Web2.0 « Content Here

Archive for the ‘Web2.0’ Category

How Many Microblogging Services Does the World Really Need?

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

After hearing all this news about status.net, I took a few moments to connect my Identi.ca account with my Twitter account. I am not at all sure what good that did but I figured it couldn’t hurt. While I was there, I got to thinking what is so special about a microblog? And I came to the conclusion — nothing. You can think of a microblog as a title-only blog (entries with no bodies). What is new there? Subscriptions have already been handled quite well by RSS. What makes Twitter (and Facebook) so important is not the ability to post 140 character messages. It’s not even really the API or mobile integration. What makes Twitter/Facebook important is that they are used by so many of the people that you want to reach. There are plenty of failed status-oriented services that have had the technology but, either through bad timing or other missteps, failed to build an audience.

I wonder how attempts at internal microblogs are working out. I haven’t heard any success stories and I doubt if any survive past the initial novelty phase. If there are urges to microblog within the enterprise, employees could satisfy them with the internal blogging infrastructure that has been idle in most organizations. If there is any internal application for the microblog it is aggregating what employees are tweeting out on Twitter. But, depending on the staff, I don’t know how interesting that would be either.

I think that the microblog is going to fail as a category of software. There just isn’t a big enough market of buyers that can build a sustainable microblogging community. I can’t think of existing sites with large audiences investing to buy or build a microblogging capability. If you were CNN, would you rather have a reader tweet a story link on Twitter (where it could be re-tweeted by millions of users) or on your CNN own microblog community? The only purpose I see for status.net is just in case Twitter kills itself (by running out of money or ruining the service). I seem to remember a lot of people threatening to defect to Identi.ca and FriendFeed when Twitter was going through its problems. But that didn’t happen. How long can the status.net’s and Identi.ca’s of the world sustain the energy and motivation to be an understudy behind a healthy actor?

I know the argument that suggests that distributed communication services will eventually win like how the open, distributed web was destined to eventually beat out then popular online services like AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy. But I don’t think this is the same. If I am missing the point here, please enlighten me. I would love to see competition in this sector if it makes sense. I just don’t see it.

Posted in Web2.0, commentary | 6 Comments »

Blogging: Alive or Dead?

Friday, March 13th, 2009

Paul Boutin’s Wired article “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004″ last year created a lively dialog about the future of blogging. The general gist of the article (in case you haven’t read it) is that mainstream media companies have adopted and started to dominate the blog format while independent bloggers have drifted into the even more casual and spontaneous domain of “status updates.”

Independent bloggers do tend to let their productivity ebb and flow and I am sure that many of the “citizen journalists” who were really flowing during the blogging peak are seriously ebbing right now. I agree with Boutin that blogging is no longer the primary way that people casually share ideas. Now, when I run across some interesting information I have three choices. I can blog it, I can bookmark it, or I can tweet it. My general rule of thumb is: when I have something to add, I blog it; when I just want to save it for later (perhaps with a little note), I bookmark it in Delicious (or star it in Google Reader); when I just want to tell my friends, I tweet it. All of my stuff goes into FriendFeed where occasionally people comment and add their own ideas. I imagine other bloggers’ productivity is similarly diluted across these other channels.

But Boutin’s trend is going even further. There was a great article in the New York Times that described how television journalists are getting addicted to Twitter. Robert Scoble has created his own format on FriendFeed where he starts an item with something like “Why Twitter is not for conversations. I will give you five reasons here:” and then goes on to list them in the comments. As he adds items, everyone else chimes in with their opinions. The result is a Crossfire-like discussion but without the interruptions (and, thankfully, without Tucker Carlson). In this case, he gave 5 reasons out of a total of 158 comments and another 143 people “liked” the post. In these cases the journalist moves from commentator to facilitator or catalyst. But, while this format is very dynamic and has lots of energy, it lacks the authority of a single person summarizing and interpreting the information.

