Snap Preview Facility

A WordPress feature which is enabled by default is the preview of the destination of links, which is displayed when you move the mouse over hyperlink. This feature, which is illustrated in the screen shot, is provided by Snap.

That’s cool, I thought when I first came across this. And I still find it useful: I get a feel for the destination of a link before clicking and waiting for the page to be retrieved. However a couple of people have commented on this blog that they don’t like Snap. And on 22 February 2007 the Guardian’s Online supplement featured an article entitled Is Snap Preview the most hated Web 2.0 function ever? The following week the letters page contained several letters in agreement with this sentiment, with just one, from the director of Snap, which sought to make a case for Snap.

I’ve argued previously about the benefits of giving users options to choose their preferred settings, rather than the the service provider making the choice on behalf of the user community. So how should I resolve this dilemma? It does seem to me that the Snap facility does allow the user to select various configuration options (the time before the popup display occurs, its size; etc.). In addition Snap can easily be disabled by clicking on the clearly marked Disable option. So users do have choice. But if I were to disable this feature on the blog (as I am able to do) wouldn’t I be removing choice from the users?

What should I do? Do I respond to the loudest voice? Or the largest numbers (and maybe persecute a minority)? Is there a fair and equitable solution?

Technorati Tags: snap

Scribd – Doing For Documents What Slideshare Does For Presentations

As I’ve recently described, a couple of months ago I uploaded PDFs of a few of my papers to Slideshare, and wondered whether there was a business opportunity for Slideshare in extending its remit from providing a repository of slideshows to include documents in general.

Well last week I came across Scribd – a Web 2.0 service which provides this functionality, describing itself as “YouTube for documents”. I registered for the service (although, strangely, you don’t need to be registered to upload documents) and uploaded several of my papers. And I have to admit that I’m very impressed with the service. I could upload my papers in several formats (including MS Word, PDF, MS PowerPoint and MS Excel) and, when I uploaded an MS Word document, alternative formats were created, including PDF, HTML, plain text and even an MP3 file which provided a computer-generated sound file for the paper! As well as the accessibility benefits which this may provide, being able to download various formats means that the service cannot be accusing of ‘fake sharing’ – a term coined on the lessig blog and discussed on the O’Reilly Radar and eFoundations blogs.

The interface seemed very usable; as well as allowing the paper to be viewed in a variety of formats Scribd, as seems to be the norm for these type of services, allows resources to be bookmarked (‘favourited’ seems to be the word used to describe this), usage statistics are provided and, as with Slideshare, the resource can be embedded in Web pages.

Has Scribd raised the bar in users’ expectations for digital repositories? In some respects, I feel it has. However there are concerns which need to be recognised:

• Poor quality resources which are hosted: there is no guarantee of the quality of the resources which are hosted on Scribd. And there are copyrighted publications (including those from O’Reilly) which have already been uploaded.
• Sustainability of the service: As will all of these type of services, there is the question as to whether such services are sustainable. Techcrunch reported on 6 March 2007 that the service “is coming out of private beta this morning with a fresh Angel investment of $300K on top of their original Y Combinator nest egg of $12,000.“This may keep the service running for a short time, but will it be around in the medium to long term? And what will happen if copyright holders, such as O’Reilly, take the service to court for their misuse of their copyrighted resources (as Viacomm have recently done to YouTube).
• Lack of a interoperable resource discovery architecture: The approach taken by Scribd is not interoperable with the approach being taken by the JISC development community, which is looking to support the development of distributed interoperable digital repository services which make use of OAI-PMH.

So perhaps Scribd might be felt to have no relevance to those involved in digital repository development work. I, however, feel that it would be a mistake to dismiss Scribd. We can’t guarantee that the service would have a role to play in the long term, but the approaches it has taken are worth exploring. Indeed, as I commented on some time ago in a posting about the accessibility of PDF resources in digital repositories) I feel that we should be exploring ways of improving the accessibility of repository services, and it is interesting that this commercial service, rather than one developed with the academic community, is taking a leading role in providing MP3 versions of papers in the repository.

And rather than just trying out Scribd to see what features might be worth implementing in our own repository services, is there an argument for making a deal with Scribd to host our scholarly resources in a managed fashion?

Technorati Tags: scribd

Slideshare Repository and PDFs

I recently discovered that the Slideshare service (a repository service for slides in PowerPoint or Open Office formats) also allows PDF files to be uploaded. This makes sense as PDFs can be used as a presentation format for slide shows. I then wondered whether Slideshare could be used as a repository for papers in PDF format. So I uploaded a PDF version of a paper on Contextual Web Accessibility – Maximizing the Benefit of Accessibility Guidelines (a paper presented at the W4A workshop in Edinburgh in May 2006). As can be seen, the PDF file has been successfully uploaded to the service (with over 200 views since the document was uploaded).

Why am I doing this? If you access the resource you will discover that the text is too small to read unless you zoom in, and if you do this, you will have only a small screen area to read the paper. The file may be inaccessible (a Flash interface to a PDF file) , an issue discussed recently, and the PDF file is not easily printed, downloaded or reused (as Andy Powell commented a while ago, Slideshare is an example of ‘fake sharing’).

However such reservations are based on Slideshare in its current form. If the company felt there was a business case for hosting papers in PDF format, it would surely not be too difficult to provide a more appropriate user interface, and perhaps also providing access to printing and downloading services.

And even if Slideshare felt this was an inappropriate use of their service (and they could, of course, ban papers in PDF format for being hosted by the service) there are still a number of interesting issues which evaluating the service in this way can help address:

• ease of uploading
• rapid prototyping
• architecture (URIs, APIs, …)
• additional functionality
• the pros and cons of allowing only quality publications to be uploaded

But since I first drafted this post, there have been further developments in this area – which I’ll address shortly.

