Month: June 2007

by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Social Networking and Web 2.0: Who is doing it?

Business Week has done a nice bit of research pulling together some demographic information to come up with profiles on who uses the current crop of social web services and how they use them.

Overall, social sites are growing at a huge rate, but for many of us it seems that we just want to lurk and are not actually contributing anything. Only 4.59% of Wikipedia users actually contribute any content, while the numbers for sites like Flickr (0.2%) and YouTube (0.16%) are surprisingly low.

Not surprising, the major contributors to social sites are in the 12-26 age group. Business Week calls them the Creators. These are the people who publish web pages, blog and upload videos to sites like YouTube. This group also has the largest percentage of social network Joiners with between 51% to 70% participation rate.

What is surprising to me is how consistently low the level of the Collectors is across the board. In every demographic, the rate of people who are tagging or aggregating, collecting and remixing content via RSS hovers between 11% and 18%. While it is encouraging to see some consistency across the demographic board with taggers and aggregators, overall it tells me that people have yet to see the value of both syndication and tagging.

For me, collecting it is one of the most exciting features of social networks – the ability for me to take all these disparate pieces of information and mash them up into a form that makes sense to me. It allows me to become my own editor, to begin to create my own mediascape and filter my own information.

Tagging is really what puts the social in social networks. It is through tagging and folksonomies that you begin to harness the power of the collective. As content gets tagged, it begins to take shape and organized into a coherent system. But in order for tagging and folksonomies to work, there has to be a fairly diverse and large group of users. Until that happens, the value of tagging and folksonomies run the risk of being tainted by a small group of sophisticated users.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Keep working in web apps offline with Google Gears

One of the big sticking points with using web applications is that you have to be online to use them. No internet connection = no access to the application. It looks like Google is working to plug that hole with the beta release of Google Gears. Google Gears is a browser plugin (still in early beta release) that allows you to use web applications even when you are offline.

While initial reaction has been that the plugin is a good proof of concept, Gears still has a ways to go before being unleashed onto the world.

One of the stumbling blocks right now is that Gears only provides the read functionality of the read/write web. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done before Gears will provide full read/write functionality. Plus, there is only one app in Google’s stable that works with Google Gears and that’s Google Reader, although there has been strong hints that Gmail and Calendar will be next. So, rather than this being a beta release, I consider this more of a proof of concept release.

Regardless, the release of Google Gears is poised to solve one of the major hurdles towards mass acceptance of web applications as a replacement for their desktop counterparts. For that reason Google Gears is an important release in the evolutionary cycle of web application development.

For more on how Gears works technically, there is a good post by Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Yahoo Pipes useful but frustrating

I’ve been playing with Yahoo Pipes for a few months now and have gone from being ecstatic to frustrated. I still think Pipes is a useful tool, especially if you want to aggregate a number of RSS feeds into one, but lately I’ve spent more time dealing with Pipes than I was hoping to have to spend by using a tool like Pipes.

Part of the problem is that Pipes is deceptively simple. Programming via GUI…drag a feed from here, drop it into a module, add a few conditions and voila you’ve got a mashup. Of course, the devil is in the details, as I am finding out.

Take, for example, my EdTech pipe, which I use to aggregate a number of blog feeds that I read. It’s a pipe that had been working fine up until a week ago. Not sure what update or fix was rolled out by Yahoo, but it broke the pipe and the feeds weren’t parsing correctly. So, for the past week when I have a few minutes I’ve been trying to fix the pipe. This morning, out of frustration, I completely dismantled and reassembled it. Turns out, the problem was probably more me than Pipes as I was trying to sort 7 different feeds based on dates, and each feed used a different type of date field to identified the published date. Despite the fact that a number of them were Atom feeds, apparently even Atom feeds can set a published date to use a different field. So when I tried to do a sort on the pubDate field, I ended up only getting the feeds that actually used that field.

Fortunately, there is a handy dandy Rename function. So I went through all the feeds, found the appropriate dates fields, renamed them to a new field called theDate and sorted on that. Bingo, all my feeds sorted nicely in chronological order.

So, despite the fact that I find Pipes a bit flaky, I’m beginning to suspect that the problem has more to do with my hacker level programming skills than the actual application.