Have I Got News For You

I’m sure many readers of this blog will be familiar with the Have I Got News For You TV programme. So I’d like to make my contribution. Which is the odd one out for the following: UMIST, AHDS, Lotus and Yahoo!?

For those unfamilar with this BBC programme, the convention is that the first responses are expected to be humourus, before attempting an answer. And note that there isn’t a single answer to the question.

It’s Not New Labour vs Old Labour, It’s Cato And Cicero (typos fixed)

I’ve previously suggested that there’s a need for political realism in the debates over ownership of social networks and the general direction of Web 2.0. And I’ve suggested that Old Labour is dead, and any expectations that the government will start nationalising services is being naive.

Well, I got that wrong didn’t I! However lefties in the US and Canada will probably be disappointed that the Government’s nationalisation of Northern Rock doesn’t herald a return to socialist principles - indeed even the Daily Mail acknowledges that nationalisation “is extremely rare and embarrassing for Labour“.

I think my mistake was in attempting to use political analogies which are still too relevant to many and capable of being reinterpretted in different ways.

So I was really pleased to read Martin Weller’s post on Downes vs Wiley - Cato and Cicero revisited on his Edtechie blog. As Martin describes:

Cato and Cicero both believed passionately in the same higher level goal, ie the establishment of the Roman Republic. Yet they frequently clashed about what was the best way to achieve it. In the same way I think Stephen (Downes) and David (Wiley both believe passionately in the overall aim of open education, but have differing views as to how it should be realised.

Cato was the purist, unbending and uncompromising. Cicero was the pragmatist, willing to compromise and work with a range of people to advance the republic. Cato often thought Cicero compromised too much, thus rendering his beliefs invalid. Cicero was often infuriated that Cato wouldn’t compromise and through this played in to the hands of the anti-republicans.

In his post Martin was suggesting that Stephen Downes’ objections to the Cape Town Declaration were based on the declaration’s inclusion of commercial entities, with Stephen arguing that “… the internet is already awash with really vile and intrusive commercial activity, do we have to export it too? We have the opportunity to do something really special in the world; why do we have to carve into every declaration of principle a paean to Things As They Are (and Those Who Profit From Them)?“.

Now I have to admit that, although my knowledge of Cicero and Cato is limited to having read Imperium, I have (mostly) taken a pragmatic approach to life generally and IT development in particular.

This struck me today when I read an article in CILIP Update about the inclusion of advertising leaflet in books borrowed from libraries and then returned home to find that my new passport had arrived - and a leaflet from a local estate agent was included in the letter (together with one from the NHS inviting me to join the NHS Organ Donor Register).

Now I personally don’t have any great concerns about the inclusion of adverts in library books or with my passport. Indeed if the income this generates can improve the quality of their services, then I would suggest that this is a good thing.

These particular issues, of course, aren’t about technologies. And neither, fundamentally, are the issues about ownership of social networks and use of commercially-provided services in the provision of educational and cultural heritage services (although I do acknowledge that the nature of IT can add extra complexities to the debate).

We need to recognise that the debates on the specifics of Facebook’s ownership, Bill Gates plans for Microsoft’s future role in Internet services and Rupert Murdoch’s plans for his media empire will only go so far. The Catos (Catoers, Catoists?) followers of Cato will need to convince the followers of Cicero that there vision have a realistic chance of being implemented, otherwise the debates are doomed to be endlessly repeated.

How I (Inadvertently) Helped A Microsoft Patent Claim

I was recently using Google Scholar to try and find out more about the impact of my peer-reviewed publications.  Initially I was looking at papers published since 2004, but I then thought it would be interesting to see how far back the citation data might go. 

So I used Google Scholar to find out about links to my paper on The Evolution of Web Protocols which was published in the Journal of Documentation in 1999 (Vol. 55, No. 1 January 1999, pp. 71-81).

I discovered two citations to this paper: one in course material for a course on Organization of Information written by the School of Library and Information Studies at The University of Alabama and, much more interestingly, one in a US Patent claim!  The title of the patent is “System and method for discovering information about web resources ”. And, as can be seen from the Google Patent Search, the patent was filed in February 2002 and issued in August 2007, with the assignee being Microsoft Corporation! 

The first part of the patent states that the claim is based on:

A computer-implemented method for identifying metadata about a first resource identified by a first Uniform Resource Identifier (“URI”), the method comprising:

issuing a request for the first resource identified by the first URI;

receiving a response document from the first URI;

parsing the response document received in response to the issued request, wherein the response document includes a second URI for accessing a second resource, wherein the response document includes an indication that metadata about the first resource exists on the second resource, wherein the indication indicates a metadata format;

generating a request to retrieve the metadata from the second resource, wherein the generated request is formatted to support the metadata format identified by the indication; and

retrieving the metadata from the second resource.

The patent goes on to describe how this will be implemented:

The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the response document comprises an HTML document and the indication comprises a LINK tag.

 Yes, the patent is based on use of the HTML LINK tag to link to a metadata description.

As my colleague Pete Cliff has pointed out to me;

OAI-ORE says you can include a resource map (which describes the agreggation of resources that make up (for example) a document - an article in the form of a Web page that includes images say)

<link rel=”resourcemap” href=”http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/importantdoc/map.xml” mce_href=”http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/importantdoc/map.xml” />

The resource map is metadata. Does this mean that doing this now will require paying a fee to Microsoft?

How can this patent claim have been granted? And why was my paper cited in the patent?

Looking back at my paper I find that I stated that:

Metadata can be described as the missing architectural component of the web.

I went on to say that:

Work in this area included Netscape’s proposal on “Meta Content Framework Using XML” [32] which provides a specification for describing information structures (metadata) for collections of networked information using XML and Microsoft’s “Web Collections using XML” [33] proposal for providing a metadata framework which can be used for a variety of applications, such as sitemaps, distributed authoring and content labelling.

Both of these proposals recognised the importance of XML for representing the syntax of the metadata. The proposals, together with other related work, led to the development of RDF, the Resource Description Framework, which provides a framework for metadata giving interoperability between applications that exchange machine-readable information on the Web [34].

At the time of writing (July 1998) work in developing RDF is still at an early stage. However RDF does seem to provide a mechanism for pulling together the various related metadata components and adding a new architectural component to the Web.

It seems the patent claim cites my work as evidence that use of the <LINK> tag to embed metadata was not envisaged back in 1998. However my paper was never intended to do provide a complete description of the architecture of Web. And I am sure that there will be examples of use of the <LINK> tag for this purpose prior to the submission of this patent in 2002.

My paper clearly has had an impact which I hadn’t expected! However rather than flaming me for helping Microsoft to patent use of metadata in Web pages :-) I’d much rather the readers of this blog provided examples of prior art and suggested ways in which nthis patent can be overturned.

