UltimateGerardM - a #blog 10 years and counting

Blogging becomes a habit, a useful habit. It allows for the regular expression of opinion without being overly present on a mailing list. It allows for the promotion of best practices and the projects they apply to. It has enabled me to form an opinion and express it on a wide variety of subjects.

To my surprise I was told that my blog is running for 10 years. Time is creeping up on me, my beard is quite grey nowadays.. Anyway it is a time to celebrate and, what better way to celebrate a blog than to blog even more.

I will politely ask some people to make a choice from among three options:

• answer 10 of my questions for publication on my blog
• write a blogpost for publication on my blog
• politely decline

When they choose for a blogpost, they may ask someone else to write a blogpost as well. This option is open for the people I invite to blog. The idea is to represent a broad spectrum of Wikimedians past and present. In this way I hope to find comments on subjects that mattered in the past and the present.

It may be useful, it will be informative but for me it will certainly be fun.

Thanks,

      GerardM

500,000 pageviews .. the love for #Statistics

What I love about statistics is that you can interpret them in so many ways. Thanks to Lydia I passed the 500,000 pageviews mark. This is a nice round number but it does not mean that much. What I would like to know is the number of people who read my blogposts. My blog is syndicated on for instance en.planet.wikimedia.org and consequently there are many, many more people who have at least noticed that I blogged when I did.

The most popular article was #DBpedia and #Wikidata, the person I admire most is Valerie.
Thanks,
        GerardM

Too long; didn't read

I recently dumped #Techcrunch from my #reader. Techcrunch features too many long articles, articles with video, articles with long references to companies. It took me too long to scroll past them so I finally got rid of all of them.

Many of the blog posts I get presented in my reader are "information dense" and too long. Typically they pass me by. Some have gems of information hidden among pebbles of data. Those posts I trawl for information and you know what, they tend to provide me with popular topics for on my blog.

A blog post needs to be sweet and short; preferably with only one point. An illustration needs to support the story or hint at more to come. In the end, a successful blog tells stories by frequently returning to the same subject.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Selected blog posts at philippebeaudette.com

Philippe of philippebeaudette.com wrote to me asking if I was happy for him to copy selected posts on his blog. He does and, it is an interesting happy selection. 

How can I not be happy when it is done like this?
Thanks,
      GerardM

Cropping images to get useful illustrations

Details of a picture often illustrate a subject better then the whole picture. Once this notion settles in, cropping becomes something that you do. The easiest way to crop is to select an area with a proper screen saving tool.

A friend of mine told me that I should apply the "rule of thirds". He also told me that it is dead easy using the Gimp. All it takes he said, was watching this Youtube video and, so can you.

As I was lectured, I learned that another benefit is that in this way I will not lose any of the resolution of a picture. Having learned a lesson, I am quite happy to relay all this knew found wisdom to you.

the things you do please your audience
Thanks,
      GerardM

Alternate view of my #Blogger blog

#Illustrations are not only attention grabbers, they also help get the stories read. What many bloggers do not realise is that when stories are too long, chances are that people will not finish reading them. Illustrations break the text and invite people back to a next paragraph.



Blogger has a novel way of looking at a blog. It shows for instance a mosaic of the illustrations used. The fun part starts when you guess what a story is about. There are more views that are nice to play with:

• flipcard
• sidebar
• snapshot
• timeslide

Thanks,
       GerardM

Best blogging practices II

My purpose as a blogger is to inform widely about significant developments for a range of topics. Because of my publishing frequency, the stories together read like a narrative; they became more about the journey then about an arrival.

Every time a subject is raised, there has to be a story with a fresh angle with fitting illustrations and appropriate hyper links. Doing this well, grows the audience for a blog and it also raises the ranking of my articles for the search results. This mechanism is the only reason I can think of why this is my best read article with currently 5,692 page views.

It is important to understand that a writing style defines a public. For me no long academic style articles, I think these are overrated because many readers do not finish them. They are not for me because an academic article aims to cover the whole ground while I prefer to celebrate developments and call attention for opportunities. By more then doubling my readers within a year, the numbers prove the viability of my formula.

Traditionally the English Wikipedia and its public dominate wiki publications. The distribution on the map shows that my public is largely in Europe and Asia. This coincides with where the most interesting Wikimedia community developments occur. It is where I expect the biggest growth in activity and traffic for the Wikimedia projects.

The Wikimedia Foundation aims to grow in the "global south"; there is a public, there are able communities held back by a lack of base technology. I raise these issues and I look for partners in crime. It should not be a crime, it should be our way forward.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Bahman 22nd. 32nd Anniversary of Iranian Revolution

Dear Gerard. Hi.

