Spent the usual Saturday morning reviewing texts for next semester, this time pouring through Persuasive Technology by Fogg, and having another look at Mader’s Wikipatterns. There are a couple chapters in Fogg that would be useful in making some distinctions when working with ethos (chapters 6 and 7 on credibility). I found two chapter in Mader that I’d recommend to students (chapter 3 on workflow and chapter 4 starting a pilot project). Mader’s focus on workplace limits the use of his book in a more general setting. Students new to wikis tend to take suggestions as laws, so a text more focused on principles tends to me more adaptable.

On a second front, I’m looking at the blogging app Blogo again, in part in anticipation of extra posting for Weblogs and Wikis next semester. Again, I like the interface, but there are little things missing that make life easier: tighter integration with flickr, automatic look up on amazon. Embedding an image from flickr involves a switching to html trick; and linking to amazon involved actually doing some lookup work.

On the other hand, I’m beginning to like the way Blogo handles tagging to categories and tags. While a checklist, as ecto uses, seems smart, a little drop down menu and some predictive text works, too. I won’t set aside ecto just yet, but the feel of blogo is so nice that I’m tempted to work more in it.

And just now had to revise my idea of how blogo integrates with flickr. Images can be drag and dropped from flickr on firefox to the blogo writing space. The image editor opens to allow cropping and linking to a full-sized image. This drag and drop works from any web page. Very nice.