PLE 1.0 and PLE 2.0

The Debates

Martin Weller has recently commented on his Ed Techie blog that there has been a lot of discussion about PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) recently, and the relationships between PLEs, VLEs, TLEs (Teacher Learner Environment) and DPLEs (Default PLEs). Andy Powell has also discussed PLEs and PREs (Personal Research Environment) is a recent post on P vs. P in a user-centric world: the first of three posts he has written prior to our joint UCISA presentation.

PLE 1.0

This made me think about what I understand by the term PLE. And I realised that my first experience of a PLE was in primary school in the 1960s - back then a PLE was a Pen Learning Environment!  And I was around at the time of several technological innovations as well as different ways in which the Pen Learning Environment (which in this post I’ll refer to as PLE 1.0) was used to support my learning.  When I started at school I have vague recollections of using a ’scratch pen’ which we dipped in the ink well on our desk.  However this was soon made obsolescent by the ‘biro’ technology.  But when I passed my 11-plus and went to grammar school I remember one teacher who didn’t approve of ‘biro; technology and insisted that all of his homework had to be submitted using a fountain pen.  But such technological luddism wasn’t sustainable, and I think that only happened in my first year.  By the time I was a teenager I was free to use a biro.

The initial focus of control was clearly on the technology itself.  But I have only recently realised the different pedagogical approaches which accompanying PLE 1.0. In some classes the PLE was used to write down what the teacher had written on the blackboard. However other teachers (or did this reflect other disciplines) the inefficiencies of the teacher having to write on the blackboard were removed, and we had to copy directly from our text books.

It was only later on the the teachers seemed to lose interest in controlling the technologies used and allowed me, the learner, the flexibility to make notes as I preferred.

PLE 2.0

What can PLE 2.0, the Personal Learning Environment, learn from my experiences in the 1960s and 70s? I think our institutions are still focusing too much on the technologies themselves and ways in which the technologies should be used - scratch pens, biros and fountain pen debates revisited. And there seems to be a tendency to be seek the best solution and make that the norm for all students - a Parker pen for all!  But what we learnt from our writing instruments was the advantages to be gained when the technology became invisible, and we were free to make our own choices. (but when, I wonder, did personalised pens become prevalent?)

The ideal PLE (to drop the versioning I introduced in this post) should surely follow the pen in becoming technologically invisible, and just something that the learner uses to support their tasks? And, perhaps more importantly, the institution’s response should be to provide the flexibility needed to support this approach.

The UK Government and Web Metrics

Spotted recently on Hansard (25 Feb 2008):

Departmental ICT

Norman Baker: To ask the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills how many hits the (a) most popular website and (b) least popular website run by his Department has received since 1 January. [162286]

Mr. Lammy:The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills corporate website was launched on 28 June 2007, following the machinery of Government changes and creation of the new Department. The numbers of hits for the most and least popular websites that come under the DIUS remit are as follows:

Website	Number of hits( 1) from 1 January 2007 to 25 October 2007
The Intellectual Property Office (www.ipo.gov.uk)	236,301,690
Technology Strategy Board (www.berr.gov.uk/innovation/technologystrategyboard/index.html	(2)82,370
(1) Please note that a ‘hit’ is simply a successful request to the web server from a visitor’s browser for any type of file, whether an image, HTML page, or any other type. A single web page can cause many hits, one for each image included on the page. (2) Figures are form page views from 1 July 2007 to 25 October 2007 as hits are not measured for this site.

Now what is worse, I wonder? The fact that Norman Baker, Lib Dem MP for Lewis is asking about the popularity of UK Government Web sites based on such simplistic criteria or the Government’s response which compares ‘hits’ with ‘page views’? Even worse is that the official response is so defensive about having to provide figures on ‘page views’ (which is a legitimate measure on Web site usage) as data on hits (which reflects the Web site design and not the popularity of the Web site) are not measured.

Even worse is that the response compares a Web site domain (www.ipo.gov.uk) with a Web site area (www.berr.gov.uk/innovation/technologystrategyboard/index.html).

And the latter Web page is not longer available - although I suspect that it refers to http://www.berr.gov.uk/dius/innovation/technologystrategyboard/page40217.html

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a Government Web page which no longer exists isn’t particularly popular!

But what worries me most about such absurdities are the implications of the Government’s increasing preoccupation with such (flawed) measures of impact and the responses which might be expected from the Government critics.  I could easily envisage a Daily Mail leader article being critical of a drop in the numbers of ‘hits’ to Government Web sites, ignoring the realities of technological enhancements which may mean that although the numbers of hits or page views go down, the user may actually be getting a much more valuable and useful experience (e.g. the data being surfaced in other areas).

PLEs Please Me

AJ Cann recently described his experiences of “teaching” PLEs (his quotes). In his post he described how his discussions with his peers in the elearning community began with a ‘tweet’.

And his colleagues (or should that, in the context of Twitter, be his ‘followers’) asked him to share his experiences. Alan then went on to explain that he felt that:

I should start by saying that I don’t believe you can “teach” someone how to build a personal learning environment, any more than you can teach them “wisdom” - it’s an experiential, contextual thing.

From previous discussions I’ve had with AJ I know that he is a fan on use of PLEs to support learning, as opposed to the more monolithic VLE approach - and, in a way, the question of whether the VLE is open source or not is a bit of a red herring. But although PLEs may please AJ, how confident can we be that it is the PLEs which helped with the “clear winners with the students, notably the Google suite.” Might not the enthusiasms shown by the students simply reflect his own enthusiasms.

AJ will, of course, be aware of such factors (and I should declare that I am a member of an advisory group for AJ Cann’s Leicester PLE project which is “Using Web 2.0 to Cultivate Information Literacy via Construction of Personal Learning Environments“). But if we are honest we (the blog readers and those engaged with Web 2.0) will be aware that there with be large scale chunky proprietary and unfashionable enterprise systems which are crying out “Love me do” - and the supporters of such systems will, indeed, be happy to use the systems - and there are also likely to be happy users of such systems, too. Indeed I can remember the first time I attended the ALT-C conference -I attended the technical standards where I heard about developments using an SOA approaches, the e-Framework and Web 2.0 developments, but in the other strands other academics and e-learning support staff were presenting about the quality of the learning and user satisfaction for services delivered by Blackboard and Web CT.

I guess we do need to be honest about how our enthusiasms, whether it’s for Web 2.0, open source, social networks, Twitter or whatever, may help to enthuse others but the indifference shown by the majority may be invisible to us.

IT Services - Set Your Documentation Free!

Back in 2005 I presented a paper entitled “Let’s Free IT Support Materials!” at the EUNIS 2005 conference, an annual conference aimed at IT support departments throughout Europe. In the paper I argued that IT Service departments should be making their documentation and other support materials available under a Creative Commons licence for reuse by the wider community. I pointed out that the UK had a well-established tradition of collaboration, through organisations such as UCISA, and, in the area of document sharing, had already set up a national archive of Computing Service documentation.

