James Wanless » technology

Customizing menus and widgets for my new WordPress theme

James — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 05:33:12 +0000

I have a history of somewhat routinely tweaking or fully redesigning my theme, but it’s usually just a matter of moving some elements around, changing a colour here and there and calling it a day. With the release of WordPress 3.0, I took a slightly different approach this time. This release brings with it some major changes and I decided to begin digging into WordPress a little more deeply than I usually do this time.

In particular, I decided it was high time I really began grokking widgets to a degree I hadn’t before and I was determined that the new WordPress menu system would be my friend. This meant a different approach to the usual. I’ve built a number of sites with WordPress where I presently work, and for clients in the past. As we move more deeply into WordPress for blogs and other projects at BCIT, I felt that leveraging the platform’s features for my personal use would be useful.

Simple menus – different mindset

I’ve always written custom menu code in the past. For the most part, I did this because I could ensure that I maintained states for styling on families of pages and I could include exactly what I wanted to in various areas of page real estate. However, I’ve always been bothered by this to some degree because, once I’ve finished designing a theme, I’m still opening up my code editor and FTP-ing something or other to the server as I make a tweak here and a tweak there, as opposed to simply updating my site through the admin panel.

Taking a look at the two menus in the header area above, the upper-most menu contains the core static pages of the site. Originally when styling this theme on my test server I was worried that I’d have a hard time preserving parent menu styling when on a child page of that page. However, with the automatic generation of current_page_parent and current_page_ancestor classes, I can easily make my menus behave just the way I want and not write a single line of conditional PHP menu code. The ability to build any number of custom menus and use them wherever you want, is a game-changer.

While I’ve usually implemented journal categories and archives in drop-down or bullet sidebar lists for all blog and archive pages, I decided I would reduce the number of categories significantly and implement them as the lower of the two header menus above. I don’t use tags and this also helps ensure that I use a few key categories or topics for my writing, and that those categories are always on top for visitors to find. I couldn’t find an easy way to implement a label for this menu, even looking closely at the parameters and arguments for the wp_nav_menu function.

My hardcoded category menu label

What I ended up doing was placing a margin on the menu code and wrapping it in another div, with which I hardcoded the label for the menu (pictured at left). Imperfect I admit, but perhaps I’ll be able to figure out how to do it with only the menu code, as I know I can set the wrapper div for the menu, but just haven’t found a label argument so far.

For a simple explanation of how to implement 3.0 menus in your theme, check out Digging Into WordPress’s explanation.

The trouble with widgets

Even when widgets first came out, I resisted the urge to use them on my personal site because I like more contextual elements on my pages and have generally preferred to control things with PHP. The difficult-to-style/control markup generated by functional widgets, coupled with the fact that widgets would be site-wide once implemented, turned me off using them. I was also a little unclear about how to widget-ize various areas of my theme without screwing things up.

If you’re looking for a simple explanation of how to add widgets to your WordPress theme, the guys at Digging Into WordPress have done it again. I found this article simple and to-the-point. It allowed me to enable widgets in my existing theme through the functions.php file and then place the widget code in the various places in my theme where I want them to appear. I addressed most of my issues around styling widget markup by trial and error. Where the WordPress default or plugin widgets I tried didn’t produce the markup I wanted I often got around this by inserting WordPress functions directly in the widgets, just as if they were coded into my theme’s sidebar.php file.

You may be saying, “That’s all well and good, but you can’t run PHP code in your widgets.” You’d be right, unless you first enabled the handy little ExecPHP plugin, which I’d recommend being careful with, as it allows you to execute PHP in posts, pages and widgets.

Contexutalizing widgets

While this fixed most of the issues I had with how widgets worked and styling their markup, the concept still posed a significant issue for me, as I couldn’t control where they appeared and where they didn’t appear. It turns out that there are a few options that allow you more granular control of where widgets will appear on your site. In my case, I wanted a fat footer with some Flickr photos and couple of my external feeds to appear only on my homepage, while I generally have a different sidebar for posts, archives, static pages, pages with children and my homepage, to name a few.

When I first started looking for ways to make widgets appear conditionally, I stumbled upon what I thought was the perfect solution in the Widget Context plugin. When editing a widget, a large second panel appears below the widget content which allows you to include (or exclude) the widget in any or all of your theme’s templates via checkboxes, or to select pages on your site by URL (see below).

The Widget Context plugin editing panel

This implementation makes sense to me, as setting the options as you create or edit the widget works well and so does the plugin, provided you only use the checkboxes. The real power in the plugin is the ability to use specific URLs for widgets on your site, if it worked. I’m not sure if it’s due to the fact that this plugin has not been updated since before the release of WordPress 3.0, but implementing by URL doesn’t work, and having to live with templates as the deepest level of widget granularity doesn’t allow you to override widget appearance on a page-by-page basis if needed.

As I did a little more searching, I came across Kyle’s post about Shiba’s Custom Widgets plugin. That led me to make my way to Shiba’s own site, where I found a lot of good WordPress plugin work happening.

In large part, it does just what Widget Context does, but through a different type of implementation. It adds new widget creation, management and options links and, frankly, having duplicate widget panels (and several instances of the same widget in them) is a little confusing until you get used to the concept. What I really like about it, though, is that the granularity of widget control is perfect and, when you want to override the template settings you do so through the post, page or category editing panel. In other words, using Shiba’s Custom Widgets, you can place widgets exactly where you want them on your site, provided you’ve enabled widgets in that part of your theme and factored the widget into your CSS.

In closing and next steps

I still have a few pages to whip up, but most of the work is done. What I like is that I finally dug into a few things I wanted to and found that, with a little sleuthing, I was able to do pretty much exactly what I wanted despite my old-school attitude that I needed to hand-code all the custom stuff. I can build the menus I want with the styling I want, and I can build the widgets I want, styled as I want and placed where I want. I’m really looking forward to exploring more menu and widget customizations as we start using WordPress more and more at work.

Epic fail of the day, Microsoft style

James — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:57:47 +0000

I love opening files sent around work in our Windows-centric environment. In particular, when I think of the Microsoft promise to embrace standards and then see these kinds of dialogue boxes, I get shivers up and down my spine. Hey Microsoft, if you’re gonna port your crappy software over to other operating systems, the level of suck should be the same, not a little extra for good measure.

No related posts.

Getting social media for CRM right

James — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:30:35 +0000

How do you use social media for CRM?

This issue has been percolating just under my skin for a while now. I often hear it said where I work that we still haven’t figured out how to use social media and I’d guess that’s probably true of many places. I think, though, that most folks who are charged with figuring out how to use social media to their advantage are simply looking at it the wrong way.

Often, it’s about setting up Facebook groups or fan pages, or making sure their organization is tweeting announcements from corporate accounts. Some build networks to try and drive traffic to their web sites. I’m not saying any of these efforts is necessarily wrong. Ineffective for the most part? Yes. If, to you, social media is about getting followers, becoming a guru or simply driving traffic to another site, it’s likely not going to be effective for long-term benefit.

External social networks like Twitter and Facebook allow limited conversations but not ones which are contextually centered on your business or organization. In truth they are more about broadcast than social. Try having a real conversation with someone on Twitter sometime. It’s not impossible, but support and issue resolution will likely need to move to another forum to be completed. A good conversation happens because there’s a two-way dialogue and it’s at least somewhat intimate.

Where should you do it?

I’d argue that the best social media CRM implementations happen right on your own interactive properties. Where do your constituents interact with you? If I’ve got an issue with a product or service, I usually start by conducting a web search, then refining it down to a search in a knowledge base or FAQ at the site of the organization of interest to me. An external social network is not a comfortable or intimate enough environment for this. Plus, it may just be a personal preference, but I don’t follow corporate tweets and I don’t join corporate Facebook groups or pages. Frankly, I update Facebook through ping.fm or another service and rarely directly visit the site any more.

A colleague recently recounted an experience in which his son was purchasing something from a site halfway around the world. He had a question that couldn’t be answered without some help, and was very impressed when he could have a live chat with a customer service representative via an on-page box. He had to input his name and issue and wait in a short queue. The question was answered quickly and the purchase completed. By contrast, think about the same situation but one where the customer is forced to leave a voice message or send an email after hours and wait a few days or longer, or sometimes not receive a response at all. The opportunity is lost and the customer has likely gone to a competitor.

Think about the Amazon.com model. Not only can users review books and publish wish-lists for their purchases, but reviews can then be subject to ratings. The system continually provides more and more information of relevance to a potential customer within Amazon’s own context, not via external networks. While a post-secondary institution like the one where I work is hesitant to allow customer reviews of courses for myriad reasons, opening your organization up to external feedback and publishing relevant information to assist potential customers in their decision-making process will continue to become increasingly important in order to compete.

How should you do it?

ReadWriteWeb has some solid thoughts on how you need to think about a social media CRM strategy. While I still think the features need to be part of what you do on the web, IBM’s thinking is to extend an external network like Facebook to connect students and mentors in a more meaningful way:

“Facebook and MySpace are great places for social networking, but they don’t really have a goal. They don’t make the kind of connections you need to move forward,” Mr. Vogt said. “This platform is helping students say, Here are my ideas, and IBM is saying, Come work with us and we’ll help you.”

