My nominations for the 2009 Edublog Awards are:

Best individual blog – Jay Cross – Informal Learning Blog - Jay is always probing the leading edge of the learning and development field, and posts almost every day.

Best individual tweeter – Harold Jarche - I’ve been following fellow Canadian Harold Jarche since getting on Twitter, and he shows up in my Twitter stream with useful tweets more often than anyone else.

Best group blog – O’Reilly Radar - A smart group of people who produce lots of insights about the world of learning technologies.

Best new blog – Nick Jones - Nick start this blog just over a year ago. His posts are funny, insightful, and frequent. What more can you ask of a blogger?

Best resource sharing blog – Mashable - If you want to keep up with the latest in learning technologies, you need to check this blog every day.

Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet based discussion – #lrnchat - Organized chaos on Thursday evenings from 8:30-10:00pm ET.

Best educational tech support blog – ReadWriteWeb - A must read for followers of educational technology and the Internet.

Best elearning / corporate education blog – Janet Clarey – OK, I know I work with her, but she’s still the best. Irreverent, funny and in your face makes for an unusual corporate blogger…Just sayin’.

Best educational wiki – Wikimopedia – This compliation of resources on mobile learning is very useful.

Best educational use of a social networking service – LearnTrends Ning site – the international, around the world events organized by LearnTrends will make you lose sleep.

Best educational use of a virtual world – School of Nursing, University of Kansas - a slick site for training nurses.

Lifetime achievement – Stephen Downes and OLDaily – the hardest working educational blogger out there. I know he’s cranky at times, but he cares passionately about what he is doing. He’s also been at it for a long long time – almost a lifetime.

There you have it. I look forward to the announcement of winners on Dec. 18.

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Nick Jones summarizes the differences between two conferences on mobile projects – one in Orlando and one in Cannes. His brief analysis of the attitudes of Europeans versus Americans in regards to innovation is fascinating. He says, “Europeans tend towards interminable analysis before action…Americans lean towards action before analysis.”

But this paragraph at the end caught my eye:

While I’m on the subject of undemonstrative Brits, Reuters reports a survey from T-Mobile showing the rise of the British metrotextual. Apparently 22 percent of British men are signing SMSs to male friends with a kiss (x). Some of my colleagues think this is positive indication that the Brits are getting in touch with their feminine side and maybe soon grown British men will actually embrace male friends in public as the French and Italians do. I think it’s a sign of serious degeneration of British moral fibre.

Greetings and endings in person or in e-mails are pretty interesting. In Canada, the habit in meeting others you know well is to kiss one cheek of the woman and shake hands with the man. For some gay men I know well, I kiss them on both cheeks on meeting, because that is what the local gay community does with each other, and I want to show solidarity. For friends from France I kiss on each cheek twice or three times, depending on what their local practice is. On email, I sometimes pause over whether I end with “Regards”, “Best Regards”, “Warm Regards” or nothing (for example, with close colleagues).  (I expect that someone will write a doctoral disseration on this soon).

What do you do? (GW)

European Mobile Projects and British Metrotextuals | Gartner Blog Network | Nick Jones | 6 November 2009

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