Web 2.0: Introduction

 Presentations, Technology  1 Response »
Nov 062007
 

At the CSW XML Sum­mer School this year I gave a talk on Web 2.0, in the Trends and Tran­si­ents track. I’ve been pon­der­ing wheth­er to write it up as a series of post­ings or not; there’s so much hype and inform­a­tion around Web 2.0 that many people are bored silly with it now. I decided it’s prob­ably worth­while since I found some ways of organ­iz­ing the fea­tures com­monly asso­ci­ated with Web 2.0 that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

I’ve cre­ated a series of posts, of which this is the first. The links will become act­ive as I pub­lish the posts.

  1. Buzzwords
  2. Social and Collaboration
  3. Tech­nic­al
  4. Pro­cess
  5. Issues

The big thing about Web 2.0 is the concept that lots of people want to have a say, and that many of them have some­thing valu­able to say. The idea is that sys­tems that give people a voice, and that enable them to take part in dis­cus­sions, have value. It’s no longer the case that only spe­cial­ists or celebrit­ies can have their opin­ions pub­lished, ordin­ary people can too. This idea that users can cre­ate the con­tent that oth­er users read or view has its detract­ors of course, but they tend to be out­numbered by the pro­ponents (or is it just that the pro­ponents are louder?).

The mar­ket­ing hype tends to over­shad­ow everything of course, and now we’re get­ting into the silly sea­son where every new idea is labelled with its own Web x.x vari­ant. Pretty soon we’ll be repla­cing the num­ber and append­ing the year, just like happened with oper­at­ing sys­tems, then with names taken from obscure or made-up lan­guages. Web 2.0 as a fea­ture set is, how­ever, worthy of atten­tion, even if the mar­ket­ing hype gets a bit much.

I’m not going to dis­cuss new devel­op­ments such as Google’s OpenSo­cial API in this series; it’s too new for me to be able to say any­thing use­ful on wheth­er it will change the big pic­ture, or just the details.

If you’re look­ing for a pub­lic­a­tion with a lot of detail, try O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Radar Report. It’s expens­ive, but it has a lot of mater­i­al and ref­er­ences in it, as well as recom­mend­a­tions for best prac­tices. Worth read­ing if you have to make bet-the-com­pany busi­ness decisions about this stuff.

XML 2007 Last-Call Deadline

 Conference  No Responses »
Aug 302007
 

The XML 2007 talk sub­mis­sion dead­line is loom­ing; there’s only one this year (and it’s this Fri­day, August 31st!), so if you miss it, you miss out. I’m one of the review­ers. If you want a high grade if I’m assigned your paper to review, read these hints on writ­ing good abstracts first. 

Since the talk sub­mis­sions are blind-reviewed, the only thing I have to go on is the qual­ity of the abstract. Here’s the check-list I go through.

  • Is the abstract long enough? Abstracts that are too short don’t give enough inform­a­tion for me to judge the qual­ity prop­erly. Remem­ber, I don’t know who you are when I read the abstract.
  • Does the abstract say why the sub­ject is import­ant, as well as what the talk will cov­er? Both of these are neces­sary to let people know why they should both­er going to the talk.
  • Are tech­nic­al terms and acronyms used cor­rectly? If these are wrong, I will tend to assume you don’t know what you’re talk­ing about and grade appropriately.
  • Is the gram­mar and spelling cor­rect? I appre­ci­ate a well-craf­ted, gram­mat­ic­ally cor­rect abstract and will tend to assume someone who can write a good abstract can also write a good talk.
  • Who’s the expec­ted audi­ence? The abstract should make it clear who is expec­ted to bene­fit most from hear­ing the talk, wheth­er that’s novice or expert, tech­ie or manager.
  • Does this look like a product pitch? If so, it’s prob­ably not suitable.

Home from Oxford

 Conference  2 Responses »
Jul 312007
 

As usu­al, the trip to the XML Sum­mer School in Oxford was excel­lent. I learned a lot and met some inter­est­ing people and had fun too, even though I’ve decided that two trips to Europe, with a one-year-old, in 26 days, is a little too much travel in a short peri­od of time. The XML Sum­mer School had day­care, oth­er­wise I really would­n’t have been able to cope. I think the baby enjoyed the trip as well; she made lots of new friends and I star­ted call­ing her “Prin­cess” because of the way she waved and simpered. I am extremely grate­ful for all the work the Sum­mer School organ­isers and the day­care people put in to make the trip as easy as possible.

I did­n’t see a lot of the flood­ing and was only tan­gen­tially affected by it; I do have memor­ies of the water slosh­ing around on the arrivals floor in Ter­min­al 1 when I arrived on the morn­ing of Fri­day 20th July and the attempts people were mak­ing to stop it going down into the base­ment where the Tube and the tun­nels to get to oth­er parts of the air­port are loc­ated. The tun­nel out of Heath­row was down to one lane and it was closed in the oth­er dir­ec­tion. I was­n’t sur­prised to learn later that sev­er­al flights had been cancelled.