This was initially established in the late 1980s/early 1990s based on a centralised repository of documentation on the HENSA/Micros service at the University of Lancaster. However floundered due to the complexities of network access in pre-Web days and the effort it took to transfer resources to a centralised location. A renewed effort in the mid 1990s provided a Web-based interface to a distributed archive known as the UCISA TLIG Document Sharing Archive. Although this required little effort from participating institutions, the service failed to be sustainable due to the technical expertise require to provide and maintain the indexing across the distributed archives. And since the search interface points to a script on Mailbase, despite the message saying “Unfortunately the search facility is currently unavailable. We hope to rectify this shortly” I suspect this hasn’t worked since Mailbase was replaced by JISCMail in November 2000.

But now the indexing capabilities can be provided easily, using third party services such as the Google Custom Search Engine (GCSE). Is it really easy, you may wonder? Well the interface is shown below. and, as can be seen, setting up the search engine requires little more than entering the URLs to be indexing and then copying the code to be embedded on a Web page.  Easy :-)  And the search engine is easy to use from a user perspective. Why not give it a try.  You might even wish to embed the search interface into your own page.

Now you might be suspicious: it’s too easy; there’s no metadata; it’s not open source; etc. My response - am I bovvered? Computing should be easy - I remember the excitement I felt when I discovered the Apple Macintosh in the 1980s and Paul Walk has been making similar comments about his iPhone.   Ease-of-use and simplicity are to be applauded, I would argue.

And, as I discovered from my Twitter friends recently, a number of colleagues have been using the Google Custom Search Engine for some time: Pete Johnston for searching music sites he frequents, Mile Ellis for his search across museum collections and Phil Bradley for searching across 35 Web 2.0 sites. And thanks to Matt Jukes for pointing out the use of this approach on the JISC Web site and the How Do I? example from the Open University, which is described in a blog post by Tony Hirst. And edubloggers may find Stephen Downes Edublogs search of interest: this searches across no fewer than 456 blog sites! 

But how might my experiment be scaled up to a service, in order to deliver the original aims of this service, only about 15 years late :-)

Perhaps the UCISA TLIG group could take responsibility for developing this prototype and seeing if there are are barriers to it being deployed into service. But there might also be an interest from a institution which could see benefits of such a search facility across a region (Scotland, perhaps?).

Or maybe individuals would be motivated to do this.  And as it is possible for me to open up the management interface to pothers, I would be happy to respond with anyone who may be interested.

And as I’ll be giving a talk at the UCISA Management Conference on 13^th March 2008, that would be an opportunity for me to name-check anyone who would be willing to investigate further :-)

The Oxford vs Cambridge Race

No, not the boat race - which has the most popular Web site, Oxford or Cambridge University? We don’t know, has been the traditional view. The data is only available on the institution’s Web server and there’s no point in making such data publicly available.

But this isn’t quite true. If you go to the Alexa traffic ranking service you can view traffic data for public Web sites - and you can compare the traffic data across a range of Web sites.

So who has the most popular Web site? Well if you visit the comparison page you’ll find the answer is …

too close to call :-)

Now the obvious response when discussing Web site statistics and making comparisons with one’s peers is to point out the limitations of the methodology - unless, of course, your Web site is on top :-) In this case we might discuss the limitations of Web traffic metrics (caching, etc.) and point out that an organisation’s Web site isn’t the organisation and need not reflect the quality of the institution’s teaching and research. But we need to remember that the people who have an interest in such figures are typically civil servants and policy makers - they’re like the so-called ‘Google generation’ - they don’t explore issues deeply and will dismissive of explanations of the limitations of such figures :-)

The rest of us will be aware of such limitations. And we’ll also know when such league tables are inappropriate in many contexts and not just within the Web environment. or example the New Stateman magazine on the 21 January 2007 has an article entitled “It’s wrong to publish league tables” in which Peter Wilby argues that “News scores tell parents nothing about schools“. The next thing we’ll hear will be suggestions that football should be judged on a single metric such as the number of points obtained during the season - we know that this is more of a indication of the bank balance of your team’s Russian, American or Thai billionaire and factors such as the number of African players your team may have who may disappear in January and the quality of the players and their countries (an inverse relation as, if they’re too good, they’ve stay away for longer period) :-).

Even so, it can be fun using the Alexa service to make comparisons with your peers. And, of most interest to me, when did usage traffic stop growing? And what has been happening since 2006? Have all the users of university Web sites moved to Facebook or even Second Life? Joking apart, there are some interesting questions to ask. Why has Web usage traffic been in decline since February 2006?

When Web Sites Go Down

A colleague of mine has just alerted me to the fact that the University of Southampton Web site is down for scheduled maintenance from 2-4^th January 2008. She had noticed this as she regularly visits the Web site to access the wide range of resources it provides on institutional repositories (note added on 4 Jan 2008 - the Web site is now available, ahead of schedule!).

That’s no big deal, you may think, servers do need maintenance and the first few days after the Christmas break is probably the best time,with students still away and many researchers likely to take an additional few days holiday.

I’d be in broad agreement with such sentiments (I used to work in IT Services, after all, and I’m aware of the complexities of managing IT systems). But have our expectations changed, I wonder? And rather than taking time off at this time of year, what if users have imminent deadline for papers and need to access such services? And who are the users of the University of Southampton Web site - no longer just staff and students at Southampton, I would argue’ rather at prestigious institutions such as the University of Southampton there is likely to be a significant national (and indeed international) user community.

But how should we establish what reasonable practices may be in addressing user expectations of a 24×7 service availability, but without the business models to fund such requirements. Perhaps the debate can be helped by initially monitoring best practices within the community and making comparisons with other communities.

In this respect the Netcraft service can be useful, as it provides automated analyses on public Web services, including profiles on Web server software usage and server uptime data.

As can be seen from the graph, the main Web server at Southampton University has had an average uptime (based on a 90-day moving average) of 405 days. And this data compare very favourably with Sun’s data for which the equivalent figure is 34 days.

I suspect the University of Southampton will have a high rating with the UK HE sector for its server uptime. But, of course, that will probably not be appreciated by the user who tries to access the site on day 406 to gather data for a paper which needs to be submitted by day 407!

Is it possible (or, rather, realistic) to improve the server availability for institutional services? Should we be replicating our servers (or our data)? Should we outsource the management of our services to companies such as Amazon, as an international company such as Amazon (with their data hosting S3 service) may be better positioned to provide 24×7x365 availability?

But before responding to such questions I feel that institutions may need to ask themselves to whom they should be accountable. If institutional Web sites are now providing significant services to a global audience, how can we ensure that that global community is being provided with acceptable levels of service? After all, we ask these questions of externally-hosted Web services. But don’t we all act as externally hosted Web services to others outside our institution?

