Doodle Is Simplicity Itself

Paul Walk’s blog post on Get off of my cloud acknowledged that even clever techies sometimes value simplicity over the complexity often found in richly functional and distributed systems., In Paul’s case he was praising the ease of use and convenience of an iPhone over, say, the additional functions provided by a Nokia N95 or the inconvenience of carrying multiple devices.

I feel that this is a valid position in many cases. And, coincidentally I have just discovered a very simple Web-based tool for organising meetings.

With Doodle (address www.doodle.ch, incidentally) you simply select dates and times and email the people you wish to invite. The service will then send an email with the URI of a page containing the available dates. And, as can be seen in the image, once the data has been entered you can see the preferred slots.

OK, there’s no authentication, updating dates can’t be done and security is through obscurity. In addition the data can’t be output in formats such as RSS or iCal. But sometimes we need to remember that we don’t always need such richness. And yes, who knows whether this service is sustainable. And, perhaps, like Facebook (according to some), is is a front for an extreme right wing organisation. But, for arranging a date for a practice and a rapper dancing crawl prior to the national rapper sword dancing competition, I am willing to take a risk and avoid the confusions of arranging such events on email or, even worse, via text messages. Why not give it a try?

Is Southampton Setting A New Standard For Institutional Web Sites?

Is the University of Southampton setting a new challenge for other institutions with their new iSoton service, I wonder? Or is this merely an attempt to be stylish by bolting on a variety of Web 2.0 features? What will the users make of it, I wonder?  And what about accessibility, interoperability, compliance with standards and the other issues which the providers of Web services tend to emphasise?  

I came across iSoton via an RSS alert from Lorcan Dempsey blog.  In his post Lorcan expressed a particular interest in the four (out of six) panels which provided content from Web 2.0 services:

The other four are more interesting. One displays the University’s wikipedia entry. One displays photos from Flickr (I am not sure how they are being selected: is it more than the ‘university of southampton’ tag?). One displays videos from Youtube (again, I am not sure if these are any videos which show up on a ‘university of southampton’ search or if some other selection criteria apply).

I would agree with Lorcan’s comment that “this seems like a sketch for what one might do, rather than the fully worked through presence. For example, why not display the full del.icio.us tag cloud which gives richer access to the Southampton pages?“. 

However I suspect that “The site is designed by Precedent, ’specialists in strategic thinking, digital communications and brand communications’” will be regarded with concern be some of the more traditional Web developers who have been sceptical of Web 2.0 style interfaces. And it’s true that the page does contain HTML errors - but these seem to be minor problems, such as unescaped  ampersands, which could easily be fixed. And, shock, horror, passing the page through the WAVE automated accessibility testing tool reveals that “WAVE has detected no accessibility errors“.

I’ve criticised reliance on automated accessibility tools previously - and here’s a good example which demonstrates the need for user testing on the accessibility and usability of the page.   

Is this, then, setting new directions for University Web sites? I don’t know, and I’m sure that further examination of the site is likely to reveal some problems - but it is good to see something new happening in the design and functionality of University Web sites.  And it would be good to get some feedback from those involved in commissioning and developing this Web site, and, even more importantly, feedback from users of the Web site. A potentially interesting talk at this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop, perhaps?

TwitPic, Twitterwhere, Twitterfoo

On Sunday 10^th February 2008 infobunny twittered “TwitPic: TwitPic lets you easily add photos to your Tweets. Upload to TwitPic, add you.. http://tinyurl.com/2wrbr8“.

Twitpic was new to me so I Googled it and discovered that the killerstartups blog gave a somewhat politically incorrect description of how a photographic microblogging extension to Twitter might be used:

Yes, Twitter is unstoppable. And it’s currently amassing an army of Twitter related apps that’ll ensure its reign for a good amount of time. The latest recruit is TwitPic, an application that allows you to post photos and images to your Twitter stream. Now daily ramblings can have an added visual element instead of just the usual plain stream of text. Say you’ve just had the worst blind date ever, but you managed snap a pic of the twit. Now you can go home and post your grievances along with a visual aid to demonstrate your dating woes. TwitPic works from your PC. All you have to do is log in to your Twitter and upload the image or photo you want, then post it. TwitPic is absolutely free.

Via Techcrunch I found that the service was launched in November 2007 but the service seems to only now becoming discussed on the blogosphere and in Twitterland. Worth further investigation, I felt, so I created my fist twitpic. And I quickly received a response from Noah Everett, the TwitPic developer who directed me to a page which described why he had developed the service: “TwitPic was born out of my need to be able to share & comment on photos easily with twitter. I developed it over a weekend, from concept to working site. As always I’m open to feature suggestions“.

Blogowogo, however, points out that:

An obvious disadvantage to Twitpic is that you have to be in front of your computer to post your images. Contrast this with other services such as VisualTwitter and MobyPicture, which allow you to upload an image from your mobile device. Seeing as Twitter really shines as an on-the-go social network, this limitation might be devastating.

Hmm - so there are other services available which build on Twitter which I wasn’t aware of. Indeed the day before discovering Twitpic Brian Suda mentioned the Twitterwhere service which is described on readwriteweb.com as “a service that makes tracking Tweets from any location“.

Rather than discussing how such services might be used (a topic I raised recently) I would make the observation that the development of these services is based on lightweight services and open APIs. The approach isn’t one of developing a richly sophisticated service or use of data standards which will cover every contingency. Is this approach one we should be adopting more generally, I wonder? And I’ll leave it to others to suggest how Twitpic, Twitterwhere, Twitterfoo and Twitterbar (too late, that’s already gone) might be used to deliver real benefits.

Thoughts on Goowy

Yes, there’s another integrated Web-based environment for providing access to email. calendar, instant messaging, etc, as well as having a widget environment which provides extensibility. The service is called Goowy.

I have just been notified of this service via a tweet from Techcrunch which has just announced that “AOL Acquires Goowy http://tinyurl.com/2n9dhb” (in this case I find that Twitter does provide a useful alerting service, which has similarities to RSS alerts).

The news here was the acquisition of the service by AOL. The Techcrunch article went on to say “On Monday AOL will announce the acquisition of San Diego-based Goowy, a startup founded in late 2004 and which launched, incidentally, in my living room in late 2006“.