Even if you think I’m wrong and an external network is your solution, you’ve still got to choose the right one to reach your audience. A big chunk of BCIT’s student demographic is older and looking at applied skills to improve their job prospects or is upgrading, mid-career. Twitter might reach some of that target for push communications, but not so much for a traditional post-secondary trying to reach mostly students who are still in high school:

In June 2009, only 16 percent of Twitter.com website users were under the age of 25. Bear in mind persons under 25 make up nearly one quarter of the active US Internet universe, which means that Twitter.com effectively under-indexes on the youth market by 36 percent.

What about employee collaboration?

Intel published a white paper documenting their approach to developing a social computing intranet strategy. They did wide consultation across the enterprise and engaged with key stakeholders, developed usage policies upfront, performed user and proof-of-concept testing and outlined a solid architecture and phased approach to rollout. In short, they took a user-centred design philosophy and set measurable goals and objectives. This is something that any organization should do whether their implementation is internally or customer focused.

Based on my own experience at large organizations, the measurable objectives are often missing. The desire to use a cool tool often seems to trump a problem-solving approach, where the right tool is used to solve a business problem. Post-secondary institutions, in particular, are caught between the desire to leverage the web more effectively for employee productivity, while they grapple internally with labyrinthine policies and rules and red herring privacy concerns about how employees use web technologies.

Perhaps I’ll leave the last word on social media on intranets to Jakob Nielsen’s findings:

Underground efforts yield big results. Companies are turning a blind eye to underground social software efforts until they prove their worth, and then sanctioning them within the enterprise.

Frontline workers are driving the vision. Often, senior managers aren’t open to the possibilities for enterprise 2.0 innovation because they’re not actively using these tools outside of work. Indeed, many senior managers still consider such tools as something their kids do. One of the dirty secrets of enterprise 2.0 is that you don’t have to teach or convince younger workers to use these tools; they expect them and integrate them as easily into their work lives as they do in their personal lives.

Communities are self-policing. When left to their own devices, communities police themselves, leaving very little need for tight organizational control. And such peer-to-peer policing is often more effective than a big brother approach. Companies that we studied said abuse was rare in their communities.

Business need is the big driver. Although our report discusses specific tools (blogs, wikis, and such), enterprise 2.0′s power is not about tools, it’s about the communication shift that those tools enable.

Organizations must cede power. Using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with customers has taught many companies that they can no longer control the message. This also rings true when using Web 2.0 tools for internal communication. Companies that once held to a command-and-control paradigm for corporate messaging are finding it hard to maintain that stance.

Is cloud computing still blue sky?

James — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:43:51 +0000

As I lurch through this summer trying to finalize the thesis proposal which will frame a large part of my life for the next year, collaborative tools for learning are never far from front of mind with me. A real interest of mine is the use of collaborative writing tools for learning in higher education. In particular, I am interested in learning more about why adoption is so weak – certainly where I work, anyway. Where I get to with my thesis research on that front is another post for another time.

A big clue as to why some post secondary institutions are so jittery about Open Educational Resources (OER) might be contained in the news this past week that Twitter suffered a substantial security breach perpetrated a second time by the same French hacker. An institution’s specific approach to open computing will also have a lot to do with how jittery they should be about it. For example, are we talking about true cloud computing or just using open tools, but hosting them? There’s a big difference from a data ownership and access control perspective in each approach. For the sake of argument, I’ll stick to using the cloud.

Over the past week or so, my feeds were all-a-twitter (and so was Twitter) with news that Microsoft Office’s cloud offering might be imminent. Given the success of Google’s office suite in the cloud, it stands to reason that Microsoft needs to make a me-too play and quickly. Not to be left behind, cloud computing provider Zoho announced a plug-in to migrate their DBs to web apps, either on Zoho or as Google Apps. The big players are pretty certain about the move from the desktop to the cloud. Google’s announcement that Apps could now translate uploaded documents paled in comparison to their bigger one.

Chrome OS is the next Google play in moving everything to the cloud. The idea that you can seamlessly move your desktop work to the browser would still seem to be a ways off, given the weaknesses in some of the Google Apps feature set:

But there are still a variety of applications that simply can’t be replicated within a browser, and consumers have had a mixed reaction to Google’s own apps, embracing Gmail but finding its presentation software to be severely limited compared to its desktop app counterparts.

As Chrome OS will ship with netbooks at first, full desktop replacement at this stage may not actually be on Google’s mind:

The Chrome OS will be appearing first on netbooks, which can’t handle some of the more heavyweight desktop applications in the first place. And the new offering has the potential to drive users to rely on Google’s online offerings, which certainly would further the company’s goals.

This probably spells the end of long-term Android development, as a single, more robust OS from Google to be run on all devices would make the most sense.

While the happenings in cloud computing show the big players are clearly making a push in that direction, moving everyone there will be no small task. For post-secondary institutions, there are many concerns including ownership of data, privacy and, as Twitter just showed us, the risk of a complete breach of authentication data. However, these issues are just the tip of the iceberg.

Technical, SLA and business solvency also pose extreme risks for organizations, let alone individuals, in trusting their data to Google or Microsoft and hosting it in the cloud.

What about power outages?

In the last week alone, there have been several high profile outages at data centers that host sites, such as video site DailyMotion, credit card authorization service Authorize.net, and Microsoft’s Bing Travel. Even the Google App Engine—a platform for third-parties to run their own cloud services—experienced performance issues that resulted in high latency and even data loss.

Or uptime guarantees?

Many large companies are used to having control over and responsibility for all of the servers that the business uses, so the idea of putting parts of their business on rented, “black box”-style cloud services makes them uneasy.

When it comes to education, we often think of OER in terms of access to scholarly journals, tools to help learners and instuctors, social software for social learning activities, repositories of objects, and the value that opening your work up to a wider audience brings. If enough instructors use OER journals, the story goes that more academic publishing will be placed in open, peer reviewed journals. Demand drives innovation and change, after all.

All of this is great in theory and I’m certainly a big proponent of social computing. However, I’d stop short of putting all my eggs in the cloud basket just yet, and maybe ever. I much prefer open source software, but hosting it, where I own the data and support the servers. There’s nothing wrong with using online office suites to help share collaborative work and tools like blogs, wikis, Skype, IM and chat are wonderful for bridging the distance gap. However, I always want to keep my core data, or at the very least backups of everything I’m doing there, locally stored. If I always have to do that anyway, then it starts to dilute the value of cloud computing as a way of providing cheap storage and persistent access.

Frankly, I’d never want to be the one to have to tell a class full of students or anyone else for that matter, that they couldn’t get at that assignment that was due because Google had a server farm meltdown. Or, that institutional data like student numbers, grades, addresses, credit card numbers and the like had just disappeared into a cloud because they were housed there in the first place.

Severing the Telus umbilical cord

James — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:57:45 +0000

: Image by Darren Hester via Flickr

The first move was finally made last night. It’s been long overdue and I’m happy to be on the path. I’ve taken the first step to getting Telus hands out of my pockets – and they’ve been pretty deeply in there for a long time. Complete disclosure forces me to say that I was a Telus manager for five years and my wife has now been an employee for 11. We met while working there, so not all my associations with the recursive T are bad. However, most of my customer service associations with them are horrific. This could be a very long post, so I’ll endeavour to keep it short.

I’ve been a cash cow for them. Particularly as my sons are now 19 and 16, we have four mobile accounts, our home landline and high speed internet. That’s too many eggs in one basket anyway, but since we’ve had four accounts they’ve been able to count on me for a minimum of $220 in revenue every month. Unlike our US friends who can usually add a new number and pool voice/data in a family cellular plan for a few bucks, now that Telus doesn’t offer family plans (and never did affordably), four accounts with reasonable data/voice runs well over $150 a month. Add another $60 for landline and high speed internet and that’s just shy of $2700 a year. When you look at it that way, the costs are nothing short of obscene. They don’t blend mobility and landline billing and good bundles for being a good customer are pretty much non-existent.

Earth to Telus: you’re not a monopoly

We’ve been having a battle with them for the past few weeks. My son had to change a handset and they transferred his faves (for free texting) for him, only from what we can tell they got one of the numbers wrong and he incurred probably $30-40 in charges that we feel were not right. My wife has been on the phone with them several times trying to get them to go back a few months and determine the error. Most calls end abruptly with the reps refusing to do enough to clarify the issue. So, they can’t look enough at the big picture that they’re willing to risk a good customer over a $40 bill reversal. Brilliant. Maybe someone forgot to tell them they’re not a monopoly any more because they’re as arrogant as one. Based on this, the expensive voice/data packages and getting locked into long contracts to get decent phones, we’d already decided that as our contracts rolled we’d be looking elsewhere for wireless.

Since the feds auctioned off some wireless spectrum last year, my understanding is that Canada may finally have competition more like the US in the next 6-12 months. There are already options to go without contracts and system access fees but the voice/data is still pricey and the three carriers who offer these are simply subsidiaries of Telus, Rogers or Bell. You can’t get away from the monoliths as it stands right now. I think things will be looking very different in a year.

I don’t need no stinkin’ landline

I’d always operated under the assumption that cable was still slower than ADSL, but Shaw has been making steady improvements with their cable service while Telus hasn’t been keeping pace. Their high speed internet is generally rated as faster now, while their customer service consistently blows Telus out of the water. A little research yesterday told me I was probably with the wrong ISP. What really sealed the deal for me was when I thought about our home phone use. I can count the calls we get in a week on one hand as most of us use our cells for our voice. While Telus very much needs that wireline connection to try and sell me high speed or, gawd forbid, Telus TV, I don’t need it at all, thank you very much. Decision made.

