Archive for December, 2007

Chandler and ease of description

Published December 27, 2007 Technology Closed

As many folks know, I was involved in the Common Solutions Group‘s investment and participation in OSAF’s Chandler project, which was started by Mitch Kapor.

In it’s initial conception Chandler was supposed to be an open source personal information manager incorporating calendar, email, instant messaging and task management in a new and flexible manner. At some point the focus of the project shifted from being about common communication tools to focus on the intersection of task management and calendaring in a way that promotes sharing and group collaboration. The OSAF folks have been heavily influenced by David Allen’s Getting Things Done methods.

The Chandler project is currently at a 0.7.3 release state for its flagship desktop client. While I haven’t spent as much time with the current release as I should have, my brief forays into using Chandler have left me scratching my head in some confusion about how to make use of the product. In the meantime I’ve become completely captured by using the prerelease version of OmniFocus for managing my own sets of tasks and projects.

I subscribe to the Chandler design mailing list, so I at least casually keep up with the chatter and progress on the project. Lately there have been a couple of threads that might indicate that I’m not the only one confused – one thread titled What’s the ‘pony in the product’? and one titled What is Chandler supposed to do anyway? (you can see them both in the list archive for this month). Both of these threads have a lot of good conversation about what Chandler can do and why it’s different than other tools, but they center around a common theme that it’s hard to explain Chandler to people.

I was thinking about that this morning when John Gruber’s blog called my attention to this post from Aristotle Pagaltzis where he postulates this hypothesis:

The more easily you can talk about a user interface, the more easily you can understand how to manipulate it.

It strikes me that maybe that’s the problem with Chandler.

I hope they figure their way forward, because there are an array of very talented people working at OSAF, and I think there is a need for a good open source product that re-thinks the personal management of tasks and information in new and creative ways. The folks at OSAF have done a lot of really good thinking on that topic – just watch Scoble’s interview with Mimi and Katie and you’ll be convinced of that.

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New UW Wireless login page

Published December 20, 2007 Technology Closed
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I just love the way the new UW Wireless network login page looks – especially on my iPhone!

Catching up on some reading

Published December 18, 2007 Other Closed
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After chatting with Richard Katz about the idea of an ECAR book club a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been feeling a need to catch up on some professional reading lately – I get plenty of reading about specific technologies, but not enough on strategies that make technology useful.

I was impressed by Web Worker Daily’s list of the Top 10 Books for Web Workers 2007 and immediately picked up a bunch of them. I started out by reading local author Scott Berkun’s Myths of Innovation which is interesting and insightful, if not revelatory. Also on my shelf now are Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick – Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die; Dave Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous – The Power of the New Digital Disorder; and Lois Kelly’s Beyond Buzz – The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing.

I’m also working my way through Richard Florida’s paper on The University and the Creative Economy – I’m intrigued by his ideas that it’s the creative class of workers (artists, software people, the gay community, etc.) are a driving engine of success for urban areas in today’s economy.

And when I don’t feel like reading business books, I’m really enjoying Michael Chabon’s delightful alternative history detective novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.

At the urging of a couple of friends, I’m also exploring the world of social book-listing – I’m using the Visual Bookshelf app on Facebook along with Richard and other friends, and at Tom Lenon’s suggestion I’ve also joined Shelfari. We’ll see if they stick.

[ECAR 2007 Winter] Nicole Ellison – Facebook Use On Campus

Published December 7, 2007 Learning & Teaching , Technology Closed
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Nicole Ellison, from Michigan State University, is talking on Facebook Use on Campus: A Social Capital Perspective on Social Network Sites.

Social network sites allow individuals to: construct a profile, articulate a list of other users that they’re connected to, and view and traverse their list of connections and those of others.

In Facebook people are primarily articulating an existing offline network, as opposed to trolling for new connections. An estimated 79-95% of all undergrads have Facebook accounts.

Who’s using Facebook? White students more likely (Hispanic students more likely to use MySpace). Students who live at home less likely to use social network sites.

When are students using Facebook? Not substituting for f2f time – use is less during weekends, for example. During summer it’s higher – when they’re not together.

Did a series of surveys of MSU undergrads, interviews and cognitive walk-throughs, and automated capture of web content.

What are students doing on Facebook?

  • Engaging in online self-presentation – going to be an increasingly important skill as digital citizens.
  • Engaging in social behavior: converting latent tiees to weak ties; maintaining existing relationships; resurrecting past relationships
  • Converting latent ties to weak ties – ties that are technically possible but not yet activated socially – e.g. someone who’s in a large lecture class with me but I haven’t spoken to yet. FB makes it easy to find out about these people, through their profile. Hypothesize that having that kind of social info about people lowers barriers to f2f contact. FB enables managing a large network of weak ties.
  • Maintaining relationships – students use FB to remember phone numbers or dorm room numbers (interesting thoughts wrt our directories).
  • Resurrecting past relationships – maintaining contact with high school friends.

Students surveyed said they had an average of over 250 FB friends and around 150 friends at that campus, and about a third of those are actual friends.

Social capital – benefits we reap from our relationships with others. Like other forms of capital it has real value. Bridging social capital is linked to weak ties – provides useful information or new perspectives for one another, but typically not emotional support. Bonding social capital reflects strong ties with family and close friends – support network.

Survey items about FB intensity. Facebook intensity is a good predictor of bridging social capital. Bridging social capital may be especially important in the period of emerging adulthood (18-25). They found that FB helps students with low esteem build bridging social capital more than students with high self esteem. In 2007 students reported 4 hours Internet use a day and 54 minutes a day on FB.

Stanford had a course (CS377W) on Creating Engaging Facebook Apps – two of the top five facebook apps were from this course.

[ECAR 2007 Winter] Robert Kraut – Conversation and Commitment in Online Communities

Published December 7, 2007 Learning & Teaching , Technology Closed
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Robert Kraut is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Business School at Carnegie Mellon.

It’s interesting to study online communities because the interactions are exposed and documented.

Defining success:

- Success is multidementional: transactional (did your question get answered?, were resources exchanged?); individual (was commitment developed?); and group (did it successfully recruit and retain members, and persist over time?).

Developing Commitment:

Commitment develops ov er time, with early phase especially fragile, and it’s a bi-directional process. There’s a cost-benefit analysis.

It’s rational for groups to be skeptical of newcomers. Newcomers take resources from existing members. The group is more likely to be welcoming if they perceive newcomers as”deserving”. Thesis: individuals may use self-revealing introductions to signal both legitimacy and investment.

He’s looking at research questions about whether groups ignore newcomers and whether conversational strategies encourage group members to pay attention to newcomers. Looked at 99 Usenet groups, around 40k messages. They’ve seen that groups respond less to newcomers across the board, particularly in political and hobby groups. They then used machine learning to analyze messages to find self-introductory messages. Attempt to predict whether a given message will get a reply. Found that newcomers with a self-introduction are treated as well as old-timers without one. They found that messages with a group-oriented introduction (“I’ve been lurking here for a while…”) almost doubled the chance that a message would get a reply.

I wonder how this connects with the public profiles like in Facebook?

When will indivduals “join”?

Individuals evaluate potential benefits from the group. The reactions they get from initial attempts to engage the group will be especially meaningful. Hypothesis is that people will be more likely to continue to participate if people respond to them, and if the reply comes from people with higher status in the group and if they are positive in attitude. Found that only 20% of newcomers who don’t get a reply to their initial message are seen again, while 40% of those that do get a reply are active subsequently. The idea of the “welcoming committee”, like Wikipedia has, is very useful in developing commitment. The more central the replier is to the group, the more powerful it is for developing commitment of the newcomer. The tone of the welcoming language also has an effect.

I asked whether they’ve done any work in looking at the formation of new online communities and what factors might lead to success. It’s hard to research the formation of new communities because it’s hard to catch communities at the moment of formation. The problem with starting new groups is that there’s no content, so no reason for people to go there – a chicken and egg problem. One thing that helps is to find niche markets where people have a very high need for information sharing and will accept relatively low returns as worthwhile. Working with an existing organization might help.

Facebook is a fantastically successful community. Some of its success can be attributed to it having started with a small handful of communities (universities) that provide a pre-existing connection (students at the same institution), and then built on the early success, with the latest example being opening up the API to allow other people to build new services for the community.

In his courses they’ve been using Drupal because it offers lots more flexibility than course management systems. Even then they’ve had a hard time getting students to participate – so they’re learning how to issue challenges, use reputation-building systems, and other techniques to encourage participation. In on-campus communities, the hostility towards newcomers is less of a problem because people already consider themselves part of an existing collective.

DeliciousSafari – Delicious plugin for Safari

Published December 6, 2007 Uncategorized Closed

I tend to use Firefox as the main browser on all my machines for two-and-a-half reasons:

1. The Foxmarks extension keeps all my bookmarks synchronized across all of my machines.

2. The del.icio.us extension makes it just so easy to post bookmarks to pages to my del.icio.us account.

1/2. I can use all the same conventions on both my Windows and Mac machines – that’s only a half because I find myself using my Windows machines less frequently over time and because at least most of the time I do use them I use IE6.

Now it’s down to one-and-a-half reasons because I discovered DeliciousSafari, a plugin for Safari that makes it almost as easy to post as the Firefox extension. It has good features for applying tags too – but it doesn’t have the feature that the ff extension does of copying selected content on the web page you’re bookmarking into the Notes field of the del.icio.us entry. Anyway, it’s worth a try if you’re a Safari user.

Sakai conf blogging

Published December 6, 2007 Uncategorized Closed
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Bill is blogging the Sakai conference over at our eTech blog – great stuff!

Sakai conf blogging

Published December 6, 2007 Uncategorized Closed
Tags: , ,

Bill is blogging the Sakai conference over at our eTech blog – great stuff!

[ECAR 2007 Winter] Guy Creese – Should We Work In The Clould?

Published December 6, 2007 Uncategorized Closed
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Guy Creese is an Analyst with the Burton Group, talking about the Pros and Cons of Software as a Service.

During 2007 the major players have all jumped into Saas productivity applications. From Burton’s point-of-view the market is immature, but over the next couple of years there will be lots of progress and it will become a buyers’ market.

Different user types map differently into different parts along the Communication-Collaboration and Asynchronous-Synchronous axes. Some are better at living in the cloud than others, based on roles, generations, and skills.

CFOs love SaaS because they can treat it as an operating expense.

SaaS typically has faster development cycles than packaged software.

In commercial institutions SaaS is more epxensive than packaged software in the long run, though that’s not true with educational discounts.

You can configure SaaS, but not customize it. And it doesn’t usually support offline work. UIs are not as rich as local software, though that’s not quite as true as it used to be before Ajax.

A third party is hosting the content, leading to security and intellectual property concerns.

Customer has no control over product rollouts – clients instantly get what the provider releases.

Records management is difficult and requires extra qork.

Lots of players in the market now:

Adobe – going for platform-neutral collaboration, with flash-based apps. THey offer word processing (Buzzword), web conferencing (Connect), and document sharing (Share).

Cisco – Collaboration is key and will generate demand for network gear, They acquired WebEx primarily for the web conferencing, but got WebEx WebOffice in the bargain, which offers shared calendar, web meetings, email, and database.

Google – SaaS is the wave of the future. Premier/Education edition – 5+ GB mailbox, IM, Collab office apps (docs, spreadsheets, presentations), shared docs.

Microsoft – Software sandbox_comments.diff Sandbox.zip sandpress.zip services. Live@edu suite – 5 GB per mailbox, 500 MB of storage (SkyDrive), IM, Alerts, Collab.

Salesforce.com – SaaS is the wave of the future. Acquired Koral.com and is rolling it into Salesforce. Salesforce Content – Content tagging, automated content recommendations, community feedback and ratings, version control. Initially rolling out for CRM customers, but the company has worked a lot with k-12 schools.

Yahoo – strong email and API offering through the acquisition of zimbra.

Folks seem to accept as valid that SaaS is here to stay. For higher ed, better infrastructure at a lower cost is a big driver. Hosted email is the typical point of entry. Common calendar is next, then document collaboration. User segmentation is key.

Guy had a good list of evaluation questions to ask when evaluating SaaS products.

Clemson offered fac/staff an opt-in to Exchange, then asked students what they wanted, and students told them they wanted Google Apps. This semester: 1848 students opted in, but only 694 forward their clemson.edu mail there. 195 employees opted in to gmail, with 69 forwarding.

Bruce Maas from UW Milwaukee notes that the policy issues are key.\

[ECAR 2007 Winter] Guy Creese – Should We Work In The Clould?

Published December 6, 2007 Uncategorized Closed
Tags: , , ,

Guy Creese is an Analyst with the Burton Group, talking about the Pros and Cons of Software as a Service.

During 2007 the major players have all jumped into Saas productivity applications. From Burton’s point-of-view the market is immature, but over the next couple of years there will be lots of progress and it will become a buyers’ market.

Different user types map differently into different parts along the Communication-Collaboration and Asynchronous-Synchronous axes. Some are better at living in the cloud than others, based on roles, generations, and skills.

CFOs love SaaS because they can treat it as an operating expense.

SaaS typically has faster development cycles than packaged software.

In commercial institutions SaaS is more epxensive than packaged software in the long run, though that’s not true with educational discounts.

You can configure SaaS, but not customize it. And it doesn’t usually support offline work. UIs are not as rich as local software, though that’s not quite as true as it used to be before Ajax.

A third party is hosting the content, leading to security and intellectual property concerns.

Customer has no control over product rollouts – clients instantly get what the provider releases.

Records management is difficult and requires extra qork.

Lots of players in the market now:

Adobe – going for platform-neutral collaboration, with flash-based apps. THey offer word processing (Buzzword), web conferencing (Connect), and document sharing (Share).

Cisco – Collaboration is key and will generate demand for network gear, They acquired WebEx primarily for the web conferencing, but got WebEx WebOffice in the bargain, which offers shared calendar, web meetings, email, and database.

Google – SaaS is the wave of the future. Premier/Education edition – 5+ GB mailbox, IM, Collab office apps (docs, spreadsheets, presentations), shared docs.

Microsoft – Software sandbox_comments.diff Sandbox.zip sandpress.zip services. Live@edu suite – 5 GB per mailbox, 500 MB of storage (SkyDrive), IM, Alerts, Collab.

Salesforce.com – SaaS is the wave of the future. Acquired Koral.com and is rolling it into Salesforce. Salesforce Content – Content tagging, automated content recommendations, community feedback and ratings, version control. Initially rolling out for CRM customers, but the company has worked a lot with k-12 schools.

Yahoo – strong email and API offering through the acquisition of zimbra.

Folks seem to accept as valid that SaaS is here to stay. For higher ed, better infrastructure at a lower cost is a big driver. Hosted email is the typical point of entry. Common calendar is next, then document collaboration. User segmentation is key.

Guy had a good list of evaluation questions to ask when evaluating SaaS products.

Clemson offered fac/staff an opt-in to Exchange, then asked students what they wanted, and students told them they wanted Google Apps. This semester: 1848 students opted in, but only 694 forward their clemson.edu mail there. 195 employees opted in to gmail, with 69 forwarding.

Bruce Maas from UW Milwaukee notes that the policy issues are key.\

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