Technorati Tags: slideshare

HTML Email – Views From The Grizzled Techies And Evil Marketeers

“One of our web officers has been asking about whether there’s any good, reasonably priced training in creating HTML mails. If anyone has any experience with this, would you let me know?“

That message, sent recently to the web-support JISCMail list seemed a reasonable request for information. So I was surprised to see responses saying “I can give you a complete course right now. Don’t do it“, “If people learn to write they don’t need HTML to spice their text” and “the people that want it are the very last people that should be allowed to have it. To me, the reception of HTML email from an organisation is a great big hint that I never ever want to deal with that organisation.“

Well, there are some unequivocal positions! And look at that last comments: “the people that want it are the very last people that should be allowed to have it.” What happened to having a user-focussed approach to Web development?

Fortunately there were other responses to the debate which took a more holistic view: “Don’t just say ‘No’, say ‘Let US do it’, or at least ‘Let us get involved’. Take control if possible. Otherwise they’ll just do it anyway, and quite possibly do it (very) badly.“

The debate seemed to polarise the “grizzled techies” and the “evil marketing managers”. One of the latter gave his reasons for making use of HTML in email:

As the resident evil marketing manager on the list I’ve tried to restrain myself but can’t hold back any longer…

We always use HTML based e-mail for our marketing (we send multipart e-mails with a text version so that most users should see something on their screen). All our e-mail marketing is opt-in and we give an unsubscribe link on every message sent, partly because that’s the law, but mainly because it’s polite – we’re happy that our unsubscribe rate is reasonably low. We developed a set of corporate templates which were thoroughly tested with Outlook, Outlook express, Hotmail, Gmail, Mac mail, et al (if you think getting HTML to render in a variety of browsers is fun wait until you start developing HTML e-mail!). Every message we send is sent to test accounts using a variety of e-mail services before we send in bulk.

It does strike me that there are two polarised communities. Coincidentally around the time this discussion was taking place I attended the Aoc Nilta conference [note Web site no longer available - 12 Jan 2009], at which, as described in a posting by Scott Wilson, personalisation was one of the key themes of the conference (and, as described recently by the BBC, is also on the Government’s agenda).

My view? I’m on the side of providing flexibility for the user community – and if the marketing community are the ones who try to respond to the users’ needs, then we should be working more closely with that group, rather than the dated technical views of the grizzled techies!

Further Comments On JISC 2007 Conference

I recently mentioned that the highlight of the JISC Conference 2007 for me (and, it would seem, many other participants) was the final plenary talk on BBC 2.0.

The organisers of the conference should be pleased with the success of this talk, and also with the organisation of the event itself. No doubt the organisers will receive detailed comments when they analyse the conference evaluation forms. However at events link this, which will expect to attract participants who are IT literate and many of whom will be users of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, it will often be possible to obtain more immediate feedback by using various search tools to see what people have been saying about the conference.

I have recently used the following searches to find comments about the conference:

• Technorati search for “jisc conference“
• Technorati search for postings which link to the URL http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2007/03/ (and below).
• Google Blog Search for postings which link to the URL http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2007/03/event_conf_0307.aspx

What strikes me for the blog posts? There are examples of further confirmations of the success of the talk on BBC 2.0:

“Finally the inspirational talk of the day was given by Tom Loosemore from the BBC. He runs their whole online operation by the sound of it and mercifully sounds like he really has his head screwed on. ” (Sam’s Work Blog).

“Tom’s principles [about BBC 2.0] were very much in the spirit of Web 2.0 and just the kinds of things that Brian Kelly and others have been banging on about for ages, but it was nice to hear the same messages coming from outside the community.” (E-foundations blog – thanks Andy).

The conference organisers will be pleased with comments on the role that the conference plays in providing networking opportunities:

“an excellent opportunity for networking and meeting up with old friends” (E-foundations blog)

although the organisers may wish to reflect on comments about the lunch:

“Lunch was the worst part of the day. As a non mushroom eating vegetarian, and a very hungry one by lunchtime, I was disappointed to see both veggie options contained mushrooms. I ended up with a plate of potato salad and wild rice, not very nourishing.” (Vashti’s Blog)

and workshop facilitators should find it useful to get feedback on their sessions:

“I went to an hour long session about the JISC e-Framework, SOA and Enterprise Architecture in the morning.  I have to say that I was somewhat disappointed by the lack of any mention of Web 2.0.  Err… hello!.” (E-foundations blog).

“The session was supposed to be a workshop and I thought they might just do a real demo to show how it works… but no this is another death-by-powerpoint moment.” (Sam’s Work Blog).

Of course, as well as reading such comments and reflecting on them,  there is also the opportunity to respond to such comments for those blogs which allow comments to be made, and engaging in discussion and debate.

Blog Policies

I was interested to see that the Blog Policy for this blog (and the rationale behind it and how it can be applied elsewhere) has been picked up and adopted by the Blogging@UoD blog (“A Blog on blogging in Higher & Further Education from the University of Derby”).

I would expect to see further developments in this, as universities, libraries, etc. begin to make greater use of blogs to support their activities. It would be interesting, therefore, to see how such policies shape up, and to observe patterns in their approaches.

Feel free, therefore, to include links to policies you come across or have developed, as comments to this posting.

In addition, I’d suggest that the tag “blog-policies” is used to tag postings on this subject, to enable the postings to be found more easily in search engines such as Technorati (I notice, incidentally, that Technorati currently finds 43 postings using this tag).

Technorati Tags: blog-policies

Being Informed Of New Comments

When a new comment is made on this blog I receive an email alert. And details of the last 5 comments are included in the sidebar widget. But how can readers of this blog find out about new comments made to postings of particular interest, especially if they miss the information in the sidebar (which can happen if several comments are made in quick succession, if they don’t visit the blog site regularly or, indeed, if they use an RSS reader, email delivery of postings, etc.

This occurred to me after receiving a comment on the FireFox – The Researchers Favourite Application? posting from Peter Miller, in which he mentioned that Mike Kaply, the Firefox Operator guy, is blogging on enterprise deployment. There has been a fair amount of interest in this topic (indeed the post is in the list of top postings in this blog) so it would be unfortunate if people missed this useful link on developments in this area.

WordPress does provide an RSS feed for new comments. Perhaps I should provide a link to the feed in the sidebar. But, as has been discussed previously, many users don’t know what to do with RSS feeds, so should I provide a link to an email delivery of RSS feeds? But won’t this be confusing – what will receiving notification of a comment mean without the context? Or do they applications provide information about the context? And do RSS readers solve this in any case, so there’s no need for me to make any changes (and to add more clutter to the sidebar)?

What do you think?

Sudden Jump In Technorati Rating

I noticed recently that this blog had jumped up in the Technorati ranking, from about 110,00 to 80,535. This was due to n increase in the numbers of links to the blog and blogs linking to this blog, as illustrated in the graph (taken from the Blotter application I posted about recently).

What was responsible for this sudden rise? Had I posted an article which caused a flurry of interesting across the blogging community, I wondered? Alas no – further investigation revealed that a blog hosted by the LibraryThing service had picked up on a post I made about LibraryThing and that this blog was being replicated using several domains (http://hu.librarything.com/buzz.php, http://cym.librarything.com/buzz.php, http://fi.librarything.com/buzz.php, etc.).  These domains provide access to the LibrayThing service in different countries (and in appropriate languages)  but their blog entry is simply replicated across the Web sites.

I think this is further evidence of the limitations of blog statistics.  But the worrying aspect is how easy it would appear to be to artificially inflate one’s Technorati rating by replication of links from multiple blogs.  I don’t feel that LibraryThing have acted unethically – but, sadly, others will.

BBC 2.0

On Tuesday 13 March 2007 I attended the JISC Conference 2007. As always, this is a valuable opportunity to meet people from the sector and catch up with gossip, developments, etc. There are also a number of plenary talks and workshop session to attend as well :-)

A great development this year was the provision of the speakers slides and a commentary on the sessions, which was provided shortly after the conference had closed. Many thanks to the organisers for doing this. As these materials are available online (from the link given above) I will avoid duplicating this work. Instead I will mention the highlight of the conference for me – the talk on “BBC 2.0″ by Tom Loosemore, project director of BBC 2.0.

Tom described a review of the BBC’s involvement in the provision of Web sites which was initiated in 2004. As a result of this work, the BBC had identified 15 key principles which underpin their approach to the provision of Web services. And with the widespread acceptance of the “Web 2.0″ phrase, this enabled them to coin the “BBC 2.0″ term to describe their lightweight user-focussed approach to Web development.

The 15 key principles are summarised below:

1. Build Web products that meet users needs, is the first principle.
2. The best Web sites do one thing really, really well. For example, the BBC news site attracts 5.5m users per week and answers the question – what’s going on right now.
3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves… link to other high-quality sites yourselves. A good example of this is the John Peel Day Web site, which brings together an enormous number of concerts and festivals run in the late DJ’s memory. Interestingly the BBC make use of the Flickr photographic sharing Web site to enable photos taken by music lovers at these events to be uploaded to the Flickr website and tagged with the keyword ‘John Peel’. The Flickr community can then chose their favourite photographs, which can help the BBC to chose photographs to be uploaded to the BBC Web site from this short list.
4. Fall forward fast… make many small bets. By this Tom means making small developments and testing them to identify successes. An example which was given was the Catalogue site (but it should be noted that the success of this site ironically causes performance problems and the site is not currently available!)
5. Treat the entire Web as a creative canvas. The best example of this is an ABC programme which spent three times more on sites away from its own ‘Lost’ site than it did on the ‘Lost’ site itself, including ‘Lostpedia’, and the commissioning of a book which was available on Amazon. Note I use the term ‘blended Web sites’ to describe this approach (based on the ‘blended learning’ phrase) and I recently coined the phrase ‘blended blogging’ to refer to online and offline relationship between this blog and use of the content in my talks.
6. The web is a conversation… join in. Adopt a relaxed conversational tone (rather than telling people). Admit your mistakes.
7. Any Web site is only as good as its worst page. Rigorous processes are needed in developing and editing websites.
8. Make sure all content can be linked to forever. Linking is what is key to the Web.
9. Remember your granny won’t ever use ‘Second life’. If you focus only on early adopters then you’re missing many potential users; too much on everyone and you will lose the urge to develop web sites and cutting edge services.
10. Maximise routes to content. Develop as many aggregations as possible reflecting as many people, places topics, channels, networks and time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high on Google. BBC sites do this extremely well.
11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one size fits all… Architecture should reflect interaction.
12. Accessibility is not an optional extra. The www.traintimes.org.uk Web site, for example, is the result of a passion on the part of the developer to ensure that everyone could use the Web site.
13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes. YouTube is an excellent example of this.
14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them… Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale.
15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent. Respect your users’ data.

I’ve heard many people saying how useful they thought the talk was. For me it was great to hear that an organisation like the BBC (with its expertise in Web site development and large budgets) makes use of third party services like Flickr and has moved away form developing services such as bulletin boards. This has been a theme of several of my recent postings – so I was pleased to hear that this view seems to be mainstream thinking within the BBC.

Technorati Tags: bbc2.0

I’m A Dedicated Follower Of Fashion

Around Christmas time, I think it was, I was talking to my colleague Paul Walk (in The Star, probably Bath’s finest pub) about ways in which we can communicate effectively complex ideas. We discussed the JISC e-Framework strategy in the context of the animated cartoon which seeks to explain the Service Oriented Approach (Feb 2007).

We then discussed aspects of Web 2.0 – and suddenly the Kinks’ song “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion” came to mind. How do you explain the concept of social networks and services which become better as the numbers of users grows? “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion” sums that up nicely, I thought.

However last week I noticed that on the programme for the UCISA Management Conference that Gill Ferrell, JISC infoNet, is giving a talk with the title “Are you a Dedicated Follower of Fashion? (Designing technology rich learning spaces for the future). Damm, beaten in coining of this analogy, I initially thought. But no, on reflection I realised that now I really am a dedicated follower of fashion (oh yes I am!), whereas Gill is clearly the leader of the gang (she is).

Now what other songs can help communicate aspects of Web 2.0? “I am the eggman they are the eggmen I am the walrus Goo goo g’ joob” struck me as providing an interesting biological mashup, with perhaps some character encoding problems at the end. But I’m sure you can do better than this!

IT Services Reinventing Themselves

I gave a talk on IT Services: Help Or Hindrance? at the UCISA Management Conference 2006 held in Blackpool on 8-10^th March 2006. The UCISA Management Conference is aimed at senior managers in IT Service departments (and also attracts those involved in related support service departments, including the Library). I was very pleased to be asked to speak at such a high profile conference, which attracted over 300 participants. The conference was also highly successful; as Owen Stephens summarised in his Overdue Ideas blog:

How often do you leave a conference feeling inspired, and then end up getting dragged back into the daily grind?

I think that this year the UCISA conference has challenged me to make some changes. So – I want to go back and do at least one thing that has been mentioned during the last 3 days. It could be changing the way I engage with students, (Stephen Heppell), having an evening meal with my colleagues (Tim Smit), developing partnerships with the community (Michael Ahern and Craig Hickson), or by working with the students rather than against them (Brian Kelly), or something else that has been inspired by one of the speakers.

So – a challenge for me to go back and do something differently. And a challenge for all UCISA delegates (and others reading this) – change something about the way you work, or deliver a service. If you want, leave a comment to say what it is.

At the JISC Conference 2007 which I attended earlier this week I had the opportunity to talk with a number of the UCISA staff, and was able to obtain a summary of the feedback from last year’s UCISA conference. I was very pleased to discover that my talk received a rating of 3.2 for the content and 3.4 for the presentation (with a rating of 4 for excellent). The talk received the third highest rating (and I hope I’m note infringing anyone’s privacy by reporting that Tim Smit received the highest rating, scoring a perfect 4 for the average for his presentation on Creating Dreams).

It was particularly pleasing that my talk received such high ratings as, as indicated by the title of “IT Services: Help Or Hindrance?“, I was suggesting that the traditional approaches taken by IT Services to the provision and support of IT may no longer be applicable in a Web 2.0 environment. The feedback indicated that, rather than IT Service managers acting like turkeys voting for Christmas, they are, in fact, aware of the need to reinvent themselves. This realisation struck me after being invited to give a follow-up presentation to IT Service managers in universities in the East Midlands back in November. It struck me that that I didn’t really need to labour the point of the need for change; rather, the participants were rather more interested in how IT Services should go about implementing change.

I’m not the only person thinking along these lines. Yesterday Mark Sammons, a Senior Computing Officer at the University of Edinburgh (and contributor to this blog) published a posting on IT Services 2.0 on his blog. Mark predicted that “ In 5 years time, IT Services will be almost completely unrecognisable to how they are now.” Rather than feeling threatened by such changes, Mark is very optimistic about the future: “I see a great opportunity with this new world, this “IT Services 2.0″.

I’m pleased that Mark has coined the term “IT Services 2.0″ to refer to a modernisation of IT Services to reflect the changing environment. And I heartily support his vision for change:

The real challenge therefore, will be for IT Services to adapt, to provide services to help end users collaborate or communicate and help each other, and to offer more value to the organisation. Of course, there will be casualties such as support staff who can’t learn to develop new services will be increasingly marginalised, will be increasingly redundant, but in many ways, it is exciting – the chance to move from an environment of being reactive to providing increasingly rich new services is much more interesting (to me, at least).

I’m pleased to find increasing evidence that IT Services are adapting rapidly to a Web 2.0 environment. But where does that leave the Library? The term “Library 2.0″ has already been claimed to refer to use of Web 2.0 technologies within a library context, so we may have to coin the more clumsy phrase “Library Services 2.0″ to describe the re-invention of the Library. But are Library Services 2.0 to be found or are they behind IT Services 2.0? Or, on the other hand, is this term redundant as the Library has always emphasised the importance of the user, and all that is need is minor refocussing?

Talk on Deployment Strategies For Web 2.0

Background

On Monday 12 March 2007 I gave a seminar on Deployment Strategies For Web 2.0 at the University of Nottingham, following an invitation from Stephen Pinfield, Deputy Chief Information Officer at the University I received the invitation from Stephen following a similar presentation (entitled Web 2.0: How Should IT Services and the Library Respond?) I gave in November to senior managers in library and IT service department at East Midlands Universities.

The aim of this presentation was to engage with a wider range of staff responsible for the delivery of services in support service departments. About 100 people signed up for the seminar, which included staff from several of the local universities.

I was particularly pleased when I arrived at the University to discover that the talk was being videoed to China! Apparently the University of Nottingham Ningbo Web site. So a video link was set up to enable IT support staff at the Ningbo campus to attend the seminar.

