Tag: web2.0

Categories
Digital Culture

Joost

Joost™

So I managed to convince a friend to get me into the Joost beta. Joost is the Interweb video project formerly known as The Venice Project from the developers who brought the world both Kazaa and Skype. They clearly know their stuff, and Joost has some interesting things going for it.

 

Pro

  • Licensed content.
  • They currently have deals with just a few producers of significance, the biggest being MTV.
  • Great technology: the video is smooth, but the quality is a little low…less than broadcast TV.
  • Meta-information: there are TONS of meta-informational widgets you can add and interact with while the video is running…this is one of the killer parts of the service. IM and other widgets while you watch is very nice.

Con

  • Can’t save videos locally (that will change in hours, I’m guessing, as soon as it launches, whether they want it to or not)
  • Closed system: no way to add videos yourself, and you can bet that since they are licensing stuff that will be difficult to change
  • No killer content: there’s nothing here you can’t get somewhere else on the net, usually in a higher quality

The interesting thing about Joost is that it will be much, much better than television in execution. Channels you choose, playing content you want when you want it, for free. The problem with this is, of course, TV has already lost…Joost has to compete with bittorrents of nearly everything ever put to video or audio, YouTube, and new forms of entertainment like ARGs and Second Life. It might become better than TV, but that’s a little like saying that the telegraph is better than the Pony Express. Neither really matters anymore. I look forward to what they have up their sleeve, but I’m cautiously calling this a yawn so far.

Categories
Digital Culture

5 Weeks

I haven’t talked nearly enough about the 5 Weeks to a Social Library project. I mentioned it long ago, and then never followed up with more information, so I’m fixing that today.

I just finished my presentation for 5 weeks, and it was a complete blast! It was only my second time doing an interactive webcast, and it was amazing…fun and informative and just great. I absolutely adore the multiple conversations aspect of most webcast software, where I’m presenting and doing visuals and voice, but the rest of the class is having a conversation completely separate from me via text on the side. Just amazingly info rich!

My presentation was entitled Make Your Library Del.icio.us (warning: full screencast IE only), and focused on the what and how of del.icio.us. If you want to listen or take a look at the slides and such, all the content can be found at OPAL.

Let me just say that the organizers of 5 weeks (Meredith, Dorothea, Michelle, Karen, Amanda, and Ellyssa) have completely knocked it out of the park. If this isn’t an exemplar of how to do an online learning experience, I haven’t seen one.

Categories
Digital Culture

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo Pipes

If you haven’t looked at Pipes yet, it’s a visual programming site that allows for logical linking of sources and then provides output of your logic. Take a feed, and find Flickr photos based on the most used terms in the feed. Search Yahoo for a phrase, combine it with geographic location, and find the nearest hits on a map. It’s basically a programming language for RSS and web searching…powerful, powerful stuff.

Anyone out in library land using Pipes for anything fun? It’s quite an interesting little tool…I’m playing with it, and have a few concepts that I’m going to try and work out. The only library-related Pipe I found looked like something Meredith was putting together (and was something I was thinking of) that just mashed up the feeds of all the library bloggers I read. But that’s a relatively low-level use of the service…anyone out there pushing the possibilities of this thing? I’m certainly going to try…but will have to play to learn first.

Categories
Digital Culture

Collaborative Genealogy

Web 2.0 has now brought us a collaborative genealogy site in Geni.com. It popped up in my del.icio.us search today, and I thought I’d take a look.

Geni example

That’s the interface screen, which begins with you signing up for the site. Doing so begins your tree, and allows you to branch off by clicking the yellow arrows for different relationships (up for parent, down for child, sideways for spouse or sibling). The bit of brilliance is that the field for names includes email, and the recipient can automatically sign up and become part of your tree. It’s a combination of viral and collaborative, and a brilliant way to do genealogy.

There’s also a “background” profile where you can give more info, contact information, etc, so that anyone in your tree can contact you. You can also add photos to your profile, so the entire thing can become a sort of name prompt for those family reunions.

Problems? Well, some families are a lot more complicated than this. My biggest complaint, and I can’t honestly believe they did this, is that the sideways arrow doesn’t prompt for “spouse”, it reads the sex of the selected person and prompts for “husband” or “wife”. Sexism ahoy! They should really change the prompt to Spouse, and allow a radio button for the sex of the spouse. As well, for complex child relationships, it kind of falls apart…step-children aren’t part of the tree either.

The technology and concept is amazing, and if they tweak a few interface issues, I think this is a huge Web 2.0 winner in the making. It’s a social network limited to your family, and a collaborative content creation system all in one. They need to add abilities to export the data, or import from existing genealogy services and much more detailed noted fields (not up front in the tree, just behind the scenes) this might become a huge draw. The best thing they could do is publish an API, and allow for other tools to leverage the information…imagine being able to crawl the tree with an API and generate other bits of info from it.

All in all, a great Beta product, but needs work before hitting the bigtime.

Categories
Digital Culture

Folksonomies = Translation Engines

I was lounging about today, idly thinking about folksonomies (hey..it could happen) and I had what I consider a somewhat interesting idea. Are there any existing sites that allow for tagging in multiple languages? I suppose that del.icio.us does by default for language that use the Roman alphabet, but what about systems that use a non-roman…does flickr or technorati allow for Chinese or Japanese kanji? Or for Farsi?

For any system where this were the case, and there was an enormous database of folksonomic data to mine, and the folksonomies were in some way descriptive (it’s possible to have non-descriptive folksonomies…some people actually leverage del.icio.us by using specifically non-descriptive tags in order to pull very specific things from the organization)…well, if you were describing things in the world…would you be able to data mine such a folksonomy as a translation engine?