I had committed to two years with Telus high speed just before Christmas for the privilege of getting a lower price, so I knew I’d have to swallow a cancellation fee to move to Shaw. I’d already accepted that I’d be paying more with Shaw, but for faster high speed and way better customer service, it seemed like a fair trade off. What I didn’t realize is that Shaw’s current promotional offer would more than make up for it. Two months for free, six more for $20 and then $43 a month after that when bundled with my HD digital TV service. I’ll save $200 in the first eight months with Shaw and cover my $120 cancellation fee with Telus. My home phone will be gone and so will my copper connection with Telus.

The best part

Aside from severing the umbilical cord with the Local Incumbent Carrier (telecom lingo for former monopoly), the best part of this is that my Shaw bundle for TV and ISP will run me about $122 + tax after the eight month promotional period is done. Right now, when I add up TV, landline and ISP with Telus and Shaw blended I’m paying about $140 + tax. By the end of this month I’ll be taking about $720 a year before tax out of Telus hands. Sure I’m putting it somewhere else, but I’m going to make sure I get satisfaction with my dollars. As our wireless accounts roll over the next 18 months or so, we’ll be pulling another $500 a year at a time more out of Telus hands.

The worst thing that could happen to Bell now

Web trends interactive map

James — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:57:57 +0000

This came by way of a couple intermediaries, but it’s cool nonetheless. In the embed above, you can zoom in as deep as you want and pan and drag to see web domain trends and more. A great way of visualizing the state of the web. The embed above is a little clunky, but if you click the arrows to start and then click within the animation, you should be able to zoom in and out (at least I can with my scroll wheel).

From Flowing Data:

Information Architects, a design firm with offices in Japan and Zurich, release their annual web trends map. This is the fourth one in the series. Popular domains on the Web are mapped to the Tokyo Metro and organized by how they are most related to the cities. Heights represent success in traffic and branding. Subway lines are colored by area of interest. For example, take the orange line to find the creatives. Notice that there are several colors passing through Apple.

Avoiding social media spam

James — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 07:07:15 +0000

The web is chalk full of really good social software applications. Some help you connect with friends, share things you find on the web, create and share video, images or thoughts and many of the good ones are accessible from virtually any device, while letting you extend or build upon them through open APIs. The good services are good, usually because they do one thing really well.

Facebook (friends), Flickr (photos), Delicious (bookmarks), WordPress (writing), YouTube (video) and last.fm (music) come to mind as best-of-breed tools for sharing. It’s the ease-of-use that draws people in, while the quality of interaction likely determines adoption and longevity. The really good ones also tend to get bought by a big player, as even with the small list above, the first two are owned by Yahoo, while YouTube is owned by Google and last.fm by CBS.

The psychology of sharing

What are we actually doing when we share? We’re putting a piece of ourselves out there for …. consumption, reaction, response … anything really. I’m convinced, though, that it comes down to people sharing and connecting with other people. We want to connect and discover and, as such, when social media is used to promote products it lacks authenticity. Even in the nonprofit sector, where groups like Tech Soup are remixing the web for social change, it still comes down to a social thing – a person, a problem to fix, or a law to change, for example. The ugly truth about your social network is actually that most people are using it for pretty mundane stuff anyway, so making a marketing channel out of it starts from a point of weakness. It’s not a captive audience like the one staring at one channel during a movie. The internet attention focus is far more limited.

When you replace one of the people in that equation with a service or a product – a thing in essence – the dynamic changes. It’s not a conversation, but an advertisement or a broadcast. The dialogue is replaced by a monologue. As we continue to share, connect, contribute, and re-use, we begin to build what’s being referred to as our social graph, the “map of our global network and how we’re related.” By definition, a thing cannot have a social graph because a thing is not social. Notwithstanding the legal oddity that gives a corporation the rights of a real person, this notion doesn’t extend to social relationships very well. Sure, corporations can have relationships with customers, but not when they make that relationship all about promotion, marketing or selling. I don’t buy the whole Mashable post, but this quote about being human is great advice:

Don’t want the worst day of your life to be played over and over again like Groundhog Day? Then don’t talk, share, Tweet or write about it via social media. That said, no one is happy, or perfect all of the time. It’s okay to let people into the “real” events which happen in your life. Social media for business is about return on engagement. Connect with people, build opportunities through dialogue which would not have otherwise occurred, then connect them with your business.

Make it real

This brings me to the main point I’m trying to make. Marketers are grappling with social media just like many of us are, to make it have value for them. Unfortunately, many of them think of the social web as just another media channel, with the same rules as traditional ones. Product promotion is largely viewed as taking because it’s only about getting money from a customer. Social media is about giving and taking. Sure, you can be a little promotional at times, but you’ve also got to contribute something for no other reason than the act of sharing. That’s the whole point of the ingredients of the social graph – they change, morph and mutate based on user contributions.

If you want to market a product or service via social media, remember one key thing. Connect with other people as a person, put a face on what you promote and make it about real relationships. Just like email, social media spam is bad.

Siftables, a brilliant interface

James — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:50:34 +0000

I already bookmarked and tweeted this, brought to my attention by one of my RRU cohort. However, as I thought about the educational implications for such a usable human-computer interface, the possibilities seem only limited by programming and concept.

David Merrill is my interaction and usability hero at the moment.

One gigantic learning cycle experiment

News online – it’s not as far fetched as you might think

James — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 03:24:45 +0000

Saw this courtesy of my pointy-haired manager, somewhere ~~in his twitter-stream~~, ~~on Facebook~~, ~~from ping.fm~~, out there. Absolutely hilarious, and not that long ago for old guys like me.

Twits shouldn’t twitter

The folly of free

James — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:22:54 +0000

I’ll admit that I’m really qualifying the title of this, specific to business critical applications, regardless of what sector that business is in. We now seem to be in pre-bubble-burst 2.0, big-time. How long before the social web balloon pops in favour of more realistic and sobering economics? The social part is clearly here to stay, while the "everything-is-free" part can’t.

As a provider you can’t really offer something of value for free for a very long time. You need to have a business model that includes more than angel funding, venture capitalists or simply being bought by a big player. Particularly the last strategy will make you into a small part of a large ad platform. However, there’s only really probably a handful of services that are valuable enough to survive.

As an end-user, do you want to depend on free tools to deliver business-critical services? It might be nice to use the latest Web 2.0 technology for e-learning, but if you’ve built a nifty mash-up on an open API which suddenly disappears, or becomes not free overnight, how do you factor that into your course or program budget? And what of web services versus hosting an open source tool yourself? The latter makes far more sense than the former, but then you’ve got to have the thing you probably don’t (and the reason you went looking for a free tool in the first place) – technical support and programming/design skills.

The last and, perhaps, most important thing – free cloud applications and data ownership. Can you really manage your data and mitigate security risks?

Building value

While Facebook will clearly be around for a while, it’s not presently making enough money to have staying power. As Peter Schwartz said before Christmas:

Now, as we close the books on 2008, one might wonder if Facebook is actually worth anything. The company has grown rapidly by any measure, with estimated 2008 revenues of nearly $300 million. From zero to $300 million in four years is nothing to sneeze at. But the company is burning through cash much more quickly than it can replenish its coffers. Its electricity, bandwidth, data storage, and personnel costs are immense.

I think the biggest questions here are, other than the social graph, what real value has Facebook created for you? Not much, in an economic sense … and just try to remove your data completely.

Would you pay for news delivery? I’m not sure how to answer that one, except that I know I wouldn’t pay for the news AND the conduit. Maybe a subscription to a number of sources, but then a quick look in the news I get in Google Reader feeds everyday suggests not. BBC, CBC, and a couple local papers cover me pretty well. Everything else is more germain to work, school and personal interests.

For something like this to succeed it will take a good bit of effort. Internet users are used to information being free, and will balk at the idea of having to pay for it. The additional services that make this project compelling and valuable will also have to be easy for the average internet user to understand, and – let’s face it – we’re not there yet.

We can get all kinds of information from the web, lots of it of the opinion or review nature. However, if you’re talking about objective journalism, then I’m not so sure I’d pay for an app that delivers it, but I might pay for online access to the same thing I pay for a newspaper to get, particularly if the paper version disappeared. After all, it looks like online news is taking over print in a big way and the news business models haven’t figured out how to get people to pay for it online. Could an online, totally ad-supported news model work on a big scale? We’re probably about to find out. If you get past the enjoyment of flipping through a newspaper, the strain of the online version on your eyes, and the need to be at a computer, would you pay for a completely online newspaper? Is the value proposition solid?

Depending on the free cloud

Suppose you do find something of value. Let’s take a little app like Twitter. The fact that it presently doesn’t really have a business model isn’t stopping it from becoming useful. Whether you’re using it as a rapid update text service, or perhaps you’re learning to follow the people who are actually tweeting things you find useful, what if it disappeared tomorrow? The uses I’ve just described probably aren’t a big loss, but what if you were using a Twitter stream to keep critical communications happening between connected people in a group. It might seem ridiculous to do that with a free service, but lots of cash-strapped groups and individuals likely depend on it for some pretty important communications.

Beyond information services, what about cloud computing? From Zoho to Google Docs to Adobe Air apps to Live Presentations, you can now do a lot in the cloud, that you used to need a hard drive for. And what of the rumours of a GDrive? On the one hand, we’re seeing unprecedented variety in ways you can work directly on the web, and the power in those applications. These developments are great for productivity, access and democratizing information, but I’m not so sure allowing your data to be stored in the cloud is really completely to your benefit. Google makes a lot of money from selling ads based the content of your searches, mail messages and other intellectual property. What will they do with your data on a GDrive and how much control would you have over it?