The Talk

The talk gave an introduction to a variety of aspects of Web 2.0, with a particular emphasis of its applications within a higher education context. A new development to this talk was the addition of links to relevant postings published in this blog. This aims to provide access to additional reading materials, but, more importantly I would argue, access to comments about the posting and the ability to engage in those discussions. In particular I updated one of my slides which suggested that encouraging take-up of the FireFox and various FireFox plugins can provide a simple means of engaging with various Web 2.0 services. Following the comments made by Mark Sammons and Phil Wilson to my posting on FireFox – The Researchers Favourite Application I now describe the difficulties in managing FireFox across a large organisation and invited the participants at the seminar to engage with the issues made in the comments.

Another new aspect of the talk was in extending the discussion on strategies for deployment of Web 2.0 technologies within an organisation. A set of new slides suggest the need to develop a risk assessment and risk management approach to using Web 2.0, with the advice that this approach should also be applied to defending the status quo (there are risks associated with doing nothing) and in sticking with the traditional approach of use of licensed software from well-established software vendors (we have seen company takeovers which can affect published roadmaps and, of course, companies may also go out-of-business).

Reflections

In my talk I argued that some of the traditional assumptions that made have been made are no longer necessarily true. In particular I suggested that in a Web 2.0 context, we no longer need to own the applications which are used to provide services to our user communities. I summarised this view by suggesting that “Ideology is dead; pragmatism rules“. Rob Kirkwood, a former colleague of mine at Loughborough University, responded by suggesting that “Ideology may not be dead, but a greater emphasis need to be placed on pragmatic approaches to the provision of IT services” – a less snappy conclusion, but one which is more accurate, I would feel.

The other interesting aspect to this talk was the video-conferencing link to China. I was very pleased that this worked so well ()and one aspect that I introduced shortly before that talk started was use of a Gabbly chat facility to allow that participants in China to have a mechanism for providing comments and feedback). It helped that the opening slide for my presentation explicitly stated that I granted permission for my presentation to be broadcast, as illustrated (and can be seen from the slides which are available on Slideshare). It would have been unfortunate if I had not given permission for my talk to be made available to a remote audience (which I would legally be allowed to do) or for the talk to be recorded (which I would have been happy with, although, in this case, the talk was not recorded).

We are likely to see much greater take-up of communications technologies to allow users at various locations to participate in meetings, seminars, etc. so there will be a need to address the technical issues and also, and more importantly, I feel, the non-technical issues associated with maximising the benefits to a distributed audience. UKOLN has published a briefing document on “Guidelines For Exploiting WiFi Networks At Events” which covers some of these higher-level issues. One additional area that should be added to this document, based on my experiences at Nottingham, are ways of engaging effectively with both the local and remote audiences: at the start of my talk I mentioned that remote audience and received feedback from them (using Gabbly) on who they were and what they hoped to get from the session); however at the end of the talk, I moved nearer to the audience for the questions and discussions session, forgetting (until I was reminded by the AV technicians) that the remote audience then couldn’t see anything and couldn’t hear the questions and my responses.

Feedback

I would welcome feedback from participants at the seminar on any of the issues raised during the talk, or more general issues related to deployment strategies for Web 2.0, engagement with remote audiences, etc.

Benefits Of Uploading Your Image To Technorati

How do you ensure that your blog stands out in a page of search results? A well-established way of doing this is to associate an image with your Web site. For a blog the image could be a photograph of the blog author or a relevant icon.

This struck me whilst using Technorati. I noticed how links to my blog from bloggers who have added a photograph when they registered with Technorati stood out from the crowd. In the example shown the small image of the author of the poster on the RIN Team blog and Sam Ruby drawn attention to their comments.

There may be reasons why bloggers may not want to upload a photograph of themselves when they register in Technorati (and related services) – but uploading some form of image (a caricature or an image related to the purpose of the blog, perhaps) might provide dividends. This could also help the end user in remembering blog authors whom they have previously found helpful.

Wikipedia – Can We Provide Open Access For Training Materials?

Melissa Knighton, who works on the Staff Development Unit at the University of Leeds, and I took part in a workshop at ITCP held in Trieste a couple of years ago. So I was interested to rediscover her Elgg blog recently. Her posting on Wikipedia – a resource for learning and teaching? described a staff development course on the role of Wikipedia in learning and teaching. Further exploration of the Elgg blog service at the University of Leeds led me to a posting on Wikipedia: What the critics say by Angela Newton, the Information Literacy Team Leader in the Library at the University of Leeds. Angela’s posting summarises Wikipedia’s strengths and weaknesses – issues which, I’m sure, will be addressed more fully in the staff development course.

But how much time and effort will be spent in duplicating the development of similar materials across the library and information sector? The Library sector, in particular, should appreciate the benefits to be gained by providing open access to resource, and such benefits need not be restricted to research publications – Creative Commons licences can also be used with document and training materials. This is an argument I made in a paper on Let’s Free IT Support Materials! which I presented at the EUNIS 2005 conference.

Which will be the first Library to provide a Creative Commons licence for its documentation and training materials? And have a Creative Commons logo on slides used in training courses? Or is this already happening?

Does Web 2.0 Herald The End Of In-House Development And Provision Of IT Services?

A while ago I submitted a proposal for a talk entitled “Does Web 2.0 Herald The End Of In-House Development And Provision Of IT Services?” to The Shock of the Old 2007: Shock of the Social conference. The proposal was accepted, but by the time I had received confirmation, other commitments had cropped up. Fortunately this topic is of interest to my colleague Paul Walk and, as he has described in his blog, Paul is very keen to receive input from readers of his blog about his talk.

This is an approach I’ve adopted recently, as I described in a posting on Web 2.0: What Can It Offer the Research Community. On that occasion, I received some useful examples of use of Web 2.0 technologies in a research context. And yesterday when I gave the presentation I encouraged the participants to visit the posting and, if they felt motivated, to engage in discussions and debate themselves. I coined the term ‘blended blogging‘ to describe the process of using a blog to inform the production of slides for a presentation and to allow the blog post to provide a channel for discussions afterwards.

