Technology

Classes start tomorrow. So, in preparation for the new semester, it is time to upgrade this blog to the latest WordPress platform version, 2.0.

I have done will do the upgrade and have revised then come back to revise this post. Just wanted to warn any Marcomblog visitors and contributors that the blog is going to be unavailable for a bit.

The update: OK, we are all done! The whole thing took less than 30 minutes. That includes the following tasks: download/backup of all files, backup of the database (over 33mb now), deactivation of all plugins (16), upload of all new files, reactivation of all plugins (18, since two mandatory plugins are included in the new version), checking comment functions and then twiddling a few more things. Ta-da! We are done.

Yes, I know that for casual observers there is no big difference. I’ve retained the existing blog theme and may update it as a part of a class project this semester. The real changes are under the hood. They include: Akismet’s improved spam protection, a very “Ajaxy” admin area for creating posts, simple uploading and displaying of images (see above/right) and more. One thing I have noticed is the need to add a “vspace=” and “hspace=” addition to the image tag to assure there is some buffer between image and text. I’m guessing that, and other quirks, will be addressed and updated soon for this relatively new platform version.

This may take a bit of getting use to by our contributors, but I believe they will feel that the new look and easy admin area are quite useful.

There are some quirks to the new platform. I note that the “bold” and “italics” buttons don’t work right now. Hmm? I’ll have to investigate that one. Hey, it is free opensource software. Ya’ get what ya’ pay for, or - in this instance - the time you expend in learning how to fix a few things here and there. I like it. Learning is good.

Best wishes to all of our contributors and readers for a positive and successful 2006!

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As a PR professional or journalist, online research can be tedious. Imagine you wanted to learn about a company such as Blogsite (disclaimer - it’s one of MyST Technology Partners’ companies). You could go to the web site (which is really a blogsite) and try to find your way around. Or, you could go to a different type of interface - a topic cloud.

The topic cloud makes it a bit easier to drill into subjects based on keywords. And since it provides a search capablility, you can mix and match terms to get closer to content that you’re really looking for but didn’t know it existed without the tag cloud view. There are many interesting aspects of a topic cloud - here’s a paper that provides a little background.

Imagine (as a PR executive) you must review your company’s weblogs for interesting story ideas or police the blogs for things that people should’t be discussing. Topic and tag clouds would be ideal for these tasks.

Other great examples of tag clouds (not topic clouds) include Technorati and TagCloud but each have different ideas about the value and implementation. For example, TagCloud extrapolates keywords from RSS feeds, whereas MyST Topic Cloud uses real (human-generated) keywords based on each blog post; both implementations are useful.

Topic Cloud also decomposes longer key-phrases into discrete key terms. The key-phrase “Marcom Blog” would exist in the cloud as “Marcom”, and “Blog”, and each of these terms would be related and cross-referenced to the unambiguous term “Marcom Blog”. Of greatest interest - this approach begins to embrace keywords as topics, much like a topic map (see XTM), the closest specification we have to describing knowledge. As such, topic clouds are uniquely different from tag clouds.

In any case, consider tag clouds and topic clouds unique concepts that may (or may not) be important for public relations. Think about how these types of tools can be used in PR and let me know your thoughts - maybe I can help you apply this model to some use cases I haven’t considered.

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