At eWeek, Steve Gillmor names his Best and Worst of Messaging & Collaboration in '03,
Among the best are RSS, Technorati, and Sun's licensing model. Among the worst? SCO, lack of IM interoperability, and e-mail.
...via Dan Gillmor
According to KoreaHerald:
Samsung Electro-Mechanics said yesterday it has succeeded in developing a futuristic wearable mouse, "Scurry," where one can control keys and roam around computer screens by moving your fingers freely.
Jon Udell talks about The Social Life of XML [Dec. 23, 2003]:
The really important thing, it seems to me, is the way the XML document can become a shared construct, a tangible thing that processes and people can pass around and interact with. On the one hand, an XML document is the payload of a SOAP message that gets routed around on the Web services network -- a payload that represents, for example, a purchase order. On the other hand, an XML document is the form that somebody uses to submit, or approve, or audit that purchase order. Now, all of a sudden, these two documents are not only made of the same XML stuff, they can literally be the same XML document.
Jakob Nielsen lists his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003
I've been cleaning out files, something I do every once in a great while and I came across something I wrote at least two and a half years ago. Since I think it's still timely and useful, I thought I'd post it here:
Principles to guide us in building new visions for online communication, education, learning, and community building
'The Web is a conversation is one of the central tenets of The Cluetrain Manifesto. We characterize the Web as a source of information, but its appeal and its potential is the ease with which it makes possible connections, community, and conversation. When you look at the Web in this way a number of things become clear.
In an issue of JOHO (Journal of Hyperlinked Organization), David Weinberger says, speaking of the connections the Internet now makes possible: "We are, I believe, at an 'inflection point.' We thought we were answering email but we were instead building a world."
One of the outcomes of the web as a conversation is that it's increasingly informal. When most of our business communication is online, this informality permeates everything we do. The lines among people change and blue.
People don't come to the web for formal instruciton, for three credit hour classes, They come for conversation, for communities of practice, for interactive conversational learning, for informality and control. Organizing successful classes on the web will require stepping firmly out of semester, credit-hour, program-based education.
Other notes:
It's a truism that kids are great at new technologies and that the rest of us can only scramble helplessly, out of touch and behind. The true picture is, as with most truisms, vastly more complex. Conversations and learning communities began with FidoNet and Genie and other services even before the Internet, at least ten to fifteen years ago. The people who started those conversations, even if in their teens and twenties then (which many of them weren't) are now in their thirties and forties. And many of them enthusiastically participate in online communities to this day. Senior citizens are one of the fastest growing users of computers--becuase computers give them access to community and to learning at a time when their physical limitations may be increasing. People who are remote and isolated for whatever reason turn, even now, to the Internet for community, contact, and learning. They don't necessarily turn to universities for these things, but they're out there looking.
People will learn what interests them. People will generate energy when they're excited.
We reveal ourselves on the Web almost always in terms of our interests....David Weinberger
Tell us some good stories and capture our interest. Dn't talk to us as if you've forgotten how to speak. Don't make us feel small. Remind us to be larger. Get a little of that human touch....The Cluetrain Manifesto
eLearn Magazine has a good article on making e-learning less boring and more memorable:
For teaching to be effective, cognition and emotion must work together,” says Norman. He says four elements must be present for an e-learning experience to be successful:
- Strong motivation: The material is structured around a problem the student really cares about.
- Positive encouragement: Efforts to explore and understand the material are rewarded.
- The social factor: A strong social commitment is present, achieved either by having people work in teams or by establishment of a strong personal commitment to the teacher through continual feedback and interaction.
- Stress: Frequent assignments that impose deadlines on learners. A little stress is a great focus-booster.
...via elearningpost
Dan Gillmor says that Nokia gets or is starting to get content syndication.
From the Nokia Content Synidication Program page:
The Nokia Content Syndication Program (NCSP) offers direct links to Nokia documents, toolkits, videos, images, etc., all through standard XML and JavaScript interfaces. Using the links in green below, you can directly access content in RDF, RSS, and JavaScript.
LiveJournal publishes regularly updated statistics
1,414,441 total accounts
63.5% female
93.9% free accounts
Top State--California
And, btw, if you're over 30? You are so not the average LiveJournal user.
...via BoingBoing
Christina Wodtke has a weblog, Widgetopia, "a Collection of Widgets and UI elements from various websites, with notation of their sterling or plate metal qualities."
...via mamamusings
RSS in Government reports on RSS Winterfest 2004, an online discussion of RSS and content syndication:
RSS WinterFest will be a forum to discuss RSS and its future as a technology for use within and outside of the enterprise. Attendees may choose which events they want to attend. They may also contribute by posting to their Weblog or to the wiki. Moderators will highlight Weblogs and the wiki during the Webcast and the intermissions.Case studies will include those from a media campaign in InfoWorld that distributed advertising through RSS feeds, the Department of Justice and those from companies that have implemented RSS and other Internet content syndication technologies.