Returning to Paul’s presentation at the “Shock of the Old 2007: Shock of the Social” conference, the title of the talk is intentionally controversial, intended to challenge conventional thinking regarding software development. This was an issue I raised recently with my posting on Dapper – Web Mashup Development For All?

Clearly, Web 2.0 won’t herald the end of in-house software development. But to what extent does it challenge the norms of software development? At one stage there might may have been a belief in some quarters (perhaps within further education colleges, for example) that institutions didn’t have the expertise or resources to engage in software development, and needed to purchase commercial off-the-shelf software. However many institutions are now reaping the benefits which development using open source software within an open source community environment can provide.

But where do Web 2.0 services fit in with this approach? And with a model of ‘software as a service’ does it really matter how the software was produced? Will making use of open source software be the equivalent of purchasing electricity from green providers – one might feel good about this, but it is just one of the factors to consider when seeking a solution for one’s needs?

And what about the provision of IT services? Do institutions need to do this? And could we see the debates that one still encounters within IT services over whether, for example, to migrate email from an open source environment to a Microsoft platform (or vice versa) being made redundant by institutions simply renting email services from a company which gains benefits of scale (perhaps Google, for example)? Or, as Slideshare have done, purchase storage capacity from Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service)?

Quite clearly there are many issues which need to be addressed. But rather than getting bogged down in the details, what are the merits of such an approach? And what are the major concerns?

Talk On Web 2.0 At PPARC

Earlier today I gave a talk on “Web 2.0: What Can It Offer The Research Community?” at PPARC. I mentioned the concept of ‘blended blogging’ – and would like to invite any of the participants at the talk to give their feedback. Did I convince you of the potential benefits of Web 2.0? What are the main barriers you foresee? And how do you think you may try to address such barriers?

Note that details of my presentations are provided in an RSS feed, which includes location details. You can view a dynamic map of talks I’ve given this year and future presentations. As I mentioned during my talk today, the location data I have is not always sufficiently accurate. I notice that that was true for today’s talk, as you can see (or am I going off the rails?)

10,000 For 100 And Counting

Statistics For The Blog

This blog was launched on 1^st November 2006 and today, 18 weeks later, the blog has received its 10,000 visitors and this is the 100^th posting. The Akismet spam filter has caught over 1,300 spam comments, although I’d estimate that about 20-30 of these have been legitimate comments (if there had been about 300 spam comments fewer there would have been a nice symmetry to these figures!)

The Spam Issue

The blog has also received 382 comments. I’ve very pleased with this figure, as it indicates that the blog is succeeded in its aim in actively engaging with the community. This policy has been to allow unmoderated comments for all postings. This has worked well, allowing people to see their comments immediately, and others to read them and perhaps respond even when I’m not around to manage the blog (on a handful of occasions legitimate comments have been held by Akismet and I’ve had to manually authorise them).

It is clear from these figures that the blog would not be functioning as a forum for discussion without the Akismet filter – the comments area would be full of spam comments giving links to Web sites selling Viagra or providing pornography or, alternatively, I’d be spending significant time and effort in filtering the spam.

Akismet is free for personal use and there are special rates for educational institutions and non-profit making organisations.

In light of my experiences I would suggest that some mechanism will be needed in order to avoid spam. This will be of particular importance if a purpose of the blog is to encourage feedback.

Something I will have to consider is what to do if the Akismet filter fails (unlikely, I hope) or WordPress.com changes their licensing conditions for use of the filter (I have no reason to suspect this will happen, but it is a possibility). I may also need to have some contingency plans for when I am away on holiday and not in a position to manage the blogs (e.g. if legitimate comments are caught in the spam filter).

RSS Statistics

I should note that the figures given above relate only to visits to this blog Web site. A significant number of readers of this blog appear to use an RSS reader, I’m pleased to say (in light of previous discussions on the importance of RSS!) Interestingly, as can be seen from the graph, it would appear that RSS readers were discovered on 19 February as prior to that date there were only a handful of accesses to the RSS feed, but since then there appear to be over 200 accesses following every new post.

And The Rest

As has been described previously this blog has been registered with the MyBlogLog service.

The free service is being used, which provides access to a limited set of statistics, which are shown (note statistics for ‘click-thrus’ are note available in the free version).

The figures have shown a consistent pattern for a number of weeks. There seem to be about 50 readers who read new posts over the weekend and around 70 who read new posts during the week.

From these figures can we conclude that MyBlogLog is successful in ensuring that postings are found by members of that community?

JISC TechWatch Report on Web 2.0

A JISC TechWatch report entitled “What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education” (TSW0701) is now available on the JISC Web site. The JISC Web site contains the following information about the report:

This TechWatch report was commissioned to investigate the substance behind the hyperbole surrounding ‘Web 2.0’. It reports on the implications this may have for the UK Higher and Further Education sector, with a special focus on collection and preservation activities within libraries.

The report establishes that Web 2.0 is more than a set of ‘cool’ and new technologies and services, important though some of these are. It has, at its heart, a set of at least six powerful ideas that are changing the way some people interact. Secondly, it is also important to acknowledge that these ideas are not necessarily the preserve of ‘Web 2.0’, but are, in fact, direct or indirect reflections of the power of the network: the strange effects and topologies at the micro and macro level that a billion Internet users produce.

The report argues that by separating out the discussion of Web technologies (ongoing Web development overseen by the W3C), from the more recent applications and services (social software), and attempts to understand the manifestations and adoption of these services (the ‘big ideas’), decision makers will find it easier to understand and act on the strategic implications of ‘Web 2.0’. Indeed, analysing the composition and interplay of these strands provides a useful framework for understanding its significance.

What IS a Web Site? Who Should Manage the Web Site?