You would imagine that on flickr, a picture of a red ball might be tagged “red” and “Ball” by multiple languages. By doing some basic statistical work on the data, I think you could come up with a pretty good translation engine.

Anyone out there see that this couldn’t/wouldn’t work? Would this be better than traditional translation engines…I don’t know. It leverages the wisdom of crowds in an interesting new way, though.

Categories
Digital Culture

$1.65 Billion

That’s what Google reportedly just paid in stock for YouTube. The interesting question is whether Google Video will go away, or will YouTube? The press release says that both will stick around…but that makes little sense. It will be interesting to see, that’s for sure.

Categories
Digital Culture

del.icio.us as social network

Over at Read/Write web, there’s an article today about how del.icio.us is moving towards becoming a social network:

But Joshua has bigger plans for del.icio.us – it will essentially turn into a social network, with more focus on people instead of data. I learned this when I asked Joshua what kind of new functionality we can expect to see from delicious over the coming 6-12 months? Joshua replied:

“One of the amazing things about our users is how smart and far-reaching their interests are. While delicious previously has been very much about just the data, in the future I hope to allow our users themselves to come forward within the system. Additionally, I want to help people connect with others within the system, either to people they already know or discovering new people and communities based on interest.”
(emphasis mine)

This points to a social networking future for del.icio.us, perhaps more so than a content bookmarking one (which it currently is). delicious already has a ‘Your network’ feature, but that basically just connects users’ bookmarks. I think what Joshua is talking about is expanding this into a more full-featured social networking system – with commenting, groups, etc. Perhaps similar to Imeem, which combines content browsing with social networking.

I would argue that del.icio.us is already a social network. It’s possible to identify users with similar interests (a la Facebook), you can “subscribe” to a users information, you can send links to users in your network, your network acts as a sort of friends list…it’s all there already. If what Read/Write means is that the individual user will become the focus rather than the user’s content…I hope desperately that’s not the case. Del.icio.us is nearly perfect at what it does. I would hate to see any of the functionality buried or de-prioritized for the sake of becoming more social.

Now what I would like to see is a collaborative folksonomic site that merges del.icio.us and flickr (both owned by yahoo now). Not inside the current site of either of them, but some new site where you could see how the tags interacted…search for “cats” and get flickr pictures of cats along with del.icio.us links on cats. Hell, if del.icio.us returned relevancy ranked links, you’d have a sort of human-powered Google…both sites and pictures that have all been vetted by an actual human to relate to tag X. I’d love to see how that would look…Yahoo? Pretty please?

Categories
Library Issues

Facebook takes down libraries

Facebook seems to be getting touchy in their new-found attempt to take over the social network world…they took down the University of Kentucky’s profile with no warning, citing breach of ToS:

Facebook profiles are intended for use by a single individual. Groups, clubs, and other types of organizations are not permitted to maintain an account. I apologize for the inconvenience, but you will no longer be able to use this account. I will not be able to reinstate the account under a different email address.

—text from email from facebook support

So Facebook won’t give them back their content? This seems like a BAD idea on the part of Facebook support, and I’m guessing this will get fixed in short order.

I’m friends with a few libraries…curious how long it will take Facebook to get rid of them all. Here at MPOW, we’ve not created a page just for the library, instead having the library as Group, as Facebook suggests. This wasn’t done with any forethought…just seemed to make sense at the time.

Categories
Digital Culture

Identity 2.0 meets real life

Mark from BoingBoing tells this story about a friend who meets the next identity crisis early: what do you do when there’s bad information given about you, and you have no recourse?

What interests me is that this whole phenomenon is only just beginning to get rolling. Criminal background checks are still a little too expensive right now for most apartment landlords, home-owner associations, and employers. That obviously will not last, since apparently those millions of paper documents in county court houses have been largely digitized. Now that the data entry has been completed (competently or otherwise), information just wants to be free, right? Certainly it wants to be cheaper than $78. In a few years (or maybe months) from now, when you can check any job applicant or prospective tenant for $5, or maybe for free if the service is supported by context-sensitive popup ads, everyone will be checking everyone. Already it costs me nothing to view a map of the alleged child molesters living in my neighborhood. (I wonder how many errors are in _that_ database.) Can other felons be far behind?

Maybe one of your readers has some ideas on how this can be fixed. I don’t see any way. It makes the fuss over Wikipedia look pretty trivial; John Seigenthaler certainly didn’t have to submit a set of fingerprints to get _his_ error corrected, and it didn’t deprive him of a place to live, either.

This is as much about information management as it is identity. I’m not sold on this answer, but what if we owned the information about ourselves? That is, any information that was a formal measure of my identity was owned by me in the same sense that I can own copyright on something I write. I could then license said information to those institutions I wished (the government would have built in license for identification purposes, I suppose, in a limited scope) and could sue organizations that used my information illegally. We solve junk mail and the many-database problem all at once. Of course, the cure may be worse than the disease…

Categories
Digital Culture

CrazyEgg

The newest Web 2.0 tool in my expanding arsenal of webilicious goodness: CrazyEgg. With registration and a simple addition of a bit o’ code you get:

  • Individual click counts for every link on a page
  • A summary of a click data
  • And my personal favorite: an overlayed heat map

Pictures as soon as I get them. I’m using it for two sites, currently, and need to figure out where the code goes inside WordPress…not as easy to find the right place in the PHP. But I’ll get it working soon.