Today is bahman 22nd. 32nd Anniversary of Iranian Revolution. It's usual. Blogspot is censored The government temporarily blocked all SMS, and Internet access last year after the 2009 Iranian election protests(yup. here, this article is censored too). So the censorship might be temporary.

I'm not interested in politics, but it affects us. I can't read your blog. I was wondering if you could create an alternative means for reading your new blog posts. like a mirror, copy,download, newsletter mail, ... I'm asking this because "blog" is about "news" and if blogfa re-opens late, there is neither time for nor benefit in reading so many posts

Since I  don't know whether this is hard to do or not, I only expect your help if this is "very easy"

thanks, Ruhollah

At Fosdem, the ability of governments to throw the switch on the Internet and to censor was a theme in many presentations. The most prominent presentation was by Eben Moglen who introduced the freedom box and spoke at length about the need for mesh networks and the decentralisation of social software.

Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot and even Wikipedia are easy targets for those regimes who do not abide by the freedom of speech. If my blog was somewhere on a server, Ruhollah would still be reading my blog while he now needs a way to bypass the censor.

The freedom of speech has its value when it is accompanied by an ability to participate. The value of social media to its users is in the ease of reaching out and communicating to friends and "friends". Some legislations have freedom of speech enshrined in law. It is time to enshrine the freedom to communicate in the software itself. Software that is resilient and has no kill switch.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikileaks paranoia; Sunnyvale California

After I blogged about Julian Assange and Dick Cheney, my blog has been frequented by someone from Sunnyvale California. I have the impression that all my blog posts have been read over the past few days.

For those who do not follow the news, Halliburton has paid a bribe to keep Mr Cheney out of jail. In the mean time Mr Assange is still in remand for something that is quite dubious.  Mr Cheney's bacon is saved with $500,000,000.-- but as always he must be considered innocent because no judge pronounced him guilty.

With Sunnyvale California dominating the traffic to my blog, I have no information what my readers are interested in. This information is publicly available on my blog. The value for me is in learning what it is people read about.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Official #Wikimedia announcements

Dear #Wikimedia officials, there are many messages that you need to tell us, that we want to get out of you. Typically it is very hard to get the message out of you; you wait until the last moment and what we get is the "official announcement" type of boring stuff.

Not only the director, Sue, had a great career in journalism. I cannot imagine that you all forgot how much difference a great illustration makes to an essentially boring message. Please, we need to be motivated, what we do should be fun and it is for you to make it so.

Is it that illustrations are considered "unprofessional"? Is it like children with a library card that we should be proud that our books have no pictures? With so many Wikimedia people with a journalistic background, this dullness never seizes to amaze.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Commons as a source for "stock photography"

#Commons is not only #Wikipedia 's repository of illustrations, it is also a rich resource of freely licensed images that can be used for all kinds of other purposes. Commons does a great job for Wikipedia, but how do you measure its success for other purposes and how do you make it more successful.

I blog for instance and while I was in the Ardennes, I saw horses grazing above me, there is no picture that gives the same sense of nearby horses grazing above. In a previous blog I asked for pictures of the yak a running yak, a yak being milked, yaks in a caravan.

The question is, how do we compile the kind of pictures that are particularly illustrative, the kind of pictures that would make Commons a source for what you can also find in the collections of companies that sell pictures.

The difference with featured pictures is very much in the subject matter. There is only so much use for just another bug, bird or mammal. How do you illustrate back pain, love, madness, hard work, a person of a particular caste?
Thanks,
      GerardM

#FUD around #WikiLeaks

When Ward Cunningham was looking for a name for his new way or working, he thought of the Hawaiian word "wiki" meaning fast. When he originally described a wiki it was "the simplest online database that could possibly work."

WikiLeaks is a wiki in that it provides a fast and easy way to do what WikiLeaks is meant for; the submitting of confidential or secret material. When you consider the might of those opposing WikiLeaks, it is obvious that allowing everyone to edit will be extremely counter productive. This is not where Wikipedia's NPOV rules the roost. It is much more like WikiSource where it is also extremely relevant to keep the original source pristine.

WikiLeaks is not a Wikimedia project and, it does not suffer from a lack of credibility. The credibility of its material is such that new material published makes for new scandals. The one thing WikiLeaks is good at is proofing the veracity of what it publishes.

The notion that it somehow infringes on the Wikimedia by using the "wiki" moniker is silly. There are so many websites that have "wiki" in their name; wikiHow, OmegaWiki, Wikia to name a few that it is far more interesting to learn about exceptions like Citizendium that does not have wiki in its name.

