What’s an infostrat? Picking up from Ton and Kicks:
“deciding what and how to bookmark or archive stuff, sorting through conflicting news stories and accusations, and alternating “periods of discovery with periods of digesting and consolidating”
and
“what is my strategy to comb through the gigs and gigs of input I can plug myself into on the Web?”
I find it all very interesting and would like to work out an infostrat for myself. Quite often I fall into the pit of infinite scroll and end up in a mess of information overload. Need to change my filters.
What do I want from the world of information out there? I would separate my goals in to the social and the informational.
For the social side: I want to not only communicate with people, but to over time become close to some of them. I must say that until recently, social media has always felt remarkably asocial to me. Ton seems to have achieved sociality very well over time through blogging. I’d like to explore if there’s a knack to that, other than just giving it time.
For the informational side: this is more what social media has traditionally given me. However, so far, it’s facilitated more consumption than consolidation I would say. So I am very intrigued by Kicks’ mention of the linkage between blogs and wikis. I like the idea of the blog timeline crystallising into a personal wiki over time.
Thanks Ton and Kicks for the discussion. I have some reading to do!
To me blogs and wikis are the original social software. My blog emerged as a personal knowledge management tool (Harold Jarche is the go-to source for PKM). Knowledge management to me has always been a very people centered, social thing. Learning through distributed conversations, networked learning (George Siemens and Stephen Downes‘ connectivism). My friend Lilia Efimova did her PhD on it, with our shared blogger network’s conversations as an empirical case. At some point social software morphed into social media, and its original potential and value as informal learning tools was lost in my eyes.
Blogs and wiki’s, they go well together. Blogs as thinking out loud and conversations (also with oneself). Wiki as its accumulated residue. I had a wiki alongside this blog for a very long time (until it succumbed to spam), both a public external one, and a private one. My friend Peter Rukavina still has his wiki Rukapedia alongside his blog. It serves in part as an explainer to his blog readers (e.g. see his wiki entry on me). Boris Mann, also a long time barcamp/blogging connection, runs a wiki which is editable by the public in part.
A year ago I felt the need to accumulate things in a more permanent way next to the timeline like blog. As I am the only one editing such a ‘wiki’, I opted to use WordPress pages for it (but you could open pages up for wider editing with a separate user-role). I added a few plugins for it, e.g. to add categories to pages so I can build menu structures. Kbase in the top menu leads to this wiki-for-just-me, although it doesn’t show all pages it contains (search will surface them though).
Replied to Introduced to infostrats by Neil Mather