What is a Web site for an organisation such as a University? And what is the remit of the body charged with managing the Web site?

I used to think we knew the answers to these questions: a large organisation would have multiple Web presences (organisational, departmental, Intranets, etc.) with a combination of centralised and devolved approaches to managing such resources. And many members of the community would meet up at UKOLN’s annual Institutional Web Management Workshops to learn about ways in which organisations have gone about developing best practices and to hear about some of the latest innovations.

However I’m now beginning to think that this consensus is breaking down. With my involvement in Web 2.0 technologies and engagement with JISC development programmes the emphasis that I see focusses on the Web as a highly interactive, collaborative and distributed environment; members of institutional Web management teams may, however, continue to regard the Web as primarily a delivery mechanism for quality institutional informational resources.

We do, of course, need our institutions to continue to provide such services. But I’m beginning to wonder whether the institutions should rethink their priorities. Back in the mid 1990s in many institutions the University Web server was the responsibility of the IT services department and, initially, control of the hardware and software enabled the department to stake a claim for responsibility for the content (back then, PR and marketing departments didn’t understand Web technologies, and when they became involved initially they provided graphic-intensive and inaccessible Web sites). However over time PR and marketing departments developed a better understanding for Web design principles, resulting in many attractive and accessible institutional Web sites.

However I am concerned that a new conservatism is blighting the institutional Web. And just as the Web was dismissed as a technological toy for the geeks in the early 1990s, there are dangers that same dismissive approach may be taken to Web 2.0.

I see this conservatism manifesting itself in the view of the Web site as a static informational resource, rather than the richly interactive and collaborative environment which was Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the Web.

From this perspective, we might regard the Web as an operating system environment which can be used for a wide range of applications: blogs, wikis, messaging, discussions, e-learning, e-research, oh and information. The informational aspect may then be regarded as the help system for the institutions operating system (click here to find out about the university, the courses it runs, etc.) – all important stuff, but not the area in which the significant development work is likely to happen.

Or, to put such thoughts in a bite-sized chunk “Content isn’t king; rather, communication is king“! Or, to generalise this point, it’s not just about the resource (and all of the processes associated with publishing quality resources and it’s not just about the user (user needs analysis; stakeholder analysis; usability; etc.). These are, clearly, important. However the overlooked aspect is the relationship between the resource and the user; and this relationship can cover a variety of areas (collaborate, alert, entertain, amuse, annoy, etc.) and not just inform (as is assumed in the conventioanl view of the instituitonal Web site).

So after 10 years of PR and marketing departments managing our Web sites maybe it’s time for IT services, the research community and innovative e-learning developers to engage more actively in defining and developing a vision for our institutional Web services.

Is this an approach which others share? And is this a topic which we should be discussing at this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop?

The Blotter Dapper Application

One example of a Dapper application (a ‘Dapplication’) which is available from the Dapper Web site is Blotter. This uses Dapper to scrape the Technorati Web site for statistical information on usage of a blog (and note that the Blotter page describes how this application was developed).

As an example I have embedded the Blotter application in this post. Blotter scrapes the Technnorati service’s results for this blog on a daily basis in order to record trends, as illustrated.

It would appear that over time the image will be updated, to show changes in the numbers of links to this blog and the Technorati ranking. At the time this posting was published, the legend on the graph indicated that the blog has 632 links from 34 sites, and is ranked 115,721. The graph shows that the numbers of links and sites has remained static on Friday and Saturday, but the rating has dropped from around 115,300 to 115,721 over these two days.

To return to a point raised by Peter Miller: isn’t this application ‘stealing’ data from Technorati? I think it’s clear from the image, that acknowledgments are given to the provider of the service. And if this service becomes popular, it could raise the profile of Technorati in new sectors. Indeed as the Yedda quotation says on the Dapper Web site: “Dapper has made it very easy to distribute our content in new and exciting ways. We love Dapper!“.

Technorati Tags: Dapper

Dapper – Web Mashup Development For All?

I’ve never been a fan of the mystique that you sometime find with Web developers, who like to keep the secret art of development within their own closed community and sometimes belittle small scale development work. “Real programmers don’t use Pascal” was their war cry in the 1980s.

I enjoy pointing out to admin staff that when they develop a spreadsheet, that they are developers. And it’s good when the spreadsheet applications makes it easy to do this.

So I was very interested when I discovered Dapper recently. I’ve looked at the video introduction and played with some of the demo applications (“Dapplications”). Magg, the Movie Aggregator, gives good example of what Dapper can do – in this example video clips from a variety of services (Yahoo Video, Google Video, etc.) are integrated into a seamless, attractive looking interface. But hang on a moment, the seamless access to distributed resource was one of the aims of the JISC’s DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource) , which was later rebranded as the JISC Information Environment.

So has the solution arrived? Does Dapper provide the easy-to-use integration environment for the masses? To be honest, I don’t know. So here’s a challenge for blog readers: see who can create the coolest example with the least effort. And, before anyone asks, the prize – the plaudits of your peers. What more could you ask for :-)

Technorati Tags: Dapper

Gabbly – A Simply Chat Facility For Blogs

I’ve previously described how the Meebo plugin can be used to provide a chat facility for blogs. However its use requires installation of the plugin as a sidebar widget and users need to have a browser which support Flash.
An alternative approach would be to make use of a more native Web-based chat facility. One possibly would be Gabbly.

Gabbly’s approach is interesting – it provides a chat facility which is associated with a Web page (or, to be more accurate, with a URI). As an experiment I’ve set up a link which provides a chat facility associated with this posting. Why not try it. I will try and be around this afternoon (Friday 2 March 2007). There are a couple of recent posts which might be worth discussing: the difficulties of managing FireFox across an organisation and a more informal posting which suggested that the Web is now a difficult teenager.