Julian Assange the "Jimbo" of WikiLeaks

All in all, it is to be expected that negative editorials are written about WikiLeaks. When you profess to write about "Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia in the News", writing about WikiLeaks is seriously off topic. Calling WikiLeaks "contraband" demonstrates a bias. It is easy to forget that laws differ from country to country and that someone's hero is another man's villain.
Thanks,
      GerardM

World Press Freedom Day

Every year on the third of May it is World Press Freedom Day. It is difficult to find to find the appropriate verb for this day. You want to celebrate press freedom except, in many countries there is nothing to celebrate. In those countries there is everything to hope for, remembering the days when there was a more free press or envying the countries where the press is more free.

As I am preparing this blog, I find myself considering what is worst, the 99 journalists killed in 2009, or the 136 who were in jail on December 1, the 573 journalists arrested.. I could illustrate all three. Reading the interviews of journalists who have to deal with a lack of press freedom is also sobering..

It is a mistake to think that press freedom is only about elsewhere, journalists in the USA have been victimised by law officials who flaunt the law. In a country where the press is truly free, such officials would have to face the law.

I blog and, in a way I am like a journalist, I report, editorialise and I am happy to have my worldwide public. My subject matter is a niche but I report about what I consider relevant. In order to keep this freedom, it is important to raise the issue of a free press. A free press is essential to be free, to make up your  opinion and to be heard.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Feedjit Recent visitors

Recently Google translate was added as a function to this blog. Since then I have seen a growth in the number of visitors to my blog.

The Feedjit recent visitors show a sliding window of visitors and, as more Asian visitors show up, I see fewer American visitors. It is obvious from this map that Europe is "my" heartland.

The business model of Feedjit is one where they inform about traffic on your website. Lately, they ask people to identify themselves as a guest to my blog with a facebook, twitter or other account.

I am not sure what to think of it.. On the one hand it is nice to know when my ma or my sister have visited, but it is also the kind of information I do not need to know, and I do not want it to be aggregated for my blog and up for sale.
Thanks,
      GerardM

German chapter not liable for #Wikimedia content

I am pretty pleased with #Buzz, I am getting news from that channel like this one: a court in Hamburg, the Landesgericht, has expressed a strong opinion that Wikimedia Germany eV cannot be held liable for what is written in the German Wikipedia.
I have also been experimenting with Google Reader, and I added the German chapter blog as a feed. It gets translated for me into Dutch, but it is relatively easy to get an English translation as well.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Best blogging practices

I was asked to write what I consider best practices for blogging. Before you start blogging, it is important to consider who you do it for; what it is you want to achieve.

My blogging is aimed at achieving goals I set myself. As the visitors to my blog are from the whole world, I write in English but I do provide a translation service in order to widen the appeal.

People are sloppy readers, pictures are typically better understood. Use few words and many illustrations. Restrict yourself in a blogpost; not more then one message is to be preferred. An unfamiliar or new message needs repeating; most people do not "get it" in one go.

Your message, your objective is a composite of many smaller parts. They are related and these relations allow you to vary your approach. In a way, you put on an act, but the act has to be sincere because you will be associated with your writing. I aim to achieve things but when I write in a negative style, people will resent both me and my objective.

Some of my most effective blog entries are written by others. Other people allow you your success anyway and, as success has many fathers, it is best to acknowledge them and thank them. Their success is your success.

In order to blog successfully, you have to blog often and be brief. It helps to be on aggregators to tweet your new blog posts and know what your audience read and where they are coming from. Oh yes, spend time on your hyperlinks.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Following a #Swahili blog

The Swahili #Wikipedia is a vibrant, innovative African Wikipedia. It is blessed with a dedicated community and, one of their own, Muddyb Blast Producer has started to experiment with a blog.

Blogs are there to be read, so I promised him to blog about it. I will even follow his blog as he installed Google translate on his blog. The most convenient way of following him would be in my reader.. The question is, how do I get it to translate those blogs in languages I cannot follow otherwise..
Thanks,
     GerardM

More mobile news

• localisation is shooting at a moving target; another message became available for Mobile MediaWiki
• there are 47 languages with no more then 1 message missing
• there are now 22 languages that are completely localised
• they are Aragonese, Bengali, Danish, German, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Swiss German, Hebrew, Interlingua, Karachay-Balkar, Lazuri, Malayalam, Nedersaksisch, Dutch, Norwegian (bokmål)‬, Polish, Russian, Swahili, Telugu and Urdu
• one of the Mobile Wikipedia developers has started a blog; thedj writes
• he told me where the Mobile Wikipedia Statistics can be found
• there are 1,288,736,349 Happy Pages Served
• he also told me that they need a bit more work :)
• here is a sample

Thanks,
GerardM