A new way of doing business

According to the Chris Anderson from Wired, it’s partly a whole new business model. Quality applications and products, free to the end user and companies which are still making profits. He claims the shrinking cost of tech, coupled with the continual improvements in processing power, means costs continually plummet.

Mr Anderson refers to Moore’s Law, which states that computer power doubles every 18 months. The economic reciprocal of that, he says, is “the cost of a net unit of computer power falls by 50% every 18 months, which means that everything gets cheaper by 50% or more every year and a half.”

“Imagine a factory of the 19th Century where the labour got cheaper, where the steel got cheaper, where coal got cheaper, the real estate got cheaper, every aspect.”

“That’s why there’s such an imperative to make things digital, because you go from an economy where things get more expensive, such as oil and food – the economy of atoms – to an economy where everything gets cheaper, which is the economy of bits.”

However, people still need to eat. I think a little deeper analysis is required when you claim web software companies are making money. Some, yes. Most, no.

His claims about the costs being so low, that they don’t need to make much money doesn’t hold a lot of water in the long run, methinks.

“The new form of cross-subsidy is one where a tiny minority of people who really appreciate the product, really get value from it, can subsidize everybody else, because the underlying cost of doing things online, in digital, is so low that you can give away 90% of it for free.”

Going back to the Facebook example, there’s no long-term stable revenue model and their costs will likely burn anything they do have in reserve. The funding they’ve secured thus far won’t keep replenishing. While Anderson’s arguments about cost are probably true, producers of web services and applications have to make money eventually. Facebook can’t give away 90% of it forever, when they require thousands of servers in the next year to support their growth.

Pragmatism

We can expect some things to be free. We can expect certain bricks and mortar services to continue to move online, and we undoubtedly need to get our heads around new economic models. However, we also need to understand that, ultimately, there still will not be any completely free lunch. Putting your critical eggs in one cloud basket just yet could be a really dangerous thing.

Could Twitter kill delicious?

James — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:13:54 +0000

This is something I’ve been pondering for a little while as I’ve finally settled on my own model for enjoyable and productive (if not slightly distractive) Twitter use.

I’ve become quite accustomed to going through my Google Reader feeds, opening the articles I’m interested in within new Firefox tabs and then, at some point in the day, reading them quickly. If I find them particularly interesting, I bookmark them on delicious. The only real re-purposing I do with that feed is include the last ten on my blog homepage. I don’t refer back to them too often because those things I find of extreme importance – perhaps a reference for a paper I’m writing – will go into Zotero, the research Firefox plugin.

What got me thinking about Twitter and delicious is that I’d been considering taking some of the more interesting bookmarks and quickly tweeting them. However, if I’ve got a Twitter feed, can bookmark a shortened URL with a bit of descriptive text and have roughly the same thing as a delicious bookmark feed, albeit with an entry text length restriction. To me that’s a good thing as it forces my description to be economical (which my delicious descriptions usually are anyway).

I know it runs contrary to the original intent of quick text hits, but since Twitter’s been implementing search enhancements, power features and the like, what about tags? Would one more text field for comma separated tags bulk up the interface? If not, would this effectively have the potential to be a delicious-killer?

Does this make sense, or is it simply feature bloat and not worth considering? Thoughts are welcome.

Making Twitter more useful to myself

James — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:07:09 +0000

I’ll admit to being a big fence-sitter with Twitter, and micro-blogging in general. I used to see absolutely no value in it whatsoever. My knee-jerk assumption was that I simply didn’t want numerous, routine updates on the minutiae of peoples’ daily lives. However, I’ve also begun to see the bigger picture of real-time quick hits of information, if it could be useful and important to me. From that perspective, I decided to give Twitter a whirl for a while, following a few dozen friends for a few months.

In short order, my initial apprehensions proved pretty much spot on, and the broader Twitter hype is no help to me. I was seeing all manner of updates from friends and co-workers that, while I’m sure were important to them, were utterly irrelevant to me, cluttering up my day with more information when I already suffer from overload in that area. Not to mention, I found myself doing the very same thing – posting inane observations and wasting time I really didn’t have. I even played around with ways to make my tweets, along with last.fm loved tunes, blog posts and delicious bookmarks all show up on my Facebook wall, so it would look like I have activity there, even though I rarely use it.

While I think comparisons between Facebook and Twitter are pretty meaningless due to their completely different purposes, it’s fairly easy to see how micro-blogging and text services can be used to update more fully blown social networking web sites. In fact, it’s probably learning to not only use social web tools in moderation, but to use the right ones in combination with each other, which will allow you to derive some benefit while not losing your mind to social web overload.

Some say Twitter and LinkedIn are the future, while others label them fads or time-sinks and question whether they are of any use whatsoever. Thing is, they may both be right. The debate over the utility of key social media services reared its head again through some recent articles that question the amount of time we spend with them, and whether we’re getting anything in return

I found the experiment with Twitter to be so disappointing, that I canceled my first account, but I couldn’t get over the fact that I see the potential for the service. Then I saw an email from one of the lists I’m subscribed to, where a guy raised $12,000 in a single day on Twitter (and his blog) to help a family in need. The caveat, in my mind, in this story is that this guy is pretty connected online, has over 8,000 followers on Twitter and can engage the kind of audience to help him reach his goals. This doesn’t diminish this very positive story of the social web and giving, just that most of us probably couldn’t leverage an online community to this degree. How about the ways in which news is being twittered where you wouldn’t get it otherwise? Pretty good stuff.

“We saw it happening with the Chinese earthquake, where reports were coming through on Twitter before anyone else had it,” Hermida said. “We saw it during the fires in California.”

A better approach?

Not only could Twitter be a valuable alert distribution channel as above, but following the right people could actually provide valuable information, given a better way of using it. I decided the key was to add selectively, tweet even more selectively, and if the tweets I was seeing were annoying or useless, simply stop following that person. With my newfound strategy, I’ve set up a new account and have embedded my most recent tweet in my homepage, and about page sidebars. I’m not going to automatically use tweets as Facebook status updates, but am going to use ping.fm to update specific kinds of messages to appropriate services. In short, I am going to try to selectively build a useful social web for myself and avoid the mundane. We’ll see how it goes.

Grappling with the reality of always-on

James — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:20:49 +0000

With every issue for which the previous generation is ill-equipped to deal, the hand wringing begins anew. I recall only a few years ago, prior to the advent of the social media which now dominates the web, internet addiction was a serious issue in the late 90′s according to some. You’d think the sky was going to fall, and that addiction was to a web without a sticky, social component. Before that, TV was going to ruin young minds (OK, so maybe that has merit). Citing primarily internet addiction, The Toronto Star recently published a piece indicating students are putting Facebook before exams. Let me get this straight – college kids enjoying social distractions instead of school? I can’t believe it.

Surprisingly, Perret doesn’t suggest they actually swear off Facebook during exams, “because then they’d start worrying about what they’re missing and that would be even more distracting. I tell them to use it as a treat after, say, each hour of studying. It’s like any addiction; you have to learn to manage it.”

A distraction to be managed? Probably. If it’s actually an addiction, it probably can’t be managed, so categorizing it as such might be a tad alarmist. It’s certainly true that the online options available for distraction are significant. When you consider how services like Twitter or Ping.fm can work with social platforms like Facebook or niche social networks like last.fm, people (and I’m not only referring to post-secondary students) can lose their perspective and assume they have to spend a lot of time polishing their social presence.

Before Facebook and YouTube, there were always things standing in the way of focusing on school. It doesn’t matter much whether you’re talking about a kegger, a weekend at Whistler, or a pub crawl, college kids have always put socializing before studies. The fact that they’re doing it online, too, doesn’t matter. It’s not the tools that are important – they simply facilitate what we do in other contexts already.

Perret’s comments above strike me as naive, and fuel the notion that schools and parents don’t really get how the digital realm is now integrated into the lives of youth (and middle-aged web geeks like me) to such a degree that there’s no separation – Facebooking (yes, it’s becoming a verb) can’t be viewed as a ‘treat’ during breaks. Whether connecting via campus WiFi on their laptops or using a mobile app on their cellphone, constant access to the tools of digital living is a given, and it’s simply an extension of their world – context doesn’t much matter.

This generation uses and communicates with digital media constantly. Whether it’s online discussion, status updates, social networking, listening to music, sharing photos, watching video or gaming – it can’t be stopped. I’m not sure I completely buy the notion of the net generation/digital native, but one thing is for certain – embrace the technology and understand it, or die trying.

What’s really the issue with new media, then?

If you ask me, it’s more about magnifying the human condition. Some people have obsessive personalities and have to learn control and some don’t. Some people will say and do stupid things and some won’t. The only difference with living openly online now, is that employers and others upon whom your future life can partly depend, can easily search for you and find those lapses in judgment and poor choices. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve stopped following on Twitter because I get tired of seeing 20 updates an hour, covering every inconsequential thought which crosses their mind.

Frankly, it magnifies idiocy. Should we really be concerned when others unfriend us on Facebook? Maybe if we’re 15. It’s pretty much like any other parting of ways in my mind. If you have a reason to stop communicating with someone, you might well stop taking their phone calls and ignore their emails. While changing your status to single or unfriending someone on Facebook is a little more of a public demonstration of feelings, it shouldn’t matter all that much. It’s really the same thing as breaking up with someone and then talking with everyone you know about it. Is it worth a lot of analysis?