I’d not heard of Goowy, but via a quick look at the online demonstration and reading a Techcrunch article from 2005 I find that Goowy provides a Flash-based interface to popular communication technologies (email and instant mesaging), file store management (1 Gb filestore available for free), games and, well that’s about it. I had to stifle a yawn - and not just because it’s 5 am and, following a recent long-haul flight I am both wide awake and feeling tired.

But is there anything which can be learnt from Goowy? From my point of view I found it interesting that Goowy’s instant messaging capabilities are based on providing an interface to MS Messenger and AOL Messenger. It’s good, I feel, that they haven’t released yet another instant messaging service. But about 4 years ago I must admit that I felt that by now an open solution to instant messaging, based on the Jabber open environment, would be widely deployed. But no, it seems that Jabber is still finding it difficult to break out of its niche ghetto and interoperability is based on companies supporting the major players rather than interoperability through open standards.

And from Googling for information about Goowy I found a Techcrunch company profile which reviewed the company in 2005 and a more recent Crunchbase profile of the company. But the most intriguing company profile was provided by the Web2.0list service. This provides a mashup of user statistics data provided by Alexa.com and compete.com with both graphs showing a decline in numbers from the start of the recording period.

Goowy is not for me, I’ve decided. But the information provided by Crunchbase and Web2.0list can, I feel, be useful in helping to inform decisions on making use of Web 2.0 services.

Facebook Is So Last Year

The Guardian’s Predictions For 2008

Facebook is so last year. It’s official - it was in the Guardian. It was back in May (2007) when John Kirriemuir picked up on the buzz which Facebook was generating, with his post Facebook: Social Networking grows up? describing how

“there is now a social networking site that: (1) is based around people and their real social networks’ (2) looks quite good’ (3) isn’t full of inane people spouting inane conversation’ (4) is very easy to use and configure’ (5) has a growing number of add-ons, some with potential educational uses and (6) is expanding in terms of who is using it“.

Well with the possible exception of (3) I feel John’s predictions for Facebook were true. But Facebook is now suffering from over-exposure - there are now tutorials on use of Facebook in a library context, which illustrates how mainstream Facebook has become. The cool guys are becoming excited by a number of emerging technologies. But what are they?

The Cool New Services For 2008

The Guardian suggests Twitter will be big in 2008. I recently echoed this sentiment and I’ve also noticed that JISC are making use of Twitter and intend to use it to support the JISC 2008 conference (but note that other micro-blogging tools such as Jaiku have their fans).

Dopplr, which is also mentioned in the Guardian article, is another service I’ve been using for some time, to record details of my trips and to share this information with my contacts.

Excluding Web sites aimed at kids, the other service mentioned in the Guardian article is Seesmic.com. I’ve not yet got an account for this service, but a Techcrunch article describes how this video-like Twitter service service: “Users can upload video directly from their webcam and post it to a personal page like with Twitter. They can also grab content from other sites such as YouTube by copying a video’s url and placing it in their stream. Additionally, videos that users create can be automatically linked to in twitter (potentially other platforms) and uploaded to YouTube.“

Whither Facebook?

So there are several new services to excite the early adopters. But what does this mean for Facebook? Will it face a gradual, or even sudden, demise? I would suggest that this will not be the case. Rather, like Microsoft’s operating system, office suite and Web browser, it will be a part of the infrastructure, widely used by many and having a significant role to play within organisations. But it will not be sexy. And, just like Microsoft products, it will have flaws (the annoying email messages which some Facebook apps send out seems to have parallels with Microsoft’s little-lamented dancing paper clip)  - such flaws do not necessarily lead to a downturn in a product’s usage.

So the early adopters will be excited by the new generation of micro-blogging and multi-media blogging tools. But when people start to question Twitter’s financial viability and the mass media start to speculate on how it can be misused (being used by paedophiles, perhaps) or the services which make it easy to share travel information are  used by burglars to target their house-breaking activities, it will be time for the early adopters to move on to the next generation of tools.

Or to put it another way, when the early adopters begin to distance themselves from a tool, this may be when it has progressed on the Gartner curve from the early adopters to mainstream usage.   And, for me, the mainstream usage of services is something to be welcome.

A Call for a Web 2.0 Policy Debate

A brief interview with me has just been published on the JISC Web site with the title ‘Information Professional of the Year’ calls for Web 2.0 policy debate. The article reflects many of the discussions which have taken place on this blog during the year:

There are divergences in opinion within the sector over the most appropriate development and deployment strategies for Web 2.0,’ he claims. ‘Some argue that higher educational institutions should be installing Web 2.0 services locally whilst others would argue that externally-hosted services can be used to support institutional requirements, with this providing benefits of scale and acknowledges that such services will, in any case, be used by people in their social activities.’

My call for a policy debate on these issues is clearly very timely in light of the demise of the Eduspaces social networking environment, its subsequent rebirth and the lively discussions taking place about the migration of the Eduspaces environment and the sustainability of the community.

I will be revisiting these issues in the new year.  But until then I’d like to wish everyone a Happy Christmas  - with the exception of readers in the US, to whom I pass on my seasonal greetings :-)

When Two Tribes Go To War

Hostilities Commence

Niall Sclater, Director of the OU VLE Programme at the Open University recently pointed out that the Slideshare service was down, using this as an “attempt to inject some reality into the VLEs v Small Pieces debate“. His colleague at the Open University, Tony Hirst responded with a post entitled “An error has occurred whilst accessing this site” in which Tony, with “beautifully sweet irony“, alerted Niall to the fact that the OU’s Intranet was also down.

Similar differences of opinion are taking place at the University of Leeds. My former colleague Nigel Bruce send me a wall-to-wall post on Facebook some time ago in which he expressed the view that “Personally I don’t see the point in ISS (the IT Services department) running blogging servers unless we want to automatically create and populate groups based on modules. Why not just encourage people to sign up for an account with WordPress? It’s better than anything we could offer. Much better than Elgg. This area is moving so fast no Uni computing services can hope to compete or keep up.“

But Melissa Highton, a colleague of Nigel’s will give a talk on Monday at UKOLN’s “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs And Social Networks” workshop on Leedsfeeds: a Blogging Service based on the Open Source Elgg Application in which she will describe the benefits of running a local open source blogging service (Elgg) to support the aims of the institution and members of the institution.

