Some of the more popular posts include:

• New Helicoverpa thresholds in vegetative soybeans
• Are corn earworm a problem in winter cereals?
• Cereal Aphid Update
• The Beat Sheet is now a blog

We created a wee post at eco2oh also The Beat goes on

Great effort by the Entomolgy crew at DPI, all the best for your future eExtension efforts.

i.e. shows up everywhere, busily pollinating as it goes.

Twitter is an extraordinary free Social Media service that allows use to share short messages (limited to 140 characters) from your computer or by SMS from your mobile phone. The platform allows you to follow or subscribe to messages (called tweets) from other twitter users.

By searching Twitter for keywords in your areas of interested. It might be Integrated Pest Management, Entomology, and Bio-control you can find other Tweeps (a nickname for twitter users) to follow who are interested in the same things.

Before long your network will grow around the globe putting you in touch with people you might never otherwise meet and giving you access to a very rich stream of knowledge. It is also a great way to stay in touch with people you already know.

There are a burgeoning range of 3rd party Twitter applications sprouting up that make it a real power tool. One nice little mashup http://pipes.yahoo.com/mmmeeja/twitterfollowers can be used to create a world map of twitter follwers i.e. people subscribed to your twitter updates.

While it doesn’t capture all your followers, it’s a pretty groovy thing to see 100 of your followers on a map and visualise the global conversation taking place everytime you send a tweet.

011_8.JPG

Originally uploaded by whirledkid

In the future when Agricultural, Natural Resource Management, or Environmental extension will be one discipline. Equally balancing hard and soft science, cultural, social, economic and ecological dimensions.

Small, smart, svelte organisations and innovative individuals will provide Extension services to Governments, Universities, and others wanting to reach their audience.

Extension initiatives will appear in a stream of content that the audience receive from their trusted service provider. An instant “community of practice” will form around this new content, slicing, dicing and adding to the new Extension content using video, voice, real time data from loggers on farms, in streams, embedded in indicator species.

The future is closer than you think.

This week Nielsen reported Twitter (a microblogging application to allows rapid sharing of information) has grown by more than 363% in the last 12 months. Stargazer Perennials reports that setting up blogs and an online store has doubled their income and put them in touch with their market.

The future is here and it is constrained only by your imagination.

Oh and those small, smart, svelte organisations and innovative individuals, they got started in eExtension ahead of the curve. They used free, simple to use Social Media tools to start building their audience in 2008.

A good eExtension Strategy has 3 pillars

• Listening – using social media applications to listen to the content and conversations taking place in your industry/niche/specialty and listening to your audience.
• Sharing – using a integrated mix of social media tools to share rich media with your audience and have them share with you and one another.
• Connecting – using social networks and other web 2.0 properties to build a “communities of practice” around your extension products.

The sharing should almost always 99.9% of the time be based around a blog platform (maybe in some exceptional cases other technologies will be more suitable). The blog content managment system provides a powerful foundation on which other social media properties in your eExtension Strategy can mesh.

A blogs are a wide range of website that have some common features;

• easy to edit and publish
• publish articles in reverse chronological order
• creates a “feed” of content that makes it easy for readers to subscribe to
• Usually allows readers to comment and respond content

Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick have created some fantastic resources for anyone wanting to know more about blogging. Thier Become a Blogger Videos and Become a Blogger Roadmap provide instruction to take a begginer from registering a domain name to building a blog with authority, readership, and rich content.

If you are seroius about developing a world class eExtension Strategy, then you need to learn how to become an authority blogger.  If you are serious about become an authority blogger in your Extension field, then I suggest that you head over to Become a Blogger and sign up for the free roadmap.

I mentioned in the video review above the Gideon and Yaro will soon be releasing premium content (coaching, lessons and other resources) to support beggining bloggers to become authority bloggers. I must disclose that I am an affliate of Gideon and Yaro’s, so if you do decide to purchase thier product I may recieve some renumeration.

As I say in the video at the very least head over to Become a Blogger and sign up for the Become a Blogger Roadmap. Evaluate their premium offer for yourself, however don’t miss out on this really valuable free content.

Since I believe a) that our survival and prosperity depends upon healthy food and fibre and clean air/water/healthy environment, and b) that using eExtension will create and share the knowledge we need to have vibrant Agriculture and a healthy Environment. I have a purpose to learn and share how eExtension can be more effective. For some months now I have been working on a State of eExtension Report, in an effort to document eExtension practice in 2008 and to find some best practices. The results of the research will be published as a free report available to anyone who wants to improve Agriculture or the Environment.