Wouldn’t it be interesting to have server uptime data across all our institutions? And if the data for sector compares favourably with the commercial sector, then we will have something to be pleased with. And if the comparison is unfavourable, then this should help to inform our planning - and provide objective data to inform discussions on the relevance to our sector on services such as Amazon S3.

Me, Myself, I

The OCLC report on ‘Sharing, Privacy and Trust In Our Networked World’, which I wrote about recently, introduces the report with a quotation from the Time “Person of the Year: You” article, published a year ago on 13 December 2006.

Web 2.0 services, such as YouTube and Flickr, enable the individual to be active creators of content, rather than passive consumers as has been the case in the Web 1.0 world - which can be good for the citizen and good for the student.

And in a report on the recent Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin conference, the Secret Plans and Clever Tricks blog Chris May reported that “Social == Me First. Social tools are primarily organised around self-interest, not altruistic participation in a community. Community, where it emerges, is a side-effect of the tools.“.

But how do we reconcile the tensions between the power which many Web 2.0 tools provide each of us as self-interested individuals (now that I can blog, upload pictures and videos so easily) and the requirements of the institution where individuals work or study? How, for example, can the institution safeguard its reputation if individuals can create content without being validated by editorial processes which have been the norm in the past? How are copyright misuses to be addressed? And what about the legal challenges such as data protection, defamation, compliance with accessibility legislation, etc.?

From my point of view I have been observing the pragmatic approaches which are being taken by people such as Michael Stephens on his Tame The Web blog (in particular with his Ray Of Light video) and John Dale at the University of Warwick, with his comments on the potential of YouTube and his willingness to write posts beyond his work-related activities.

I think the approaches being taken by individuals is helping to set patterns of acceptable use of such technologies, which now bodies such as Intute are using (as can be seen from this recent blog post).

Nothing new, perhaps - individuals were deep-linking to Web resources whilst the lawyers were still wondering about the legality of such actions. But I think, or I should say, I hope, that it is individuals who can be instrumental in setting in motion changes to outdated legislation. Who knows, we might even be able to rip our CDs and listen to our music collection on our iPods within infringing copyright legislation at some point (the Gower Report recommends this, but the required legislation has not yet been enacted)? However I should add that IANAL - and this post should not be construed as legal advice, or to reflect the views of anyone apart from myself.

The Way We Were

Can you remember what your institution’s home page looked like when the service was first launched? And how did it evolve over time? Did you take advantage of frames when they were first released? Did you then exploit client-side technologies such as Java, JavaScript and Flash (and perhaps even ActiveX control)? And how long did they last before you realised the downside of such technologies?

And did changes to the home page not only reflect changes in technologies, but also the department which had responsibility for the home page? Did the home page have a visual makeover when the marketing department took responsibility?

More importantly, though, do you have a record of how the home page looked, and documented descriptions of the reasons for the changes? This could be a valuable part of your organisation’s digital history and it would be unfortunate if such information were lost.

If strikes me that one of the lessons we should have learnt from our experiences with organisational Web sites is the need for such record-keeping. And these lessons should be applied to the approaches we are taking in a Web 2.0 environment, as we (as seems to be the case) set up institutional presences in Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc.

How should we go about doing this? Should we take screen shots of the interface when substantive changes are made? Or perhaps at fixed intervals (monthly, perhaps)? And can we automated the process? Or should such data be a standard item in Web team reports?

Or rather than capturing the screen interface, should we not be harvesting the HTML pages? And how easy will this be if the pages are dependent on the installation of particular applications?

Has anybody started to address such issues?

IWR Information Professional of the Year Award

I am pleased to report that yesterday, at the end of the first day of the Online Information 2007 conference, I received an award for the Information World Review (IWR) Information Professional of the Year :-)

Prior to presenting the award Timothy Rinda, American Psychological Association  said:

“When I judge the IWR American Psychological Association Awards I look for someone who is, to my mind, the model IWR reader.

That is someone who is really pushing the boundaries of information, of technology and developing the role of an information professional into something really exciting.

For the 2007 award, I can see that my fellow judges on the panel did the same thing and it is with great pleasure to announce a winner who in his working life , lives to push the boundaries of information and has been involved in researching WiFi, Skype, podcasts and video streaming as information delivery methods. He is also author of one of the most popular blogs in the sector. His is of course Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus of UKOLN.“

Many thanks to Timothy for his kind words and the judges for selecting me as the winner of this prestigious award.  But more importantly I would like to thank all of the people I have met over this past year at the many events I have spoken at and, of course, the online contacts I have made via this blog, on discussions lists and social networks such as Facebook, for sharing my enthuisiasm in building a richer and better online environment.

And now the pub awaits …   

The History Of The Web Backwards

The “History of the World Backwards” comedy was launched on BBC 4 on 30 October 2007. The joke is based on time being reversed: “Today’s opener sees Nelson Mandela enter prison as a sweet-natured Spice Girls fan, but emerge from a long incarceration as a terrorist bent on the armed overthrow of the state.“

How might this apply to the history of the World Wide Web, from its global success in 2007, through to its sad demise in the early 1990s? And what are the lomger term implications for its demise? Here are my thoughts. What are your views? And if anyone fancies writing their own blog post in this style, I’d suggest using the tag “history-of-web-backwards” (or, indeed, history-of-foo-backwards, if your main passion is in ‘foo’).

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The global pervasiveness of the World Wide Web in 2007 appeared to guarantee its long term success. Sadly the sceptics who argued that the Web was just a mere fad proved to be correct, with a steady demise over a period of ten years, leading to its complete disappearance by 1990.The WCAG 2.0 guidelines, which were due to be released in 2008, were expected to bring about the much-promised dream of universal success to Web resources, exploiting the potential of much richer (and usable and accessible) user interfaces based on Ajax, Flash and related technologies, whose popularity had been successfully demonstrated in a series of global experiments provided though the benevolence of companies such as Google and Yahoo!

 Sadly political changes in the UK led to the release of a government mandate which banned such technologies, in an effort by a socialist government to prevent the decline in use of public services. The lead taken by the UK government was followed throughout the rest of Europe with European legislation being enacted which suppressed any technological innovations which had not been approved by the the sinister-sounding WAI organisation. The EU also funded the development of an automated robot which would report on deviations from approved practices (the naming and shaming robot).

Although these moves were initiated by the goverment, the side effects destabilised the commercial sector. Facebook, an incredibly successful social networking service in 2007, lost users from this peak and, despite the mass demonstration, coordinated on the THEY ARE TRYING TO SHUT DOWN FACEBOOK - PETITION TO KEEP IT! INVITE ALL! group (which had over 1.6 million users in November 2007) the uncertainty ultimately led to Facebook’s demise. The writing was on the wall when Microsoft’s withdrew its investment in the company in 2007. Facebook’s response was to return to its roots in the US, but failed to sustain its momentum across US universities, eventually choosing to provide a niche service at Harvard University. Even this proved not to be sustainable and, in despair, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founders, chose to go to university in order to try and find an alternative career.