Two tribes with, it would appear, fundamentally differing perspectives - but not, I hope, about to go to war.

Two Tribes Meet At The CETIS Conference

Myself and my colleague Paul Walk had been invited by CETIS to facilitate a half-day session on Responding to Change and Institutional Challenges at the conference on Beyond Standards - Holistic Approaches to Educational Technology and Interoperability. In our planning for the session it struck me that the tensions between the views held by Tony Hirst and those of Niall Sclater would provide a useful way of exploring the institutional challenges of the Web 2.0 characteristics such as ‘the network as the platform and commercial providers of services.

I must admit, though, that I hadn’t expected both Tony and Niall to attend the session! This was an opportunity not to be missed, and so the session provided an opportunity to explore the tensions openly articulated by two of the participants.

Peace In Our Time?

Niall Sclater has already written about the session in a post entitled VLEs v Web 2.0: is consensus breaking out? As Niall summarises in his post:

I suspect Brian Kelly took great pleasure in attempting to pitch Tony Hirst against me in a session at the JISC CETIS Conference yesterday (photo: Mark Power). Brian had spotted that I had been promoting the benefits of institutional VLEs while Tony is pushing the boundaries in the use of Web 2.0 software for learning… After the session I caught up with Tony over a pint and we looked at whether there is any common ground in our thinking and, not surprisingly, there’s plenty (though Tony may now deny it!).

It was pleasing to see such mutual understanding being reaching - and Paul and myself can congratulate ourselves on the counselling work we carried out :-)

More seriously, though, participants at the session did actively engage in exploring the ‘gaps’ between the commercial and institutional provision of services (which I wrote about recently). And I have to admit that my previous thoughts that the gap needed to me addressing my policies, risk assessment, managing expectations, etc. have been modified as a result of the discussions at the session, and I now wonder whether it might be better to sometimes leave such gaps unfilled. For as ‘Webdunc’ recently commented “To oversimplify; I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a policy for what to do when you pass a peer/colleague/superior/lecturer/student in the street - why do we need one for online social behaviour?“.

Conclusions From The Session

Facilitators of the workshop session had been asked to summarise the conclusions in a single sentence. I must admit that I’m not convinced how useful this is - although I would acknowledge that it can provide a useful exercise for the participants in seeking consensus.

However when articulating the sentence it tends to appear bland. I feel this is the case with ours: “We need to think beyond the institution, beyond the sector, beyond the UK and beyond the short period spent in the institution - but we need to think carefully, widely and deeply.“

But although the conclusions may appear bland, I think they reflect the sentiments expressed by Oleg Liber, Director of JISC CETIS, and Sarah Porter, Head of Development, JISC, in the opening presentations at the conference.

And, finally it is possible, I feel, to enhance the impact of this sentence.

The Gaps Between The Owned And The Externally-Hosted Services

Scott Wilson (JISC CETIS) and Andy Powell (Eduserv Foundation) has recently published a couple of interesting posts on their blogs. which reflects my areas of interest.

Scott’s post on PLEs and the institution contains an image which depicts his thoughts on “the set of connections between what an institution offers and what individuals manage“.

I tend to agree with this vision which acknowledges that MySpace, Facebook, Slideshare, etc. will have a role to play in the services which are used to support institutional activities, but there will be a for the institution to “provide a coordination space“.

It’s the gaps in Scott’s diagram which particularly interest me. As well as the technical aspects of the coordination space (which could include automated dumps of data held elsewhere, bulk uploads of metadata, etc.) there are also the implied questions associated with this space: Do we trust the services? Can we compete with them? Do we compete on all fronts or select the appropriate areas? What are our institutional liabilities if things go wrong? What are the risks to the individuals and what responsibilities do we have to safeguard the interests of the individuals in our institutions?

Some of these issues were touched on by Andy Powell in his recent report on Eduserv’s OpenID event entitled OpenID - every student should have one. Andy argued that

“the management of our online identities is increasingly a user-centric and lifelong activity - it doesn’t start and stop at the system-induced transition points of our lives (going to school - leaving school, going to uni - leaving uni, getting a job - leaving a job, etc.). In consequence, there is a danger of us offering a poor fit to our user’s requirements if the approaches to identity management that we adopt are too rooted within particular sectors or phases of sectors.“

Andy identifies that there is a time dimension to the issue of the services institutions should be providing. Those of us who have been working in IT support or development within educational institution for some time with have been brought up with the view that it is an institutional responsibility to provide a quality, safe managed IT environment for members of the institution. But now we are starting to find that individuals will have their own digital identities when arriving at the institution, together with their own preferred applications (email, photo repositories, social networks, etc.) And this will not only apply to students arriving at our institutions, but also visitors, part time staff, staff on short term contracts, etc.

The spaces in Scott’s diagram is starting to look very interesting, I think.

Thoughts On Animoto

The Tool - Animoto

Andy Powell introduced me to Animoto, after he produced a video clip for UKOLN’s “Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks” workshop. Shortly afterwards he wrote a blog post about the Web-based tool for easily creating multimedia video clips by simply uploading photographs and letting the software do the donkey work.

Andy had previously commented (in the context of providing a live video streaming for the workshop) that his aim was “to demonstrate the possibilities for video-streaming live meetings using cheap or free equipment and services.“

The Experiment

Andy’s interest reflects mine which, in brief, are to explore:

• Free or low-costs solutions for organisations with limited budgets or technical expertise (this is particularly relevant to many public libraries, museums and archives, which are an important part of the communities UKOLN serves).
• The appeal of successful Web 2.0 services.
• How the successes of such services can be applied to in-house development work.
• Whether such services can be used in a service environment.

Animoto, “a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology and high-end motion design“, was therefore worthy of investigation, as 30-second video clips can be created for free and just $30 per year for an “All access unlimited pass”.

My initial experiment was to produce a video clip entitled “Memories Of IWMW 2007“, making use of photographs of UKOLN’s IWMW 2007 event (on Flickr with the ‘iwmw2007′ tag) held at the University of York in July 2007. Upload the photographs, select the backing music and publish. Simple!

My next experiment, based on Andy’s idea for the video preview of the Blogs workshop, was to make use of images contained in the speakers slides. Slightly more time-consuming, but nothing too difficult.

