paul walk’s weblog

Yesterday I went along to Mashed Library UK 2008 in London. Quickly abbreviated to ‘mashlib’, the event was the brain-child of Owen Stephens. Owen did most of the organising, aided by David Flanders who provided the space at BirkBeck college, and our excellent events team at UKOLN. The event was sponsored by UKOLN, using funding from the JISC.

I thought the balance of activities on the day was excellent - a healthy mixture of short presentations, demonstrations and a good amount of hands-on hacking. The group was comprised of commercial vendors (Talis, ExLibris, OCLC), academic-library folk (the majority), a lone representative from the public library world (Paul Bevan for the National Library of Wales), and a few developers from various (mostly JISC-funded) services.

Rob Styles from Talis gave us a demo of the Talis Platform. There is an open API which you can play with - it’s quite impressive. I was very struck by some of the language Rob used in his demo - he talked about dipping, where a result-set from a query (in RSS 1.0 format) is “dipped into” another - with the original data-set accreting more infromation from the second. (Jim Downing and I had an interesting chat about this over lunch, with Jim proposing that we could visualise data-sets as molecules - having a certain shape which allows them to bond with other molecules which have a complementary shape). Rob also talked about mixing in in a smiler vein. The Talis Platform APIs appear to be quite RESTful, with a good deal of passing URLs around rather than result-sets. I plan to have a closer look at this.

Timm-Martin Siewert spoke next about the ExLibris Open Platform. I did get a URL for this but it takes me to a page whcih challenges me for a username and password which I do not have. The Open Platform is , apparently, open to paying customers only. Edward Corrado suggested via a tweet that:

I think they mean open in the sense of the open systems movement of about 20 years ago

Next up was Mark Alcock, standing in for Tim McCormick and representing OCLC, to talk about the WorldCat Developer Network. Mark came armed with a bunch of limited life API keys, so that people could try out some of the WorldCat services. OCLC appear to be offering a spectrum of services, from the commercial pay-for-use variety, to the ‘affiliate’ model - i.e. form a business partnership with us and use our services, to some free services. I’m interested in several of the WorldCat services but am wary of getting too fond of something I cannot, in the end, afford to use. Unfortunately, I did not get time on the day to make use of Mark’s API keys.

I noted that the three vendors represented seem to be spaced evenly along a spectrum of openness, with Talis at the ‘very open’ end of the spectrum, ExLibris at the ‘closed’ end, and OCLC (specifically WorldCat) somewhere in between. I can’t yet see how Talis are going to monetise the completely open model, and I think ExLibris will certainly need to open up somewhat. Perhaps OCLC have hit a sweet-spot of openness? I really don’t know enough about these services in detail, but I noticed some comments from Dorothea Salo which are somewhat critical about the business model behind WorldCat.

Ashley Sanders followed, with a quick description of an Atom (APP) based object store he is developing as part of his work extending the COPAC service. I’m following COPAC developments with interest - I’m very much in favour of the general direction they seem to be taking (I recently blogged about one aspect of this).

Tony Hirst, mashup maestro, gave a tour-de-force demonstration of using Yahoo Pipes and Google Spreadsheets as mashup tools. This went down very well with the technically-minded-but-mostly-not-developers group - especially Yahoo Pipes. I gave a presentation at the Shock of the Social in March 07 where I remarked that the potential of Yahoo Pipes was to do for web development what the spreadsheet did for non-web development before it (Microsoft Excel has been described as the most widely used Integrated Development Environment). Tony showed us how the spreadsheet is certainly relevant in a web-mashup world with his demonstrations of using Google Spreadsheets to mashup data-feeds.

Later on, after lunch, the group got down to some general hackery. On Twitter, Chris Awre (who wasn’t at the event but had been following comments on Twitter) remarked:

Silence from #mashlib08 this afternoon. The mashing must be going well…

And he was right! There was a fair stream of Twitter commentary in the morning - but it dried up as people got absorbed in hacking code and testing interfaces. I saw people exploring the Talis Platform and, in particular, Yahoo Pipes. I expect there will be some blogging about this activity - look out for the official tag:

mashlib08

Andrew McGregor of JISC has already written up his experience of this , as has Jo Alcock - I think these posts describes representative experiences of the event.

Paul Bevan rounded off proceedings with a view from public libraries - the National Library of Wales to be precise. I learned a lot from this presentation about the unique challenges facing the public non-academic sector.

