analysis on SWiK

Eclipse Plugin Central :: Eclipse plugin resource center and marketplace for Eclipse and Plugin Ecosystem

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:13:58 -0700

Cryptool - Cryptool Introduction

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:21:23 -0700

How to configure SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services to use Kerberos authentication

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:19:45 -0700

beaTunes ~ build better playlists

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:18:44 -0700

* Automatically determine BPM (beats per minute) and store the result in iTunes * Manually determine BPM and store the result...

The Lord of the Rings Score Analysis Project

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:11:57 -0700

Piwik - Web analytics - Open source

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:09:11 -0700

Will The Semantic Web Have a Gender?

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:15:51 -0700

One academic warns that it might and says we need to pay attention to it.

As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? "Objective" descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships. How will the emerging Semantic Web understand relationships and what will that mean for us as human users?

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Will_The_Semantic_Web_Have_a_Gender';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';Austrian researcher Corinna Bath argues that there is a real risk that the semantic web of the future will be built with the perspectives and assumptions of male computer scientists baked-in unconsciously - at the expense of everyone else.

Background

Corinna Bath is currently research fellow at the "Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society" in Graz, Austria. She's now working on engaging the several decades old study of gender and technology with the emerging world of the semantic web.

What is the semantic web? We define it as a paradigm that makes the meaning of particular web pages understandable by machines - not just in full text searches or keyword categories, but in terms of which concepts are central to a given page and the relationships between them.

The semantic web is hot. World Wide Web founding father and W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee says all the pieces are now in place for a semantic web to emerge.

So is it a boy or a girl?

When You Assume, You Make an...

Corinna Bath did an interview last week for the Austrian Semantic Web Company where she articulates her concerns about gender and the semantic web. Unfortunately, the interview is extremely academic in language and tone - so we'll try to explain her arguments here.

Her first argument is that the architects of the semantic web need to be very careful about the assumptions they carry into the creation of categories of relationships. Bath draws a historical parallel with the first phone books, where listings were organized by the names of the husband in each household. That appeared to the authors to be the logical way to do it at the time. It wasn't until after years of feminist political organizing led to general cultural change that the phone books changed. Why is this important? Because systems like the phone book help color our view of the world we live in and are the building blocks of basic inequalities.

Too often, Bath argues, "binary assumptions about women and men are not reflected [upon] or the (gender) politics of [a particular] domain is ignored. Thus, the existing structural-symbolic gender order is inscribed into computational artifacts and will be reproduced by [their] use."

Right: The Semantic Web made me grow this beard. Semantic web t-shirt via SpreadShirt.

For example, the Dublin Core ontology concerns Documents. It consists of a list of elements that can be used to describe a document, including "creator," "contributor," and "isReferencedBy." Are there types of relationships that aren't included on the list but are important to an accurate understanding of a document? There probably are, and different perspectives could help articulate what those relationships might be.

For example, some feminist critics argue that the Western cannon of almost every type of literature is full of work that men didn't give women appropriate credit for. Some argue that Albert Einstein's wife deserves substantial credit for his theory of relativity - should that be included in semantic markup wherever the book is cataloged? How should that relationship be described? Calling her a contributor would be controversial and wouldn't really capture the history - a new category may be needed.

There are no shortage of ways to describe documents, events, people or concepts. The roster of people who will participate in the creation of a standard way to describe them will become increasingly important as machine learning becomes more important in our every day lives. Failing to take this seriously, Bath argues, could lead to the silencing of "minority views, quieter voices, and allows the dominant voice to speak for everyone, which seems highly problematic."

Is Categorization Itself The Right Solution?

The semantic web today is based largely on what are called "triples" - sets of subject, predicate and object. For example Marshall Kirkpatrick [subject], loves [predicate] Punkin' the Tabby Kitten [object]. (Hypothetical, I don't have any kittens and please don't send me any.)

This way of describing things isn't beyond question, however. As Bath argues:

Even the modeling concepts themselves should be questioned as Cecile Crutzen suggest, since e.g. the class concept and the inheritance concept lack to represent social processes, because of limited formal expressiveness for conflict, change and fluidity. Such an ontology abstracts from human sociality, situated action and real meaning construction processes.

In other words life aint so simple: people change, conflicts and context matter and things in this world don't just get their meaning by one object bumping into another, one event leading to another, child inheriting traits from a parent, etc.

Computer logic may necessitate simplification of some of life's richness - but this is nothing to take lightly. We're talking about helping computers understand meaning and that is not a simple or trivial matter.

Is Knowledge Only The Absence of Doubt?

Bath calls into question "computer science modeling that rests on the Cartesian epistemology," or the belief that way we know that we really "know" something is by having no doubt about it.

If our semantic markup reading robot finds markup asserting that a certain relationship exists and does not find any markup asserting that it does not exist - ought we conclude that we've determined the truth of the matter? Particularly if not all perspectives on the matter have been taken into consideration in even formulating how the situation is described, then an assertion that a particular object has a certain property or two subjects have a particular relationship may be woefully inaccurate in describing reality. There are a lot of things people disagree about and there's a lot of knowledge that people deny for political convenience. The absence of doubt is not sufficient basis for determination of truth. Repeated attempts to disprove a theory make a much better basis for working knowledge.

Or, as political blogger Karoli Kuns said to NPR's Andy Carvin this morning when Carvin asserted otherwise, "I'd argue that tag dissent balances folksonomies, not undermines."

Let's talk about "working knowledge" and stop whispering about "truth", before the robot children hear us.

Philosophy Aside, What Does This Mean?

It means that as the language we use to communicate meaning to machines develops, we'd better watch out who is building it and what perspectives they take into consideration. Unconsidered assumptions could lead to a real disconnect between the meaning that machines know of the world and they way that millions of other people experience it.

Bath isn't suggesting that the semantic web should be rejected, quite the opposite in fact. "I am convinced," she says, "that the perspectives I tried to sketch here can contribute to build better semantic systems or even prevent them from failure in function or on the marketplace."

She has her own explanation why this is important: "With the use of the Internet we are already witnessing a radical change in practices of how knowledge is represented, stored and spread. In the future most of our work and life will involve the manipulation and use of information. It will crucially depend on the epistemologies, concepts and leading metaphors of the Semantic Web, which direction the semantic "human-machine reconfigurations" (Lucy Suchman) will take."

That's a nice way to say that we need to work hard to avoid creating fascist robots that exercise a homogenizing influence on diverse human experiences. There are people who are doing semantic web work in directions that take this into account, but it's something worth considering for all of us.

Disclosure: The author has consulting relationships with a number of pre-launched semantic web companies.

Mainstream Web Watch: The Olympics & Online Video

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:16:12 -0700

The Beijing Olympics starts in a few days and what better test of the mainstream web is there than the world's biggest sports event. This is the first in a series of posts that will look at the Web technologies powering this year's Olympics.

One of the most obvious ways the Web will be utilized with the Beijing Olympics is with online video coverage. In the US, NBC has teamed up with Microsoft Silverlight for 2,200 hours of live coverage. Meanwhile in China, Adobe has teamed up with a Chinese network.

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/olympics/Mainstream_Web_Watch_The_Olympics_Online_Video';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';The New York Times reported today that NBC will stream 2,200 hours of live events across 25 sports on NBCOlympics.com. For context, at the Athens Olympics four years ago there was less than 100 hours of on-demand video. According to the NYT, NBC will use the Internet to "send out mass quantities of video in high resolution". The only catch is that the coverage will only be available to users in the United States, because that's the only place where NBC has rights to broadcast the Olympics.

Despite the geographical limitations, NBC is promising lots of 'new media' features in its Web coverage. These include:

Users have the ability to watch whatever sport they want, unlike on TV where you get what the broadcaster dishes up.
There will be 3,000 hours of "on-demand encores of full events and highlights".
Users can switch between up to 4 live streams.
Users will see the standard world feed that is sent to all broadcasters, so there will be no network TV commentators. Instead, the NBC expects to see bloggers "serve as play-by-play voices and analysts" (free talent!).
Users will have access to statistics, biographies and other information.

As the NYT notes, NBC's coverage of the Olympics online is the culmination of NBC's "multiple-network strategy, which began in 2000 with the addition of CNBC and MSNBC to the mix." The upshot is that coverage of the Olympics becomes an on-demand, 24/7 experience -- although unfortunately not worldwide in NBC's case. This is possible because the "cyber-pipelines" infrastructure is largely in place now, in the US, to support such extensive online video coverage.

NBC's coverage online will be powered by Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Media player. CNET reports that Limelight Networks is being used to route the video streams to Internet service providers. NBC was originally planning to use Adobe's Flash, but CNET noted that NBC "was convinced by Microsoft earlier this year that Silverlight would allow it to stream more high-quality video than would have been possible using Flash."

It seems China's TV networks didn't buy that line, as Adobe has partnered with CCTV.com to bring Olympics online video to mainland China.

CCTV.com and Adobe Partner for Internet Coverage in China

Today, Adobe announced a partnership with CCTV International Networks Co, Ltd. to deliver Web coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games to fans throughout mainland China and Macau. CCTV.com owns the online video rights to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games for mainland China and Macau. CCTVOlympics.com plans to provide 5,000 hours of "on-demand protected streamed video content including full event replays, highlights, features, interviews and encore packages." This is made up of 3,800 hours of worldwide broadcast Olympic Games video and 1,200 hours of CCTV's own video.

Choosing Adobe as a partner, as with NBC and Silverlight, is a hint that Chinese Internet viewers can expect a rich interactive experience. The press release trumpets "an unprecedented Web experience created with Adobe Flex and delivered via Adobe Flash technology".

Unlike NBC though, CCTV is not eschewing commentators and replacing them with bloggers. CCTV promises "expert analysis from CCTV's Olympic media team". However it also will be diving into the social web via "social networking features that will enable fans to share aspects of their Olympic experience with friends."

Conclusion

The 2008 Olympics is set to be the first to have a mammoth online video presence. Up to 5,000 hours of coverage would be enough to satisfy even the most rabid of Olympics fan. What's possibly even more interesting to watch will be the performance of interactive Web technologies such as Silverlight and Flash in this coverage. Which one will end up better? Although I guess if you're in the US, you'll never know about Flash - and vice versa for the Chinese regarding Silverlight.

Further coverage from the RWW Network:

RWW: The Olympics Go Mobile

last100: Roundup: The most digital of all Olympic games is well underway

last100: NBC Olympics on the Go will allow (some) fans to download events to watch on their computers

What Should Exxon Do About Twitter? Absolutely Nothing

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 06:11:58 -0700

Energy giant Exxon Mobil fell victim to a Twitter user spoofing official use of an account named ExxonMobilCorp, it was discovered yesterday, and now a discussion is unfolding among social media advocates about what the company should do.

Many people say that Twitter is frivolous and unimportant. In this case those people would be correct. Just six weeks ago the US Supreme Court rejected Exxon's appeal to drop a lawsuit alleging that its employees in Indonesia "committed murder, torture, sexual assault .. genocide and crimes against humanity" in defense of one of the world's largest liquid natural gas facilities. Placed in this context, whether or how this company deals with Twitter seems irrelevant.

International Corporations and New Social Media

The conversation about how Exxon should have or will deal with the spoofed Twitter account can be followed via a post last night on analyst Jeremiah Owyang's blog. It makes sense to tackle the general questions concerning "big brands" and new media, but a line should be drawn somewhere in order to keep technology in a larger perspective. The case of Exxon Mobil is on the other side of that line.

The Context in Indonesia

Indonesia is a sprawling country of more than 220 million people and an amazing 17,000 islands. It possesses huge amounts of liquid natural gas and gold and has major geo-political significance.

The country has a long and troubled history of international and internal conflicts but the US government's own documents detail US payment of local groups killing subversives based on US provided lists of individuals in the 1960's and US State Department acceptance of Indonesian government massacres of civilians using US supplied weapons in the 1970's.

Key player and Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger retained financial interests in the country's natural resources throughout the 1980's, the human rights abuses alleged to have been committed by Indonesian soldiers working as Exxon employees were far from the only crimes alleged to have been committed in the 1990's (see in addition the Dili Massacre, for example) and since the turn of the 21st century multiple US administrations have sent elite US military training groups to "train the trainers" in Indonesia despite US Congressional bans against direct co-operation with the Indonesian military on the basis of documented human rights abuses.

It's not a pretty picture. There's an intense history of globe-dominating nations doing horrible things to the people of Indonesia.

The Current Lawsuit

On June 16th, 2008 the US Supreme Court denied a request by Exxon Mobil to dismiss a lawsuit titled Exxon Mobil v. John Doe, 07-81, brought by international rights groups on behalf of 11 villagers in Indonesia's Aceh province. The suit alleges that Indonesian soldiers hired by Exxon Mobil "committed murder, torture, sexual assault .. genocide and crimes against humanity."

One British rights organization specializing in Indonesia, called Down To Earth, further reports that "the company has been accused of providing the military with buildings used for torturing local people suspected of involvement in the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and excavators to dig mass graves for the victims of military violence." The worst accounts of the treatment of civilians in Indonesia are something no one wants to read.

Exxon argued to the Supreme Court that the lawsuit against it should be dismissed because it involves issues of international relations that should be left to the Executive Branch. In 2002 the US State Department said that "adjudication of this lawsuit at this time would in fact risk a potentially serious adverse impact on significant interests of the United States..." Indonesia is a country heavily populated with Muslims and the US argued that a ruling on the Exxon lawsuit could harm anti-terrorist efforts, among other concerns.

Since that time various courts have shaped the debate such that now-resigned Solicitor General Paul Clement said this May that the case had been sufficiently narrowed to avoid harm to the nation's foreign policy interests. According to the Associated Press, the Bush administration urged the US Supreme Court to reject Exxon's request to drop the case this June.

Thus the lawsuit still stands and Exxon may, years later, have to answer to some allegations of human rights violations.

And what about Twitter? There may or may not be a time when Exxon's engagement with new social media is important, but this same summer when the Supreme Court has just said they will be judged is not that time.

New Media and International Human Rights

In October we wrote here about the last active bloggers in Burma, fighting to let the world know what was happening there as the military massacred monks and turned the country inside-out. In December we wrote about YouTube's deleting videos documenting torture of civilians by Egyptian police because of the site's policy against violent imagery. On the Fourth of July we wrote about the Iranian Parliament's consideration of the death penalty for subversive bloggers.

The internet and human rights intersect often. If we are to believe that these democratizing media are going to make the world a better place, then it's important to keep them in context regarding what's going on in the world outside of our tech niche. It's with that in mind that we point at the lawsuit and Supreme Court ruling against Exxon when the company's communication strategy with the world comes up in conversation.

After all, as Exxon Spokesperson Alan Jeffers said yesterday about Twitter: "It's our perception that social networking is based on honesty, transparency and trust..."

Photo: A market in Aceh, Indonesia. Creative Commons from Flickr user A. www.viajar24h.com

Eight Ways to Get Users to Fill Out Their Profiles

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:11:04 -0700

"Hi, my name is MrCucumber69, I have a gray blob for a face and that's all I care to share about myself - will you be my friend?" Silly as that sounds, this is the way users of many social web applications greet each other. It's not very useful or inspiring.

Communication works better when you have a good idea who it is you're talking to. How can new online services get users to describe themselves, though?

Bellow, we discuss some of our favorite ways it's being done well. We hope you'll share your favorite strategies in comments so we can all learn about more ways to tackle this common problem.

LinkedIn = Boring but Effective

One of the most well known ways to get people to fill out their profiles is the way LinkedIn does it. Users are shown a progress bar and told that their profile is "X% completed." This is probably effective but some people tell us it makes them feel guilty.

It's much better than nothing, but let's look at some more creative and fun solutions.

What's Your Most Common Username Elsewhere?

Personal search engine Lijit does a great job of making it easy to associate your account with them with all kinds of other accounts you own around the web. It's simple: they just ask what your most common username is and then they check for public profiles with that username on a long list of different services. In just moments, with a handful of keystrokes, all kinds of info about you can be gathered together.

It's the first step new users take when they click the button to register on the site. You can exclude certain accounts, add particular usernames for accounts where you use a different one. It's incredibly elegant and a great model that others would do well to emulate.

We suspect that social media ping server Gnip will make this kind of approach all the more powerful and easy for application developers to implement soon.

Once you've got usernames from these services, why not display recent activity feeds on their profile pages? That's kind of how Jive Software's ClearSpace does it (see image on the left) and we think that looks great.

Did You Know...?

Another interesting approach is to offer users information about the activities of other people in aggregate and use this as an opportunity to prompt them to provide more information about themselves.

Social recommendation service (and, disclosure, RWW sponsor) Strands, for example, presents customers of Spanish bank BBVA with messages like the following: "Grocery spending: A married person spends 103% more on groceries than a single person. By the way, are you married or single?" That's interesting to know and would motivate me to answer the question with a click.

How else could this be done? Check out categorized Twitter directory Twellow, where Twitter user bios are categorized by interest and occupation. It's a great way to find like minded Twitter users, but imagine if Twello (or another app) said something like this to users: "We see that you are an accountant - did you know that Twitter users who are accountants tend to post more photos to Flickr than Doctors do, but fewer than people in Defense related fields do? If you'd like to tell us what your Flickr username is, we'll connect it to your Twitter account here."

Maybe it could be done more elegantly than that, but you get the idea.

Similarly, eco-credit card company Brighter Planet tracks your personal ecological impact but starts each user out with the median numbers for people in their geographic area and works backwards.

Messages like the following greet users when they login to their Brighter Planet account: "You live with one other person and you use 15% green electricity. Improve your profile by telling us about the car you drive and your flights."

You Look Like George Bush

Brand spanking new social news site SocialMedian assigns a big picture of a famous (or infamous) person as each new user's avatar. My default profile was graced with a photo of Bill Gates, but other people start out with George Bush - something that must get a lot of new users to click the "change my photo" link. It's a witty idea and we wonder just how far it could be taken.

"You are 15 years old, clean up after circus animals for a living and love Britney Spears videos on TV. (unverified - not true? click here to edit your profile.)" Oh yeah, that could work.

I Heard About You On Twitter

If you've used red hot social lifestreaming app type thing FriendFeed, you've probably wondered why, with everything the service knows about you, there's no place to see bio info about other users on their FriendFeed user pages. Enter Hao Chen's FriendFeed Profile script for Greasemonkey. Every time you visit a the user page on FriendFeed of someone who has associated their Twitter account with their FF account (everyone) - this script grabs their bio info from Twitter and slaps it up on their FriendFeed page. It's fantastic!

Why not let users of your app opt-in to populate their profiles with publicly available profiles from other accounts? (I'm here on FriendFeed by the way, if you'd like me to feed you like a friend.)

Still More Ways to Do It

OpenID accounts usually have some profile info associated with them. Some apps pull that info. The OpenID community is working hard, if slow, on "attribute exchange" - a protocol that would flesh this out all the more.

MyBlogLog is a widely used social network for blog readers where you can find headshots of millions of people, their demographic info, interests and many associated accounts from other social networks. Have you tried out the BlogJuice bookmarklet to see the job titles or your blog's most recent visitors, via LinkedIn? It's SO much fun!

If you don't mind renting users from Facebook, the new Facebook Connect login and profile system looks pretty hot too. For some reason people don't appear to put as much fake info about themselves into Facebook as they do other places - it's a rich source of user profile data and comes with the added comfort of extensive privacy controls. The downside is that putting this much control in the hands of Facebook is pretty creepy.

Conclusion: It Doesn't Have to Be Hard Anymore

There's not a whole lot of excuses any more for asking users of your brand new website to fill in a whole lot of information about themselves. Nor is there for having super anemic user profiles, which leave new users totally uninspired to connect with each other. You need users connecting as quickly as possible in your apps and rich profiles really help.

What other ways have you seen apps solve this problem? We're sure there are many more creative examples and we'd love to find out about them!

The handsome devil at the top of this post is Flickr user thomas pix.

Breaking Free of Outlook

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 02:11:37 -0700

I recently moved to a new office and found that I couldn't send mail via Microsoft Outlook. I've had this same problem in different locations. I've been told that it depends on the ISP settings and it is easy to fix by contacting the ISP. That seemed like a pain, so this week I just started using Gmail as my default. I've not looked back. This is anecdotal and maybe I am a market of one, but it is a big deal for me. I have “lived in Outlook” for years. It was the one part of Office that I thought I would never replace. I suspect I am not alone.

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/software/Breaking_Free_of_Outlook';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';I use multiple email addresses. I need to send and receive mail from company domains. That took me about 10 minutes to set up in Gmail. Once I had done this, I noticed two big benefits:

1. 99% of Spam was gone - poof. I had foolishly once put my email address on a web site in clear form where it could be collected by spammers and one of my accounts, managed on an Exchange server, was overrun with spam. Once I went to Gmail, no problem. I am sure I am missing a few valid mails that got incorrectly seen as spam, but that will eventually correct itself as people contact me some other way. When I am contacting somebody new by email I always now assume that overzealous spam filters stop my mail getting received, so I ask a contact who knows that person to forward my mail. That is a small price to pay for getting rid of spam and using contacts that way is obviously good for business as well.

2. Searching was much easier. There is debate about whether Outlook or Gmail has better search. Personally I find Gmail search way better than Outlook but that can be subjective and habit is a major factor in productivity. What I know for sure is that having both Gmail and Outlook makes search a real pain - you have to search in both mail systems if you don’t know which one you had used. That is significant. When time comes to make a decision, which one do you axe? I had that personal tipping point and switching to Gmail was a no-brainer. It just looks like a better long term way to go.

The reason Gmail looks like a better long term way to go is quite simply mobility. I can use Gmail from anywhere. I can change PC without even thinking about conversion. I don’t need to worry about not having access to my laptop. If my laptop is stolen/lost/destroyed and I have not been totally diligent on back-ups, no worries on that score.

I have some worries about a) losing connectivity and b) occasional performance/reliability issues on Gmail (which could get worse as they get more users). I hope that Gears will enable temporary offline use to mitigate those issues, but I have not tried that yet.

So Gmail as a client is a done deal. What about Gmail as the server? I don’t usually think about that level of IT. I am involved with a new start-up that needs to make that decision. We can run Exchange internally. Or we can use a hosted/managed version of Exchange. I am sure the future is with hosted/managed. Who can possibly view email management as core, who wants that internal overhead? So I was interested to see this thread on Slashdot. The news is that:

“LA hosting company DreamHost, which hosts more than 700,000 web sites, is encouraging its customers to use Google’s Gmail for their e-mail, rather than the DreamHost mail servers. DreamHost is continuing to support all its existing e-mail offerings, but said in a blog post that email is “just not something people are looking for from us, and it’s something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better.” DreamHost addresses a question about Google that has vexed many web hosting companies: is Google a useful partner, or a competitor that intends to make “traditional” web hosting companies obsolete? In this case, partnering with Google offers DreamHost a way to offload many of its trouble tickets, reducing the support overhead. Is Google starting to make web hosts less necessary?”

When you realise that you can easily use Gmail with your domain, the issue of appearing unprofessional in a corporate context by using an @gmail.com address goes away. For a start-up looking for a no hassle way to do email, this seems like a no-brainer.

Microsoft is clearly well aware of the threat to Exchange, which is why they launched their own Hosted Exchange offering in July 2008. This will put Microsoft in head to head competition with their hitherto partners who offered third part Hosted Exchange offerings. This game is now clearly all about economies of scale on those giant server farms, so we are likely to see email server hosting consolidate down to a handful of companies in the next few years. This is the normal and expected lifecycle for a commodity market such as email serving.

In this battle, the email client does matter, if only psychologically. If you feel wedded to Outlook you will probably go Exchange for your server. Gmail looks like it is moving purposefully from personal mail into small business. Hosted Exchange is also going after small business. Large enterprises switching off Exchange is still years way. The battle ground is around small business. The clear winner - small businesses that can profit from some real competition by the big guys.

Can New Media Be Taught in Schools?

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:11:39 -0700

Tests on Twitter, wiki-style study groups, students quizzed on yesterday's most popular YouTube videos and the biggest hits on Del.icio.us/Popular - is this what the future of education is going to look like?

In some journalism schools around the US, it just might be. Would that really be so bad? Though many may disagree with us, we think there is some merit to teaching new media in journalism and other schools.

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Can_New_Media_Be_Taught_in_Schools';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';Inside Higher Ed has an article today detailing some colleges' plans to fund "new media" sections in their journalism schools. Many people think that new media departments in schools are a terrible idea. Jobs in traditional media can't be considered secure, though. (See this example from today.) We believe that there will be some important successes in teaching new media in schools.

The world is changing, media education has probably always needed to change and this point in history offers some exciting opportunities for educators and students.

Making The Changes

Old media is slower, less compelling and more expensive than many emerging media online. It's also more professional, often of higher quality and generally easier to monetize. The same could be said of old vs internet new in almost any industry where new players are fast taking leadership positions they would not have been able to access so easily without the technologies in question.

We think the video short series Good Morning, Internet (right) captures some parts of this dilemma well.

What will the future of media work look like, for participants old and new? Good places to look for detailed guesses include the Poynter Institute, Kansas Proffesor of Digital Ethnography Dr. Michael Wesch and blogging media critic Jeff Jarvis (see Jarvis's post on Editor 2.0 in particular).

Can You Teach New Media In School?

The new media world of blogging, RSS, tagging, wikis, podcasting and more is all so new that there are hardly any established standards or best practices well established yet. That said, there are definitely skill sets that make a world of difference in a practitioner's efficacy.

Can those skill sets be taught in school? Most people we talked to said that schools could do well to facilitate learning experiences regarding new media. We believe, however, that there are large amounts of tangible information that can be transmitted to students in any setting that will enable them to have far more meaningful experiments in learning.

Drop a sucker in SecondLife and they'll be an avatar for a day, teach them how to learn about and navigate to the most interesting events going on there and they'll...well, you get the idea.

Update: A number of people have responded in comments, arguing that it's not the skills that need to be taught, it's knowledge about the issues. Ethics, history, ethos, etc. While that's all very important, the skills themselves are not trivial, either. As we responded in comments:

it's one thing to figure out how to use social media tools, another to learn how to use them powerfully in a professional context. I see that there are a number of people here saying it's "issues" that educators need to focus on, but I believe that proficiency in the use of the technologies themselves warrants extensive education as well.
For example, journalists should know how to run a feed through a filter and then monitor it by IM/SMS. Just knowing different ways to do this is material enough for one short class session. Strategic considerations in doing it better than a competitor does are material enough for another session.

Journalists should know how to navigate Wikipedia, reading edit history effectively and understanding participants in conversations there in context. I'd love to spend one class session learning about that. Ethics and case studies could surely be one part of it, but the mechanics of advanced use of these tools are complex enough that teaching them is a good idea.

Can that information be transmitted to students in a school setting, though? Students may be better off spending an hour watching all the 5 minute Social Media in Plain English videos from Common Craft.

Academia tends to be woefully behind in almost everything it teaches. Experience in the private sector tends to be a faster and more effective method of learning almost anything. Hard sciences may be the exception.

The internet is changing faster than almost anything in this world, so expecting academics to be capable of offering timely teaching in this field may lead to serious disappointment. That may be shortchanging a lot of hard working teachers fired up about the web, though.

There is Hope

Looking at what Dr. Michael Wesch teaches college students, what the incredible Vicki Davis manages to do with Elementary school students and the internet and what popular education blogger Stephen Downes advises - it is clear that there is some powerful potential for teaching new media.

Nonprofit technologist Amy Sample Ward, who graduated with a Major in New Media from Valparaiso University in Indiana, explains what one new media teacher, Milan Andrejevich, was able to help her learn.

For new media 'courses' to be successful, in my opinion, the 'teaching' and 'learning' need to be synonymous. Experiential learning and project-based assignments are really the only way to provide a space to learn and discuss new media tools. For example, a project that I had in one of my new media classes, was to take the regional newspaper's website, and re-vamp it be an actual community space using new media tools for story-telling, community building, and up-to-the-minute input. We even had the chance to present our changes to the newspaper staff. It doesn't get much more 'real' than that; and made us all focus on the biggest lesson of new media application: it needs to fit, not just be cool.

There's certainly no substitute for experience, but there are some basic skills that new practitioners can benefit from being taught by someone else. We're sure there will be a lot of bad New Media departments popping up in colleges around the world, but we believe there is hope that many others will be worth attending, too.

Photo at top: "School Rules" by Flickr user zzellers

After Cuil, Blekko Will Be More Careful - But Does It Matter?

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:11:21 -0700

My first post for ReadWriteWeb, just over 1 year ago, started with the premise that search was “game over”, that Google had won and the only space left was (re)search - what users do after the basic search.

None of the search start-ups since then has made me change my mind. None of the cool new user interface features or ways of expressing your search intentions matter one iota, if the core search proposition is not better from day one. Well, enter the latest contender: Blekko.

When Google launched, 10 years ago in 1998, there was no “new paradigm” or wizzy features - just a search box that worked better than the competition. The search competition bar is now way, way higher than it was back then.

Yet new search start-ups continue to get funded, even in what is a less frothy funding environment. Cuil(l) raised $33m. Looks like they blew it. In contrast, Blekko raised only $5m in two rounds. It is still in stealth mode and one assumes they'll will play the hype game a bit more cautiously after the Cuil debacle.

The proposition that launched countless search start-ups was “if we can get just 1% of the search market we will have a very valuable business“. That maybe true, but getting 1% has proved elusive. The reality is you either win big or fail totally in this game. There are no hedged positions in search. It is a really “non-trivial” technical problem.

Assuming the game is defined as the search infrastructure game. I think that game has been over for some time. The barriers to entry are just too high. An entrepreneur pitching VC now has to answer the “how do you avoid the Cuil problem?” Yahoo BOSS is the perfect play in the new game, with search infrastructure players offering their platform to developers. Hundreds of start-ups can make a decent business within less than 1% of the search market if the infrastructure is provided by somebody else. You don’t build operating systems, do you? You don’t build search infrastructure, do you?

You don’t, unless you believe that you really have disruptive technology. Blekko is one the few remaining plays building search infrastructure. They must think they have that disruptive technology.

Blekko seem to understand the complexity of the challenge, from comments on their Blog (as their site says nothing, their founder’s Blog is best source of insight into what they are up to):

“Search is an absolutely fascinating problem to work on for a bunch of reasons. For one thing you have to scale the thing before getting the first user. You can’t just start with a server or two and add more when the users come. Step 1 is to copy the internet onto your cluster. Step 2 is to analyze it..

The componentry is remarkably deep.

Search is like 7 hard problems wrapped into a stack. Distributed systems, html analytics, text analytics/semantics, anti-spam, AI/ML, frontend/UI. And scale…”

His Blog is well worth a thorough read if you are in the search game or just like hard technical problems. (As a historical footnote, Skrenta’s notes on Cuil, written well before the launch, make interesting reading).

Later on he says:

“you don’t need a million servers and half of the phd’s in the field to build a search app. It takes 20 people and $5M of hardware…if you know what you’re doing.”

I totally buy the “It takes 20 people” people bit. All my experience in software has confirmed that Frederick Brooks was totally right in the Mythical Man Month that small teams always outperform large teams. I cannot imagine what more than 20 people would do other than get in each other’s way.

Its the “you don’t need a million servers” bit that I am less certain about. Google invests $ billions in server farms. You have to have something fundamentally and totally disruptive. P2P enabled Skype to take on AT&T and Verizon. That was fundamentally and totally disruptive technology that enables such a compelling value proposition that they got millions of consumers using them. That is why I was excited to see Faroo attempt this with P2P, but I can see that they fail at the critical “has to be better than Google the day it launches” test.

Purely incremental improvements to the economics of crawling + indexing will not enable a new consumer search play. Saying “we only need $1 billion in infrastructure cost to compete out of the gate with Google and Google spent $3 billion” does not cut it with investors. Nobody will fund that $1 billion. However, incremental improvement is a great pitch to the big infrastructure players. If you can say “I can take 20% out of your infrastructure costs with my patented technology”, you will get your phone calls returned by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. And one of them may offer to buy you for a big fat premium to prevent their rivals getting access to the same technology.

That is very, very different from launching a new consumer search engine.

In summary, I see 3 possible search plays in search today:

1. Build search applications on top of Yahoo BOSS or equivalent offerings from Google or Microsoft. There is room for hundreds of niche, vertical start-ups, using search as a feature not as the only proposition. I think Yahoo has a great shot at this as Google will suffer from cannibalization fears, so they won’t open up as much as Yahoo. Microsoft will undoubtedly play here as well, they are best at technology for developers.

2. Hard core search infrastructure technology sold to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. That’s tough to get right as the technology has to be really, really good, the patent has to be rock solid and you have be good at playing poker with the big guys.

3. The totally disruptive Skype style venture that nobody has heard about.

Twitter Versus Plurk: The UI Advantage

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:11:32 -0700

When I first reviewed Plurk for ReadWriteWeb, I had only been using this new lifestreaming service for a little while. After using it for much longer, I've realized that there is really just one major difference between Twitter and Plurk - but it's that one difference that makes Plurk so much better.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

If you think about the basic functionality, all micro-blogging sites offer more or less the same. You can create an account, add some friends, and then message back and forth (privately and publicly) and share stuff with each other. What Plurk does differently is the user interface and the effect of this change reverberates throughout the site. Here are the major UI changes and their impact.

1. The Timeline View

Not everyone has been happy with it but changing the way the information is displayed was a bold move, and ultimately the right one. The new layout performs exactly as expected. The timeline scrolls left to right, with the most recent data at the left. You can control the timeline using the trackpad or the arrow keys. Since the messages are arranged in chronological order, and because sometimes people send messages at the same time, this view also let's you easily read a large number of messages at the same time.

2. The One Line Messages

Just like the timeline view, the one line message layout is such a simple idea that at first it's very easy to not even notice it. But take a second and you'll notice that Plurk displays the avatar, a qualifier, a message snippet, and the number of replies for the message, all on one line. Again this allows you to easily read or ignore a large number of messages based on who posted the message, what qualifier the user used, and how many responses the message already has. This way you can skip between messages as you deem important, rather than looking at conversations from a top-down view (like on Twitter).