The third experiment was to create a video clip using some of the key slides prepared by the plenary speakers. The JPEG images were created by saving the slides as images from within PowerPoint.

And my final experiment was to take the key slides from my Introduction talk, and turn them into a 30 sector video clip.

As one might expect, the Animoto video clips can be embedded in Web pages, as illustrated.

What’s The Point?

The more cynical reader - or perhaps the reader who has actually viewed the video clips and listened to the cheesy background music - might be asking what the fuss is about! After all, ever since Microsoft released PowerPoint 1.0 it has been possible to easily create visual presentations, and the accompanying clip arts, clip music and wizards have often led to cliched presentations.

This is very true and, if Animoto takes off, I would expect such cheesy presentations to me the norm in the early days. However good presentations can be created using tools such as PowerPoint, Open Presents, etc, if you have the appropriate expertise and knowledge. And this takes experimentation.

So I’d encourage experimentation and the sharing of failures and successes. Two ideas which spring to mind:

• Video clips summarising the highlights of an event such as IWMW 2007, using photos from Flickr, the presentations and perhaps music created by the participants.
• Using the 30 second video clip to reduce a presentation to its bare essentials, for the ‘elevator pitch’. After all Michael Nolan on the Echge Hill University blog recently mentioned Pecha Kucha: “20 slides; 20 seconds per slide. You don’t have time to bore the audience.” Rather than wasting 6 minutes 40 seconds of your life, why not save over 6 minutes?

If such experimentation reveals that there’s nothing to be gained from such approaches, at least we’ve saved time being wasted in software development. Although it may be that limitations we encounter may be addressed in the commercial version of the service (perahps $30 per year might be worth the investment) or in new services which may be released in the future (the interface implies that a number of new features are due to be released).

OCLC report on ‘Sharing, Privacy and Trust In Our Networked World’

I recently received a copy of the OCLC report on “Sharing, Privacy and Trust In Our Networked World“. This is a report which I would recommend to everyone with an interest in the Web 2.0 world, in particular those who welcome evidence of the views of users of social networking services and discussions of the implications of such views.

The report is available on the OCLC Web site (in PDF format). I should point out that the report is very large (about 250 pages, I think) with many colour graphics. I should also add that I received a hard copy of the report as I contributed to the report, being one of only two UK contributors (the other being Andy Powell from the Eduserv Foundation) who gave their views on issues related to sharing, privacy and trust.

The report is based on a survey of 6,545 participants carried out between 7^th December 2006 and 7^th February 2007. The participants were from the US (a total of 1,801), Canada (921), UK (970), France (821), Germany (846) and Japan (804). An additional survey of 4,000 US library directors was also carried out, with 382 replies from library directors from academic, public, community college, school and special libraries being received. Interviews with selected information professionals (including myself and Andy) were also carried out. All in all, an impressive survey which helped to shape a fascinating report.

I will not attempt to repeat all of the issues raised in the report, you’ll be pleased to hear. Some particular issues of note are worth commenting upon, however. There seems to be a discrepancy between the views of library directors concerning privacy issues and the general user community: librarians have real concerns about privacy, and are less likely to make use of social networks for relationship buildings and for fun. Ironically general users “do not rate most library services as very private” even though “the majority do not read library privacy policies.” Most users do, however, “feel commercial sites keep their personal information secure” but only “about half think library Web sites keep their personal information secure“. The nature of trust of commercial social network services is also increasing with use.

These findings do surprise me. I had expected libraries to be the trusted organisations, with users having concerns regarding potential misuse of data held by commercial services. It seems that my views may perhaps reflect my personal prejudices, and that, as someone who is an information professional and who has spent his working life in the public sector, my views do not reflect those of the general public. Are public libraries (especially in the US) regarded as being too closely aligned with the government, with concerns over government snooping reflecting on the attitudes users have to making their personal data available in a library context? And do the reservations over use of personal data by academic libraries reflect concerns by staff and students over the relationships between the organisation and the individual?

Such issues informed the conclusions of the report. The section on “Open The Doors” felt that “the library brand must go from institutional to personal“. The authors felt that the views they held a few years ago, which “conceived a social library as a library of traditional services enhanced by a set of social tools - wikis, blogs, mashups, and podcasts” were mistaken, and their views “after living with the data, struggling with the findings, listening to the experts .. is [now] quite different“.
It would be a mistake, the report concludes, “to create a checklist of social tools for librarians to learn or to generate a ‘top ten’ list of services to implement on the current library Web site“. They argued that “The social Web is not being build by augmenting traditional Web sites with new tools.“

They now feel that institutions should “Open the library doors, invite mass participation and relax the rules“. The dangers were acknowledged (”It will be messy“) but the rewards where felt to be worth it: “mass participation and a little chaos often create exciting venues for collaboration, creativity, community building and transformation“.

The authors of the report invite feedback on the OCLC Web site. I too would welcome comments. In particular, how relevant is this vision within a UK context? And what are the implications for current plans for library development activities?

We’re The Young Generation

On Wednesday 10^th October 2007 I attended the “Inspiring the iGeneration Web 2.0, teenagers and libraries” event which was held at the Wolverhampton Science Park.

My Opening Talk

I gave the opening talk entitled ” We’re The Young Generation, And We’ve Got Something To Say” which provided an overview of Web 2.0 and outlined why social networking software, such as Facebook, are providing so popular, and the challenges which such popularity is posing. (The title of the talk referring, of course, to the popular hit by The Monkeys in the 1960s, which aims to provide an alternative cultural reference to social networks to “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion” which was picked up by Wikipedia).

It was pleasing to receive an email after the conference saying:

“I very much enjoyed the conference yesterday. The first session from Brian Kelly was exceptionally good. It was thought provoking. A much better start to the day than cornflakes!!.“

although of course the subtext could have been “better than cornflakes - but not as good as a full English breakfast” :-)

Other Talks

The other talks at the events described a variety of approaches which are being taken by public libraries and related organisations in making use of Web 2.0 services to engage with young people. Interestingly, a Web 2.0 service which was mentioned by a number of the speakers was WetPaint - a wiki service I’ve been using for a year of so (including using it to support the Masterclass on ‘Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Library’ at ILI 2007).