I thoroughly enjoyed the day - kudos to Owen for getting the right balance of people, subjects and activities. There was a ‘buzz’ generated as the day went on which was excellent. I have been to a fair number of ‘hacker’ events where the emphasis is on the tools and the running code - I generally enjoy this kind of thing. But mashlib08 was different - what was really good about this day was that the enthusiasm came from doing stuff with information, more than from the actual development.

I think Tony Hirst deserves a special tip o’ the hat for firing up a real enthusiasm for mashups on the day.

We should definitely do this again!

Tags: ExLibris, google-spreadsheets, mashlib08, OCLC, Talis, ukoln, Yahoo-pipes

I was recently invited to join the JISC Resource Discovery Infrastructure Taskforce - the first meeting was yesterday. We had been given some background material, and a couple of people (Owen Stephens and Paul Miller) were asked to present ideas around this general area, but the main order of the day was to establish terms of reference and some guiding principles. I had fondly imagined that this would be a fairly rapid exercise - more or less a bureaucratic process before we got down to the nitty-gritty of what problems we needed to solve and how we were going to solve them.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. As the day progressed, I was fascinated to gradually realise that there was a real disconnect between different understandings of what was meant by the term infrastructure. I made a few attempts to pause proceedings while we sorted out a definition, and at the end of the meeting I suggested that a priority for the work which will go on before the next meeting ought to be to establish a reasonable working definition of this term.

Some other scoping issues were dealt with fairly quickly. For example, the infrastructure, what ever that is, would be national in scope, but would serve ‘local’ services. But I think the lack of a general and common understanding of the term ‘infrastructure’ became a real problem yesterday.

Now, I’m not one to insist on precise definitions. Some terms are very useful in spite of, or even because of the fact that they have no precise definition. I have no problem with using ‘Web 2.0′ for example, even in non-marketing contexts! My own problem was that I have some fairly clear ideas about what infrastructure is - or is not - but it turns out that these are not shared by everyone else. For example:

• I assume that infrastructure is not generally user-facing. In the sense that a national infrastructure supports local services which support users, I see the primary stakeholders in an infrastructure as being those people who are providing local services. They are the people who both know what users want (or they should do!) and who know what support they need at a national level to make that happen. However, others in the meeting assumed that users would be directly accessing ‘infrastructure services’ in a variety of ways.
• I imagine a successful infrastructure to be mostly invisible. This turns out to be the opposite view to some at the meeting, who (perfectly reasonably) want UK national infrastructure to be overtly ‘world-class’.
• I imagine a successful infrastructure to be rather boring. Even train-spotters don’t generally photograph the infrastructure, the track etc…. But some of the discussion yesterday was around innovation and not being afraid to take risks. I guess I see infrastructure as tending to be the product of a conservative development process.

Some at the meeting had notions of infrastructure as clear (to them) as mine (are to me), just different. Some I suspect did not have a clear idea in their mind to start with. These were probably the wiser ones in hindsight. I suspect by the end of the meeting, everyone’s ideas had shifted (mine were in free-fall).

Nonetheless, the discussion was really interesting - I enjoy having my preconceptions challenged - and I met some insightful people. I look forward to the next meeting,

In the meantime - help us out please! Infrastructure - what does it mean to you?

In my previous post about QR codes I made a couple of points which, after receiving some interesting comments, I’d like to expand on.

“I see them [QR codes] occasionally on blogs/web-pages but I just don’t much see the point of that”

Shortly after making this point, I suggested on a UKOLN internal mailing list that it might make more sense to include a QR code in a cascading style sheet provided for printing, rather than viewing on the screen. If I want to link my blog/post/webpage to some other web resource, I include a hyperlink (which might be displayed as a title, rather than the raw URL, and so occluded on the screen). If I want to link a print-out of my blog/post/webpage to some other web resource, I can include a hyperlink, being careful to display the actual URL, or I can present a QR code. Or both. Tony Hirst also made the point about CSS for printing in a follow-up post to his original.

“I see QR codes as an interim technology, but a potentially useful one, which bridges the gap between paper-based and digital information.”

Some context: QR has been around for a while, and is well established in some industrial contexts. However, the aspects of their usage (or of their potential usage) which is of interest to Mia, Tony, Andy as well as Lawrie, Jon and Mike who all commented on my previous post stems from the possibility of wide-spread use by consumers with mobile devices, typically phones.