3. The Red Flag Replies and Update Boxes

The best part of Plurk is the constant chatter. Once you log in and add some friends, it's hard to get away. The reason for this is the way Plurk announces new activity to you. Unlike other services where you have to go looking for replies, on Plurk, every reply sticks out like a red flag. Every time someone posts a message you can see how many people replied to it, and with one click, read all the replies like a threaded conversation.

First, because the replies clearly stick out, you are bound to check them fairly quickly after they are posted, and second, because every Plurk message that is posted gets it's own conversation page (where all the replies are threaded and easy to follow), more people are likely to reply to a message and start conversations. Finally, because your Plurk page isn't static, and tells you every time you have new replies or your friends post a new message, you are more likely to check out what other people are up to (although at times of high activity this can feel like a nag screen).

4. The Inline Attachments

This one is a twofer. It is a user interface improvement but it's also a feature. Unlike Twitter where you can just post link to media, on Plurk, whenever you link to a picture, song, or video, the media is immediately visible/playable from within the message and you can double click it to get to the original source.

5. And Everything Else

Finally, another great Plurk feature that most people forget about is that the design offers so much information but is never overwhelming or confusing to navigate. All the chatting and microblogging activity takes place above the scroll to encourage maximum engagement, while everything else (like user info and activity stats, friends and fans, and mobile links) is below the scroll and out of the way (I sometimes forget all that stuff is there).

Conclusion

That said, the problem Plurk faces is the exact same problem that Mixx faces. Though the site has a better service, they can't match the same number of registrations or activity as market leaders simply because of the first mover advantage. People either find it too complicated (it's not) or are too lazy (they definitely are) to transfer their entire network over to a new service. The problem is that no one wants to move to a new site unless their entire network of friends moves too. This means unless there is a mass migration, a majority of the people (though they are definitely testing it) won't stay with the service in the long term.

In fact, even though I really like Plurk, I don't use it as frequently as Twitter simply because all my friends are using Twitter more frequently.

You can friend me on Twitter and Friendfeed.

Has The Web 2.0 Cycle Come to a Close? No

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:11:33 -0700

The selection process for DEMOfall 08 (RWW is a media partner) is coming to a close and Chris Shipley has been blogging her thoughts about it. She's identified a number of trends in the 'class of DEMOfall 2008', one of which is this claim: the Web 2.0 cycle has come to a close. She also makes a case for an end to the 'free' model for web businesses.

I'm not sure that I buy either argument.

After first dismissing the notion of 'web 2.0' ("Web 2.0 has been more of a hype cycle than a business cycle"), Chris Shipley goes on to say that the Social Web has nonetheless delivered a solid platform:

"But the social Web - the true definition, we think, of this most recent wave - has sparked tremendous innovation. It has given us the "operating systems" for social networks, the culture of conversation and engagement, the discipline of rapid and disruptive development, and the technology basis on which to build reliable, scalable Web applications. In short, it's delivered a platform on which to build the next phase of the Web."

It's arguable whether there's much difference between 'web 2.0' and the 'Social Web'. We at ReadWriteWeb have been using both terms interchangeably over the past couple of years. But I do take Chris' point that, whether you like the term web 2.0 or not, what we've ended up with is a solid Web platform for applications and services.

So what's next? Chris identifies:

Distributed Web: "disseminating information and applications to the users where ever they may be - another Web site, a mobile device, a consumer electronics gadget."
A Smarter Web: better information discovery.
Business Becomes Usual: defined by Shipley as moving beyond the 'free' model that consumer apps have practiced in the web 2.0 era, to apps for SME/enterprise and business models such as subscriptions for consumer apps.
Transparency: according to Shipley "this theme has echoed across every market segment and has become a byword in our thinking about the next-generation Web."

The first two points (distributed and smarter) have been themes we've expanded on many times on this blog. Regarding distributed web, last week we wrote about how companies need to have a presence on all major platforms. And regarding a smarter web, an example is the emerging market for Semantic Apps.

So, no argument from us on the first two points.

Where I disagree is the notion that the 'free' model of the Web has ended or will end soon. Online advertising has been a very powerful business model for many, including of course the master of this Web era, Google. While I do agree that consumer apps should explore alternative business models too, in my view the statement by Chris that "free isn't a business model" just isn't true. Clearly 'free' has been a business model for many - and will continue to do so as long as the online advertising portion of the total advertising pie keeps growing (which it is forecast to).

And to the central question of this post: has the Web 2.0 cycle come to a close? Well if it has someone better tell O'Reilly Media and TechWeb ;-) To my mind, unless we see a significant change to the Internet market or the pattern of innovation we're seeing (the Web as platform etc), the current era continues. But it continues to evolve - into semantic web, distributed web, and so on. That's the exciting thing and it's what keeps the creative juices flowing at RWW!

ReadWriteWeb is a partner of DEMOfall 08, being held September 7-9 in San Diego. Our readers can receive a discount rate of $2,395 ($600 off the standard rate of $2,995 and $400 lower than the July early bird rate of $2795) by clicking here for registration.

Image credit: hober