1. Relevant links from edna now show in communities. eg. http://me.edu.au/c/Professional%20Associations This gives further information and value to the communities.
2. Icons are now used for feeds showing the various sources. See the screenshot below or visit me.edu.au

We have been busy working on release 2 specifications which we are looking to release early April. This release includes:

• a smarter search technology for users and communities,
• a content space for users within the profile and
• a blog service.

We will keep you posted as we get closer to completing specifications and know more on release dates.

The busiest Community is Beginning Teachers, but this is apparently due to new teachers visiting, looking for useful material, and then moving on, spending an average of 55 seconds there. Until recently there was little content on the page. By contrast, the most lively Community is Digital Storytelling which has a lot of members, has a large number of whiteboard entries and links, and visitors spend an average of 2min 10 sec.

Other active communities are:

• me-edu-au
• web2ools
• Twitter
• Social Networking
• Australian Digital Revolution
• Wikis

Of course this is only one view of ’success’. There may well be Communities that are working on a small scale that are very beneficial to those involved.

• once you register for edna you automatically get a me.edu.au space and if you are a current edna registered user all you need to do is visit the site: http://me.edu.au/ and login and update additional profile fields to start sharing.
• your profile contains your professional information such as work, education and recent activity, and your Interests. You can post messages to your Colleagues. It also tracks your activity within me.edu.au and displays your edna Groups membership.
• if you want potential colleagues to find you within me.edu.au, be sure to include as much information to your Profile as you want visible and feel comfortable with. We recommend that you fill in your contact, work, photo and interest information at the very start. To edit your profile, click Edit below your basic information. Or use the Edit your profile in the menu bar. Make sure that you set the privacy settings to ‘Public’.
• to see all of your profile information or that of a colleague, click View all in the left menu bar. It will display all the information a person has shared public.
• when you add an interest it automatically creates a community of interest. This is a space where other colleagues can come and join and collaborate around a particular interest. See the top 100 communities at: http://me.edu.au/public/browseCommunities

Second, Communities now each have an rss feed (just add /rss). This means that one can readily display all one’s communities in a feed reader, as is shown on the image below and quickly scan for interesting new contributions.

So it is really easy to promote a Community or an individual profile by sharing addresses. Already some of the Communities are generating a lively set of links and comments, and the scrolling whiteboard and links lists can contain significant amounts of information.

There is an interesting blog entry from Bradley Horowitz who is head of the Technology Development Group at Yahoo! Search Marketplace about levels of participation in social networking sites. He says that in Yahoo Groups,

• “1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
• 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
• 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)”

But me.edu is a different sort of site from Yahoo Groups, and makes comments easy to make (we think) but these numbers might still apply. It remains to be seen whether people’s willingness to contribute is evolving, as the tools become easier to use and the communities (of various sorts) become less threatening. I wonder if there is a desirable balance of contributors and observers in a community? If it is 5 out of 100 and the five are having a healthy exchange and the observers are benefiting is that OK? I expect that the number of contributors is the critical number. Once there is a sufficient number to make the exchange lively, it is not important how many reader-only member there are in a Community.

An upgrade to how Communities are rated in the Communities listing will make selection of active Communities easier. At present the Communities with the largest number of members are shown as large. In the upgrade, next week, greater account will be given to the level of activity in each Community. So big means busiest.

Here is an audio-visual tutorial on how to bring feeds into your Profile. It is a VoiceThread, and you can leave audio comments on the presentation.