If you would like to updated as the report becomes available, please join our our Early Bird Notification List. You will find the sign up form in the right hand sidebar or on the State of eExtension Report page.

To augment the online research I have been doing in the last couple of months, I have today created an online survey using Google Docs (great and free eExtension tool). Could you please take a couple of minutes to complete the survey (there’s easy 13 multiple choice questions and 1 optional text question) and can you please tell any one you know who working in Agriculture or Environment to do it too. The State of eExtension Report survey can be found here.

Tags: eExtension, State-of-eExtension-Report. Extension, Agriculture, Environment.

Well fret no more!

There is a simple way to start eExtension

Social Bookmarking is a really simple way to share great online Extension content with your target audience, and to find great content others in your speciality/niche/industry have bookmarked.

Before Social Bookmarking if you found web content that was helpful, you could bookmark in your browser (the software you use to access the internet). If you wanted to share that content with others, you could email them or put a link or put the link on your website if you had one and if you could edit it.
Enter Social Bookmarking, literally hundreds of sites offer a social bookmarking service. Which allows you to bookmark great web content as you find it and store it online. That way it doesn’t matter which computer you are on, if you have internet access, you have your bookmarks. You can choose to make bookmarks private, so only you can see them or public so anyone who visits your Social Bookmarking profile or page can see them too

But wait there’s more to Social Bookmarking!

Social Bookmarking services allow users to add tags to bookmarks. Let me give you an example and explain why tagging is useful.

Let’s suppose you visit THINKeEXTENSION and think this site is a handy resource, I might like to come back here. So you bookmark THINKeEXTENSION. Now you probably have dozens of other bookmarks stored on your Social Bookmarking profile or account so to make it easy to find the THINKeEXTENSION bookmark, you might add some tags to it. Some words that describe the content on THINKeEXTENSION. You might tag it with eExtension, eExtension Strategy, Extension Techniques, and Innovative Extension.

That way in the future when you are looking through your bookmarks, you might be thinking what was that site that had an Innovative Extension approach? What was it called? It was about eExtension and eExtension Strategy so you look at your tags and listed under Innovative Extension, eExtension, eExtension Strategy, and Extension Techniques you will find a link to THINKeEXTENSION. and a short description if you have added one.

This ability to use tags is called Folksonomy. Folksonomy allows the broader web community to make online content more meaningful and more useful, it makes the internet “smarter”. It’s a way of adding participator generated meta data, which in turn informs search engines and web users. If you have content online, bookmarking it is one way to increase it’ visibility to search engines.

But wait there’s still more to Social Bookmarking!

So far you can see Social Bookmarking is a pretty handy tool, however we haven’t got to the most powerful functions yet.
Let’s suppose you manage a Horticultural Extension Program that is focussed on Integrated Pest Management. You have now been using Social Bookmarking for some time, and you have bookmarked a boat load of great content (video, photos, articles, websites) that you have bookmarked. If you know what to share this super content with your growers, you can include your Social Bookmarking profle or page in a newsletter, email, or workshop presentation. Now growers can benefit from all your research by browsing through all your bookmarks (the ones you have made public).
Here is the cool thing if you wish you can share just one tag. Or nested tags e.g. Horticulture/Apples/IntegratedPestManagement
Let’s continue with our example and suppose that you create a tag for Integrated Pest Management or IPM and tag all content related to IPM with that tag. On your profile there will be a stream of content tagged IPM that you can share with your growers. Now some of you have been reading this blog for a while might have just got a hint. When I just wrote “stream of content” you might have remembered our recent articles about RSS (Really Simple Syndication), the value of using RSS, and our eExtension Tip #2 on using Google Reader.

Well guess what?
Most Social Bookmarking sites publish an RSS feed of public bookmarks for a particular profile (like yours or mine) or a particular tag like IPM for example. Very cool, so you could show growers how to subscribe to an RSS feed of your all bookmarked content about IPM.
Once your bookmarks are published as an RSS feed, there so many great ways to use and share that data. We won’t delve into this today, but stay tuned to THINKeEXTENSION for more about nifty ways to aggregate, share and slice your web content using RSS feeds. It will literally blow you away when we show you what you can do with free eExtension tools.