It seems to me there are two, different, aspects to this:

1. giving users an easy way of jumping to a virtual resource while they are not immersed in a virtual context
2. connecting the physical and the virtual worlds

QR codes seem to satisfy the former to some extent. In a comment, Jon mentioned that:

City AM (a free London daily business newspaper) use QR codes printed on the frontpage to drive visitors to their mobile site. It’s a simple idea that does actually work really well. There is clearly great potential for this in any number of marketing/promo activities.

Leaving aside the clunkiness of the iPhone as a QR-reading client device, the user is still required to actively scan the barcode with a handheld camera/scanner. The user must know that they want to, in this case, ‘go’ to the website. I find it hard to imagine that this will ever drive huge volumes of users to such webpages, but I guess that isn’t the point - it’s just ink after all and costs almost nothing…. there’s nothing to lose for the publisher. And even on an iPhone, scanning a QR code to input a URL is still probably quicker and more convenient than typing in a URL read off a piece of paper. As a way of encoding a URL in a machine scannable and readable way on paper, QR codes have the virtue of relative simplicity, very low cost, and a growing capacity among users to exploit them. And having thought more about Tony’s idea for QR codes in the margins of learning materials linking to video clips which supplement the content, I’m now persuaded that this could be worth doing.

In my previous post, I mentioned in passing how it might be interesting to use QR codes in a museum context:

Imagine walking around a museum - scan a QR code attached to an exhibit, load the URL and get a commentary played on the iPhone without needing to supply/hire those dedicated units some institutions supply to visitors.

Now imagine that, rather than having to scan a QR code, my phone automatically knows that it is near a particular exhibit. When I enter the physical space of the museum, I load the virtual space into the browser on my phone. As I stand in front of the physical exhibit, my device orientates me in the virtual space as well. There are are existing technologies which might help get us to this point, such as RFID & GPS. Imagine linking this with something like Graffitio for the iPhone….

Lawrie picked up on my point about ‘bridging the gap’, and Mike said:

It seems to me that the ways in which we begin to bridge the gap between virtual and real is something that is pretty permanent…

I agree with Mike’s sentiment absolutely. How virtual and physical worlds interact, and how technology and people mediate between these ‘places’ is already becoming fascinating. However, I think the fact that we’ve all jumped on the ‘bridge’ metaphor is revealing. A bridge is a narrow, limiting connection between two larger places. The bridge represented by QR codes is, furthermore, one way. We need bi-directional connections…. but that’s another blog post.

In the meantime, and coming down to earth, it’s difficult to see how information from QR codes can ever be pushed to the user. And that, I think, is why in many contexts it can only be an interim solution.

Tags: Graffitio, QR

I spent half an hour this morning experimenting with QR barcodes, prompted by Andy Ramsden who is running a small test/survey. I used various iPhone clients to try to decode and make use of three QR codes printed on a sheet of paper. Each of the three codes encoded different information - a URL, a simple string of text, and an SMS message with mobile number respectively.

It transpires that the iPhone does not make a first-class QR decoder. There may be several factors involved here, but the main one seems to be the rather poor camera which often lets the iPhone down. Having tried several (free) clients with mixed - but generally disappointing - results I settled on ‘Barcodes‘ which works rather well, insofar as the iPhone allows it to. One important tip with the iPhone is to take the photograph from a distance of around 18 inches from the QR code - this is counter-intuitive, but it works better within the tolerances of the fixed lense and means that you then have to stretch the image with an iPhone ‘gesture’. Again, this actually worked quite well, but it is a shame that all of this is even necessary. My Nokia-toting friends tell me that it works so well on that platform that it is actually fun, rather than a little chore. Having said that, once the image capture stage is done, Barcodes on the iPhone was actually really good. It interpreted codes correctly, figured out which applications to launch (Safari web browser or SMS client) and was generally well designed. I won’t comment further on the details of the experiment and the results as Andy is going to write this up himself.

So, QR codes - what are they good for? There’s clearly some interest - I mentioned what I was doing on Twitter and got quite a bit of interest. But it’s still rare to come across QR codes in the wild. I see them occasionally on blogs/web-pages but I just don’t much see the point of that (except to allow people like me to experiment). I see QR codes as an interim technology, but a potentially useful one, which bridges the gap between paper-based and digital information. So long as paper documents are an important aspect of our lives (no sign of that paper-less office yet) then this would seem to be potentially useful.

