The Ed Techie

What sort of open do you want?

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/42386632@N00/8528725328/ >

I've been thinking about openness in education a lot recently (my plan is to write a book on this, more on that later). And I've slowly, probably years after everyone else, come to the conclusion that it's a mistake to talk about openness as if it's one thing. There may have been a time when it was, when all the forms of openness blended easily into one indistinguishable lump, but that's not the case now. Not only are there different aspects of openness, but I'm beginning to feel that some may be mutually exclusive with others, or at least prioritising some means less emphasis on others. 

What do I mean by this? Well I could list the different types of openness in education: OERs, MOOCs, open access, open scholarship, etc. But instead it's more useful to consider the motivation for openness, why has someone adopted an open approach in the first place? Here are some possibilities:

Increased audience - you want as many people as possible to be able get at your resource, be it an article, book, course, video or presentation. The main aim here is to remove barriers to people accessing it. This means it has to be free, easily shareable, online, and with easy rights.

Increased reuse - related to the above, but slightly different, you want people to take what you have created and combine it with other elements, adapt it and republish. The same considerations are required as above, but with an extra emphasis on minimal rights and also creating the resource in convenient chunks that can be adapted. Whereas the first motivation might mean releasing your song online, the second motivation might lead you to sharing each of the tracks that constitute the song separately under a CC-BY licence.

Increased access - this is different from the first motivation in that you want to reach particular groups who may be disadvantaged. You have open access in that you do not require formal entry qualifications. You may decide that free is also the best way to gain increased access, but that may not follow. If you want to work with learners who often fail in formal education then simply making a resource free doesn't really help. What they need is material aimed at this audience and specific support. Open access is not just about price.

Increased experimentation - one of the reasons many people adopt open approaches is that it allows them to do different things. Whether that's use different media, create a different identity, or experiment with approach that wouldn't fit within the normal constraints of work, an open method allows this. If this is your goal, then the emphasis is on getting an audience that will feedback on this and maybe participate in this experimentation.

Increased reputation - being networked and online can help improve your, or your institution's, profile. Openness here allows more people to see what you do (the motivation of increased audience) but your main aim is to enhance your reputation. If you were an academic who really wanted to be on the keynote circuit then operating in the open, publishing openly, creating online resources, being active in social media and establishing an online identity might be a good way to achieve this. Here openness is a method by which you realise a different goal, but it could be anything. The emphasis here then will be on networking and using openness to establish identity.

Increased revenue - while we may have suspicions about open washing and using openness as a route to commercial success, it's true that an open, or part-open model can be an effective business model. The freemium approach works this way, where a service is open to a large extent, but some users pay for additional services. If this is the goal then openness works by creating a significant demand for the product.

Increased participation - you may need input from an audience, but can't pay to access them. This could be crowdsourcing in research, or getting feedback on a book or research proposal. Being open allows others to access it and then provide the input you require. Openness here can be quite targeted, you want to reach a particular audience and get them involved, not necessarily as large an audience as possible.

Let's take an example in education and consider it from these different motivations. Let's imagine your university (or a university you know) wants to create a MOOC. They've heard all about them and think they should be doing something in this area (this actually covers about 90% of university's approach to MOOCs). They seek your advice, so you go around to a bunch of different stakeholders and you ask them "what is the aim of the MOOC? What do you want from it?"

Now, the person from marketing says they want to increase the university's online profile and reputation. From this perspective you propose a MOOC in a big hitting subject, featuring a big name academic. The subject will be "Life on Mars". It'll be expensive, high end production, acting as a showcase for the university and getting it in the press.

When you speak to the Dean of the Science faculty they say they are concerned about student recruitment on their post grad course. They want it to bring in high fee paying overseas students. The model that might work here is one that makes the first 6 weeks open, and target a specific audience, who can then sign up. You suggest offering badges and allowing people to build up to taking the full masters.