What nobody had expected, though, was the growth of the anti-globalist movement supported by left and right wing militant organisations. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft were found to be funded (using a possibly illegal manoeuvre known as ‘tax breaks’ ) by the US government, and where suspected of passing on secret data on an organisation known as Al Quaida (a terrorist organisation in the twenty first century who, to the astonishment of many, eventually received significant investment from the US government to help expand the US’s plans to open up a marketplace in Afghanistan). In contrast the right wing groups campaigned that social networks were leading to a breakdown of the family as a social unit.

Despite Rupert Murdoch’s investment in MySpace (which proved to be a financial disaster) these combined pressures led to the demise of all of the social networking services. A mass campaign of disobedience by young people (who called themselves the ‘Hoodies’) resulted, with the protesters taking to the streets. This failed, however, and, in a remarkable consumer revolt, household throughout the country cancelled their broadband subscriptions. The demise of the broadband industry had predicted side-effects, bringing to an end plans to invest in high definition TV and digital TV. On a personal level, although critical of his invention many felt that the UK government was being rather unfair in ceremonially stripping Tim Berners-Lee of his knighthood.

By 2000 the majority of users had abandoned their interest not only in social networks but other networked services. The Web eventually retreated to the walled ivory towers of academia. There was a renewed spirit of camaraderie within this group, who felt they were keeping alive the original vision of the Web, based on notions of user generated content and trusting the user. However the conservatives were in the ascendancy, and institutions responded by investing large sums of money in Content Management Systems (a phrase which caused so much consternation that the term ‘CMS’ had to be used as a euphemism). Organisations then mandated use of CMSs - which so disillusioned those involved who were working on the Web (”they’re forcing every page to look the same; it’s a Stalinist nightmare world we’re now living in“) that, by 1995 only a handful of stalwarts were still employed in the profession.

By 1994 the writing was on the wall, and everyone knew the the Web would soon cease to exist. The W3C was formally wound up as a company and had vacated its US offices at MIT. The decision to delete all W3C documents did take many by surprise - although AltaVista did make a valiant attempt to index the few documents which remained on the Web.

Not all was gloom, though. CERN made a discussion in 1994 to host the final international WWW conference - an event so significant that it became known as the ‘Woodstock of the 1990s’.

By 1990 there was little interest in the Web. A small group did try to revive some aspects of the Web by developing Gopher. But this was simply a strictly hierarchical distributed menu system and - without even having any social networking capabilities - its short life span was inevitable.

Life in the 1980s is certainly much simpler. But is this a better life? Or would people in the 1980s wish to return the the more vibrant and connected environment which was the norm in 2007? Possibly - but someone called Douglas Adams has just released a trilogy of five books (although the last two are no longer in print) which is shortly to be made into a radio series. And Douglas argues for a return to the simplicity of our live as apes - and is wondering whether the move from the ocean, 20 million years ago was, in retrospect, a mistake :-)

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Please note that this parody of the BBC programme is meant to provide mild amusement. I do not wish to imply that the current UK government is socialist. The WWW conference in 2004 was, however, described as the Woodstock of the 1990s. I will leave it to the readers to determine for themselves examples based on fact and those provided for comic effect.

The Power Of Information Report Also Wants To Avoid Duplication Of Services

A response on his blog by Matt Jukes (of JISC, but currently on secondment to HEFCE) reminded me that, in my post on The Power Of Information report, I should have mentioned that, as well as encouraging reuse of government data, the report also recommends:

• Working with existing user-generated sites rather than creating anything new ones.
• Researching what user-generated sites exist in the space and where there is duplication terminating or modifying the government versions.
• Encourage civil servants to become active in these communities.

These recommendations, which have been endorsed by the government, would appear to reflect the conclusions of the OCLC report on Sharing, Privacy and Trust In Our Networked World, which I blogged about recently.

So one part of UK government doesn’t want to compete with existing social networking services and the OCLC report suggests that libraries should seek to engage with existing services, rather than developing their own. And a post by Matt Jukes blog entitled More eGov ramblings cites a report from Richard MacManus at the Read/WriteWeb blog which is “pretty damning of the ‘one-stop portal’ concept (i.e. Directgov!) and supportive of the idea of reusable information supporting ‘mash-ups’ and the like through the use of web services (very similar to the Power of Information report)“.

Is anyone listening, I wonder?

Hey, Hey, We’re … In The Charts Again!

The Background

I was asked recently to advise a colleague at the University of Bath on how to raise the Google ranking of some Web pages. “Should I go to an SEO company?” was the question I was asked. A similar question was asked recently on the JISCMail website-info mgt list: “Can anyone recommend a training provider for Search Engine Optimisation and / or Search Engine advertising training?“

My response to such questions has always been that there is no silver bullet to getting into the first page of Google search results - if there were, the bad guys (the porn companies, for example, or the estate agents) would exploit such techniques. Rather, I suggested, you should follow well-established best practices for Web sites - have a static URI, ensure that it is persistent, that the page complies with HTML standards, that content is given as text and not in images and encourage people to link to it. These simple techniques can help to ensure that your pages are Google-friendly.

Getting Into The Top Google Hits

When I sent the email I remembered that I’d recently given a talk, and subsequently discovered that the title of the talk was near the the top of the Google search results. Revisiting the search query, I found that pages related to my talk at the Inspiring The iGeneration event on Web 2.0 for young people on “We’re The Young Generation And We’ve Got Something To Say” now occupy the top four places.

The title of this talk, incidentally, I used after Ian Watson reminded me in March that I’d used this song title as a metaphor for young people providing user-generated content at the AUKML conference last year.

Discussion

So it is possible to get your pages into the top set of results in Google without paying a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company a lot of money. But what relevance does this have to the organisation which wants to market its services: for example a university which wants to promote its courses (for a search of ‘top university Computer Science degree’) or facilities (’conference facilities in beautiful city’) ahead of its rivals (the University of Bath provided an excellent location for the IWMW 2006 event, but the University of York, another beautiful city, did likewise for IWMW 2007. I’m sure Bath would like to be ahead of its rival in the search engines).

My findings were based on a series of words which would be in wide use on the Web (music sites, song lyrics, etc.) This then is similar to ‘conference facilities in beautiful city’ - which has 1,940,000 results, led by the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh.

The Web sites I used which were found in the top four results where the page on the UKOLN Web site (HTML page and PowerPoint presentation), a post on this blog (hosted on wordpress.org) and the slides for the talk, which were hosted on Slideshare.net. The UKOLN Web site I can understand (it has been in existence since about 1993, I think, and has static and relatively stable URI. The prominence of the two Web 2.0 services I found very interesting. Although they haven’t been around as long, they both provide clean URIs and both services are popular and are likely to have many inbound links to them - which will enhance their Google ranking.

