as measured by volume of comment spam)
6. Failures (our end)
- Not as many articles as we would like (time)
- When moving to the JISC blog we lost established readers
(esp US readers)
- The content not as tidy as we might like
7. Failures (hosting end)
- Lack of resource / Lack of control
- Setting up, maintaining and resetting user accounts
- Handling spam
- Styling / branding
- Plugins (RDF)
8. Point of View
I believe that the point of view and subject matter are
(nearly) all that matters
Be clear on what you're writing about and stick to it
Know how the blog fits into you communications strategy
9. Voices
- Different people write differently
- Copy-editing / approval mechanisms are slow
- Each blogger needs to maintain their own standards
and speak about their own area of expertise
10. The Way Forward
- Easier account management (shibboleth?)
- Better spam management
- Engaging with more writers (guest authors, Advisory
Committee, Mike, etc)
- Engaging with more readers (web analysis, better rdf,
better tagging, better syndication, etc)
- Cross-blog tagging
JISC and OSS Watch evaluation
11. Aggregators
- Alternative approach to blogging
- Collect RSS feeds (usually from blogs)
- Reflect a single community or topic
- Came of age in the Apache, Debian and RedHat communities
- Blogs, bookmark engines, mailing lists, version control
repositories, image archives, ...
12. Questions?
- (The closest good pub is The Honeypot, 8 Hollybush Row, OX1 1JH)
It is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales licence.
OSS Watch is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee.