Facibus On Blogging

I wrote an article on Mobloggerese on Facibus Reviews a couple of months back.

Just to recap - moblogging is defined (your mileage may vary as to the interpretation) at wikipedia. I posited that moblogged posts are sometimes written in mobloggerese - it’s the shorthand style that you might use when taking notes at a conference. Some people do just that - moblog at conferences - it is a great way to get future use out of the notes. There is a good example of mobloggerese on Dan Saffer’s blog.

Mobloggerese is an efficient way of getting aides-de-memoire down in a hurry - the comments can then be indexed, searched, and are available to all who want them. They are great in context - where the original author is available and able to remember enough of the other stuff around the notes so that they can be fleshed out. Using storytelling to implicetise the tacit. Adding context is the key to making the mobloggerese useful beyond that author at that time and place.

A couple of us are working on a day-job client project at the moment that supports a government committee process - where the collection and contextualisation of a mobloggerese-analogue (phew, what a mouthful!) might be vital to making the whole process run stronger/better/faster. Adding context to the mobloggerese is one of our issues - but it looks likely that we can get away with a combination of machine-addable hierarchical stuff (like date, committee, process stage, document template) and user tagging. I’ll update on HumaneIA when more information becomes available.