So what would my advice be to the conference office? Create some slides about the conference facilities you provide and upload them to Slideshare, making sure that you provide metadata containing the words you might expect people to search for and add a link back to your Web site. In addition set up a blog, perhaps providing updates about the events you are organising. And if you want to enhance the Google ranking, ensure that you use a popular blogging services (such as WordPress or Blogger) - as hosting it on your own site is unlikely to boost the Google ranking.

Of course, as well as this advice being relevant to the business sectors of our institutions, the approaches I’ve described can also be used to help project Web sites to be more easily found. It’s interesting, I feel, that the approaches to making your content more easy to find in a Google world rely on hosting your content on a variety of popular sites, rather than hosting the content centrally - especially on a Web site which is not widely linked to from other sites.

Ethical Issues

Is this a desirable approach, some may wonder? Is it ethical? Could the success with “We’re The Young Generation” be regarded as spam for people who are searching for information about the Monkees’ song? That’s for you to decide (in this case I would argue that we shouldn’t resort to using unambiguous factual titles for our content, as this would be boring).

And if I were evil I would suggest that it would be an interesting experiment to see if you could replace Edinburgh and Cambridge in the top Google places for a search for ‘conference facilities in beautiful city‘ ith your own city. But, as I know people in both of these prestigious institutions, I couldn’t possibly encourage people to take part in such an interesting experiment …

And if you are seriously concerned about such ethical issues, perhaps you should pay an SEO company to do the job for you - the money they get will help to ease the guilt they may feel.

Why We Should All Use Externally-Hosted Web Services

There may be an argument that in higher education we have no need to make use of externally hosted Web services, such as blogs, wikis, photographic sharing sites, etc. as institutions will typically have IT services departments with expertise in installing and supporting enterprise systems. And we also have a wide range of JISC services which can provide access to applications on a national basis, including services such as JISCMail which are used by all institutions, as well as more niche services aimed at the research community.

However. although this view was probably true ten years ago, I feel that it ignores a significant change to the IT landscape over the past few years: the use of networked services outside of a work context and use by large numbers of people who aren’t members of the HE community. I suspect a large number of users of in-house IT services will also be likely to make use of IT services for social purposes - such as storing personal photographs and sharing them with friends and family. In such cases it may not be possible to make use of an institutional service. So we, as individuals, will need to learn how to use such services and evaluate the risks of such services. It is not only institutions which will need to safeguard access to teaching and learning and research resources - individual members of the institutions, staff and students, will need to safeguard their precious digital assets.

I also feel that we can also expect to see lecturers who use such services for personal use to explore the potential of such services in teaching. Indeed shouldn’t institutions be pro-active in this, in order to ensure that students (and staff) are experienced in such risk management issues when they leave the institution?

Is this how institutions see things? Or do they focus on just providing a safe, managed, secure IT environment? And if the latter approach is taken, how can we expect staff and students to react when they leave the nest?  After all, we no longer expect to me in the same jobs for life.

The UK’s Newest University

What is the UK’s newest university? I thought that it was probably Edge Hill University. But I recently discovered that the University of Central England is now BCU - Birmingham City University. I’m assuming this is the UK’s newest university.

What are the implications of changing the domain name for a well-established Web site (http://www.uce.ac.uk/) to something new (http://www.bcu.ac.uk/)? Do you lose your ‘Google juice‘ and have to start all over again in regaining your Google ranking? Or are there techniques you can use which will ensure that links to your old site will be transferred, not only to provide a seamless transition for users but also ensure that automated tools, such as indexing software, will migrate your site’s ranking data, and not treat this as an attempt to masquerade a porn site as a legitimate site.

Anthony Colebourne has described his experiences in a post to the web-support JISCMail list, which summarised what happended when the Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST changed their domain names from www.man.ac.uk and www.umist.ac.uk to www.manchester.ac.uk and The University of Manchester was formed. However as this JISCMail list seems to require a JISCMail username and password I will include his comments here:

We begin with a new www.manchester.ac.uk site running in parallel with the old sites. The old sites informed visitors of the change and provided a hyper link to the new site. Very quickly our new site rose up the results listings (without any special effort on our part) to a point where we were competing with ourselves.

Some of our sub domains had setup Aliases of old domains to new ones. However many search engines saw the 2 domains as separate sites. So again these site were competing with themselves for position in search listings and also confusing our users too.

1) The longer domain achieved higher ranking in most cases, possibly this was due to the more relevant keyword in the domain ‘manchester’ as opposed to ‘man’ plus the new site was ‘better’!

2) Our local GSA also indexed everything twice, using up paid for page limits.

3) Our marketing people preferred that the domain in the users address bar to change (i.e. Apache Redirect preferred over Alias).

We configured old addresses to issue Redirect Permanent (301). Firstly for individual sections as we were able, then for everything (/).

We formally merged in Oct 2004, we took down our old sites home pages and redirected them in June 2005. We currently still receive around 500K hits a month to the old domains that get redirected to our new site. We are monitoring usage of the old domains and are not consider removing the redirects until usage drops significantly.

Completely closing down our old domains is a huge task, when you begin to consider non web uses of DNS (email, desktop / server host names etc) and the dependences. It will be many years before our old domains are completely decommissioned. However to the outside world we are now manchester.ac.uk.

These comments are, I feel, very valuable. But what is missing is the implications of a domain name change in a Web 2.0 environment. What will it mean if third party services are used to annotated page on your Web site? What will happen if you have embedded third party content in your Web site, and authenticated based on the URI of the page embedding the content is used? Similarly what will happen to data kept by Web statistics counters?

Answers to these questions will be of interest to many readers, I think. It strikes me that the BCU change may provide a valuable opportunity for research on the implications of changes to a domain name and advice on best practices. An interesting student project, perhaps?

Another One Bites The Dust

I recently suggested that the English secretly prefer being failures, as we enjoy complaining about our failures and belittling the vulgarities of those who are successful, and that, while this is particularly true in the sporting field, in IT and Web development we find it easier to criticise successful services rather than to exploit their successes.

And on a day in which England have once again failed to build on their previous success, having been beaten by South Africa in the Rugby Union World Cup final, I think it is timely to revisit successful Web services - and to draw some parallels with world champion sporting teams - and one loser.

Apache is an obvious example of a successful Web application. Apache must therefore be the Brazil of Web software: it’s the people’s champion and the favourite of the neutrals.

 

Microsoft, in contrast, has to be (from an English perspective, at least) Germany: dull, methodical, lacking in flair, but you just know that you mustn’t write them off, as they often do well.

 

As for Facebook, well this has been a real surprise over the past few years. Nobody expected it to do so well, but, in its own way, it has its admirers. But is its current success likely to be sustainable? Or, just like England’s rugby union team, will it fade away when we thought success was guaranteed?