Every since weblogs became popular, marketers have been trying to figure out how to use them to, well, market things. Here's a stab at getting some Spiderman 2 promotion through blogging. The site provides Spiderman templates for Blogger and Live Journal and instructions for setting up your own blog:
Step three
Now that your blog is set up, it's time to start posting. To get and keep an audience, you'll want to write interesting things and post often. If you use the Spider-Man 2 templates, you don't have to only talk about Spider-Man. Current events, music, art, your social life - any of these can be good subject matter. But the better the quality of your writing, the more people will stay interested and keep coming back for more.
...via BoingBoing
In the past, we have brought to your attention many interesting, and occasionally even useful, USB devices. On Slashdot, here's a listing of strange devices that can be powered through the USB port on your computer, including:
There's a new group blog called ATAC: Abusable Technologies Awareness Center, for discussing technology that causes concerns about privacy and security:
Welcome to the Abusable Technologies Awareness Center (ATAC). Our mission is to provide current and accurate information about technology that oversteps its bounds. Whether the concerns relate to unexpected privacy violations or inappropriate security, ATAC serves as a clearinghouse for informed discussions. Our panelists, all respected Computer Scientists introduce topics as new disclosures are made, and the forum is open to the public for discussion. This site is hosted at the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Contributors include Bruce Schneier and Ed Felten.
Bruce Schneier talks about how MSBlaster may have affected critical computer systems involved in the east coast blackout:
Let's be fair. I don't know that MSBlast caused the blackout. The report doesn't say that MSBlast caused the blackout. Conventional wisdom is that MSBlast did not cause the blackout. But it's certainly possible that MSBlast contributed to the blackout. The primary and backup computers that hosted the alarm systems failed at the same time MSBlast was attacking Windows computers on the Internet. What operating system were the alarm computers running? Were they on the Internet? These are interesting questions worth knowing the answers to.
...froman article by Debbie Weil at MarketingProfs.com. The definitions include:
...via Scripting News
If you've every tried to look up information about RSS online and learned that, among other things, it also stands for Royal Statistical Society, Relay Spam Stopper, and received signal strength, then you may want to get behind Rename this contenst:
Amy Gahran, creator of the weblog CONTENTIOUS, is offering a contest to select a catchier name for RSS.
Some of the entries so far include:
John Patrick says some good things about blogs and business:
So where does blogging fit in? It's a way to energize the expertise from the bottom—in other words, to allow people who want to share, who are good at sharing, who know who the experts are, who talk to the experts or who may, in fact, be one of those experts, to participate more fully. We all know somebody in our organization who knows everything that's going on. "Just ask Sally. She'll know." There's always a Sally, and those are the people who become the bloggers. And such people write a blog about, say, customer relationship management, and they're taking the time to find the experts and the links to leverage, to magnify what they're writing about. And from those links people can be led to information and see things in a context they might not have considered before.People won't go to the company intranet to search for information. Instead, they'll look in blogs see what people they trust and respect have to say. The company intranet simply doesn't have that kind of credibility, nor ever will at many companies. Further, blogs aren't old, like an HTML document that's been there since 1997. Instead, blogs are very likely to be something that interests [the blogger] greatly. Bloggers are writing all the time about what's current in various contexts and subject categories. Blogs are off-the-cuff, candid, real—and now.
He doesn't really say anything that most people using blogs for both providing and getting information don't already know, but it's something that can be said over and over because many people still don't get it:
I think a lot of times people see something come along and they say, "What's the big deal? We had that in 1972,"—like knowledge management or artificial intelligence. When instant messaging started, a lot of people said, "oh, this is no biggie. We had this on the mainframe in the 1960s." It's true—we did. But what makes IM different is that now we have the Internet—the widespread sharing of information. That allows for collaboration, it allows for a global effort. So it spawns many more ideas, it allows a new thought to take off like wildfire.I like to think of blogging as a new way to communicate. And there are many ways to think about this. Some people like to say this enables everybody to be a publisher. In fact, a lot of people said that about the Web back in 1994 and 1995—that it's a document-publishing phenomenon and that now, everybody can publish. In theory, that was true—but only if you knew HTML and if you knew how to set up a Web server and a lot of other ifs. What's new with blogging is that anybody can do it.
Johnathon Briggs talks about starting knowledge fires:
Over the weekend I listened to IBM’s Dave Snowdon discussing the need for organisations to try lots of options and focus on emerging successes rather than to try to define what would be successful and then only try out that option. A metaphor for this would be starting lots of fires. Some will be quickly extinguished by their environment, some will burn a bit but go out and some will become the centre of attention encouraging people to add wood or dance and sing around the flames.
...via Seb's Open Research
Freecom announces a 1 Gigabyte USB flash memory card that fits in your wallet.
...via Gizmodo
The Government of Canada has a new newsroom which includesRSS feeds for a number of categories.