You then speak to an academic who is really keen to try a student-led approach. They feel frustrated by the customer-led focus of conventional teaching and see in MOOCs an opportunity to try some more radical pedagogic approaches that they have been blocked from implementing. They don't see it as particularly massive in terms of audience, but it will be a rich learning experience for those who do it, as they will be creating the curriculum. You propose a MOOC based in Wordpress, and featuring a range of technologies with learners co-creating the content.

Later you have a conversation with a funding council who want to bring under-represented groups into science. They will need a lot of support, but they are willing to fund the provision of mentors and support groups in the community. You suggest a MOOC based on adapting existing materials, with carefully targeted support and minimal technical barriers.

And so on - you can see that from each of these perspectives the resultant MOOC would be a very different beast. It would be open in each of these scenarios, but with a different emphasis on the form that openness should take.

So, now that openness has to a large extent won out as an approach, the question is no longer 'do you want to be open?' but rather 'what sort of open do you want?'. 

Open media and the new Stasi

"Trust me, I'm a journalist..."

I came across a disturbing story last week, particularly for academics in the UK who use social media. A UK academic who blogs and tweets as Plashing Vole reported that a journalist from the Sun on Sunday had contacted him, telling him they were going to run an article about him. It concerned a few anti-government tweets he had made, in one jokingly making a Nazi comparison. An MP was calling for him to be sacked. In the end they didn't run the piece, but it must have been a stressful few days.

This worries me on a number of levels. Firstly, I often encourage academics to establish an online identity, and that part of that identity is to give a bit of themselves, not just bland broadcast. If we are now entering a phase when any opinion or joke will be used against you then this advice might be harmful.

Secondly, I think most of us will have a 'there but for the grace of God' moment on reading his account. I am mindful of being offensive in any online communication, but I've made jokes & expressed opinions so if someone really wanted to I'm sure they could construct a negative story about me and use a few carefully selected tweets to prove a case. The same is true for any of us I think - a friend of mine was berated by someone because they tweeted about biscuits during work hours.

But the thing that bothered me most of all was the sense of surveillance and suppression of opinion. The East German secret police used to have people in every workplace reporting to them, and they would drill holes in walls to spy on citizens. Any anti-state sentiment that was expressed would be recorded and that person would find their life difficult, or they'd just be disappeared. The consequence was that no-one would express any dissenting view in public, which was, of course, the aim. It is the same here, it doesn't matter that they didn't run the story, they only need to threaten to often enough to make academics scared of expressing an opinion publicly. And that is a very dangerous society to live in.

The possible saving grace is that I would hope universities are strong enough to stand up to this nonsense, and also, I think it's such a non-story, and would be of so little interest to their readers that it's not a practical policy. But who knows?

Academics and online impact

I presented at the OU's communications conference yesterday. I was asked to talk about how you create an impact online. I'm always a bit cautious about giving advice on this, as I didn't (don't) have a plan, so it's all been trial and error and messing about. But I guess that is my advice - just get started and try stuff out, don't wait to go on the "Creating academic impact online with blogs" course, just do it.

I was lucky to share the stage with two great OU colleagues. Meg Barker is an expert in relationships, and has a good blog associated with her book Rewriting the Rules. Natalie Starkey's expertise is in comets and asteroids and does a lot of TV work and writing for the Guardian, as well as blogging. I went last, so the previous two subjects had been sex and space. I then had to follow up with... educational technology. Do you ever get the feeling you made the wrong career choice? 

Anyway, my presentation is below. I make the point that I don't really know what all the stats mean associated with blogs, but they must mean something, right? 

Academics & online impact from Martin Weller

What do all these numbers mean?

<image - http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmorgan8186/5946796450/>

Bloggers, or anyone who maintains an online profile, have an ambiguous relationship with visitor stats and data. On the one hand we like to dismiss them as meaningless, but then secretly feel chuffed when we can outscore someone. I've tried to promote them as one way of measuring impact, but with the caveat that context is important. For instance, if you're a blogger in a relatively obscure area, such as Barry Town football club, then your range is limited and unlikely to compare in absolute numbers with, say, a blog reviewing Apple products.

I recently passed 300,000 views on this blog, over about 700 posts - that's not as exciting as it might sound as I've been going since about 2006. My friend Liam says he gets about 200K a year on his mobile tech blog. Here are some more stats from tools I use:

• Slideshare - 220,000 views over 6 years on 59 presentations
• Blipfoto - 92,000 views over 420 entries
• Flickr - 49,000 views over 1,140 photos
• Citations on academic articles - 1,620 (according to Google)

The first thing to ask is how reliable is this data? Tony can probably answer that better than me, but I think the blog traffic doesn't take into people who subscribe via RSS, so in that case underestimates. At the same time it does include my own obsessive self-clicking, so that may even out. It may also include bot traffic which doesn't really mean anything at all.

But if we take the data as accurate for now, the more interesting question is what does it mean? I would like to make the case that 300,000 visits to my blog equals 300,000 careful, considered reading of my posts, but the data doesn't back that up. Google analytics tells me that my average visit duration is 57 seconds. I suppose that is just about the time it takes to read a blog post, but it probably doesn't compare well with time taken on reading academic articles. My bounce rate is high too, at around 85%, so people come in, read a post and then go elsewhere, but I think that's fairly typical for blogs, I'm not providing a newspaper where you want people to go from one feature to another.

Blipfoto probably has the highest return on audience per post, and does better than Flickr. This provides a nice comparison as I have linked my blipfoto account to twitter, so it automatically tweets when I post, but I haven't done this for Flickr (which I think of more as a repository). I get 219 views per post on blipfoto versus 42 on Flickr, so we could say that the effect of linking to twitter is a 5-fold increase in traffic (if that's what you want). But I would say that Blipfoto is the most personal of these tools and the least connected to my professional life, so I wouldn't argue for any professional impact here.

What I think we're struggling with here is the newness of all this. What is the value of a slideshare view versus a download of a paper? Is there a conversion rate? I've tried to keep a foot in both the traditional camp, through publications, and the new forms of dissemination, so these figures might offer a reasonable comparison between the two. Looking at my citations you could crudely say that one citation is worth about 200 blog views (or vice versa).

However, it's probably futile to try and measure these things. It's not as if citations are a particularly reliable metric anyway, so we shouldn't use those as a currency to convert everything else into. It will also vary widely depending on discipline, and individual. And more importantly, we already have plenty of systems that our career path requires us to game, so why invent more?

Make no mistake, turning altmetrics into performance measures linked to real things like promotion, job security, money would have negative effects. For example, there is a correlation between number of posts and views, so if I was purely chasing the numbers I should post more often, regardless of quality (what quality?), or I might think I could get better numbers from splitting this post into three separate ones. This already happens in traditional outputs, I remember someone advising me not to write books because for the same effort I could have 5 REFable publications. This return on investment view ignores the internal validity of the form. I also tend to think of blogging as a social function, connecting with friends and peers, but if I'm linking it to direct returns then it's another example of monetising relationships that Brian is so uneasy about.

But when I've tried to make the case for digital scholarship and tenure, it is something along these lines that I want to argue - that the impact you see here is as valid as the impact we have chosen to recognise and measure. So we need to start thinking about what these numbers do mean for academics - we just need to make sure we don't turn them into the thing itself, with all of us chasing and parading numbers. But maybe that's inevitable as soon as you shine a light on them, in which case, ignore this post.

Online rep manager = American cheese loaf

This is all the way wrong...

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/wordridden/205945730/>

John Naughton pointed me at this article in Nature about academics managing their online reputation. In a loose sense we all manage our identities, particularly online where it has the possibility of going beyond the current context. But the tale of people employing online reputation management companies made me sigh/smile/rant in equal measure (not a pretty facial contorsion I can tell you).

If you need to _employ_ a company to manage your online identity then you really haven't grasped it at all. It is exactly about connecting with you, and not some media company. Rather like 'white pop reggae' and 'American cheese loaf', 'online reputation management' are three words you never want to see used together. 

On the plus side I thought it demonstrated a good case for why academics should engage in social media sooner, rather than later. If you have established a good online network already then people may be more forgiving of an indescretion. It will depend on what it is, for example if I was found guilty of torturing puppies, I wouldn't get much sympathy, but maybe if it was revealed that I had bought my PhD with tokens from cereal packets then that doesn't really impact on any value I may have provided online (I didn't - it was tokens from biscuits). In social media you establish your own currency and value, and that is hard to fake or buy, so people will value that, or at least weight it against, other reputation damage.

 

A Couros birthday and user generated content

I'm sure many of you will have seen this, but it's worth showing again. Below is a video that Dean Shareski compiled for blogger Alec Couros's 40th Birthday (Dean describes the process here).

 

It's fun and heartwarming, but it's also a great example to show people about the power of the network. As I understand it someone suggested the idea on twitter, Dean then put together a Google Doc with the lyrics and contacted people in Alec's network to assign them lines. They then uploaded or emailed him the video clips, which he then compiled together.

Here's why I think it's interesting, beyond it being for Alec who's a great guy and featuring some of my favourite online people.

• It illustrates Clay Shirky's point about the cost of organisation collapsing. I'm sure it involved a good deal of effort on Dean's part to organise and compile, but imagine the effort it would have taken in a non-socially networked world.
• It demonstrates the reciprocity economy. Why did all these people contribute, many of whom (I'm guessing) Alec hasn't even met? Because he shares a lot of resources online, responds to people and is seen as a valuable member of many people's network. This was a way of saying thankyou.
• It shows the ease of production. As well as organisation being easy, this demonstrates how the production of multi-media artefacts is truly democratised now.
• YouTube isn't television. One of the complaints people such as Andrew Keen make about web 2.0 is that it's not professional. That isn't the point, this would never exist in a professional context, and yet it works very well as a piece of YouTube content.
• You can't predict what is learning content. This is part of my problem with OERs, they seem to predetermine what learning will take place. I have made many of the points above in various places, but I wouldn't have said 'what I need is a birthday video to demonstrate these'. 

Speaking of using the video to demonstrate points, I was part of the OU's annual LearnAbout Fair the other week, which is a well organised internal event, where people host different stalls demonstrating projects or technology. I was on the 'User generated content' stall, and put together a bunch of examples in a wiki, including Alec's birthday vid. I think people did really get it through these examples, perhaps more so than with the standard ones of Wikipedia, etc. Oh, and a belated happy 40th Alec.

Real friendship

As it's coming up to Christmas, a nice post about the value of friendship. Many of you will have read William Deresiewicz's article in the Chronicle entitled Faux Friendship, which decries the loss of 'real' friendship in the social networking age. I ought to say that compared with most anti-social media pieces of journalism, it's well written and coherent. But it's still wrong, and based largely on ignorance.

We get a sense of where the article is going early on:

"The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction?"

The language is telling here - Facebook is a 'distortion' of social space, not an enhancement or a complement. Friendships are 'relegated' to screens, not elaborated through them. We then get on to the key question:

"If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any?"

I think the nature of relationships and friendships and the way online activity influences them is fascinating, so I'm not saying we shouldn't ask questions like this, but you know we are going to have a 'camelot' type argument any moment, which will refer back to some golden age of friendship. Sure enough, it comes:

"Classical friendship, now called romantic friendship, persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, giving us the great friendships of Goethe and Schiller, Byron and Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau."

This is the classic argument that things now aren't as good as they were, and look, I've cherry-picked some examples from the whole of history to prove it. This is akin to why other supermarket queues always seem to progress quicker than yours - you can only be in one queue while there are many 'other queues', therefore statistically, it is likely that at least one will progress quicker than yours. Because we are egocentric we interpret this in relation to ourselves. It's the same with history, we only have the present to look at since we can only live in one time - compared with all of history there will always be better examples in the past. So when he argues:

"no one in a very long time has talked about friendship the way Montaigne and Tennyson did."

No-one talks about anything the way Montaigne and Tennyson did because they lived in a different age. But to argue that people don't have close friendships now is absurd. Kingsley Amis and Phillip Larkin certainly had that type of friendship, and to choose some more recent low-brow examples how about David Bowie and Iggy Pop, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, Ant and Dec? Now they may not be Byron and Shelley from an artistic sense, but you can't deny this is friendship as any age would understand it?

Having set up a decline in the nature of friendship, he then gets onto social media:

We haven't just stopped talking to our friends as individuals, at such moments, we have stopped thinking of them as individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.

I agree, this is something new, and is certainly a tweak to friendship. But when you broadcast like this, you do so knowing that most people will ignore it, someone might pick up on it, and maybe an exchange will happen. It hasn't really cost you anything to do. I'd also add that when you form online friendships it's with people who do more than give you an account of what they are doing. The media's simplification that twitter is about 'telling people what you had for breakfast' is missing the point.

But what really irritates me about such articles is how condescending they are, as if we're all to stupid to understand and only the author has seen the light. For example:

The absurd idea, bruited about in the media, that a MySpace profile or "25 Random Things About Me" can tell us more about someone than even a good friend might be aware of

I don't know anyone who believes this, people are quite capable of having different types and ranges of friendships. Only for journalists does it seem to be a binary choice between online and face to face. They also speak from a position of relative ignorance usually. Deresiewicz seems to have used facebook, and that's about it. It maybe that Facebook does afford slightly shallow relationships, although I suspect we'd find a wide variety. When I think of my online friends most of the ones I would classify as friends I know through blogs, but not all, twitter (which he deplores for its brevity) is perfectly capable of creating and sustaining real friendships. So when Deresiewicz argues:

"when I think about my friends, what makes them who they are, and why I love them, it is not the names of their siblings that come to mind, or their fear of spiders. It is their qualities of character. This one's emotional generosity, that one's moral seriousness, the dark humor of a third."

I think 'yes that's exactly what I think about my online friends.' When I went to Alt-C this year I met some people face to face that I have regarded as friends for some time. Let's take Alan Cann for example, we hadn't met face to face for various reasons, but it was inevitable we would. When I met Alan at ALT-C it was great, but it was also kind of irrelevant - most of our interaction will remain via blogs, twitter, or whatever else comes along. Online friendship isn't 'face to face friendship in waiting'.

One of the common tests of friendship is 'would they lend you money?' and this is sometimes used to demonstrate that online friendship isn't real (Josie Fraser has a stronger test including "In the event of a zombie apocalypse, would you throw yourself between me and the oncoming brain-ravenous hoard?"). I kind of had this question answered earlier in the year when my wife asked for sponsorship for the half marathon. Lots of people who I have never met stumped up real cash. 

I'm not sure why people are so obsessed with the term 'friends' and whether one person qualifies or not. It's all a bit school playground. Are the people I regularly exchange blog comments with or tweets with 'friends'? What about those I only occassionally interact with? I think so, but maybe we do need more terms since being online has opened up whole new niches in 'friendship' which different people occupy.

But as it's Christmas let's stick with 'friends'. Here's my test for online friends - let's call it the 'George Bailey test'. If, through no fault of your own, you got yourself in a fix like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, and you really needed the help of your friends to get you out of it, would the online ones help? In my case, I'd say, absolutely.

Becoming a multi-blogger

One of the (vague, ill-defined, unstructured) tasks I set myself this year was to see if my blogging/social networking activity could be bent some way to a more focused institutional benefit. I can make lots of (unsupported, wildly inaccurate, ego-driven) claims about the benefit of this blog to the Open University, for example it acts as a form of staff development, it forms part of an institutional dialogue, it raises the university's profile, it demonstrates the university's engagement with new media, etc.

But I also feel that my blogging activity has been well supported without any specific aim, and it has now reached a reasonably robust state where can I make the above claims without everyone in the room laughing (only some of them). So, I wanted to investigate whether this practice could become more central and foregrounded in what I do and in its institutional benefit.

One result of this has been the initiation of the digital scholarship work at the OU. We have created a site as a part of this activity (knocked together very quickly at our 2-day hackfest). After another iteration of this, I may propose to senior management that it is open to all (in the spirit of things), not just OU staff, but it may be that it only really works with the specific OU focus. One element of this is that it has a central blog for news relevant to digital scholarship. This is rather like my tumblr blog but with a bit more comment. I am also taking over some blogging duties over at the SocialLearn blog.

It is going to be interesting to see whether I can blog effectively for these different audiences. I started this blog as a separate entity from the OU, and although it is obviously related, I have never really had to worry about a very specific intention behind the blog. Hence I can spout half-formed ideas about music, football, elearning and general bobbins. This isn't going to cut it in my new (on-brand, suit-wearing, performance criteria achieving) role. It will also be interesting to see if I can spread my already meagre intellectual jam thinly across three blogs, and whether it impacts upon this one.

I guess what this really comes back to is identity again and the personal-professional tension. I believe a bit of the personal is essential to give a blog meaning. I created this intellectually challenging graph to illustrate my point:

(Graph produced at crappygraphs.com)

So this mini-personal experiment will examine whether I can blog to a different audience, and still retain enough personal element to make it meaningful for me and the reader.

Riffability and MPO

Couple of quick terms for you to play with, and no apologies for butchering the English language, it likes it really.

Riffability - the potential for a resource or idea to generate quick modifications, for it to be riffed upon by others.

Riffability is one (but not the only) factor for how memes, ideas or social objects work. If something has a high riffability rating, then it means others will modify it, suggest alterations, or explore ideas around it. Not everything that spreads is riffable - some ideas/outputs are just perfect as they are and you just want to share. Others promote debate and discussion, but that's not the same as riffing.
A few examples: one of my Cardiff twitter contacts, Sianz, produces food/object based visual puns in twitpic. These are very riffable I think, and thus the photos themselves act as social objects around which others congregate.
The discussion I had (particularly with Andy) on metrics is an example of something that isn't riffing, it's debating (or just plain arguing). But had I couched the original post in the sense of 'here's some metrics I'd use', then it might have been more riffable, in that others could have pitched in with their suggestions. When Scott Leslie was preparing his Educator as DJ talk, it was a riff which some of us could work with.
So I think some ideas have more riffability than others, and you can pose your idea in a manner that has greater riffability. If your intention is to get input from others, then learning how to inject a bit of riffability may be a developing skill (when HR consultants offer courses on 'Improving Riffability' I'll know the term has made it).

MPO - Multiple Personality Order (as contrasted with Disorder). Following on from my last post, comments from Pete J and Jim G, questioned whether we only had one online personality and whether we weren't all a bit schizophrenic. I think they're right, my final conclusion that 'your academic identity = your online identity' was too simplistic. Your online academic identity will be a subset of your online identities. I follow a few people on twitter for instance who have a professional and a personal id (you know who you are). Sadly, their professional one is, well, a bit boring compared with their personal one. But I think this reiterates what I was trying to say in my talk on identity - we're still at the beginning of all this.
Increasingly people (particularly teenagers) will develop and cultivate multiple personalities online. This is an astute, and dexterous, thing to do. It allows them to have a pseudonym which might be the identity where they can mess about, swear, talk rubbish and connect only with trusted friends and like-minded people. At the same time they can have at least one other personality which is a more public facing one, which is closely allied to the real identity.
Of course, many people do this very well at the moment, and some environments (virtual worlds in particular) actively encourage a separation of 'real' identity and online one. My conjecture is that it will become the norm, and take place in more publicly social spaces. And it is likely people won't stop at two identities, but have many. When you add into this that people find you in different spaces and so may have one facet of your personality exaggerated (eg if you follow someone in LastFM but not twitter, you would have a different impression of them), then defining what exactly is 'your identity' becomes increasingly difficult.
But this is a good thing and just a natural adaptation (I'm not doing a Greenfield and arguing social networks will cause MPD). I've always found the sort of person who prides themselves on only having one aspect to their personality rather odd, those people who declare 'I'm me, take me or leave me, I call a spade a spade' etc. Being able to nuance your behaviour to a given environment (without being completely false) is a skill. And online, when stuff hangs around forever and can be spread globally in an instant, being adept at doing this will be increasingly significant.