So, should you ask? It depends. If the worry is consuming you, then just asking might be the best response. But a better first response might just be to interpret positively, and give the other person the benefit of the doubt.

Not bad advice really. If you wonder why someone is displaying poor behaviour, ask them. Groundbreaking concept, don’t you think? Would anyone actually worry if their friends had a little spat or broke up if it weren’t publicly displayed on their Facebook status or in a blog post? Why should we in the online context?

Really though, any kind of social experience on the web is simply that – social experience. It’s a different context where slightly different etiquette or nuances of behaviour might apply, but don’t courtesy, manners and social skills count for something? Being obsessed with your tweets or Facebook updates, or worrying about how frequently you blog is no more or less of an addiction than having to look at yourself in every mirror you see. Instead of treating the internet or social networking like an addiction, if we focus on being healthy, balanced people, it won’t likely be a concern in the first place. It may be that the environment breeds some of this behaviour, but not all of it.

What, if anything, to do?

While the rules of engagement in a digital world seem to be changing, what does that mean for schools, employers, parents and others? Just how much constant access to digital social technology is changing how people learn is the subject of much debate, as some profs bristle at customizing everything heavily for today’s learner. What you are willing to do about it, accept or change in response to it, will be framed in part by how important you think it is. I don’t think there’s a solid answer to that when we can’t even tell how people learn in any given context in the first place.

Connectivism, for example is an emerging learning theory that I think has some merit.

Principles of connectivism:
* Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
* Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.
* Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
* Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
* Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
* Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
* Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
* Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.

However, I’m not sure I confine the notion to that of learning. Since learning theory shares some commonality with other social sciences like communications theory, perhaps it’s more a concept for the broader notion of being, as opposed to only an activity like learning.

If we accept the premise that people do socialize and communicate, and that the digital social tools for these activities aren’t going away any time soon, we must factor them into experiences moving forward. Their immediacy and ubiquity is not to be feared or avoided, nor do they necessarily have to become the be-all and end-all. We do, however, have to meet expectations by accepting the ways in which the present generation interacts, and that includes learning.

The worst thing that could happen to Bell now

James — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 05:08:14 +0000

Telus. That’s what. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a former Telus manager and currently have my landline phone service, internet service and a family wireless plan with them. I’m not particularly happy with cellular costs in Canada, but Telus is generally the best of a bad lot of choices in Canada for telephony services. My telephony service is generally good, and my customer service poor, due in large part to limited carrier selection.

Telus was one of the suitors for Bell Canada Enterprises back in 2007, when a different deal was struck with a consortium headed by Ontario teachers. You can read about the deal in Bell’s own words here. At the time I remember thanking my lucky stars that they went in this direction. Frankly, I can hardly stomach the thought of even worse customer service than I currently receive from Telus.

News stories this week are indicating that the chance of the current bid for Bell going through are pretty much nil now. This is a large, bloated company. Telus is smaller, but more nimble, with a strong market capitalization and high customer retention. This is largely due to very little competition in western Canada. The renewed possibility of a Bell-Telus merger makes the limited competitive landscape that much smaller. Unless you happen to be a big Telus stockholder, this possibility should scare the hell out of you.

Many touch points you have with Telus when seeking customer support are in the Philippines, though the reps with the thick Filipino accents are not supposed to admit it. Outsourcing customer service overseas is in wide practice in many industries and further ‘efficiencies’ and ‘economies of scale’ would only exacerbate this stuff under a merged entity.

I’m not going to regurgitate the guts of this stuff here, as you can Google all the Telus and Bell information you can handle. A few things to keep in mind when thinking of what this would mean:

even longer support call waits
a monolithic company in charge of virtually all landline and most wireless service in Canada
reduced competition resulting in even higher costs to the consumer
increased likelihood of continued network throttling and spectrum loss
product offerings based almost entirely on carrier decisions, as opposed to customer demand

I’m not saying this will come to pass, but this development certainly has to have Telus management licking its chops at the possibility. Even with the red herring offer Telus made for Microcell a few years ago, which forced Rogers to acquire the Fido wireless service, there’s only really ever been one competitor that forced Telus to actually, well …. compete for consumer business. Bell.

A deal like this merges things into one massive network that could literally crush Rogers and Shaw. Let’s not even think about the pipe Bell has been building as a result of the $200 million they spent to sponsor the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

I’d strongly encourage everyone across Canada to watch BCE and Telus carefully. Talk to your MP and the Harper government about just how bad this would be for consumers across Canada.

BC politics and social software platforms

James — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:08:59 +0000

I read with some interest this week, that the two dominant political parties are both taking a page out of Obama’s campaign book with their approach to online politicking. The governing BC Liberals open platform is going head-to-head with the BC NDP’s rapid responders to engage the clicking fingers (and hopefully, minds) of British Columbia’s voters, who may have severe election fatigue by the time May – and the next provincial vote – rolls around.

On the surface, there’s very little to distinguish these two sites. The Libs open platform promises that, by joining:

you can share your thoughts and help make an important difference for our province. You can participate in surveys, web panels, social networks, digital “town hall meetings” and policy forums on all sorts of topics. You can also submit videos, photos, art and music that will showcase the beauty, strength and diversity of our province and its people and cultures. Many of those submissions will be selected for use on this website and profiled in various ways throughout the upcoming provincial election campaign.

For their part, NDP’s rapid responders are:

people like you who care about the issues and want to make a difference. Here’s a quick list of the top three things you can do as a Rapid Responder (scroll down the page for more options):
* Write a letter to the editor about a hot topic and help us get our message out.
* Add interactive tools and BC NDP content to your blog or Facebook profile.
* Use social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr to connect with other BC NDP supporters and share information with your friends.

In other words, while both parties have built their own social platform, the NDP are leveraging existing tools more as the Libs want to frame the discussion. It’s hardly surprising that the underlying strategy is that Gordon Campbell wants a little more control over how the content is developed, while the NDP are more about sharing what’s going on on existing sites, including your own. The NDP are tracking issues but want you to take action and share what you’re doing. The Libs want to define what you talk about.

Libs provide a dis-engaging user experience

I can’t tell you what the actual Liberal social platform is like, but signing up was pretty bad. Right on the landing page, it asks me to provide first name, last name, email address, and to choose a user name and password (which wasn’t hidden as I entered it). I obliged and was redirected to the same page with my user name pre-populated. I received no email confirmation, logging in with my password did nothing and I have no idea if I have an account at all. I’m guessing not, because clicking on the topics they’ll let you talk about reveals nothing.

A little advice to the Libs? When you ask for information and presumably provision an account, confirmation pages and/or emails are crucial cues to your audience that something has happened. Worse yet, I couldn’t find anything telling me what to expect and, as of this time, have no idea if there’s an account in the works or not.

NDP don’t seem to really get it either

While I like the fact that the Dippers seem to want the swell to grow organically and not carefully control it, signing up for an account was awful. They offer the ability to do so, built on Drupal, but I can’t tell you what that looks like, either. It threw a bunch of SQL errors my way when I signed up. It gave me the standard Drupal welcome message with the one-time account confirmation link, but because of (I’m guessing) the SQL error, the link wouldn’t allow me to finish signing up. Then again, there’s some conflict in the messaging, so who knows?

Other than that, I can sign up to stay in touch, but most opportunities to engage seem to happen by design off-site. I’m glad they’re giving me lots of places to go and ways to follow them, but a simple discussion forum on the site would turn rapid responders into interactive responders (which I’m hoping the Drupal instance provides). It has to be about more than email and postal mailing lists, if you’re really going to leverage social media. It’s called social for a reason.

Do something with your social capital

Excuse me if I don’t believe Gordon Campbell, when he says, "This is a chance to have your say and help shape the policies that Premier Campbell and your BC Liberal Team will put to the people as part of their election platform on May 12, 2009." Campbell has shown a flagrant disregard for any opinion but his own in his tightly controlled approach to governing. Again, though, I have no idea what the tools look like or how they are possibly being used to develop policy going forward.

In the recent US election, Obama did a marvellous job of engaging his base through a solid online strategy. In his promise of change, he suggested the status quo will no longer do. However, as Charlie Smith of the Georgia Straight says, it’s still about keeping your promises, regardless of how cutting edge you try to be when you make them.

Can we trust Carole James or Gordon Campbell to develop policy in an open and accessible manner and then do what they say they will?

Understanding your audience and the power of social media

James — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 02:04:00 +0000

Since I’m not the target audience, I’m not going to wade into whether I find the ad below offensive or not. The interesting thing here in my mind is twofold:

the makers of Motrin clearly didn’t do enough of the right kind of testing for proof of concept
they didn’t understand how to do a proper mea culpa

I would definitely say, though, that it’s not a stretch to see how the messaging in this piece could offend some people. It has a way of speaking down to moms, specially when it insinuates that some would carry their baby this way so they’d look like an official mommy.

Wonder if they’ve got Motrin tablets big enough for the headache they’ve given themselves with this one.

The original story with video can be found at ReadWriteWeb.

A vision of students today

James — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:24:50 +0000

This isn’t new and doesn’t pretend to answer anything, but it’s got a solid, haunting quality and certainly gives you something to think about. Does information overload scare students today? Are too many things competing for their attention? Will their education deliver what they expect?

I know what I’m doing right now can be ovewhelming at times.

No related posts.

Writing collaboratively with Skype chat and Google Docs

James — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:41:15 +0000

I’d imagine most people find the benefit of Skype to be that of free long distance calls. As long as the person you’re calling is also on Skype you can save airtime or long distance charges. That’s great, but given I do very little long distance calling and use my cell mostly for family chatter, Skype has not typically been my tool of choice to replace the telephone. I’d played with Google Docs a bit for fun, but with no real goals in mind. I’ve always got my MacBook Pro with me so I don’t often need multi-computer access to the same files. Enter the coursework for my MA. We are doing our work in small groups of four or five and, all groups are comprised of geographically dispersed folks.

Skype

While finding times for everyone to meet online is a challenge, I find using Skype chat to reach decisions to be wonderful. It gives you the ability to do public group chats on-the-fly or to set up a more secure public chat by allowing read/write permission by invite only. Promoting the room is done via link which connects them to the chat room instantly. Transcripts are always available as HTML documents written to your hard drive and are cumulative from the time you started the chat – ideal when you need a record going back a couple weeks over multiple sessions. You can send files peer-to-peer and add contacts to the chat at any time, while calling an individual for a quick conversation to clarify something is only a click away.

Google Docs

We can easily carry these discussions over to Google Docs, in deciding who needs to do what by when. I’ve set up one file for us to collaboratively write to and shared it with everyone in the group as collaborators. Formatting is easy and different collaborators can simply colour-code their highlighted changes for one editor to compile, with as many rounds of edits as necessary. Or you could just let everyone write whatever they want if you’re brave – personally, I like safer ground rules.

If anyone overwrites groupwork by accident, the versioning ensures you can revert to the last good one easily. As an extra precaution I’ve suggested everyone back up what they do as an export. Once this is ready for final submission I can easily share it via a Skype chat or simply have everyone review it online quickly. If I could change a couple things (and maybe I’m just missing a feature or two) it would be that of a live change tracker in the interface and that the formatting would be better preserved if you export to Word.

Other options less enjoyed

There are many online collaboration tools, but they tend to have problems inherent. And, truthfully, unless you need to share a desktop presentation or whiteboard something, many of the tools won’t actually be of much use.

Elluminate is a cool e-learning and business collaborative suite, but unless you’re up to paying substantial licensing fees, the free version allows only three participants in a limited-feature collaborative environment. The modules look cool, but the only way you’ll see them is a sales demo.

Yugma is another tool which, while providing a full trial for 15 days after which you’ve got a pretty bare-bones environment, I’ve found to be buggy. The feature set looks good but, in trying to use it earlier in the summer for my coursework and just recently for a contractor to demo some wireframes, it has simply hung when I’ve tried it.

Zoho tools bills itself as a suite to compete with Google Docs and more. A brief overview of their services from their landing reveals a very complete suite and what I’ve read would point to Zoho as a solid choice. However, we needed something without user limits or poor feature sets. You still need to pay to get the full meal deal and, in this case, that wasn’t going to work. I’d be interested in looking at it further though, because if all the tools are truly integrated, there would be a very compelling case to use Zoho.

Twiddla was another option that, had I been looking more at collaborative whiteboarding and drawing, I would be interested in investigating further. It didn’t meet my needs for this instance, but I found the user experience good. Simple, online and easy to use. I’m always big on something that doesn’t require the download of a desktop app, as the experience between users on different OS’s will often reflect which one the developers started with.

Final thoughts

I wish Google Talk was more like Skype. It wouldn’t even have to offer IP telephony. If you use Gmail, then you can search Google Talk web chat transcripts in your inbox. That’s not the same as a self-contained chat tool that gives you a full feature set including full transcripts. Then again, the best tools are ones that do one thing really well. Talking and chatting are great with Skype and collaborative writing and publishing to a number of formats are great with Google Docs. You can make them work together pretty painlessly and that’s probably the best way to go.

Google Chrome

James — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:21:53 +0000

The new browser offering from Google was just launched today and its name is Chrome. Well, not so much a browser as a browser-emulated OS-type thingey. I won’t link to all the places it’s popping up on the web, since Google has. I haven’t used it much, but I will offer a few very small opinions to start.

It’s hard to imagine switching from Firefox since I have so many plug-ins installed, helping it make me more productive. Having said that, Chrome is smokin’ fast. Particularly, once you’ve loaded a site, Google gears caches the page and speeds up subsequent loads. I don’t use IE, but even compared to Firefox and Safari, everything loads very quickly. As I write this post from Chrome, it’s got the nice form textarea enhancement of Safari that allows me to resize my writing space on the fly – something Firefox has yet to enable.

The minimalist design really jazzes me, too. You might be able to tell from this journal … I love whitespace. The tabs load right up top with the address bar and bookmark toolbar just below, something Google calls the Omni Box. Beyond that, it’s all browsing space. A small (presumably) AJAX indicator appears at the bottom showing you URIs as they load or link URLs, but that’s it. I’ve always found the lack of status bar in Safari unnerving, so Chrome seems to hit the sweetspot of working space maximization, with enough cues to help users understand what’s going on.

User tools are compacted into two menus at top right, while page loading controls (back, forward, reload) appear at top left to each side of the address bar. The layering of tabs, address bar and bookmark toolbar just feels good. Other than a user-specified homepage, the default loads your most recent history as boxes (in kind of a storyboard layout), with a full history list available with one click.

Downloading and privacy look pretty good, too. It allows you to drag downloads to the bottom of the page and decide what to do. No download directories here. Plus, an incognito window will help you hide information about …. that gift for your loved one

I have yet to explore some of the obvious integration with various Google tools, but as an avid gmail, calendar and reader user, I’m sure there will be many benefits. For a more solid rundown of features, ReadWriteWeb is doing some crowdtesting of the app and I plan to take a better read-through shortly.

The big, and I mean big, drawback so far? I can only use this at work, which I’m not likely to much, because it’s only available for Windows at this point. I hope it’s only a matter of time until I can test it at home in my preferred Mac environment.

I’m sure I’ll discover more when I can actually use it where I want.

Facebook in real life

James — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:12:29 +0000

From the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford. Funny stuff.

The real reason for C-61

Will post-sec embrace the open social?

James — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 05:02:34 +0000

The answer to this question seems to be largely dependent on what you read, and it probably also depends on what you want to use open, social software for. Based on some of the mailing lists and discussion forums I read, and post-sec sites I visit, social media concepts (whether built on open source or not) are far from well-articulated in most cases.

Content strategy and content management systems

Feeds are becoming more common, but are not necessarily being implemented in a way that allows site visitors to have real choice as to what updates they can receive. The public web site is the prime marketing channel of any institution, and on any given post-secondary web site you are liable to see the gamut. Poorly designed and architected, hand-coded static pages, to full-blown database-driven, XML-gasmic experiences, with a feed associated with everything, regardless of whether the content is appropriate to supply a feed for, or not.

With regard to marketing content, determining what to feature, how to elicit subscriptions, where you might want user-generated content like comments, how you engage prospective students in a public dialogue and whether you’re prepared to open up things like course ratings to public discourse are all questions institutions are grappling with in presenting a more user-friendly, socially-constructed face to the world.

As the marketing side of post-secondary is where I spend the bulk of my working time at the moment, it is not only the issue of what to publish, how it is structured and how those decisions are made that can be challenging. The CMS conundrum is perhaps moreso, always a topic of some discussion on university web development lists. Everyone wants to know what each other uses, but often the one asking the questions cannot get his/her powers that be to make the leap and use open source. Enterprise support and architecture are understandably big concerns, but with the proper mindset about how they work and bringing support in-house, the question might move from if the move should be made to what flavour it should be made to. The idea of building functionality to suit as it is needed, as opposed to waiting for a vendor to decide to implement something, would seem to be a no-brainer.

What about curriculum and textbooks?

The main discussion I am starting to see is more around opening up learning to broad audiences. Learning commons or open learning models are not new, but have hardly become common by any stretch.

I know some people probably feel “the tide is turning, there is no way to stop a moving freight train and it is only a matter of time” (How is that for mixed metaphors?), but there seems to be a lot of push and pull with the issue of open sourcing texts, let alone constructing course curriculum collaboratively. At the one end you may have younger or more digitally savvy faculty members balking at the high price of textbooks and wanting to remove the cost barrier in providing access to them for free online. However, the other end has big publishing interests who want no part of it. Yearly revisions for the cost of a new book seems to be their lifeblood.

Seems to me that opening up the whole process of accessing reading materials and collaborating on course elements brings the notion of constructivism to life:

Christopher Rice, a lecturer in political science at the University of Kentucky, is one such trendsetter. In 2006, Rice experimented with a wiki for his Introduction to Political Science class. In addition to online articles, the wiki links to books at Project Gutenberg for older texts. This kept the students’ reading list to below $40, an important consideration when tuition seems to go up every year. Students could also collaborate, posting class notes and helping to develop the course.

With regard to publishing royalties, is there a middle ground that is not getting explored much (or maybe it is and I am just woefully unaware)? Often people have a hard time reading solely online and need a hard copy. What about multi-level and multi-user licensing? A free non-printable, digital license akin to Google Books format, a slightly more expensive PDF version that you can print yourself, or an on-demand full cost printed and bound version from the publisher. If a publisher wanted to ensure they were not giving away the farm through free digital-only licenses, they could implement a very reasonable online-only class-wide license. Not quite free, but not what we have now, and that is a step in the right direction.

The Ars Technica article above also touches on tenure and the disincentive of royalty-free publishing. I do not profess to understand that enough to offer an opinion or solution, but it seems to me that if an academic world-view began to emerge that valued open access to post-secondary education, publishing models would develop that would adequately deal with the tenure and royalty issues.

Some argue that open curriculum won’t work, that is until you read through the blog post and comments, including the author’s own. The author wrote with a blanket statement, something which needed to be qualified …. badly. The basic concept of open access to, and collaborative development of, curriculum can work just fine, but not if there is no oversight, guidance or editorial hand moving it forward. All one need do is look at the concept of comments on news stories to see that, while it may indicate popularity or interest, unguided opinion on a factual piece of copy seems to have poor results (maybe it is just me). Similarly, building curriculum iteratively without experience guiding it would likely not make it worth learning.

What about learning platforms?

I would give my own present experience with learning platforms a mixed review. While a tool like Moodle puts a powerful LMS (or PLE depending on your definition) at your finger tips without exorbitant licensing costs, making the system really sing requires some work. The implementations I have seen have not really explored the user experience side enough to ensure task flow, navigation, contextual content, design contrast or user features are really structured to make the system as user-friendly as it should be, let alone appropriate use of rich media (as opposed to overwhelming use of Flash, ensuring poor accessibility among other things).

Distance learning is pretty well established. With the emergence of the web, in the past 15 years, online platforms like WebCT, Blackboard and, more recently, Desire2Learn and Moodle have replaced older distance methodologies like correspondence. I do not want to comment on the value of distance learning because so much of the success potential is derived from the user experience design effort, type of curriculum, credential and personal learning style. It is a bit of a generalization to say whether it works or not.

Attrition rates of distance-only learning are pretty well documented, but would likely be improved by adjusting the delivery method. As opposed to passive replication of lecture materials, a well designed online learning environment can go a long way to improving distance outcomes. Royal Roads, for example, blends short residencies with distance-based cohorts and has graduation rates well in the 90′s.

In conclusion

Regardless of whether an institute embraces or eschews open source software, developing strategies and plans for open access and collaborative methodologies would seem to be crucial. Students are demanding convenience and, often, self-directed education where appropriate. Developing an open, social strategy requires careful deliberation of, not only, what an institute wants to do, but the appropriate tools and approaches that will get them there. User experience design and considerations with regard to development of learning and marketing platforms is probably key in this regard. As well, pushing for more progressive text licensing models and experimenting with more student-faculty discourse on collaborative curriculum development will strengthen the student connection with the institution and develop a stronger sense of ownership of their education.

The web as a research tool

James — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:52:58 +0000

The past couple weeks have been a real education when it comes to using the web for academic research. I am at different places on each of what I’ve identified (so far) as three primary knowledge streams of the MA I’m undertaking, research being the one I’ve got a middling amount of comfort with.

I do some as part of my work but need much stronger rigour to do it well, and I’m a neophyte on the learning theory part. I’ve used the web daily in work and personal pursuits for well over a decade and tend to just take it for granted. I wonder if anyone else in my cohort places themselves in different comfort zones for these knowledge streams or if they even look at it that way?

I always wondered how citations and references were kept straight, particularly when you read a thesis with dozens upon dozens. What’s been a real eye opener is the availability of academic papers, journals and other research through online databases. Mind you, until you have access to them via your school library, they remain largely unknown or unavailable.

I know I will only have access to the academic databases through RRU for the duration of my MA, but I have a notion that I may be able to continue to access them as a staff member through BCIT‘s online library interface. It’s something I intend to check out fairly soon. I’m hoping to move to more research based work down the road, so I’m certainly hoping.

In terms of actually keeping references straight for citation purposes, I’ve played a little with Refworks to this point and have to say that it’s a marvel – another tool that you get access to as a Masters student. It’s like Delicious on steroids, specific to academic reference and citation. I’ve been aware of another research bookmarking tool, called Connotea, but brief looks have left me wondering about its value. It’s targeted at scientific researchers, but I’m not sure of any citation formatting or similar functionality. I could be wrong, as I just haven’t looked at it much.

Everything is saved for later use and you can spit out references in a variety of academic formatting, suitable for whatever you’re writing at the time. I’m already hooked and, whether I decide to go the project or thesis route, I’m sure it will become pretty much my favourite online research tool. These discoveries are nothing short of serendipitous for me.

How important is social media?

James — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:17:59 +0000

(Pretty f**king important as it turns out …)

While you have to get past the swears, the slideshow below from ParisLemon came to my attention via the Technology Liberation Front. Very good stuff.

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Does tech make us stupid, or just rude?

James — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:13:56 +0000

OK, so maybe not stupid, but apparently lazy. At least according to The Atlantic‘s Nicholas Carr it does. Based on the length of the piece, his writing chops are certainly still intact.

Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do …. I think I know whatâ€™s going on. For more than a decade now, Iâ€™ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

Carr seems to think the web’s delivery format, and the sheer volume of information he is exposed to, is making it harder for him to concentrate on longer, more involved reading. The fact that so much information, including that used for research, is often just a click or two away and digestible an excerpt at a time, says Carr, is making us impatient. He says that his friends agree:

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintancesâ€”literary types, most of themâ€”many say theyâ€™re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether.

But, is this about capacity to read more deeply or just not taking the time? I’m probably as guilty as anyone of not reading as much, but I do try to make sure I have a book going most of the time. I actually relish the opportunity to get into a novel or work of nonfiction. I certainly don’t find it any harder to concentrate, despite the fact that I follow lots of feeds and scan plenty of online content on a daily basis.

The Technology Liberation Front‘s Adam Thierrer feels reasonably positive about the change communications tech is bringing:

The death of media scarcity and the rise of information abundance was bound to have profound implications for how we read, write and communicate—in most ways for the better, but perhaps in some ways for the worse. I doubt we’ll ever have a Shakespeare arising from the world of Twitter, for example, but I believe we are better off for having technologies and media platforms like it in our lives.

On this point I also have to disagree. Not necessarily with the fact that a variety of more immediate and engaging ways of communicating is a good thing. It is, but it’s often manifesting itself at the expense of social skills and manners. Grammar and eloquent writing is mostly a lost art form, based on the general level of discourse in the blogosphere. A great deal of this can be traced directly to IM and email, where shorthand acronyms are the order of the day.

I can’t begin to count how many times inappropriate cell phone conversations punctuate the air or cause car accidents, or encountering kids who can’t turn their iPod down long enough to be polite to the store clerk. Don’t even get me started on the whole issue of texting or IM-ing via cell. Handy yes. Annoying and unpleasant? Often. Why? Because too often we use gadgets as an excuse to avoid and ignore our fellow human being.

There’s no doubt that our behaviour is changing as a result of the volume and format of information we are now exposed to. I would suggest, though, that it’s crucial for us to try to be mindful of a couple things. Take the time to read. A real newspaper, a novel, anything that forces us to focus a little more. By extension then, take that notion of focus and target it on other people. Don’t use technology as an excuse for anti-social or disengaging behaviour.

Online learning lacks personal touch

James — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:56:29 +0000

Came across the following via Stephen Downes, where he refers to to a response from Clive Shepherd. Neilsen first suggests:

I continue to believe in the linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don’t believe the Web is optimal for delivering this experience. Instead, let’s praise old narrative forms like books and sitting around a flickering campfire â€” or its modern day counterpart, the PowerPoint projector â€” which have been around for 500 and 32,000 years, respectively.

I continue to write books, and I continue to develop training seminars, because I believe these media are best for deep learning of new concepts.

To which Stephen remarks:

I think learning happens through numerous media, including web posts (which is why Nielsen writes his online column in the first place). And I think that people continue to write books and develop training seminars because that’s where the money is, not because that’s what produces the best learning.

And finally, Shepherd’s (partial) comments:

Interesting. Of course we don’t know exactly what Jakob has in mind when he talks about e-learning – traditional, self-paced instruction? live online learning using web conferencing software? collaborative distance learning? informal learning using web 2.0 technologies? If we assume he means the former – what we used to call CBT – then that gives a starting point for a critique of his assertion. Jakob’s key idea here is that ‘deep learning’ is a lean-back experience, best accomplished away from a computer, whereas most web activity is a lean-forward experience, which is designed to meet the individual’s immediate goals in the way that they see fit.

I come at this issue as someone who has developed a few very rudimentary e-learning courses in the corporate world, who now works as a web user experience lead at a post-secondary institution, and who is likely to be doing a Master’s degree soon, with a significant component delivered via distance and online.

I think what Neilsen is trying to say is that the web is not the ideal environment for the level of immersion necessary for significant learning and that his ‘just in time’ metaphor is apt. I don’t think, though, that it’s necessarily about having an author-driven narrative. Regardless of any social media capabilities you can enable to make online learning better, you will never get the engagement of sitting in a room with peers and a capable instructor.

I also think that the medium may not be capable of delivering a full degree without some face time, but is great for snippets and individual courses of certain kinds. For one thing the feedback mechanisms for students, while improving all the time, are no match for the back and forth engagement of students and instructor. Forums, comments, message boards, email, IM, chats …. they’ll all good but lack immediacy in most cases, and body language subtleties in all cases.

Truth be told I’m not sure I ever want the medium to improve to the point where it’s as good as face-to-face.

The future of the web?

James — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:04:35 +0000

Found this at I Power, via UX Magazine. A scary thought to be sure, but certainly a plausable direction for big media and telecom to want to go.