A common problem which was raised throughout the day was how to manage inappropriate content for young people. This ranged from obvious problematic content (pornography, Viagra spam, happy slappy videos, etc.) to more contentious areas, such as mainstream advertisements. There were clear differences in opinions expressed, from those who argue that happy-slapping is a problem that society needs to address, and it is a mistake to overprotect children to those who feel that public sector Web sites must ensure that they provide appropriate materials. This debate will continue …

The final comment I would make about the event is to applaud Paul Mayes, Teesside University for being willing to experiment with innovative Web 2.0 services at the event. Paul could not attend the event, so he videoed his talk ahead of the meeting. After this was shown, Paul and I made use of the TokBox video chat service (which I’ve commented on recently). Although there were some technical glitches, I felt the event benefits from Paul’s willingness to experiment, which was clearly appropriate for this particular event, with its focus on the willingness to experiment which many young people will have.

And thanks to Dave Pattern for the photographs he took of the event, including one which shows me (on stage) having a video chat with Paul using ToxBox. Now what is the metadata for this photo? Which is the real me and which is just fantasy?

And if only I had produced a video of my talk at the ILI 2007 conference I would have avoided passing on my cold to Dave Pattern, Kara Jones and others - which Dave not only blogged about but also informed the world via his Facebook status:

Results of the Evaluation of the UK Web Focus blog

On 23 August 2007 I announced the launch of an evaluation of the UK Web Focus blog. The results of the evaluation, which was open for a period of four weeks, are now available.  The evaluation, which made use of the SurveyMonkey software, have two main purposes: 1)  to gain a better understanding of the tools used to read the blog (the platform and applications and 2)  to gain feedback on the content of the blog, the publishing frequency and the length of postings. And in order to maximise the numbers of responses a follow-up request for feedback was posted on 11 September, in case readers may have missed the initial post, which was sent during the holiday season.

O f the 30 completed responses, I was pleased to read that 38.% used aUK Web Focus › Create New Post — WordPress Web-based RSS reader and 20.5% using a desktop RSS reader, with a similar percentage (20.5%) visiting the main blog Web site and 10.5% reading the blog posts via an aggregator, such as the JISC Emerge Elgg community Web site or JISC OSS Watch’s Planet aggregation service.

The most popular operating system environment was, unsurprisingly, MS Windows (64.1%), followed by Apple Macintosh (25.6%) and Unix (10.3%).  Nobody admitted to reading the blog using a mobile device (whether wearing pyjamas or not :-) )

Just over half (53.8%) of the respondents have given comments on the blog - it was pleasing that those who hadn’t were willing to give reasons why (”Worried about looking like I’m stating the obvious, I always feel I should have something new and original to offer“, “As of writing this, I’m not part of the blogosphere myself yet. Anonymous or dummy commenting doesn’t feel right” and “I haven’t commented (yet) because I haven’t felt I had anything sufficiently new/original to contribute“). Interestingly one person felt that blogs are not an appropriate medium for discussion: “I try not to make comments in blogs that require a response. For me blogs are for dissemination, they do not work well for discussion. I comment if I feel I can add something to the observation being made. If I want a discussion I will bring it up on a more appropriate location.“.

The comments on the content of the blog were very pleasing for me:

• Invariably relevant and thought provoking. Informed opinion that is not opinionated.
• Entries and variety very interesting.
• Excellent, I can’t remember reading anything that I thought was a waste of my time.
• Informative and thought-provoking — it’s good to read a blog about ‘web 2.0′ that manages to raise interesting questions rather than being dogmatic about the ‘right’ way to do things.
• marvellous - timely, detailed, open, and invitingly humble!

Many thanks for those comments (he says, humbly :-)

The question on the frequency of publication of the posts, again,  seemed to indicate that readers were happy:

• beats expectations - at least daily, sometimes twice - always somehow useful
• As I understand Brian’s workload and the diverse calls on his time, I am amazed he has time to produce as much as he does. I am happy with frequency at present, much more would be too much.
• Amazing: don’t know how you do it. Short ones are easy, but a considered article I find a lot of work to make relevant and to avoid complete pratfalls (small pratfalls are acceptable in blogging, I think!)
• Ideal. Frequent enough to keep interested but not so frequent that it becomes a chore to keep up

although there were some divergences of opinion:

• I wish postings were somewhat more frequent. Perhaps it should be a more central feature of Web Focus dissemination?
• I think there are too many postings-I often ignore them because I simply don’t have time to read through such lengthy and frequent posts.
• Sometimes difficult to keep up with all articles! But I would prefer too many rather than not enough.

The comments on the length of the posts also seemed to show that the current approach is working:

• Almost perfect. It is quite easy to get the gist of a post and decide whether to read in full.
• Good - enough detail usually to make it worthwhile. The writing style is good - waffle free.
• as long as they need to be in order to give appropriate detail - so just right - and effort made to embed examples very helpful
• Works well for your blog - other blogs work better with shorter news snippets but yours requires longer discussion to get point across
• I find the postings quite detailed - longer than several of the blogs I read, but the use of diagrams and screenshots etc breaks this up and prevents it from being an arduous read
• Shorter would be less useful (I think.)

I also invited readers to give other comments and suggestions.  These included:

• This blog is well written and presents ideas and technologies in a very clear way. It makes good use of links for finding our more. But it does not overwhelm either. A nice balancing act!
•  keep up the great service - perhaps even take on a network of distributed apprentices to propagate subtleties of ethos which may otherwise be overlooked as a legitimate set of “higher” skills - professional or otherwise
• In general, I appreciate the blog and find it useful when I have time to read it! Thank you also for taking the time to survey your readers.
• Currently, your blog is one of the Top 5 that I follow regularly Two of them are in English - the other one is Lorcan Dempsey’s
• I think it’s great to have the range of info you have and to report back on events you have attended.

This feedback has been very useful to me, so thanks to eveyone who responded.

The main issues and suggestions which a number of respondents raised which I should respond were the technical level and intended audence for the posts and problems in reading some of the posts, due, for example, to problems in rendering images.  It seems that some readers welcome the advice given to those new to blogging and Web 2.0, but other, more experienced readers, would prefer more technically-focussed posts.  I am wondering, in light of the feedback we are receiving from our funders and our discussions with the museums, libraries and archives community, whether to set up a blog, perhaps focussing on blogging and mainstream use of Web 2.0 services, aimed at mainstream members of that community, who may be making the first steps with Web 2.0.  I will float this idea at the Blogging Masterclass and with others in the Library sector I’ll be seeing on Monday and Tuesday at the ILI 2007 conference.