Mia Ridge, who joined the Twitter discussion has also blogged some thought about this - linking to Tony Hirst who mused about embedding links to video clips in QR codes in the margins of paper-based learning materials. Interesting idea? Not entirely convinced, but Mia reckons she would use this.

There seem to be so many factors at work here. If I had a Nokia, with a small screen but quick & direct QR reader, then Tony’s idea would make more sense to me perhaps. With my iPhone, and it’s wonderful big screen and Safari browser but poor QR support, I’d want to read one QR code at the start so I already had the accompanying website for the learning material/course/lesson and be able to navigate around on the device, not on the paper. This is a different model to Tony’s - his is driven by making a direct connection between one section of a paper document and single digital artifact.

Nonetheless - there are plenty of similar opportunities. Imagine walking around a museum - scan a QR code attached to an exhibit, load the URL and get a commentary played on the iPhone without needing to supply/hire those dedicated units some institutions supply to visitors.

The client end of this type of system still has a way to go I guess….

It’s Sunday evening….

Brian Kelly recently resurrected the debate about Facebook and its use in an HE context. I know he’s on the road at the moment so I suspect he dipped into his blog post ‘reserve’ for this one ;-). My initial reaction was to smile and move on, but I was caught more by a couple of the comments, from Mike [comment] and Marieke [comment] (both people I know and respect), which have stung me into responding. (Brian is becoming a master at inviting comments of that sort, and his blog has a sufficiently high profile that the comments can invite a response like this one).

There are two messages in the post and in the two comments:

• Facebook can’t be all that wrong because millions of people have accounts in it (”100 million users can’t be wrong”)
• If you say that you don’t like or want to use Facebook, then it is because you are an elitist or a techie or both (and you should “grow up”!)

I have already characterised Facebook as a a walled garden. I don’t feel particularly inclined to advocate the use of Facebook to support activities in HE. I wouldn’t stand in the way of people wanting to access Facebook but the argument which says that university staff should ‘go where the students are’ is often raised but never really backed up - in fact, as Owen Stephens blogged a while ago, there is evidence to the contrary.

Perhaps I am elitist - not for me to say really. I suppose I may be a techie - not sure what definition to check. However, my reasons for not liking Facebook are, I think, reasonable and considered.

As for millions of people using Facebook: well, 2,258,843 copies of the Daily Mail newspaper (which to my eye appears to be a horrible right-wing rag of a newspaper) were sold in August of this year. Hmmm…. more than 2 million you say…. I read the Guardian, but its figures (332,587) just don’t match up…. perhaps I ought to start reading the Daily Mail and recommending it to students?

Mike asks, “if they are [wrong], who cares?” I, for one, hope that our universities do!

Over on ZDNet, Paul Miller has blogged some thoughts about what he calls the ‘Data Cloud’. He points out that in the evolution of the ‘cloud computing’ paradigm, the:

…emphasis for much of this wider discussion remains firmly rooted in the realm of computation and storage. On many levels it’s about offloading the costs of scaling and maintaining local infrastructure, and ‘data’ doesn’t really enter the conversation at all. Something is ‘stored,’ but it’s a nameless, faceless, shapeless something that merely exists in order to be stored or computed upon.

Initially, Paul posted the germ of this idea to Twitter, where I responded with a degree of scepticism. Having given it a little thought, I remain sceptical. However, I have realised that my own, internal, ideas of what the ‘Cloud’ entails has informed my scepticism, so I figure it might be worthwhile externalising these ideas. (Note that Paul has helpfully included in his post a variety of definitions from good sources, so I won’t revisit these here. Like such celebrated memes as ‘Web 2.0′, the meaning of ‘cloud’ in this context is delineated by broad consensus, rather than strict definition. Also, I suggest that the cloud is highly connotative - depending on the exact context within which it is used it can imply much.

The word itself must surely have come from all those network diagrams which included a cloud to denote the ‘great outdoors’ - i.e. the stuff beyond the local area network. (I actually remember seeing such a diagram years ago with “here be dragons” written inside the cloud).