The NY Times has a profile of Danah Boyd, a young researcher in human-computer interaction who has been studying social networks, in particular Friendster.com:
...when two people speak to each other, they assume their conversation is fleeting, but e-mail and instant messaging, by making that conversation persistent, offer a new architecture. When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the other's social network. For that matter, no individual can see information about his or her own social network: who knows whom, and how.Friendster offers a mix of architecture-changing tools and technologies: e-mail, a profile (which offers a persistent presentation of self) and a coarse representation of a social network. Friendster is an architectural change," Ms. Boyd said. "It's not a mimicry of a change; it's a total change." Once the early users of Friendster discovered these new architectures, they began to play with them. That's how Friendster evolved from a dating site into something else.
...via misbehaving.net
We're starting to look more formally at collaboration tools and discussing what we can deploy to help people collaborate in the organization. I'm pretty sure that like most technology it's more a people-issue than a technology-issue with just enough 'help-from-tools' to get people focused on what tools to buy, on how to train people to use them, and on how to support and maintain collaboration tools and rather than on the culture, the way we work, and how we form networks now.
Anyway, I'll try to note resources as I find them and ideas as they occur to me and become coherent (unfortunately for me--ideas occur to me long before they become coherent enough to express).
==
Collaboration is only partly an IT problem. As with many things that people do, while tools can help us collaborate more effectively they can’t necessarily overcome cultural, time or communication issues. In addition, collaboration tools need to be evaluated for whether they’re actually facilitating collaboration or interfering by adding process.
People do what they need to do to get their work done
--despite tools
--despite processes
--despite policies
If tools, processes, policies work with them, they’ll use them. If people refuse to learn and/or use policies, tools, or processes (even when, or especially when, there's training available), it’s a very strong indicator that those tools, processes or policies make the job more difficult or don’t help get the job done rather than that the people just don’t like change.
It’s not about ‘changing the way people work.’ It’s about making sure that the way we’re changing actually helps people get their work done.
Others say (what I would say if I were more concise and incisive):
Technology Confined Collaboration
After the CIO picked himself up off the floor, we spent the next 15 minutes talking about why so few [collaboration tools]. It wasn't culture. It wasn't anticipated reciprocity. The IT lady summed it up best when she said, "web collaboration doesn't work the way people do." Technology was confining the natural human collaborative process. This particular product was forcing these folks (all 26, 000 of them) into working with a fixed set of tools, which was the real problem. If your problem didn't fit almost exactly into the function set the tool provided, you were forced to change the way YOU work. Compound this by being forced to work within the firewall and the need to have IT set up a space and the point is made.Collaboration is about people. Collaboration needs technology frameworks that support adaptive, ad hoc interactions. Adaptive from the sense of extending functionality on the fly and securely embracing new members on the fly. Simply put, it's the swarming culture fused with adaptive technology.
It's not simple to be productive with process-oriented collaboration tools because there are technology (e.g. firewalls, network connectivity) and administrive (e.g. permission, set-up) boundaries. The lack of flexibility and end-user control over the tools creates a lot of *noise* throughout the process and precludes any sense of immediacy. Not to mention the firewall issue specifically, which implies that there are certain people that I can't collaborate with even if I need to.What is the requisite laundry list to make net-based collaboration/communication really take off? The answer isn't obvious to me, but here are a few suggestions (from the end-user perspective; surely there is a separate IT-perspective list)....
- As simple to use as email or the phone
- End-user driven
- Fast and familiar
- No network boundaries
- No administrative boundaries
- The "right" tools (messaging, file sharing, user presence, and more over time)
- Flexibility to (a) over time, add new tools to meet new modes of usage, (b) interact in public or private context, depending upon the situation, (c) add or drop people from a thread of communication on an as-needed basis
- Ubiquity of network connectivity, hardware, and software
I think this is a great list and I would add:
Ray Ozzie says that email (which along with face to face and telephones is where most collaboration goes on now) is broken and that shared space of some kind is really better for workers to collaborate. What he’s talking about works best when all the people you want to work with already work with you in the same organization. But we also need good, fast, easy ways to work with people in other organizations, individuals, folks we meet at conferences (even while we’re at conferences), and many other configurations.
So, where do we go from here? I'm still working on my ideas for this and will post more in a day or so.
The University of Alberta has a number of articles from their Academic Technologies for Learning unit on designing for distance learning, including:
...via elearningpost
ACM Queue reports on an AT&T labs study on IM use
We found evidence of two styles of use, only one of which is currently widely acknowledged. In the interactions we monitored involving people who either infrequently use IM or rarely communicate with each other, we discovered that messages tended to focus chiefly on scheduling and coordination matters and that the conversations were slow paced and involved little threading or multitasking. Frequent IM users, on the other hand, tended to use IM more as a tool for collaboration, with discussions covering a broad range of topics via many fast-paced interactions%u2014each with many short turns in the conversation, much threading, and a predisposition towards multitasking. Although people consistent with our "light user" profile have until now been generally regarded as typical of all IM users, our research suggests that the majority of IM traffic actually involves heavy users working collaboratively to address complex, work-specific problems.
We've been talking in our office about ways to introduce IM to people who aren't using it now as part of our new network implementation, so this is timely useful information.
...via cyfernet_technology
Dan Gillmor has a list of geeky gift ideas including: