Posted: December 14th, 2005 | No Comments »
One of the project we selected for LIFT is carried out by Amnesty International and is called “web2.0 mashups and human rights“.
Internet strategists from Amnesty International will present project proposals based on web2.0 principles.
The basic idea is innovation in assembly, using RSS to mashup existing web2.0 services (such as mapping) with Amnesty data (for example, information on people disappeared during the ‘War on Terror’). Making this part of an architecture of participation should allow activists and volunteers to add value to the result and also to generate project communities.
Working from a swift overview of web2.0 examples, this presentation aims at stimulating discussion of concrete projects that apply the potential of new wave internet developments for direct human rights and social impact.
Why do I blog this? I think it’s interesting to see what NGOs like Amnesty can do with Web2.0 concepts and how it can help them to meet their needs.
Posted: December 11th, 2005 | 3 Comments »
Rather than being impressed by the Yahoo take-over of del.icio.us, I am more interested in the launch of Yahoo Answers (of course the del.icio.us thing is great and the synergies with flickr are interesting but some other things are going on). This service lets you ask a question and have a real person provides an answer. This new kind of webservice (“new social networking/online community/search/question answering service”) is very close to a new trend in the field of libraries and information science: asking specialists specific questions. Since libraries have to rethink their missions, this kind of service emerges (like Lyon’s municipal library with their guichet des savoirs project last year). Now it’s not only a matter of asking specialist through or in an institution. This is enriched with social software features plus a lazy web spin. I find this model very interesting. Let’s wait a bit to see to harsh criticisms as for Wikipedia…
Update: a commented list of ‘ask and expert’ websites is available on netsurf.ch thanks to Emily
Posted: November 23rd, 2005 | 2 Comments »
mmh this is so true: a Web2.0 checklist
Give us your email address, we’ll let you know when it’s ready!
Public beta alpha
Tags
Feeds for everything
Built with Rails
Sprinkled with Ajax
Yellow fade
Blue gradients
Big icons
Big fonts
Big input boxes
REST API
Google Maps mashup
Share with a friend
TypePad blog for a peek inside the team
Feature screencasts (thanks, Waxy!)
Hackathons for new features
Development wiki
Business model optimized for the long tail
It’s Free!/AdSense revenue stream
Now let’s discriminate do’s and dont’ts!
Posted: November 22nd, 2005 | No Comments »
Ray Osszie (Lotus Notes creator and Groove founder) introduces a new standard called SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML) meant to support sharing and ‘cross-subscribed’ feeds. It’s actually a RSS extension. What’s interesting is that the SSE specification is released under a Creative Commons license, which is a gooD thing for MS.
The SSE FAQ is available (as well as the SSE specifications):
Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) is a specification that extends RSS from unidirectional to bidirectional information flows.
SSE defines the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely cooperating applications to use RSS as the basis for item sharing—that is, the bidirectional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items among two or more cross-subscribed feeds.
For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse’s calendar, and vice versa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and add new appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or a doctor’s appointment.
Why do I blog this? RSS was already a huge achievement in terms of information management, then I’m curious about this SSE thing.
Posted: November 21st, 2005 | No Comments »
An intriguing post by Ulla Maaria-Mutanen about thinglink, a concept I was not aware of:
A thinglink is a free unique identifier that anybody can use for making the finding and recommendation of particular things easier in the Internet.
A thinglink identifier is based on the idea that many of the things we use in our daily life are quite particular. Perhaps we know their origin (who has made them, when and how) and something about their history or previous use (like with furniture and cars). Some things have more meaning to us than others.
(…)
Thinglinks are unique, 8-digit identifiers that anybody can use for connecting physical or virtual objects to any online information about them. A thinglink on an object is an indication that there is some information about the object online—perhaps a blog post, some flickr photos, a manufacturer’s website, a wikipedia article, or just some quick comments on a discussion site.
The purpose of the thinglink.org is to offer an easy way to learn about products and artifacts in their various contexts of production and use. Small-scale producers such as artists, designers, and crafters can use thinglinks to bring their products to the emerging recommendation-based market in the Internet
Why do I blog this? well this is very close to ID specifications of Bruce Sterling’s concept of spimes! There is a website coming out about this: Thinglink Besides, it’s closely related to our discussion about blogjects with Julian. This ‘thinglink’ idea could be seen a way of implementing the blogject concept since it’s able to connect information (on the web) and artifacts. So Julian what do you think? Let’s all meet and talk about it. Isn’t there a workshop scheduled about this in 2006 conference? Well, let’s have a workshop about blogject at LIFT then! (something like the day before).
Posted: November 21st, 2005 | No Comments »
Ok, there’s a new buzzword around here (Web2.0 spin): “third generation of social-networking systems” as attested by this TR article by Wade Roush. Instead than focusing on this ’3rd’ thing, the interesting point of this article is that it highlights the new important feature of social software: the ability to manipulate user-generated content:
“We’ve listened to our user base very closely, and we’re also paying attention to what the competition is doing, and we’ve formulated a new strategy that is really about personal media,” says Jeff Roberto, a marketing manager at Friendster. For example, users can now create blogs, control the appearance of their profiles, upload up to 50 photos, watch slide shows of the photos most recently uploaded by their friends, post classified ads that link back to their profiles, and share audio and video files stored on their PCs using peer-to-peer technology provided by Grouper.