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here are some of the characteristics which I think are important, and why I disagree (perhaps not very strongly) with Paul:

Remotely hosted:

In a literal, basic sense, if services or data are in the cloud, then they are hosted remotely, on someone else’s infrastructure. The immediate implication might be that the user also doesn’t particularly care, or even know about the details of this arrangement. At one level, this is nothing new - and if the data cloud is just meant to signify data out there, then OK - but this notion is almost as old as computer networking itself, and was certainly present at the birth of the Web.

However, the reason that the cloud meme has gained such traction over the last two years lies in the new possibilities for moving not just data, but applications, services and even infrastructure onto remote servers. Closely aligned with the Cloud in this context is Software as a Service (SaaS), which in contemporary terms means the delivery of application-specific functionality from a remote source, typically to a modern browser.

Ubiquitous:

If it’s in the Cloud, then it is available anywhere. There are many examples of where this statement could be challenged but there is, nonetheless, an expectation that if an application is delivered to me from the Cloud then I ought to be able to access and use it from any connected device with the requisite software. There is a weaker assumption that the requisite software might be simply a modern web browser.

Commodified:

One of the really interesting developments of recent years has been the introduction of infrastructure services to the Cloud. This moves an important aspect of computing services closer to the ‘utility’ model. I know which company ’supplies’ my electricity because they take large amounts of money off me and regularly send me ‘advice’ on how to reduce my bill (in case you’re wondering the best advice is to, “switch off things which are powered by electricity when you’re not using them”). However, I don’t know where that electricity is being generated, and frankly, one lot of electricity is much like another, regardless of who supplies it (in the UK at least!). So, I suggest that commodification works best where the commodity is undifferentiated. The history of computing is filled with examples of evolution towards undifferentiated supply of functionality - abstraction is the method used to achieve this. For example, if I want to run Linux on my servers, then I can use a variety of hardware, without much having to worry about this. If I pay someone else to provide me with Linux servers in the Cloud (this blog is running on one such), then I can get away with not even knowing the specifics of the hardware which hosts my system. To an extent, in trusting your infrastructure to a third party, you are saying “I trust you, look after this lot for me please and don’t bother me with the details”.

In fact, we have now reached the point, with services such as Amazon’s EC2 service, where we can say, “I’d like some computing power please - any old cycles will do”.

And right here is why I think I disagree with Paul. If you believe, as I do that the Cloud implies a move towards undifferentiated, commodified hardware and services, then I don’t see how to include data, at least most data. How often do you hear a user say, “I’d like some data please - any old data will do”. The value of data is often measures in terms of scarcity, provenance, authority, quality. When Paul describes data as a:

nameless, faceless, shapeless something that merely exists in order to be stored or computed upon.

I think he’s right - this is how data is represented in the Cloud. Where we differ, I guess, is that I think that this is a reasonable and useful way for the Cloud to treat data - it allows the Cloud to become ubiquitous and undifferentiated, feeing up the our time to concentrate on what we really care about - our data.

I’ll end with a song……Any old iron, any old iron, Any any any old iron….

Tags: cloud-computing, data-cloud, EC2, Paul-Miller, SaaS

Just a quick pointer to the really encouraging announcement from the COPAC development blog that COPAC individual COPAC records are now addressed with a persistent, and RESTful(ish) URL. The example given is:

…the work “China tide : the revealing story of the Hong Kong exodus to Canada” has a Copac Record Number of 72008715609 and can be linked to with the url http://copac.ac.uk/crn/72008715609

The records are marked up as MODS XML - but this of secondary importance to me compared to the fact that the records are easily and reliably addressed. I note that Owen Stephens has already commented, saying:

….I need some time/space to think about this, but I’m sure there is some stuff to be exploited here.

My sentiments also.

This is excellent news - it allows a significant service to participate in a resource-oriented-architecture to a greater degree. Well done the COPAC team!

Tags: COPAC, ReST

In the latest edition of Ariadne the JISC Information Environment (JISC IE), and that diagram in particular, get taken to task by Tony Ross in an article called Lost in the JISC Information Environment.

Tony takes a look at the origins of the JISC IE, or more particularly its technical architecture, and asks a series of searching questions about its purpose and effectiveness. I think he does a good job of highlighting some of the difficulties inherent in trying to conceptualise an environment in which the supply of resources is necessarily distributed and the requirements of users are multifarious. He recognises that it was appreciated at an early stage that a ‘homogenous’ JISC IE was an impossibility. Tony also goes on to claim that:

…the IE as an architecture can never be complete, that it is only an abstract conceptual model.

[my emphasis]

I tend to agree that there is a risk that this abstract conceptual model be taken literally, and be used in what Tony terms a ‘prescriptive’ way. The use of the word ‘architecture’ in some JISC IE literature has, perhaps, not helped - Tony also makes the point that ‘architecture’ can be both prescriptive and descriptive. Turning to the diagram, I think that the inclusion of a named service instance (Athens) is interesting in that it highlights the tension between abstract model and architecture: the inclusion of Athens in the diagram in 2005 was entirely sensible - it was pretty much the only example of this type of component in use in the sector at the time (if the diagram were created tomorrow it might have the UK Access Management Federation here no doubt, for the same reasons). However, it does tend to push the impression of the diagram as a whole away from the abstract, towards the concrete.

So, on the face of it, I agree with Tony’s statement. However, I would point out that the conceptual model, symbolised by that now iconic diagram, has been remarkably effective in the way it has become the focal point for a great deal of debate, presentation of ideas, funding of R&D etc. over a number of years. It has proven itself to be remarkably versatile. For all the constraint which it has imposed, or been perceived to impose, it has nonetheless been a useful template allowing people to over-lay ideas, models, information flows and so on. It might be an interesting exercise to collect every available, published use of this diagram where some extra information or annotation has been super-imposed on the original ‘classic’ diagram - I believe I have seen dozens of examples of this usage.

While I think I understand what Tony means when he talks about the difficulties in describing an ‘essentially ephemeral concept’, I would argue that the JISC IE is anything but ephemeral. Firstly, the JISC IE is a long-running programme, comprising many projects. To get a flavour of the breadth and depth of this programme, take a look at the growing collection of outputs from the JISC IE funded projects which are being steadily added to the JISC Information Environment Repository. To an extent, the diagram has also served well as a simple organisational tool for funding. Many JISC IE ‘invitations to tender’ for project funding have carried this diagram, sometimes in annotated form, as a kind of map - giving bidders a top-level view of where their project might fit into the overall picture. In this sense, I think that something more than ‘consolation’ is being offered.

While I would argue that the JISC IE conceptual model has served us well for a number of years, it is true that it is starting to show its age. Events have overtaken it. In 2005, it was not at all clear how user-generated content, RESTful interfaces, the drive for open data would come to be such dominant features of the ways in which people consume, augment and create resources on the Web. The emphasis on portals in the ‘presentation layer’ is limiting, and in an emerging paradigm of the ‘mobile’ networking, more attention will need to be paid to the user and the devices they use to engage with distributed resources. But then again, it does show quite clearly a move towards a contemporary, distributed, service-oriented paradigm.

Turning to the reworked diagram which Tony offers at the end of his piece - I presume this is not offered too seriously as an alternative but is, rather, meant simply to show an ‘non-deterministic’ version. It is interesting that this version seems to miss what is, in my view, the most important issue with the original, in the way it simply copies the same depiction of the client desktop/browser.

As Tony Ross reports, Andy Powell has described his diagram as a ‘myth’, albeit a sometimes ‘helpful’ one. I know from conversations with Andy that he is cognisant of the ’side-effects’ of the ways in which his diagram has been used. It has, perhaps, ended up occupying an uncomfortable middle ground between model and metaphor. Perhaps so. But, and this is the most important thing, while this model might have been wrong, it has nonetheless been useful.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful”, attributed to George Box.

Tags: Andy Powell, ariadne, JISC IE, tony ross

Commenting on the Google Apps outage last week, John Proffitt, IT services director at APTI, an Alaskan public TV station, said:

“It was constant troubleshooting, testing, research, posting to the Google Apps forums and so on. Plus there’s the emotional strain of wondering whether you completely screwed up by moving everyone to Google Apps as our sole e-mail system. That’s what freaked me out: Did Google just make me look like an idiot?”

[via Gmail leaves Google Apps admins nervous on InfoWorld, my emphasis]

In the higher-education-institution (HEI) community I have seen a fair amount of debate recently about whether or not institutions should be looking to embrace the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and, in particular, making use of all remote those Web 2.0 services. Why run local services, when you can simply find a remote service to provide for your needs?