So why not visit the chat facility and give your thoughts.

And let me know if you think a link to a Gabbly chat facility from this blog’s sidebar would be useful. Perhaps this could be achieved with a small image, to make the purpose more obvious (perhaps along the lines illustrated).

Please note, though, that it has been suggested that use of Gabbly (embedded within a Web page rather than the direct link I’ve suggested here)  may have been responsible FireFox crashing on an Apple Macintosh platform – although this has not been confirmed.

The Web: From Childhood to Early Adolescence

We are now seeing the Web developing from its childhood to a, sometimes troublesome, adolescent in our institutions. In its infant years IT service departments took responsibility for helped to nurture and develop the baby (they read the Apache manuals, learnt Perl programming and developed some simple rules so the Web wouldn’t get into too much mischief). And when the Web was old enough to be let out into public the PR and marketing departments took charge, and made sure it was dressed properly before being let out into public.

But all of a sudden the Web has turned into a teenager. It doesn’t want to do as its told. It wants to wear whatever it wants, and not the nice suit and tie we’ve bought for it. Sometimes it swears. And it wants its own identity. “I’m not Web, any more” it tells us “I’m Web 2.0 – and I can do what I want!“

And maybe we’ve been too over-protective. Perhaps we should give it more responsibility, even though this may be painful. And if it want to call itself “Web 2.0″, then that’s OK (even though it will always be Web 1.0 to its parents).

It makes me smile, sometimes, when I remember when I was a similar age. I was into ‘punk’ and annoyed my parents by dressing strangely. So maybe when it says it wants to ‘mashup a YouTube video’ (I think that’s what it says; I don’t really understand – I just know it sounds like something I should ban) this is similar to what we tried to do when we were young.

Now I wonder what it will be like when it reaches its early adulthood? And when did I suddenly become middle-aged? I’ll be voting Conservative next (only joking, I’m New Labour through and through, me.)

Technorati links

FireFox – The Researchers Favourite Application?

Peter Miller recently suggested that “Every academic’s current favourite [FireFox extension] has to be the reference management tool Zotero.” In reply I suggested that “surely every academic’s favourite application must be FireFox?!” Peter and I would be in agreement that a combination of FireFox and a variety of FireFox extensions can provide a powerful platform for the researcher.

“Well that’s pretty uncontroversial” many readers of this blog would probably feel. But is this environment readily available for the researcher and those who support the research community (the librarians and IT support staff to name two groups)? This answer to this, I suspect, is no, not widely across the sector.

There will be understandable reasons for this. Institutional support costs can be reduced by having a small set of supported applications – and this includes not just the technical support in ensuring the applications works correctly but the user support costs in addressing user queries, providing documentation and training, etc.

Institutions will have been through several generations of Web browsers, starting with Mosaic (for the early Web adopters) followed by Netscape, after the Mosaic development team left NCSA and joined the Netscape Corporation. However when Netscape found themselves in a dominant position, they introduced a variety of proprietary extensions to the Web which, whilst being innovative, alienated some of the Web purists. This left Microsoft in the strange position of being able to position themselves, at one stage, as the browser with best support for Web standards. Around this time many institutions made a decision to ‘stick with the devil you know, with the result that Internet Explorer became the supported browser in many institutions.

This was probably a sensible decision at the time, with Netscape at the time being renowned for its flawed support for CSS (which meant that Web developers had to use tables for layout purposes for far longer than they should have done). Even when Netscape rematerialised as the open source Mozilla browser, its initial implementation was also flawed, as the developers themselves admitted. It was only when FireFox became available did we have a robust and reliable open source browser. And, even better, the browser was extensible, through its support for extensions. And even the embedded search box is extensible, allowing users to easily add new search facilities.

So FireFox must surely be provided to support the research community in their activities. But what are the possible barriers to realising this vision:

• Institutions should be browser neutral: I would agree that Web sites should be usable in well-used browsers. However I would also argue that institutions should provide members of the institutions will the best tools to enable them to achieve their tasks, subject to the resource implications in providing such tools. FireFox will provide the rich environment, without any expenditure on licence costs.
• Our admin system/VLE/etc. only works with Internet Explorer: If you have any in-house services which have browser dependencies, you will hopefully have learnt from this experience. In this case, you should be open with your user community and look to explore migration strategies.
• Rolling out IE 7 will overcome the limitations in IE 6: IE 7 has been a long while in coming. It is much better then IE 6 (at last, IE users will have a tabbed interface). However IE 7 is still flawed in its support for standards and, as a platform, it is not as extensible as FireFox. This is understandable: Microsoft are happy to sell organisations an operating system as a platform and won’t want their customers to use a Web browser as a platform. But that’s Microsoft’s problem – and our opportunity, as a user community.
• We’ll have to change our documentation, training courses, etc: Is this as big an issue as it was in the days on mainframe computing?
• Provision of FireFox would not comply with our institutional IT strategy: In which case it seems timely to revisit the assumptions made in your IT strategy.
• There may be complexities in allowing users to install a variety of browser extensions from multiple sources: This may be a legitimate concern. About a year ago I had to reinstall FireFox and various extensions after one extension caused FireFox to refuse to load. However since then, I have had no problems. Do any readers have experiences to share and solutions they would recommend?

It should be noted that I’m not suggesting you should deploy FireFox because it is an open source product. If you (or your organisation) is committed to open source, then you will know this. If, however, you are sceptical or neutral towards open source applications, then you should be willing to listen to my suggestion that you deploy FireFox because,to put it simply, it is the best product.

That’s my case for FireFox. As I’ve explained, I can appreciate the reasons why IE became ubiquitous in the past. But are there any longer legitimate reasons why institutions don’t have a migration strategy to FireFox in place?

Technorati Tags: Firefox