Trends in Social Software by Burton Group

http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ERS0604

At first, I thought how can one spend 44 pages of writing effort on a loose and vagabond topic like Social Software (SS), but being in the coming thick of design of a social networking application, my ears were perked and I waded through paragraphs of cliches. But its not such a bad effort. In fact, I liked the definitions, survey of current services/products and authors' notes on SS (Flickr, delicious etc.).

The trend within actual corporations has been quite quiet. McDonalds and Avon think they may be able to garner some value via blogs which mashup corporate agenda and personal speak. However, I wonder who was the airplane company employee fired for blogging out loud.

Anyways, the report says, as far as larger institutions are concerned to put SS on the emerging technology list. i.e. Strong reasons do not exist to jump right into public social bookmarking or blogging. However, use the technologies with specific applications.

I have always been saddened by the fact that 'blogging' loses its charm when its treats the world as its audience. Blogging to an established audience provides impetus to use the tool and use it well. Like the McDonald's blog is done by their VP, who is a PhD and talks about nutrition and quality of food (yeah :~). But an established audience brings out quality in communication via these mass social cannons of opinions that blogs are. I remember reading somewhere during the dawn of blogging "Any lunatic hiding behind a fancy template can produce a blog..." - implying the lack of quality. In Higher Ed, if teachers ask students to blog (or use any other SS) with exposure to assessment and/or grading - then the quality game becomes exciting. Google Jockeying is one such example of a vagabond classroom trend being tamed by the instructors for pedagogical benefit [See 7 Things You Should Know About Google Jockeying].

Another application of SS that struck me was usability studies. I have seen website design/redesign discussion spread out over months without much to see. If the content-owners decide to be flexible about content placement and navigation design, they can base it on SS use on their sites. e.g. Allowing the audience to tag what they like and then reviewing the toplevel navigation links based on the folksonomies (tag clouds) generated would be helpful in design.

The report recommends: 'Allow your IT developers to use "Ruby on Rails / AJAX"'... mmm... a good comment but totally out of context, maybe. Just maybe.

R

Web 2.0 Discovery: The Yahoo! API

Yahoo! has overtaken Google in the AJAX Open API deal. While Google opens up Maps and stuff, Yahoo! takes the wind out of the competition's sails by opening up the entire DHTML/XML/Javascript library for building rich internet applications. Free, even for commercial use.

I tried to play with it over the weekend, but need to work from Yahoo's examples, because it didn't quite work for me while following the API documentation. Probably syntax, schmintax.

Go here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/


YUI Library Controls:

* AutoComplete
* Calendar
* Container (including Module, Overlay, Panel, Tooltip, Dialog, SimpleDialog)
* Menu
* Slider
* TreeView


YUI Library Utilities:

* Event Utility
* DOM Collection
* Connection Manager
* Drag and Drop Utility
* Animation Utility

YUI Library CSS Tools:

* CSS Page Grids
* CSS Fonts
* CSS Reset

-- Noice, Maite.

Google Does US Government

Beltway Bandits Just Wanna Have Fun... ;)

It will bring up interesting things. I searched for "India" and it brought up the biography of a presidential pet called "India" in the top 5 results: http://www.whitehouse.gov/kids/india/.

But banter apart this is a great resource for anyone wanting to write federal grants. I try to search, say for smoking and good hits. Lets try to search something closer to my research area: assistive technology... I expect to get section 508 all over... lets see...


Nope... its more of state accessibility guidelines and section508 is not even in the top 5. http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm.

Anyhoo, happy USGoogling.

Google Does Shakespeare

Shakespeare would ask: ...What stuff 'tis made of? And Google would have an answer. Lame opening line but its a segway into this post: Google does Shakespeare. This is a fantastic example of how to do things right:

Notice worthy:
--- Pre-loaded Tabbed Browsing of Categories.
--- Extra features "Search for Mr. S on News, Video etc."
--- Google earth treat on all places Shakespeare.

Overall its a fantastic example on how to build a reference resource on a person.

"Google Jockeying" a new term...

Google jockeying is an interesting term that I just encountered on the ELI website (Elearning Initiative / Educause)

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7014.pdf