Perhaps this is a model for the future. But is the right model for the present? There is a growing, commonly-held belief that we are about to enter a global recession. Just the fact that the assumption is commonly held may be enough to make this a reality. Clearly there is a degree of economic uncertainty. Is this a good moment for HEIs to begin a brave experiment with outsourcing services to remote companies?

Now, Google are clearly not a fly-by-night company - their size now makes them a fairly safe bet. But the vast majority of Web 2.0 companies are a fraction of the size of Google. As it is, many Web 2.0 services appear to exist with no visible means of support, other than venture capital. I imagine that venture capital can become harder to find in a period of economic down-turn. Much Web 2.0 service delivery is supported through an advertising model, relying on a revenue stream coming from a small percentage of advertisements ‘clicked’ on. Again, perhaps people are less likely to respond to advertisements in a recession….?

Chris Adie, who spoke on ‘Managing the Risks of Web 2.0‘ at this year’s (excellent) Eduserv Foundation Symposium, made the related point that Web 2.0 services which rely on a global scale in terms of numbers of users and/or on social networks will become decreasingly useful if the number of users starts to drop. Essentially, the network effect works both ways….

Incidentally, Chris also pointed us to some Guidelines for Using External Web 2.0 Services supplied by Edinburgh University. and spoke authoritatively about the institution’s use of remote Web 2.0 services and the risks involved in this, especially in terms of compliance with the Data Protection Act. Interestingly, the ‘back-channel’ at the symposium, populated primarily perhaps by people likely to be passionate about new technology, tended to dismiss some of Chris’s points. I felt that some participants either didn’t realise, or didn’t care that Chris was describing risks to the institution.

Once we got past the recession at the end of the dot-com bubble in the first years of this century, the notion of an open-source operating system had reached a level of sufficient maturity for it to enter the mainstream. Web 2.0 services and SaaS as a viable, mainstream approach will likely reach similar levels of maturity in time. But perhaps now, more than ever, institutions need to make sober appraisals of their options for service delivery or procurement.

After all, no one wants to be made to look like an idiot!

Tags: Google, SaaS

You may have noticed that I have included a statement on this blog’s ‘home-page‘ to the effect that:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

This is standard blurb from the Creative Commons (CC) site. In the context of my blog this means - well, what exactly? Feel free to use anything you find here, for whatever purpose you like, so long as you credit me? What about material I include from elsewhere? What about other people’s comments on my posts? It seems to me that this just isn’t clear enough….

And another problem - I don’t necessarily want to apply the same license, indiscriminately, to all of my posts. I probably want credit/attribution for anything I write here, true, but I might feel differently about commercial re-use of the contents of different posts (although I’m probably deluding myself if I think that my blog has potential for commercial exploitation!).

In point of fact, I actually changed the license on my blog a while ago, to remove the non-commercial use clause from my Creative Commons 2.0 license. I guess this is pretty poor practice as it has, by implication, retrospectively changed the license I applied to past entries. So far, no one has complained….

Would it be better practice to attach a license to the text of each post, rather than to the blog as a whole? Is the ‘post’ closer to being a ‘work’ in CC terms? Even better, should I embed the license as a footnote to the content itself? Currently, my CC license declaration is simply an artefact of the user interface I host at http://blog.paulwalk.net/index.php - it doesn’t even appear in the RSS feed. If I licensed each post, rather than the blog as a whole, I could be selective about licensing content (perhaps maintaining a sensible default to avoid unnecessary work). And I could move to a different license later without feeling vaguely guilty. I guess I could include a statement making clear to people who want to post comments on my blog just how their comments are going to be licensed. Or even allow the them to select a license themselves….!

It occurred to me that someone might have developed a ‘Creative Commons License plugin’ for Wordpress, the blog engine used to manage this blog. In fact, I found two very easily, WpLicense and the Creative Commons Configurator. However, both of them apply the CC license in a system-wide manner, rather than to each individual post. This is an improvement over my current practice, as the license will show up in the blog’s public RSS feeds for example, but it’s not really what I have in mind. I’m pretty sure I could insert license statements in the necessary templates if it came to it, and maybe code up a plugin to allow me to select from a menu of licenses. However, it occurs to me that I don’t particularly want to use Wordpress as the ‘author’ tool (currently I use Ecto)

Whatever. I can’t help thinking that attaching a license to a blog feels a little like licensing the deployment of a content management system, rather than the content itself. Anyone care to comment?

Tags: cc, creative-commons, ecto, wordpress