“The uptake we’ve seen has been incredible,” Friendster CEO Taek Kwon said in October, about a month after the new features were introduced. “We’ve seen substantial increases in media being uploaded, profiles being customized, and people posting classifieds.”
It also talks about a new player: iMeem who puts this idea into practice, using an interesting model:
iMeem hopes to attract members to by building all their activities not around a virtual representation of their social network, but around instant messaging technology.
That’s exactly how iMeem works. A downloadable application similar to Yahoo Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger, iMeem is built around a buddy-list window that shows a user which of her friends are online. From that window, she can send and receive instant messages, join group chats, keep a blog, and share photos, videos, podcasts, playlists, and the like with other users using a peer-to-peer system related to the technology behind the original Napster.
Aggregating all of these functions into one program sounds like a recipe for information overload. But Caldwell believes that iMeem users will act as each others’ media critics, perhaps bringing real effectiveness to the much-heralded idea of “collaborative filtering.” “There’s too much stuff out there,” Caldwell says. “Too much data, too much content, too many blogs. Collaborative filtering is one of the most important things that’s happened on the Web over the past couple of years. It’s holding back the tide of overstimulation.”
Why do I blog this? This ‘iMeem’ makes me think of a 1st generation social software called Huminity I tested long time ago mixed with this user-generated content trend. I like the ‘collaborative filtering’ feature but I am wondering how it would work.
Posted: November 17th, 2005 | No Comments »
Just found this on Roger Cailliau’s webpage, which seems to be a NeXT computer:
This early CERN browser is also cute:
Posted: November 9th, 2005 | No Comments »
ZDNET reports this interesting fact: IBM said it is developing an application to analyse how discussions on blogs and other Web sites are affecting a given corporation’s image. It’s called “Public Image Monitoring Solution” and it’s based on IBM’s text analytics and search software, WebSphere Information Integration OmniFind Edition. This would certainly be of interest for some e-marketing companies down there (among others).
The Web-based program could cull results on the topic of fuel efficiency from various sources and generate reports by categorizing the information. If many consumers or news stories are making negative comments about a product, for example, a marketing person would know and could react,
Why do I blog this? this seems to be a tool that would be of interest for other purposes than just marketing. I don’t know whether this service will be affordable…
Posted: November 3rd, 2005 | 1 Comment »
The latest report from the Pew Internet, which deals with ‘teen content creators’, is very insightful. It reports that more than half of online teens have created content for the internet; and most teen downloaders think that getting free music files is easy to do
Some 57% of online teens create content for the internet. (…) These Content Creators report having done one or
more of the following activities: create a blog; create or work on a personal webpage; create or work on a webpage for school, a friend, or an organization; share original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos online; or remix content found online
into a new creation. The most popular Content Creating activities are sharing self-authored content and working on webpages for others.
(…)
Bloggers and to a lesser extent teens who read blogs are a particularly tech-savvy group of internet users. They have more technological tools such as cell phones and PDAs and are more likely to use them to go online. Not only do they live in technologically rich households, but they are more likely to have their own computer at home and to be able to use it in a private space. They help adults do things online. Most strikingly, they have more experience with almost all online activities that we asked about. Bloggers are more likely than non-bloggers to engage in everyday online activities such as getting news, using IM or making online purchases, but content creating and sharing activities are the areas where bloggers are far ahead of non-bloggers.
The report is of great interest. In addition, people interested in sort of content creation might been interest in check this “I want to” webpage which summarizes the large number of web applications to manipulate content on the web (sharing pictures, do podcasts, share bookmarks…)
Posted: November 2nd, 2005 | No Comments »
Yesterday I attended a presentation about dangers and opportunities fostered by weblogs (of course ‘danger’ is where the emphasis where). One of the most interesting presenter was certainly David Sadigh from IC Agency (internet marketing firm in Geneva) in the sense that his presentation achieved to show how weblog and their corollary tools (e.g. search engine a la technorati/blogpulse) could be used for marketing/data collection/competitive intelligence issues. His pragmatic view of how using such tool was very refreshing among those talks who more focused on conservative topics.
This made me think about my own practices about intelligence gathering; which are certainly close to what to do, except that the focus is less business-oriented but rather purposely aimed at being part of a research community, finding new information about specific topics and in the end discussing about innovation. But the approach is the same.
Then I made a quick list of the tools I used on a daily basis for various purposes connected to my research activities (be it for my phd funded by public fundings or for my R&D projects for private copmanies):
Scientific database/search engines: web of science, scopus, citeseer (+ less professional but useful: google scholar)
- Web search engine: google, ask keeves, jux, A9, alexa
- Blog tracker/search engine (to see who talk about what + who talk about certain things I blogged): technorati, icerocket, blogpulse, pubsub, google blog search, daypop, g-metrics
- Social Bookmark Managers (to share my bookmarks, I also use them as search engine): del.icio.us, blogmarks, citeUlike
- News aggregator: my offline aggregator is NetNewsWire and my online is rss4you, My opml is there for people who wants to see what I read.
- txt file still rocks: I then have a list of all the books I’ve read + movies I’ve watched here
- Bibliographical references are managed through a bibtex file with bibdesk; there is also a RSS version but it’s down
I should make the same list for statistical sources.