I'm aggregating, aggregating (a shiny show special)

Image: Different uses of tools from last post, created in Gliffy

Following on from my last post, I have been looking at tools which allow users to collect together different online resources for sharing. What I'm interested in is aggregating and sequencing content together so you can distribute your sequence to others easily, a kind of flash mini-course creator. Scott Leslie twittered the other day, asking a similar thing and pointed me at the wiki scratchpad for his upcoming educator as DJ talk. So I worked through some of these, and here si my experience:

Tumblr - as I mentioned in my previous post, I've rather taken to Tumblr. It's real selling point is the ease of use, simply install the toolbar button and you can easily add anything into your Tumblr blog. It is thus ideal for harvesting all the web paraphernalia you encounter in any one day. I see it more as a personal record, like Liam I see it as a kind of digital scrapbook. But it seems a very personal, slightly anarchic tool, so not really suited to my aim of sharing a defined sequence of resources. Here is my version of Tumblr.

Posterous - AJ Cann is a fan of Posterous, and like Tumblr it's easy to use and ideal for instant sharing and harvesting. Functionally there isn't much to use between the two, I could try and justify my preference for Tumblr but it would be post-hoc rationalisation. Maybe it was the aesthetics of the themes in Tumblr, I'm a shallow kind of guy, but it's often an emotional 'decision' between similar software. Here is my Posterous.

Suprglu - this is a site for aggregating the various social data elements you create in other sites and presenting them in one nice package, sort of like your Facebook/MySpace profile, but prettier. So you can add in RSS, your LastFM tracks, Flickr, delicious, etc. It generates some tags from your content also. It's easy to use, and if you are active with different tools and what an easy to create central hub to represent your identity, it works well. It isn't about sharing a sequence of resources as such, but I guess you could create a suprglu page for a project or subject, and not an individual, which would create a dynamic set of resources. Here is my suprglu page.

Glogster - I covered this in a previous Shiny Show. It lets you embed various resources into a multi-media poster. This is probably closer to what I was after, but you can't get a sequence from it.

SecondBrain -I signed up for SecondBrain ages ago, but didn't really get it. Like suprglu it is a self-aggregation (definitely not to be confused with self-flagellation) site, but rather more extensive with password authentication agreements across a number of sites so you can pull in your content from everywhere. My initial confusion over it remains however, I'm still not quite sure what it's for. While suprglu gives you a nicely presented site, SecondBrain seems to be offering too much, it is partly a conversation and partly a resource share, and I'm not sure it works as either. But it may work for some as an archive of your online activity. Here is my SecondBrain site.

FriendFeed - again, I've not really taken to FriendFeed, although I know some people swear by it. Initially I viewed it as a twitter rival, but it has become more of an aggregator, pulling in various streams from yourself and others. The use of FriendFeed 'rooms' which allow you to gather together several streams may go some way to providing the sort of dynamic content around a particular subject, but it doesn't provide the predetermined, shareable sequence I was after. Here is my FriendFeed.

Trailfire - this lets you create shareable trails across the web, with associated comments, so on each page a trailfire link is added, allowing you to read my comments, add those of your own, and then move on to the next resource. This is close to what I want, although the interface definitely needs a bit of work, and I'm not sure how robust it is. Like most tools it has an easy to use toolbar button, so I can quickly add any site into a particular trail. I'd like it to be exportable as embed code, but this is the closest to what I had in mind, so have a look and see if it works for you. I created a trail for the sites in this post.