While there are some who ask what the future of the web looks like – and issues around accessible sites, semantic content, open source and the like are hugely important – it’s crucial to focus on the issues that will affect the most people in the most significant ways.

Whether you can see your favourite web site on both your phone and laptop isn’t nearly as important as whether you can access it in the first place. And, what about the right to your own digital media to use – legally – as you see fit. Big media is losing its grip on what it spoonfeeds you, and can charge you for, and as such, many of its revenue streams. An easy way to get them back is to package the content you can see with broadband access.

It’s an easy model for them because, as alluded to in the video above, it’s exactly the same model employed for digital cable. That’s why transparent public consultation on ACTA, and absolute net neutrality are two key things that should be on everyone’s front burner.

In my mind, the two issues are intrinsically connected. ACTA would ostensibly help media controlled bandwidth to throttle what they don’t want to give you access to, and to ensure they enforce licensing fees for every little bit of pay-for-use content they can.

Charlie Rose squared on Yahooglesoft

James — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:31:52 +0000

This really does seem to be about all most web news talks about these days … Courtesy Technology Liberation Front.

No related posts.

The scary side of social media

James — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:11:52 +0000

Would you like to be extricating yourself from a relationship with this woman? This came to my attention courtesy of Boing Boing.

The sad thing here is that it’s just more indication that we’ve lost our collective minds. And, as a divorce-wars survivor myself, I can tell you from first-hand experience that airing your laundry in such a public, vindictive way as this is almost certain to backfire to some degree (even if some of the points you make are valid).

Even if that doesn’t prove true in the land of litigation down south, shouldn’t good taste and pride count for something?

Twits shouldn’t twitter

James — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:06:38 +0000

People, use your heads when deciding what to ‘twitter’ about. At a basic level, I can certainly see the value of staying connected with your friends. However, when you start plugging twitter into social networks like Facebook, it’s a recipe for annoyance, plain and simple. Why do I care what you think as you watch some TV show? I don’t.

Personally, I really don’t want to let others know the minutiae of my day and I have absolutely zero interest in knowing what a friend of mine is thinking as they ponder life’s mysteries while sipping a Starbuck’s latte at their laptop keyboard. If I find my online friend’s thoughts of interest, I can easily stay in touch via many other means. Let’s face it, only the early adopters already extensively using social media will be twittering anyway.

I’ve really relegated Facebook to being a way to send a note to friends and acquaintances and that’s pretty much it. I find the information stream coming from Facebook friend updates to be far more than I need, anyway, and I certainly couldn’t imagine having any use for even more of that crap via services like FriendFeed, so why would I want to follow anyone on Twitter? Sorry, the details of your day, or mine for that matter, are simply not that interesting or important. And let’s face it, we all know Facebook friends are not always real friends, anyway.

So, given all this preamble about my preferences, why on earth would I want to see a new level of unwanted detail on Facebook via the Twitter app? But there it is, right below the status updates on my logged-in Facebook homepage. “So-and-so is twittering: my Salsbury steak is mushy …” So what? Apparently your brain took a holiday when you decided to twitter that little nugget.

Just one more reason to ignore Twitter and use Facebook even less.

Social software concerns

James — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:45:54 +0000

I don’t know what to make of Facebook. Honestly. I’ve never used MySpace and doubt I ever will. I started using LinkedIn, but found it of limited appeal because I couldn’t do anything much with it. Then I joined Facebook and used it like a madman for two or three weeks. Now I find I’m lucky if I look at it a couple times a week. And on and on this pattern goes. Trying and sticking with one tool consumes more time than I have and it’s often a hassle trying a new one.

As an agent for change, I see real potential in online community. However, when it comes to casual or fun tools, with every new social software tool, I’m forced to invite a list of users and then go virtually doing things together. I’m afraid after full days in the online world I tend to spend my spare time taking care of my body through real-world pursuits.

Perhaps trying and using new social software tools would be less of a pain if open authentication really took hold. For example, using the OpenID concept, having one central ID and contact list would mean that you could sign into any one of these applications and invite friends without ever having to import or transfer anything between platforms. If using Flickr, last.fm, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and/or any other of a myriad tools meant you could simply sign up and login without creating a new account, I’m sure I’d try and use a lot more software.

Extend this concept to an open API across the social software world and, well …. OK, I’m dreaming in technicolour. Enough of that, because, along with many other things that would probably cripple revenue opportunities the individual vendors.

Webreakstuff got it right, methinks, when they mused about the value of OpenID and microformats to help open up social networks from this perspective:

I want networks to ask me, right off the bat when signing up, if I already have a profile that can be imported in (through hCard+XFN). I type in the URL for my OpenID and the network gets my information (gets OpenID page, downloads hCard formatted information, builds my user information based on that). Then it can grab my list of friends from XFN formatted data. With one textfield (the URL for either my OpenID or a profile on a different network), it would pre-populate both my information and the information for friends I want to add. Sweet.

Beyond the hassle of using Facebook enough to leverage its value, I’ve always had questions about its security and whether it exposed too much. I’ve heard stories about identity theft through a little solid Facebook-ing coupled with a little Google research. The fact that joining groups may expose you to far more openness than you’d like AND that profiles become littered with moronic applications and the lustre begins to wear off a bit.

Like anything new which presents some level of opportunity to be exploited, the hype abounds for Facebook. Applications for the API roll out left, right and centre, but I’m pretty sure almost no one is making real money off them yet.

Newspapers and mock newscasts are making sure they don’t get left behind either. However, if Facebook had not been hyped mercilessly over the past year, do you think the New York Times would bother with it? I don’t.

While I agree that corporations tend to ignore things to which they should pay more attention, I think Stowe Boyd misses the point about productivity. Corporations are notoriously late adopters, and I would lean toward most use of Facebook in the office environment as a waste of time. The nature of the Facebook environment means that doing one thing, leads to another, which leads to another. Updating your status can quickly become a game of scrabble or multiple posts to friends’ walls.

There’s a much stronger argument for using instant messaging, wikis, and employee forums as internal productivity tools and leveraging tools like blogs, forums, and feeds for external marketing communications. I guess that’s the point that I’ve been coming to in this piece. Specific tools are good at specific jobs and, when they have solid rationale, they should be leveraged to maximum advantage, whether it’s for business, personal or community-building purposes.

I’m not sure, though, that the usefulness I see in a lot of social software extends to using every new tool that comes along and taking the time to keep using it, particularly when none of the systems will talk to each other.

Social networks for social research

James — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 01:35:35 +0000

Social networks are cool. But to get any benefit out of them, it is pretty important to spend significant and frequent chunks of time using them. I’ll admit it, I got bored with Facebook quickly and now I’m lucky if I check it twice a week. For me, in practical terms, a tool like Facebook for regular social discourse just can’t hold my interest for long. Use the concept to build something around an important issue or as an agent of real change and that’s different.

While my misgivings about Facebook make me doubt its usefulness as anything but fun diversion, a Danah Boyd essay from June has me wondering if there’s something deeper to online social networking, in terms of social research, and what these systems say about us. I’ll admit to the kind of knee-jerk reaction to MySpace that Danah writes about as she notes the class distinction between users of the two sites.

The discomfort in her writing doesn’t take away from what seem to be pretty keen observations about kids, their choice of social network and the broader perceptions around that. Demographic and psychographic comparisons of the two types of users very clearly delineate along socio-economic lines. While I’m no ivy-leaguer, the clean design and visual ubiquity of Facebook profiles appeals to me much more than the garish varieties of MySpace pages – I like white space and consistency. While it’s easy to see the appeal of these stark differences for marketers, how can we use this information to effect positive social outcomes?

Perhaps the divides between users of the two systems is more depressing social commentary on how we make assumptions about each other (and assumptions parents make about ‘their’ kids using Facebook):

Danah Boyd:
The division around MySpace and Facebook is just another way in which technology is mirroring societal values. Embedded in that is a challenge to a lot of our assumptions about who does what. The “good” kids are doing more “bad” things than we are willing to acknowledge (because they’re the pride and joy of upwardly mobile parents). And, guess what? They’re doing those same bad things online and offline. At the same time, the language and style of the “bad” kids offends most upwardly mobile adults. We see this offline as well. I’ve always been fascinated watching adults walk to the other side of the street when a group of black kids sporting hip-hop style approach. The aesthetics alone offend and most privileged folks project the worst ideas onto any who don that style. When I see a divide like this, I worry because it reproduced the idea that the “good” kids are good and that Facebook participation is good.

But are these conclusions about social class and online social network correct across the board? After all, MySpace came first and appeals to younger users, probably in part, because of the colourful and tacky way profiles can look, and that it’s much more about music, hip-hop and entertainment than is Facebook. Notwithstanding the fact that the clean white Facebook interface is not changeable, users can still trash up their space like crazy with everything from cyber-drink purchases, to zombie status and all manner of the downright silly and useless. And, while Facebook came later and started as a closed college network, it’s trying to become the platform for everyone. Just look at all the postings on Craigslist for Facebook application developers if you don’t believe me.

Certainly, it seems that some interesting research into behaviour and association can be done through online social networking, but I’m not sure it can inform us much beyond seeing if that behaviour is mirrored in the real world, or if something different or more profound is derived from using online social networks.

I know one thing. From a taste perspective (and this isn’t a knock against hip-hop, MySpace OR those who like them), I’m no more likely to listen to hip-hop than I am to use MySpace. Does that make me an elitist or racist? No.