Please note that if this post is appropriate, please read the post on We Are The Champions! And if you have received this post in a blog aggregator or via email delivery and you find the master copy does not exist, that is because it has been deleted.

We Are The Champions

I recently suggested that the English secretly prefer being failures, as we enjoy complaining about our failures and belittling the vulgarities of those who are successful, and that, while this is particularly true in the sporting field, in IT and Web development we find it easier to criticise successful services rather than to exploit their successes.

But on a day in which England have, against all the odds, succeeded in beating South Africa to become the Rugby Union World Cup champions, I think it is timely to revisit the successful Web services - and to draw some parallels with world champion sporting teams.

Apache is an obvious example. And Apache must be the Brazil of Web software: it’s the people’s champion and the favourite of the neutrals.

Microsoft, in contrast, has to be (from an English perspective, at least) Germany: dull, methodical, lacking in flair, but you just know that you mustn’t write them off, as they often do well.

As for Facebook, well this has been a real surprise over the past few years. Nobody expected it to do so well, but, in its own way, it has its admirers. Just like England’s rugby union team, I would suggest. And it is appropriate the England should be the holders of the Webb Ellis trophy :-)

Please note that if this post is appropriate, please read the post on Another One Bites The Dust! And if you have received this post in a blog aggregator or via email delivery and you find the master copy does not exist, that is because it has been deleted.

Should Open Content Be Open For Commercial Exploitation

I suspect many of my peers who make their content available under a Creative Commons licence have, like me, chosen an Attribution, Non-commercial ShareAlike licence,  which permits the content to be reused for non-commercial purposes provided acknowledgements are given and the same rights are applied to the derived materials.

But should I be taking a more liberal approach, I wonder? Should I permit commercial exploitation of the content? This, after all, has been the approach taken in the open source world, which provides an environment for commercially-viable software vendors to thrive.  From a macro-economic perspective, this approach should stimulate the economy and from a political perspective this would reflect the current political climes, in which the public and private sector aim to work together for the benefit of all (no cynical comments, please).

Is it time to move to an Attribution ShareA Like licence?  I’m beginning to think that this is desirable - I have suggested previously that allowing government-funded data (such as OS mapping data) to be made available for commercial exploitation by others would be beneficial to society; it strikes me that I’m being hypocritical if I fail to allow my resources to be reused in a similar fashion.

 What do you think?

On Thunderbird

“Thunderbirds aren’t go” was the initial ungrammatical idea for the title of this post, based on an article in Thursday’s Online Guardian which asked “What future has the Thunderbird email program got?” in light of the departure of the two paid programmers who were working on the project (and discussed on the Guardian technology blog).

I installed Thunderbird a couple of year’s ago with high hopes, as it comes from the same stable as Firefox. I quickly became disillusioned, though, partly because I didn’t like the interface and partly because of various bugs or limitations I encountered, but primarily because of its lack of support for a calendering tool. I soon went back to Outlook, which I use to synch with my PDA and mobile phone.

I had been told that a calendering tool which would complement Thunderbird was on its way - but the Guardian article also mentioned that this product (Sunbird) has been discontinued. This feature has, sadly, been shown to be vapourware.

Has Thunderbird shown itself to be a fad, without even being fashionable (in mainstream circles)? I think this would be an inappropriate response. As Ross Gardler pointed out recently, it can be counter productive to dismiss applications using phrases such as ‘it’s merely fashionable’ or ‘it’s just a passing fad’. Rather, some deeper thinking is needed - and maybe software which fails to become fashionable but works for particular groups in niche areas can have a role to play.

Or perhaps, as Ryan Paul suggests, Thunderbird still has potential to fly despite developers leaving the nest. And interestingly the article suggested that Thunderbird’s focus simple on email might be a barrier and pointed out that the developers “had the team for developing … a stand-alone desktop e-mail application. But we didn’t have the complete set of people to address both that and the larger issues. Without some new impetus, Thunderbird would continue in a status quo pattern.” Thunderbird with a means of integrating with Facebook - now that would be an application I’d like to try out - and could leave Outlook in the dust.

Speculation, open to discussion, I feel. What is less open to dispute is that the success of the FireFox browser has not been replicated in the email environment. And we do need to have decision making and selection criteria which recognises that success in one area does not necessarily guarantee success in another.  Time to update the QA Focus document on “Top Tips For Selecting Open Source Software“.

The Future As Today, But More So

My Background

When I was young we didn’t have a TV and it wasn’t until I was 7 or so that my family caught up, and I discovered why my school friends were so excited about Doctor Who. And at that time we didn’t have a telephone, so when my parents wanted to ring their friends, it involved a trip to the public telephone kiosk opposite our house, until we got a phone installed (which, of course, was initially was on a shared party line). But we never had a family car.

In more recent years I can recall being dismissive of yuppies and business men and their very large mobile phones.

Nowadays, of course, the TV, the landline, the car and the mobile phone are mainstream consumer products, and households without them are in a minority.

And I find myself in a position in which I’m no longer behind the times, but am an early adopter of various examples of the current generation of technological innovations. I was an early adopter of digital TV (when Freeview was known as OnDigital) and I now have an iPod and a Nokia N95 mobile phone, which can be use as a digital camera, a video camera, a sound recorder, a music player, a GPS device, a radio, a TV, and, last but not least, a telephone. Truly, it seems, Star Trek technology has arrived as a consumer product (well, the Star Trek communicator at least).

So just as, as a child, I eventually caught up with my peers with their 405 line black and white TV, I think we’ll see the devices I am currently using becoming ubiquitous in a few years time, as the prices come down, features become even richer, interfaces simpler and, hopefully, battery life improved.

Envisaging the Future

Envisaging the future as the same as today, with the general population catching up with the early adopters, what might we predict?  Let’s look at some of the things that I can do today and extrapolate their use (and the implication of such usage patterns) in a wider context: perhaps at school, at college and by the general public.

The first point to make is that capturing content is easy, at least for sound and video. I’ve heard that recording/videoing lectures in Universities in the US is common (or at least in prestigous Universities in California).  So rather than “can I borrow your notes for this morning’s lecture; I slept in” the updated version may be “beam me this morning’s lecture“.

But we should remember that the old slogan that “content is king” is no longer necessarily true. Rather it could be argued that “communications, not content, is king“.  Many of us, myself included, were surprised by the takeup of SMS text messaging, which, despite the poor user interface, has become incredibly popular, in the UK at least, and this takeup is reflected in the popularity of instant messenger applications such as MSN Messenger.

Applying this approach within the content of more sophisticated mobile devices, we might see a growth in micro-blogging (as exemplified by Twitter) and podcasting / videocasting from one’s mobile phone. Indeed we can envisage how a voice message left while using a phone could easily be syndicated and accessed via a variety of platforms, in a manner similar to podcasting, without needing to be encumbered with the microphones and PC equipment which is normally associated with the creation of podcasts.

