paul walk’s weblog

My parents recently bought my son a sandpit and a couple of sacks of sand to go in it. He loves it (although his enjoyment has been curtailed by the UK recently developing a monsoon-like climate of continuous rain). He’ll generally sit outside of it, playing with the toys and sand inside, or sometimes he’ll just climb right in. Either way, the rule is the same. The sandpit is a semi-closed system - no sand is allowed to escape the confines of the sandpit, and only some compatible (i.e. sand-proof) toys are allowed in.

Because I’m to old to play with a real sandpit (well…often anyway) I’ve been looking at the facebook platform (API) which allows developers to build new widgets which they can deploy within facebook. A basic use of the API might be to surface an existing, external application within facebook in order to reach the users inside this system. This is the web-portal model, such as used in Netvibes. A more sophisticated use would exploit the social-networking capabilities, which are the real point of facebook.

There’s a lot of hype about facebook right now, and the opening up of its API has been warmly received. The way I see it, this now makes it possible for us to bring more toys into the sandpit, making the whole sandpit experience a more rewarding one. But it’s still the sandpit, walled-off and separate from the rest of the world.

Jason Kottke says:

you do know that Facebook is AOL 2.0, right?

The world is still adjusting to the “web is the platform”, core to the Web 2.0 meme. But is this already being usurped by a new reality, the re-appearance of walled gardens, as in the early days of AOL?

In a very interesting post about ‘platforms’ and lessons not learned in the web-platform era, Marc Andreessen points out that:

You can layer new code and functionality on top of what Facebook’s own programmers have built, but you cannot change the Facebook system itself at any level.

I just can’t get all that excited about facebook as a platform. From my point of view, in an exciting era of mashups, facebook is only seriously mashable in one direction, and it’s the wrong direction. If facebook’s social networks were exposed to the web, ‘mine-able’ and mashable - now that would be exciting. But as Jon Udell points out, that would be risky and with “no obvious benefit to facebook”.

Mike Ellis says:

…the mashup environment is about playing with technology - it is therefore partially technology driven (a bad thing) but also understands and build on content and data from disparate sources in the hope that the thing which pops out at the end is useful (a good thing). It relies on a Darwinian process to determine what works and what doesn’t: if your users like it, they’ll take to it and it’ll succeed.

I agree. And facebook’s viral aspect gives the Darwinian process a shot of adrenaline. It’s a pity that facebook’s social-network, it’s viral power can’t be applied to mashups, ‘out there’ on the web.

I think that facebook is a sandpit. I’ve had a little fun in there, playing with a few toys. I’ll probably play in there from time to time - I like a sandpit as much as the next kid. But then I’ll get bored and wander off, leaving my toys lying half buried in the sand, looking for something better to play with.
Having said that, people whom I respect have a higher opinion of facebook. Perhaps I’m missing the point?

Technorati Tags: AOL, GoogleMap, Jason Kottke, Jon Udell, Marc Andreesen, platform, sandpit, walled garden, web 2.0

Web 2.0 tools allow the individual to share their interests with others. If someone is an active user of Web 2.0 services, blogging, sharing photos etc, then we can begin to build some sort of a picture of that person’s interests. I’ve been thinking about how one might extend this idea to groups of people, especially groups with some common interest. Such groups are sometimes called communities of practice. By definition, individuals within a community of practice already know some of the interests of the others in the group - these are the interests which bind them together. But is it useful for such individuals to know about other interests of other members of the group? I surmise that this could be interesting, especially if such other interests turn out to be also shared by a significant number in the group.

To this end, I’ve been experimenting with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Technorati, and a handy community of practice - namely the delegates of this years upcoming Institutional Web Management Workshop. Having invited the delegates to submit the URLs of any blogs they might happen to maintain, my script interrogates the Technorati’s open API and returns the set of tags used by each blog. Next it aggregates these sets, and ‘weights’ each tag according to how often it has been used across the collection of blogs. Finally, it generates a ‘tag-cloud’ as a way of visualising this data. Each tag in the cloud links bag to a search for usage of that tag in Technorati, so that other bloggers with a similar interest can be discovered.

Because there was some location information available (the post-codes of participating delegates’ institutions) I integrated a GoogleMap to show where the ‘community’ has come from geographically.

The results of this experiment can be seen here. If anyone is interested in the underlying code they can contact me directly.

Technorati Tags: community of practice, GoogleMap, iwmw2007, Ruby, RubyOnRails, Technorati

Good to see that 37signals have adopted (optional) OpenID support for Basecamp. I was already using Basecamp with the older, local user account credentials, but the system allowed me to swap to using my OpenID very easily. Good work, as ever, by 37signals.

However, I can’t help thinking that is only half the story. The ‘ID’ in OpenID is, at one level, about identity as in ‘Identity Card’. But my OpenID is also an identifier, which is fundamental in the context of the web. This is being lost in the system - knowing my OpenID does not help you to locate my projects in Basecamp for example. (This is not intended as a criticism of Basecamp or 37signals - I’m still enjoying the convenience of having one user account fewer to remember after all!)

I’ve thought for a while that the introduction of URIs for people was the often overlooked yet potentially most interesting aspect of OpenID. In a resource-oriented-architecture, it would seem plausible to suppose that a reliable pointer to a representation of a person would be a useful thing. But when I try to sketch out a useful application for this, I struggle, partly because I don’t want to admit that the semantic-web people might have the answer, and it might be called RDF

Technorati Tags: 37 Signals, Basecamp, identifiers, OpenID, RDF, resource-oriented-architecture, semantic web

There follows a pretty self-indulgent exercise in mixing metaphors and stretching them beyond breaking point.

I’m sure I’m not the first person who has speculated about similarities between Web 2.0 and Punk. I’ve mused over this with Liz and Brian at UKOLN for example. Brian and I have pushed the ‘music-genre-as-analogy-for-what-we-do’ a fair bit (Brian even blogged about being a Dedicated Follower of Fashion getting cited in the Wikipedia entry for this song title in the process!)

I think it is true that in Web 2.0 we find examples of the do it yourself (DIY) ethos that drove the Punk Rock movement of the late 70’s and early 80’s - Web 2.0 technologies have, it seems to me, undoubtedly lowered the barriers to participation for a lot more people. It’s interesting that the importance of, and focus on, the human element in Web 2.0 is mostly in its collective sense - it’s not actually DIY so much as ‘DIT’ or do it together. And actually we focus more on the output which gives us the exciting network effects we value. A folksonomy for example is an output from a system which allows individual contributions to be realised as a collected endeavour.

Yet it seems apparent that it is the absolute ease with which people can contribute which drives much of the success of ’social software’. I think this is where Web 2.0 and Punk converge. I think that the result of tagging, for example, manifests often as a community of practice - it’s ‘folk’. But the action of tagging in the first place is closer to Punk.

Punk tagging!

Technorati Tags: dit, folksonomies, punk, punk tagging, web 2.0, web2.0

An interesting post by Mike Neuenschwander on the Burton Group Identity Blog. I’m not certain I agree entirely with the main thrust of Mike’s argument, which he offers as an axiom:

There are no identifiers, only attributes

That is to say, things are identified by their existence as a collection of attributes in a given context. Some of Mike’s claims, such as “most people have [...] several dozen nicknames” seem a little exaggerated. However, his concluding remarks are interesting:

I understand why from a programmer’s perspective, it would be so much more convenient if everybody could simply have one globally unique, unambiguous, resolvable name. But such a quaint design constitutes a wanton disregard for reality.

The tech industry is adolescently ID-fixated.

I am professionally interested in identifiers, and am aware of serious interest in the notion of the creation of ‘authoritative’ resolution services for names, in the domain of the publication and use of scholarly work. The ability to reliably cite authors of scholarly works would surely be a good thing. But this requirement has been around for a long time now, and is still not satisfied.

Is the “adolescence” of the industry a barrier to pursuing a solution which doesn’t show a “wanton disregard for reality”?

Technorati Tags: burton group, identifiers, openid, Mike Neuenschwander

On Thursday I attended and spoke at the The Shock of the Old 2007: Shock of the Social conference at the Said Business School, Oxford University. I was speaking as a replacement for Brian Kelly who came up with the original idea for the talk, Does Web 2.0 Herald The End Of In-House Development And Provision Of IT Services? I blogged about this a couple of weeks ago inviting comments which I was able to incorporate into my presentation. My intention was to try to add value to the presentation, and to make it more social by:

• blogging about it beforehand, inviting comments
• incorporating any comments into the presentation
• providing a real-time chat facility with the presentation
• distributing the slides widely (on the UKOLN site and on slideshare)
• blogging about the conference after the event (this post), using the designated tag (shock2007), and inviting more comments

The feedback I got was pretty positive, although the real-time chat idea didn’t really work very well in practice - too distracting according to one participant. The ‘blogging about it afterwards’ idea hasn’t worked out too well in practice either - people started leaving comments on the original posting before I had chance to write a new one!

The conference in general was great - a good, varied collection of presentations on using social/Web 2.0 software for doing everything from teaching Divinity to creating an environment designed to encourage ’self-disclosure’ as part of a psychology course (fascinating, if a little disturbing….) which was illustrative of the potentially ‘confessional’ aspect of blogging, for instance.

Randy Metcalfe in his presentation explained that he participates in all kinds of social software using his ‘real identity’. I have, in the past, used several pseudonyms for blogging etc. but have recently decided to use my public identity for all such activities. My rationale is that it will soon (if it isn’t already) be possible to unearth just about anything I have contributed in public spaces, so I might as well get into the habit of assuming that this will happen.

In the pub afterwards I joined in an absorbing argument about blogging, anonymously or openly. I now blog entirely openly, where another participant (name intentionally reserved) in the argument explained that they blogged anonymously, taking some effort to maintain this anonymity. We talked about the recent AOL debacle and how this demonstrated the difficulty of maintaining an anonymous virtual existence.

It was good to catch up with some of the e-Learning crowd - I enjoyed and learned from pretty much all of the presentations, caught up with some familiar faces, and met some new people.

The Said Business School is a first-class venue for this kind of conference. The lecture-room facilities were impressive, the catering was pretty good, the WIFI worked as advertised and was free (to the end-user at least).

Technorati Tags: AOL, blogging, randy metcalfe, shock2007, UKOLN, Web 2.0

Matthew Somerville has created a great web application called Accessible UK Train Timetables. For ‘accessible’ read programmable, so that having completed the search form, the resulting page’s URL is useable in another web application in a RESTian way.
for example, my search for early morning trains from London to Bath gives me the following URL:

http://traintimes.org.uk/london%20paddington/bath%20spa/07:30/

Technorati Tags: trains, REST, timetable, web services