To really develop an idea into a cohesive viewpoint, you may not need to write a 1,400 word exposÃ© but you do need more than 140 characters (FriendFeed allows you more but most people don’t use more than 140). And for that type of communication the blog format is very well suited because you have the room to elaborate on your point and you still offer a place for others to make their own comments. Blogging is not going away. If anything, it is displacing the formal article as the preferred format for journalists who appreciate the more intimate relationship with their reading audience that comes with immediate publishing and user submitted comments. My feed reader relentlessly fills up with new content every day so I can’t complain about not having enough to read. If anything, I feel like the overall quality of the blogosphere is going up. Blogging isn’t dying, it is just maturing. And with maturity, comes sophistication (at least that is what I tell myself).

Posted in Web2.0, blogging, newsmedia, syndication | 1 Comment »

Guardian Hack Days

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Both the New York Times and the Telegraph have been innovating on the newsmedia business model by introducing API’s that expose their content and services for outside developers to leverage. Recently The Guardian held their “Hack Day at The Guardian”.

To quote:

The concept is simple: take an idea to prototype in a day and then present your work to your colleagues and a panel of judges.

Guardian staff and friends participated in this 24 hour code-fest that ended in 90 second presentations in front of a panel. You can track activity on Twitter and see pictures on Flickr. I still don’t know who won yet. I am sure that everyone is a winner

Posted in Web2.0, newsmedia | No Comments »

Blogs, Wiki’s, etc.

Monday, November 10th, 2008

A couple of months ago a WCMS sales guy said to me that when hears the words “we are looking for blogs, wikis, etc.” from a customer it is a clear indication that the customer really doesn’t know what he is talking about or (at least) doesn’t have a clear vision of goals for Web 2.0.

I too am suspicious (and a little surprised) when I hear these terms together because, other than the fact that they are relatively new to the “enterprise,” blogs and wikis have little to do with each other. Bob Doyle wrote a very good article differentiating these technologies way back in 2006 (When to Wiki, When to Blog – read the article).

A blog is a publishing system and a wiki is a collaboration tool. A blog author writes articles (posts) which reflect an idea or an observation at a point of time. You don’t typically update a blog entry unless you see a typo that annoys too much to ignore (like misspelling your name – as on of my recent posts). Comments provide a forum for a dialog around the topic. These comments may appear within the context of the blog site or somewhere else as in the case of friendfeed but they are a conversation around the article, not the article itself. Occasionally the blog author will highlight a comment by updating the blog with a reference but this is the exception not the rule. If the author changes his mind, he will write another post rather than update the original. To learn from blogs you read lots of posts and piece together a consistent understanding that works for you.

A wiki is a tool to collaboratively build a comprehensive informational resource. Rather than blog posts that a single author publishes to an audience, a wiki page allows a group of people to jointly define a topic, establish a policy, or create some other information resource that needs to be updated over time. Companies that use a wiki (rather than a WCMS) as their intranet have come to the conclusion that potentially anyone in the company could correct or otherwise improve the information there. If these contributions are wrong, their updates can be corrected or rolled back.

WCMS can serve both of these publishing and information management purposes. For example, a typical implementation “corporate brochure” of a CMS will publish “point-in-time” articles (e.g. press releases) and manage fixed pages (e.g. “about us”). If you need to do both with one tool (and want the option to strictly control contribution), you probably need a WCMS. If you need to do one of these things but not the other, you might be in the market for a blog or a wiki but not “blogs, wikis, etc.”

Posted in Web2.0, collaboration, commentary | 1 Comment »

Semantic tagging on the cheap with a WYSIWYG editor

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

I am surprised by how few companies employ the little trick of using the WYSIWYG editor in their CMS to semantically tag rich text fields. The general idea is that you overload the WYSIWYG CSS support by using the CSS classes with semantically meaningful names.

Here is an example. Lets say you are publishing a business journal and you write a lot about companies and regulatory agencies. You might have a sentence like

Apparently, following an investigation into the hacking of several dozen customer accounts, the SEC found LPL negligent.

source

The terms “SEC” and “LPL” are italicized in compliance with your style guide. To satisfy the style guide, your reporter probably just highlights the text and clicks the italics button. But, what if your style guide changes to say that company names are bolded and your regulatory agencies are in red text? Using style classes would give you much greater flexibility than “em” and “strong” tags. Most WYSIWYG editors can be configured to have a drop down list of style classes. When a user highlights the text and selects the class, the WYSIWYG editor writes it as a span tag with that class:

<span class="classname">LPL</span>

Now what should you name your classes? Here is the trick. Rather than call them “italics” or “bold” or “red,” give them names to indicate the meaning of the text that you are styling: such as “company” and “regulator.” In addition to giving more flexibility in styling, you will be able to do some really interesting things with your content. For example:

With a very simple XSL template you can have your rendering template put a list of mentioned companies and agencies on the page.
You could extend the logic of your CMS to automatically create metadata about the article to help your search engine figure out that your article is about Apple computers rather than Motts Brand Apple Juice.
You could have your rendering templates insert the stock symbol of the company or create a link to their ticker page.

The possibilities are really endless when your programming logic has access to the meaning of your content.

Using a WYSIWYG editor to do simple semantic tagging is not the only way to add meaning to your content. You can have your authors write in an XML editor. You can use a text mining engine match words against a centrally managed controlled vocabulary. However, I have found that this approach is the least expensive, most practical way to get started. They want to have their article look nice. This approach captures that intent and, with no additional effort, creates additional value that your author (at first) is less aware of. Once your content starts to have semantic tagging and your technology starts to leverage it, your authors will probably start to see the benefits and really get excited about the possibilities.

Posted in Web2.0, development, tricks, usability | 3 Comments »

Intranet 2.0 Survey

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Toby Ward and the Prescient Digital team is conducting an Intranet 2.0 survey to study the effectiveness of Intranet 2.0 tools and strategies. Here is the blurb.

In response to customer and market demand for a detailed analysis of Intranet 2.0 tools (Web 2.0 tools used on the corporate intranet) used, considered and deployed by global organizations, Prescient Digiatl Media is preparing a comprehensive report on the topic, based in part on the findings of the following study. Targeted primarily to organizations that currently have a corporate intranet and/or portal, and are considering and/or have deployed Intranet 2.0 tools.

The following survey takes approximately 10 minutes to complete. Respondents who complete the survey will be eligible to win $400 (a random email address will be drawn from all responses to the survey). All respondents will also receive a full copy of the results at no cost. Please provide your contact information in order to receive the survey results.

Only totals and summary statistics will be published. Your personal information and answers will be held confidential, and will not be shared with any outside partner or company.

Please take 10 minutes to take the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and youâ€™ll get a copy of the full results including the good, bad and learned lessons.

I am looking forward to seeing the results of this study. From what I have seen personally, employee-oriented communities have failed to sustain the levels of social and collaborative energy that their consumer-oriented inspirations have achieved. I would love to see what the market as a whole is doing.

Posted in Web2.0, collaboration | 1 Comment »

Give Your Repository a REST

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Through my research and my client work I have been running across this recurring pattern of exposing a content repository through a REST interface. In the past, I have written about the JCR and Sling and Alfresco’s Web Scripts architecture. I really like both of those implementations. More recently, I have been working with a client who has built their own REST interface on top of Day’s CRX. They started their project before Sling was a glimmer in Apache’s eye and they took a slightly different approach. Instead of using Sling’s repository-oriented request handling, or Alfresco’s model of registering a Web Script (written in Javascript) to a particular path, my client has built out a full URL based query syntax through a servlet. Right now, the syntax focuses on searching retrieving content and is very powerful.

The strategy of using a REST API for your repository solves a central problem with the JCR and other Java base repositories: remote connectivity. Without a remote connectivity infrastructure like JDBC or ODBC, technologies wishing to talk to a Java repository must resort to connectivity like RMI (Remote Method Invocation) that are inefficient and do not necessarily play nicely with firewalls. While not particularly efficient (lots of protocol layers and text processing), REST offers a nice foundation for enabling remote connectivity at the appropriate layer of abstraction (that is, how content is logically stored – not how it is physically persisted). There are many reasons why REST is a good strategy but I think that the most important ones are:

There is great infrastructure available for optimizing and controlling HTTP traffic. For example, reverse proxy technologies like Squid can stand in front of the REST interface and serve repeated requests out of cache. Firewalls can be used to filter traffic with rules that evaluate the requested path and requester origin (beware IP Address spoofing).
REST is entirely technology neutral. Everything talks HTTP and XML. You can replace the implementation of either the server or the client with little risk to the overall architecture.

I think the only downside is that developing your own API is tricky business. While you are free to change your underlying data structures, once you publish your API and start writing applications on it, you lock yourself in. Where possible, it is best to support standardized query syntax like XQuery or the JCR query language in addition to your domain-specific methods.

I expect to see this pattern of REST-based repository access to be pretty much the standard as we get into Web 2.0 architectures that support mash-up applications. If they can address the overhead of all the text handling, more and more systems will use REST API’s to de-couple the various components in the application stack. Something to consider the next time you design a content-centric application.

Posted in REST, Web2.0, alfresco, architecture, java, jcr | No Comments »

Geo Services

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Re: Virtually There - Itinerary - In Date Order

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I have been playing around with services that help me keep track of where I am going and where I have been. So far, the standout application for me has been Tripit. You mainly use Tripit by forwarding the email confirmations that you get from various travel booking services that you use. Tripit parses through the confirmation email and identifies where you are going and when. It also is smart enough to put together several reservations as part of the same trip. For example, if I book a hotel for the January 10th and 11th and a train ticket that leaves on the 10th and returns on the 12th, Tripit knows that it is part of the same trip. I found the email parsing capabilities to be surprisingly accurate. I occasionally try to stump Tripit by forwarding emails from international travel or very small hotels. It almost always got it right. Recently, when using a client’s corporate travel service, I noticed an option to add my itineraries directly to Tripit (see screenshot). I wouldn’t be surprised if other travel services started to giving their customers this option.

Tripit provides a lot of upside for the minimal effort it takes to forward an email. For one, I get a nice little itinerary that I can print out. The itinerary has the address, confirmation codes, and telephone numbers of all the places that I need to be. It even has maps. I can also subscribe to an iCal calendar of my trips so everything is put right into my local calendar (I use iCal) along with my meetings. This helps prevent me from scheduling meetings when I am en route. My wife also subscribes to my calendar so she has all the details in her personal calendar as well.

The other service that I think I will start to use is brightkite. I will use this to post when I am at a particular place and I want to meet up with a friend. I like the features of brightkite. You can easily “check in” to a location either by address or by using a saved place (called a “marker”). Brightkite suppors a simple syntax that you can use over SMS. Plus you can Ping.fm to email in your location.

I have also tried Dopplr and Fire Eagle. Dopplr didn’t do it for me at all. You have to manually enter your trips. I tried to have Dopplr listen to my Tripit calendar but it was horrendously inaccurate. Dopplr had me taking all these crazy trips to various parts of the world and treated lay-overs at different airports as discrete trips. It wouldn’t be so bad if Dopplr was not counting my carbon emissions. I hated feeling defensive about all those trips I was not event taking. I closed my Dopplr account.

I am on the fence about Fire Eagle. I should feel very lucky that I have an account there. I hear that invites are very hard to get. But I don’t feel like I get much value from the service. Fire Eagle can listen to other services to find out where I am. I have it listening to brightkite. There are a number of other applications which I don’t use (like Dopplr, Plazes, and Navizon) that also talk to Fire Eagle. The only benefit that I see is that it gives Yahoo more information to serve me up better ads (which really isn’t a benefit for me) and search results (but I use Google search).

So, for now, I am sticking with Tripit and brightkite.

Posted in Web2.0, off-topic | No Comments »

The End of Print Media

Friday, June 6th, 2008

Steve Ballmer predicts the end of printed media in 10 years. “there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network.” I guess you wind up saying things like that when you force yourself to repeat “I will not underestimate the Internet” 100 times a day.

If this is true, I wonder if that will lead to better (portable and stationary) electronic displays or a huge jump in the home printer business.

On the content production side, I wonder if content will still initially be produced for a print format (creating print-ready PDF using InDesign/K4) or in more presentation neutral contribution environment (like classic the web content management model).

Posted in Web2.0 | 2 Comments »