But I’d most particularly welcome feedback on this from readers of this blog.

Fashions In Internet Technologies

The Apache server software saw steady growth in its use from its launch. But I never heard anyone criticise Web server administrators for being fashionable, or doom merchants predicting that the growth would come to an end and, therefore, there is little point in using the software.

And yet such arguments are being made when other software, such as Facebook, becomes popular. Why is this, I wonder? In part, I think this is because services such as Facebook don’t fit in with the ideology of the ‘chattering classes’ - it’s not, open source, for example. And, unlike Apache, there is a lot of money associated with Facebook, with large companies (such as Microsoft and Google) looking to invest in the company. Such rampant capitalism again doesn’t fit in with certain ideological perspectives. In contrast, plucky underdogs, like Twitter and Jaiku are to be admired, even thought (or perhaps because) they  seem not to have gone beyond the boundaries of the geeks and early adopters.

I also feel that some people like to distance themselves from the vulgarities of profit and success. We’re British, after all; let’s leave the Americans and the Australians to boast about their successes, while we pride ourselves on heroic (or less than heroic) failures!

My view is that, whilst we may wish to reflect our national characteristics in the sporting arena (and I’m writing this in advance of this weekend’s Rugby World Cup games) as professionals we should base our judgments on evidence, rather than beliefs and, if the evidence shows that our beliefs aren’t working, then we may need to modify our beliefs, rather than ignore the evidence.

On the other hand, maybe Apache is starting to become unfashionable; after all as a recent Netcraft survey reported “its market share [is] declining closer to the 50% mark, as Microsoft … gained over 3 million hostnames“.

TokBox - A Useful Video-Conferencing Tool Or Something Sinister?

The TokBox Video Chat Tool

The TokBox instant video chat tool was reviewed by TechCrunch in August 2007. As with several of the Web 2.0 services I’ve mentioned on this blog, Tokbox is very easy to set up and use: simply register for a (free) account and, assuming you have a Webcam and microphone available, that’s about it. You can simply invite your friends to visit your area on the ToxBox Web site and they can then have a video chat with you, as illustrated below (in which I’m chatting to my colleague Paul Walk).

As is the norm for many Web 2.0 services, TokBox can be embedded in other Web pages or blogs. And ToxBox makes use of tagging for identification of users (I’ve used the ‘ukoln’ tag to identify myself).

It also seems that ToxBox can support more than two users (the icon in the top right window shows the number of users).

The Hidden Dangers

Last week when I started to evaluate TokBox I used it with a number of colleagues in. On one Later on Paul came into my office, telling me that he had been watching me and it was obvious that I was unaware that Paul had connected to my ToxBox account and was viewing the video and listening to me talking to myself!

I had expected to approve anyone who wished to view my video feed, so I was surprised when this happened - although I realised that I would have missed a sound alert as I had turned down the sound on my loudspeaker.

Conclusions

Should we be worried about the privacy implications of TokBox? My view is that this is an educational issue and, once we understand how the application works, we will use it in ways which reflect our particular requirements (indeed, one person commented on the TechCrunch article that TokBox is “going to force me to blog in something other than my pajamas.”).

Although many video chat tools are available (including Skype) TokBox is interesting as it requires no software to be installed locally. Rather the integration with the Web browser is carried out using Flash. For me I think it could be a useful ‘just-in-case’ or ‘just-in-time’ communications tool, rather than something that I’ll use on a regular basis.I was also interested to read that a TokBox application for Facebook is now available.

I was also interested to read a post on the Advercation blog which is “aggregating as many people’s TokBoxes as possible on one page” - an experiment which has some interesting possibilities. I have to admit that it reminds me of University Challenge, but I’m worried that, as a number of people have already commented, its killer use may be for the porn market :-(.

Technorati Tags: TokBox

The ‘Me Too’ Web 2.0 Applications

A few day’s ago I notice that Phil Bradley had updated his Twitter status with the comment “playing around with Trooker.com It’s really good… music videos galore!“.

As I trust Phil’s views on Web 2.0 applications I had a look at Trooker. Sure enough, it’s another easy-to-use Web 2.0 service which provides access to video clips from services such as YouTube, allows comments to be provided, the video clips to be embedded in blogs and Web pages, etc.

I know think that we are in now an era of plenty, with many Web 2.0 services providing similar approaches in the provision of access to multimedia resources, sharing resources, blogging, etc.  (as an example compare Jaiku and Yappd).  And I think this richness is to be appreciated - it is helping to demonstrate  that there is a need  for such services, and the variety of services available provides the user with choice, with features which are providing popular helping to open up the marketplace (who, for example, predicted the popularity of micro-blogging).

Of course in a time when the harvest is bountiful, we need to make plans for the winter. For me, this involves ensuring that the data associated which such applications  can be managed  - and the approaches to the management can include hosting it locally or depositing it with a third-party service, having a just-in-time approach to data management (migrating the data if the licence conditions change)  or even having a ‘am I bovvered?’ approach, which regards the data as playing a peripheral role to the needs of the service.  This might be regarded as heretical in some circles but, to be honest,  I’ve never bothered recording my phone calls, and just because I could record my Skype calls doesn’t mean I will.

Your Views On Externally-Hosted Web 2.0 Services

I have found the My Questions Facebook application useful in getting focussed responses to questions I’ve raised. In the past few months I’ve asked for comments on Skype (most find it useful with only one person feeling it should be banned) and how institutions should respond to Facebook (almost everybody feels we should engage with it in some fashion, whilst being aware of possible dangers, and only one dissenting view from someone who feels it’s a fad).

My question for this month is:

Externally-hosted blogs, wikis, etc: (a) valuable solution for institutions which can save effort and resources; (b) to be avoided, as institutions need to be able to manage and tweak their own services or (c) an alternative view (please describe)?

I’ve already found that asking this question has proved valuable, as Chris Adie has included a link to a document on Guidelines for Using External Services produced by the University of Edinburgh. Barry Cornelius, incidentally used the JISCMail mailing list to inform me of a document on Checklist for assessing third-party IT services which addresses similar issues and some time ago I wrote a QA Focus briefing document on Risk Assessment For Use Of Third Party Web 2.0 Services.

What are your thoughts? If you can keep your responses down to 255 characters, you might wish to respond in Facebook; those who prefer to waffle on for longer than this may wish to respond to this blog post :-)

Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting and All That

The Event

On Wednesday 5 September 2007 I attended a JISC Skills Update day on Exploiting Communication Channels which was held at Said Business School, Oxford. The event was very successful, as was clearly shown form the evaluation form for the event: the venue was particularly well-appreciated (over 75% of those who completed the online evaluation form thought that Said College was an excellent venue) and over 95% felt that the similar events should be held in the future.

Other comments which were made included “This event was excellent and has provided us with lots of ideas for the future“, “I found the day excellent - especially from the pov of networking face to face so another event like this would be useful! Really interesting to find the different models of use of web2.0 tools emerging” and “I found the day very informative and came back with many practical ideas for further investigation and discussion for implementation within our service“.

The main focus of the event was on the potential role of Web 2.0 technologies (and Second Life) to support the communications infrastructure provided by JISC Service organisations - although the role of more well-established approaches (including email and both print and online newsletters) were also covered.

It was pleasing that there seemed to be such a high level of interest in making greater use of technologies such as blogs and wikis within this particular community. Indeed several Web 2.0 technologies were used on the day itself, with live blogging of the talks and a scalable tag provided for the event (skillsday2007) which enabled resources related to the event to be easily found via Technorati.

The issues that were raised during the questions seemed to be on “how?” (the best practices) rather than “why?” and there were some interesting questions raised about the different approaches to blogging taken by CETIS (blogs provided by individual CETIS SIG coordinators) and OSS Watch (individuals posting on a team blog).

These are areas of interest to be (i.e. the broad question of deployment strategies for Web 2.0 technologies for national services) and will be something I will revisit in the near future.

My Talk

I was pleased that my talk on “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting and All That” was highlighted in the comments (”I thought Brian’s presentation was excellent!“) and appeared to be the most highly rated of the plenary talks with over 80% either agreeing or strongly agreeing. Note that, unfortunately the survey form was poorly designed and it wasn’t stated what they were agreeing with! But as one person commented “I hope that choosing “Strongly Agree” is interpreted as meaning I found the presentation strongly relevant and interesting (as I’m not sure from the wording of the questionnaire)” This is the interpretation I’ve taken too!

In my talk I described my personal experiences in using blogs, wikis, multimedia and social networks. The slides are available on Slideshare and are embedded in this post (in suitably configured browsers and if you are viewing the original post).

In addition I created a brief (2 minute) video clip which is available on YouTube explaining why I use blogs, wikis and social networks. Again the video clip is embedded in this post.

The video clip represents the initial experiment in use of my mobile phone for taking videos. I’m aware of some technical limitations (e.g. the lighting) - but I thought it would be useful to document the initial attempt.

Technorati Tags: Technorati Tags: skillsday2007

Butler Group Report: Rich Web Applications

Summary of the Report

I was recently invited to evaluate a Butler Group Report on “Rich Web Applications”. I was impressed by the quality of this report, which is very timely for those organisations which may be considering the development or Rich Web Applications (RWA) or Rich Internet Applications (RIA). And higher educational organisations which are involved in software development should, I feel, have a strong interest in this area, whether this is in applications which run within a Web browser (Google Maps providing a good example of a RWA) and Internet applications which do not require a Web browser (Google Earth is a good example of a RIA).

This 267 page report suggests that RIA will provide the default approach to application development in the near future, with this approach currently in the transition from being used by the early adopters through to mainstream acceptance.

Of particular interesting to those actively involved in JISC development strategies, including the JISC E-Framework, is the view that RWA and Web 2.0 ideas are being transferred to Enterprise Web 2.0. Similarly the report’s suggestion that importance of Software as a Service (SaaS) will be boosted by RWA is very closely aligned with the JISC’s Information Environment, and the well-established tradition of providing networked-based services for the academic sector.

The report provides a useful overview of the different approaches to the development of RWA, ranging from Ajax toolkits and widget libraries and use of browser plugins (such as Adobe’s Flash player, Java applets and Microsoft Silverlight) and RIA development environments including Java or .NET.

The report then provides an overview of the main development environments, suggesting that the Adobe Flex and Nexaweb platform are early leaders in the field, with Microsoft’s Rich User Experience (which seems to be a generic name which refers to Microsoft’s .NET Framework and Silverlight run-time browser plugin) and Sun’s Visual Web Pack and Netbeans IDE also worthy of consideration.

Implications for the Sector

If the report is correct in its views on the importance of Rich Web Applications (and I suspect it is) then IT Service departments and other groups within our institutions which are involved in serious software development activities will need to make some significant decisions about the technical routes they should adopt. This report should help technical managers who will be involved in such decision-making processes.

But I also feel that others involved in the provision and support of Web services need to have a better understanding of the implications in a growth in use of Rich Web Applications. At present I suspect many well-established institutional Web teams will have a development culture which is based on the notion of the Web as an informational resource, with policies based on the notion of a page-based service.  But Rich Web Applications aren’t based a page metaphor. I suspect that we will find that existing policies and guidelines are likely to be irrelevant - but there may be battles to be fought before an appreciation of the richer Web environment is widely accepted.  And one likely battlefield is likely to be the widely-held belief that JavaScript and/or browser plugins (which are required in order to deploy RWAs)  cannot be deployed on Web sites which seek to be accessible.

Initial Experiences With VCasmo

I recently wrote an article about Zentation, a Web 2.0 service which enables a video clip to be synched with a PowerPoint presentation.

I received a comment on that post, suggesting that I should check out VCasmo.  So I did - and I’m impressed. And my advice if thinking about using an externally hosted Web 2.0 service, is to look for more than one, so that you have an alternative if things go wrong.

Although Zentation was easy to use, it’s interface did seem rather clunky.

Vcasmo, by contrast, does seem easier to use and provides the facilities we nowadays expect from these type of Web 2.0 services. For example, rather than having to go to the service to view the presentation (which you can do) it is also possible, and will often be preferred, to embed the page in a Web page, as illustrated.

Now this service is new (there are fewer than 200 resources which have been uploaded, and mine was one of the first in the Academic category). And using a Technorati search I only found one blog post about the service.  But every service starts from scratch, and this one is  definitely worth investigating.

The steps I took in creating this resources were as follows.  Firstly I took the video, using a Nokia N95 camera.  I then uploaded the video clip to Google Video (together with YouTube).  I then created a number of PowerPoint slides which summarised what Kara had said and uploaded the slides to both VCasmo and Zentation.  After some simple editing to add the title and relevant metadata I synched the video clip hosted on Google Video with the  appropriate slides, as illustrated below.

I will be making further use of Vcasmo, I think.  Has anybody else tried it?  Or are there alternatives worth considering?

Technorati Tags: vcasmo

Further Experiments With Slidecasts

I have been carrying out some further experiments with Slideshare’s Slidecast facility, which allows uploaded presentations to be synched with audio.

In a previous post on the Slidecast service I was self-conscious of my ums and errs, perhaps because I was giving the talk along in my office and was thinking about both what I was talking about and the technology itself.

For a more recent Slidecast on Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting and All That I prepared a script of what I was intending to say and used that as the basis of the talk (although I did not necessarily read the script faithfully). I am more pleased with the audio, this time, although whether this is because I am more comfortable with the application, and not necessarily due to me preparing the script is not yet clear. And I still need to work on the best ways for managing Audacity, the open source application I use for recording and editing the audio. I also discovered that the text included in screen dumps couldn’t be read in the Slidecast, so I’ll have to address that issue as well.

I recently discussed these issues with Andy Powell and Bernadette Swanson (nee Daly), both former colleagues of mine at UKOLN. A suggestion Bernadette made was to had a few drinks before recording the sound track, as this would put you more at ease. I haven’t (yet) tried this approach, but it might be something to bear in mind.

How have others addressed the concerns that many of us probably have about how they sound on a recording?

Technorati Tags: slidecast

Your Feedback On The UK Web Focus Blog

What tools are readers of the UK Web Focus blog using - do you visit the host Web site (at ukwebfocus.wordpress.com) or use an RSS reader? Or perhaps you read the postings which have been aggregated elsewhere (such as on the JISC Emerge or Planet OSS Watch Web sites or within the Facebook environment).  If the latter is the case, I may not be aware of any comments you may have given to my postings - and I won’t have access to any statistics about your visits.

In order to try and get some information about the diversity of environments which may be used by readers of my posts, I have created a feedback survey.  And, as well as you providing me with information about your environment, the survey also allows you to provide general feedback on your view of the blog, such as the content, the publication frequency or any other comments you may have.

In order to ensure that the survey can be completed in a diversity of environments, it has been decoupled from the UK Web Focus blog environment. Instead a SurveyMonkey form has been set up which contains just seven questions: three about the tools you use for reading the blog whilst the remainder allow you to give your comments and suggestions.

The survey is provided by SurveyMonkey (and is illustrated in the image). I look forward to reading your responses.

Doomed Web Sites

On 12th August I received an email which informed me that:

.. the Splashblog service will be terminated on SEPTEMBER 10th, 2007. The Splashblog website, any uploaded pictures or content, and customer support will no longer be accessible after this time.

I subscribed to Splashblog’s free service (which provides a mobile photo blogging service) in January, as the Splashblog application was bundled with a Palm PDA which I’d purchased. I never actually used the service, so the withdrawal of the service does not affect me.  However having only a month’s notice to export one’s data did strike me as rather worrying.  One could easily envisage a scenario in which a service like this is intended for use in a teaching course, but the lecturer is away on sabbatical during the summer and fails to stop this message and act on it, resulting in loss of the service and data.

Clear justification for not making use of such external Web 2.0 services, you might argue. We should either be hosting our own services, or at least using services which are managed by trusted public sector organisations and aren’t subject to commercial decisions, takeovers, etc.

But this isn’t necessarily the case, as struck me when I was reminded of the article published on the BBC  News Web site in January 2007 on The doomed government websites which listed 551 government Web sites which are to be axed.

What is the future of the data and services provided on these Web sites?  What should be done to support not only the direct users of the services, but indirect use; perhaps, for example, these services could be used in an educational context.

And if you work in one of the affected government agencies, what steps should you be taking now to (a) inform your user communities; (b)  ensure that access to data and services which will still be required can be found and accessed by the users and (c)  ensure that resources which may have some historical relevance are preserved?

These issues have been brought to my attention by the headlines in the BBC News article.   But the issues are also very relevant in other sectors: what will happen to the data and services provided by the AHDS when their funding ceases; what happened to the data and services provided by universities which have merged in recent years (for example, University of North London and London Guildhall University)?

If we don’t have answers to these questions, we mustn’t use the demise of the Splashblog service as an excuse to ban use of externally hosted services provided by the commercial sector.  After all, Google has a lifespan which is longer than, for example, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which was only established in June 2007.

Integration Of Community-Led Activities And A Diversity of Web 2.0 Services

I’ve recently mentioned the videos of the plenary talks at UKOLN’s annual IWMW 2007 event. I’ve also mentioned my experimentation with the Zentation service which integrates videos (served by Google Videos) and accompanying uploaded PowerPoint slides.

Adrian Stevenson, a participant at IWMW 2007, videoed the opening plenary talk at IWMW 2007 (”From individuals to networks and sustainable communities?” by Steven Warburton) and uploaded this video to the Google Video service. I was then able to integrate this video with Steven’s slides and make it freely available on Zentation. I have also embedded this on the relevant page on the IWMW 2007 Web site:

It strikes me that Adrian’s involvement in this is a good example of a community-led activity - an approach to development which the JISC Emerge project is seeking to support within the JISC development community (as can be seen from a recent presentation I gave on this topic).

It also occurs to me that as well as the creation of data from within the community, this example also illustrates use of a number of external services for providing access to the data: Google Video and Zentation have been mentioned previously, and, in addition, the slides are available from Slideshare.

This example illustrates the move that we are seeing from use of monolithic services to use of a variety of distributed applications. Within the large-scale enterprise environment an approach based on Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) is growing in popularity, which seems to have many parallels with the lighter-weight approach which is taking place in the Web 2.0 world.

With both of these approaches there are many issues which will need to be addressed such as the risks associated with use of third party services, ongoing performance and security issues, rights issues, long term preservation, etc.

I’ll explore some of these issues at a later date.

Technorati Tags: zentation