And anything you can do with sound can also be applied to video, with the mobile phone acting as the camcorder. But rather than paying expensive rates using 3G technologies, a WiFi network with enable videocasting / videoblogging to be affordable - and even free in environments in which the user has access to an organisational WiFi network, such as is the case in many universities.

So the content creation side of things is getting easier - and the services for accessing such resources is not longer restricted to the desktop, with, for example, Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook all providing access from mobile devices to their services.

The popularity of Facebook will also lead to changing expectations regarding use of applications.  We are finding with Facebook that users are treating applications as disposable: they are easy to install  and, if you don’t find them of use, you thow away, like an unwanted toy.  And this click-to-install, click-to-remove approach to applications is becoming the norm for mobile applications too.

We seem to be rapidly moving towards both a blended environment (content can be both captured and viewed on a variety of platforms - and I’m conscious that I haven’t mentioned games machines) and a disposable environment, in which the application is no longer the important aspect.  In this environment, we will find that the technology vanishes - with many users having little interest in the technological features for applications used on a daily basis; rather many people will make their purchasing decisions based on other factors, such as how cool it looks (and maybe David Beckham is still the style guru).

And we shouldn’t be concerned at such developments.  After all, we no longer regard the television or telephone as ‘technology’ and, for many, interest in purchasing hifi separates has disappeared, with the choice between buying a Sony or Philip HiFi system at Dixons being based on marketing and aesthetic considerations.  Rather software developers should pat themselves on the back and say “job done” (except in niche areas and in the necessary back office functions which, like keeping the London sewerage system flowing, will still be needed but will be largely invisible).

Will This Happen?

Will the future pan out like this?  Probably not! Indeed, when I speculated a few years ago (July 2004) that the Netgem iPlayer (a digital TV box I use at home) will be a forerunner of Internet access via the TV, I was clearly wrong (or at least very premature in such speculations!)

And the notion that software development will not continue to grow in importance will clearly be regarded as heresy by many readers of this blog (and has been predicted on many occassions previously, not least when The Last One application was released for the Commodore Pet in the early 1980s, if my memory is correct).

And the notion that the future will be a simple extrapolation of currents trends has also been shown to be false (the streets of London are not covered in horse shit as was predicted in the nineteenth century).

But, on the other hand, the blacksmith and related occupations have (almost) disappeared once the new technology of the internal combustion engine became popular.

And, since I first started writing this post I have come across an update to the Nokia 95 article in Wikipedia which describes the Nokia N95 8GB device (increased memory and longer battery life) and read Apple’s announcement about the iPod Touch device which has WiFi support.

So maybe the future is closer to realisation that I’m expecting. Although I’m sure that the future won’t be a linear progression based on what we have today.

It’s A Walled Garden

What would you say about a service which:

• Replicated resources meant for sharing
• Had very little structure to be used for resources
• Had long, application-specific URIs
• Required the user to change the URIs of a resource if the appearance of the resource was to be modified
• Made repurposing of resources difficult
• Often hides resources behind an authentication barrier
• Uses proprietary software to host the service

I have heard the expression “walled garden” used to describe services which, although they may be popular with their users, makes it difficult for the content to be reused.

So what service and I describing here? The answer is the JISCMail service, which is based on L-Soft’s Listserv software, which is illustrated below.

In more detail, the ways in which the service acts as a walled garden, making interoperability with other services difficult include:

• The main entry point for list archives on the JISCMail Web site does not necessarily provide a citeable URI. For example if you go to JISCMail’s home page and search for the website-info-mgt list you are taken to the address http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/quicktype.cgi?m - which does not provide the address of the list’s archive.
• The URI for individual messages changes if the structure of the list archive is reorganised. For example, as can be seen in the accompanying image access to archives in by year for 2006 and earlier. Unfortunately this change in the user interface resulted in links to messages before the interface was reorganised are now broken - thus resulting in loss of citation links to potentially valuable posts which may have been references in peer-reviewed publications.
• The lack of structure provided for list archives mean that off-line browsers, which enable related areas of a Web site to be downloaded to an off-line browser cannot be used.
• Links to individual posts break well-established guidelines which require URIs to provide resource locators which are independent of the technology used to access the resource. A typical URI for a post in a JISCMail Web archive is of the form http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0706&L=website-info-mgt&T=0&F=&S=&X=40A26C40166C54F05D&Y=b.kelly%40ukoln.ac.uk&P=155
• Messages in JISCMail Web archives aren’t been indexed by indexing robots, resulting in potentially useful information being hidden from popular search engines such as Google.
• The content of the JISCMail mail archives is not being archived by the Internet Archive, thus resulting in the potential loss to a service which provides a global Web archiving service.
• Although RSS feeds are available for mailing lists, in practice their functionality is very limited, as (a) only the subject line of individual posts is provided, and not the full content or start of the content, as is normally the case, meaning that the user has to visit the Web site in order to see if the post is of interest and (b) authentication is often required in any case before the RSS feeds can be accessed.

In addition to the limitations of the mail archive provided on the JISCMail Web site, use of email itself also has several limitations:

• Unneccessary duplication of information: e,.g. an attached file sent to a mailing list is replicated, leading to additional disk space usage and maintainance difficulties if the resource is updated.
• Email lists are prone to spam. Although JISCMail has a good reputation in filtering out spam, it appears that increasing numbers of users are turning away from email because of these limitations.

Does this mean that JISCMail is of no use? The answer is most certainly, no. I am a member of several JISCMail lists, and have been a subscriber since the service was launched - and of its predecessor, Mailbase. And clearly JISCMail is well-loved by many of its users.

But when the term ‘walled garden’ is used to refer to new services it is important, I feel, to apply a similar level of criticism to existing services. And, as with JISCMail, this is not necessarily a clinching argument, as there are factors such as popularity with the user community which need to be recognised.

On the other hand,  in response to a post on Email IS Dying the initial two responses felt that:

I agree that email is dying. Many of our students no longer check their inboxes in the same way they don’t check their pigeon holes, but MySpace and Facebook (and Bebo) combined are small potatoes in comparison with the traffic going across IM and SMS. Microsloth messenger was the “killer app” after Netscape.

and

I agree with this entirely. We’ve stopped sending out mass emails to our students because they simply don’t read them! Online noticeboards, forums and the social networking sites are much more effective. We don’t utilise IM and SMS as much as we’d like too (yet!) but this is certainly the direction we’re heading in to communicate with our students.

So perhaps the lack of interest which seems to being shown by growing numbers of students, coupled with the limitations in interoperability provided by mailing list software means that mailing lists will soon meet Gopher and Usenet in a repository of obsoleted software.

Contingency Plans for Disasters