In February, I attended a seminar called “Blogs, podcasts and online syndication” delivered by Dean Owen of BRASS Media through the Alberta Business Link. The Business Link is a not-for-profit business support service provided by the government. They have lots of resources available to entrepreneurs and have a fabulous service called the “Guest Advisor Program”.

I quite like the seminars the Business Link broadcasts through their videoconferencing system. I have attended quite a few of these sessions and find that most of the material is pretty basic, but can be a nice introduction to a wide variety of topics. In fact, their portfolio of offerings has gotten better over the past year. An added incentive is that most of the seminars are free – and you just can’t beat that value!

Sometimes it is difficult to take the time to learn new things when there are a million other things clamouring for your attention. Of course, it is hard to justify going to a course when you aren’t sure if you will actually learn anything – shaking off cynicism can be tough. Keeping in mind Parkinson’s Law, (I’ll paraphrase: ‘work will expand to fill all the time available’) I am trying hard to schedule learning, marketing and exercise commitments into my schedule to ensure that I make time for these important things in my life. A few years ago I decided that I would apply a rule of thumb: if I learnt one new thing per hour from a course or training session then it wasn’t a waste of my time. If I learned two new things in total, the course was a great investment of my time.

But, back to the blogging seminar. . . I learned much more than two things! So – success! In fact, I learned some new words: splogging and flogging. I suppose that I won’t run across these regularly in my writing, but since they explain phenomena in the blogoverse, I thought that I would share them with you:

Splogging: is a term describing blog plagiarists. Sometimes this activity is also called blog scraping. The worst offenders take someone else’s content and re-post it and then earn advertising revenue based on visits to the stolen content. Of course there are degrees of scraping, but basically I have learned that it is naughty blogger behaviour. There are some companies/sites that have automated tools to do this – which expands the problem very quickly.

Flogging: an internet term that describes a fake blog, where a ghostwriter or marketing firm is hired to create content as a marketing tool and misrepresents the voice by pretending to be someone else. See The Consumerist’s article ‘Sony’s PSP blog flog revealed’.

In addition to learning a little bit more about blogging and podcasting from the seminar, I have started to become very interested in the implications of web 2.0 on science teaching, research and commercialization. I think this might become a recurring topic – once I find the time.