What’s stopping you from starting eExtension?

If you have been sitting on the edge for a while, thinking about eExtension but not sure where to get started, today is the day to start. It will take you 5 minutes and you will start building your online asset in the next 10 minutes. There are a wide range of Social Bookmarking out there, here is a list from our resources section listing popular Social Bookmarking applications that would be suitable for eExtension. Today though we will start with just one, Delicious. Delicious is a very popular and powerful Social Bookmarking site.

Your challenge today if you don’t already have a Delicious account or profile is to sign up for one. If you do have one your challenge is to add me (eco2oh) to your Delicious network (that way you can spy on all the tasty eExtension content I bookmark).

Signing up for Delicious.

Signing up for Delicious is an easy 3 step process that is free and takes less than 5 mins. Simply go to https://secure.delicious.com/register and follow the three easy steps. They only need a username, your name and your email, it’s really easy.

Add me to your Delicious Network.

If you have signed up to Delicious they you can add me to your Delicious network, this will mean you will seek all my bookmarks including stacks of eExtension Resources. To add me to your network go to my profile http://delicious.com/eco2oh and click add to my network in the top right hand corner.

Another option would be to add my eExentsion tag feed to your RSS Feed Reader.

In the comments below leave us a message and tell on a scale of 1 to 10 how easy is signing up for Delicious.

I was speaking to a friend of mine on Monday, he works for a government department. It’s not important who or where, but like many government departments, his if very unsure about eExtension. His superiors worry about security, about hackers, about stolen intellectual property, and so it goes on.

Many Extension Workers also feel the same way, what if it requires technical skills, what if it’s expensive, what if landholders don’t use the internet?

Well what if in the next 2 – 3 years the majority of your target audience are all using Social Media? What if after every shed meeting your audience expect to be able to download a recording of the event and download the fact sheets and provide feedback by video? What if the Selection Criteria on your next job application includes a question about eExtension?

Will you be prepared?

However perhaps the most pertinent question is, what if you had knowledge and passion that could improve Agriculture and/or save the Environment, what if eExtension was a really powerful way to share that knowledge and passion?

And what if you did nothing about it?

Video

An Integrated eExtension Strategy has 3 pillars; Listening, Sharing, and Connecting. A clever eExtensionist uses a range of tools under each of the pillars and connects content between tools to create an web of Extension that is easy to access. This post is a good example.

The video is created on Mobatalk (video sharing) which automatically posts a link to the video on Twitter (a micro blogging application that shares short messages to subscribers and publicly) and distributes the video to iTunes (a podcast distribution network and a free multimedia player for your computer).

The concept of Integrated eExtension Strategy is then reinforced by the image below shared from Flickr (a photosharing site with free accounts) and hopefully some readers will share this post via Social Bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Del.ic.ous, or a myriad of others. Once published the post will shared with aggregation services like Friendfeed and Tumblr.

A sound Integrated eExtension Strategy has 3 pillars; Listening, Sharing, Connecting.

If you would like to know more about developing an Integrated eExtension Strategy for your Extension Program subscribe to THINKeEXTENSION. You will find a number of subscription options at this Welcome of the world of eExtension page.

SlideShare allows you to create a free account (you’ll need a username, password and an email address). Once you’ve signed up you can upload your Powerpiont, Keynote, pdf, word document, or excel presentations. When they have been uploaded, your presentations appear in an easy to use, easy to share viewer.

The viewer can be embedded in your website, viewed at SlideShare, or shared on a social network.

Most of us working in Extension have a bagload of powerpoints on CD’s hardrives, flashdrives and in our heads. SlideShare could be an easy way for you to start using an eExtension tool. If you are already using SlideShare, maybe you share some tales about how you’ve shared presentations with landholders, stakeholders, other Extension staff, or the world.

You could upload that latest presentation you did at a field day and email it to growers who weren’t able to attend. You could create a presentation for your Extension network and then embed it on your group wiki. The possibilities are endless. If nothing else you will give some inspiration and some great information amongst the presentations on SlideShare. SlideShare costs nothing to use, it’s easy to sign up, and so simple to get started, so I have a challenge for you.

If you haven’t already take 10 mins sign up to SlideShare and upload a simple presentation. When you’re done leave a link to your presentation in the comments below.

P.S. This blog post was written for Bruce Carey, a Soil Con legend.

Tags: Slideshare, eExentsion, Extension, Presentation, Powerpiont