Although in the centre of Oxford, where we were, there were few signs of the floods (a couple of roads closed off), sur­round­ing areas were strongly affected. One friend who cycled in to meet us at the pub crawl on Wed­nes­day found it sur­real that his area was full of sand­bags and people pan­ick­ing about the rising ground­wa­ter, while a short bike ride away people were going shop­ping, going to the pub, and gen­er­ally behav­ing the way they would without the floods.

The punt­ing was can­celled of course, the Cher­well was just too high and too fast for it to be safe; there was a cer­tain amount of nervous­ness about los­ing a del­eg­ate or two.

Punts on the Cherwell River by the Boathouse

Before the Sum­mer School star­ted, I met up with a friend on the Sunday for lunch. We went to The Fishes in North Hink­sey, a cute little place with a ver­andah and a play­ground and a pic­nic area. Which would have been great for the baby to crawl around in, if it had­n’t been under a cer­tain amount of water at the time.

flooded_playground flooded_picnic_area

All in all, I was quite glad to see the sun again when I got home to Van­couver, and to be happy we don’t live on a flood plain.

Summer in Oxford

 Conference, Travel  1 Response »
Jun 272007
 

Most years I get to speak at the XML Sum­mer School put on by CSW in late July in Oxford, Eng­land. Last year I did­n’t go since I’d just had a baby 6 weeks before and the fam­ily suc­ceeded in talk­ing me out of it. This year I’m going again. It should be a lot of fun; the idea of the school is to get a bunch of experts as teach­ers who go along with the attendees to all the social events, so the attendees can ask ques­tions while every­one is in the pub or wan­der­ing around the Old Bodlei­an Lib­rary. Ques­tions while punt­ing are best not dir­ec­ted at the punter, of course, and the rest of us are usu­ally too busy laugh­ing anyway.

With ses­sions on web ser­vices (includ­ing iden­tity and secur­ity), con­tent and know­ledge with XML, XSLT, XSL-FO and XQuery, Teach Your­self Onto­logy (that one’s new this year!), Build­ing XML Applic­a­tions, and XML in Health­care, there’s lots to choose from. I’ll have to choose which days I attend care­fully, there’s always too much going on.

I’m speak­ing in the Trends and Tran­si­ents track (which I chair each year, even when I’m not there) with Jeni Ten­nison and Dan Con­nolly; I’m talk­ing about Web 2.0 while they’re talk­ing XML Pro­cessing and Micro­formats respect­ively. I even got my present­a­tion deck fin­ished, and only a couple of days late! For the last ses­sion of the day, I get the oth­er track chairs to spend five minutes telling us what they think are this year’s hyped or under-appre­ci­ated tech­no­lo­gies, fol­lowed by a pan­el ses­sion of all the day’s speak­ers. There is always some con­tro­versy around people’s opin­ions, even of these sup­posedly dry tech­nic­al sub­jects. For a sample, check out the You­Tube video of Bob DuCh­arme’s talk (rant?) last year (the video and sound qual­ity’s not great, but adequate).

CSW is offer­ing a spe­cial deal this year, speak­ers get a spe­cial code that people can use for a dis­count on regis­tra­tion. So if you are think­ing of attend­ing, email me for the code, either at my Sun email address or my Tex­tu­al­ity email address. Unless you’ve already got a code from one of the oth­er speak­ers of course… 

SLA

 Conference, Presentations, Technology  1 Response »
Jun 012007
 

Last night I was part of a pan­el speak­ing to the SLA WCC. This is an inter­est­ing bunch of people, the lib­rar­i­ans for vari­ous com­pan­ies, gov­ern­ment depart­ments, and of course uni­ver­sit­ies. The pan­el (every­one else was a lib­rar­i­an) was speak­ing about blogs and wikis and how they are being used with­in their organ­iz­a­tions. To be more pre­cise, the oth­er four speak­ers talked about how their organ­iz­a­tions use these tech­no­lo­gies, while I did a bit of a wrap-up at the end with lots of pretty pic­tures, talk­ing about some of the things people need to think about when deploy­ing. My slides are here; be warned that the file is fairly big (all those pictures!)

With five speak­ers in not much more than an hour, we did­n’t have a lot of time to go into detail. Check out the pro­gramme for the list of speak­ers and a brief sum­mary of what they talked about.

One thing I found inter­est­ing when talk­ing to people at the meet­ing was the almost uni­ver­sal theme of how hard it was to get the IT depart­ment to do things. The suc­cess­ful deploy­ments either had the ini­ti­at­ive come down from on high, so IT had to imple­ment it, or they were using out­side-hos­ted free ser­vices (which has its own issues). 

And then there was the issue of get­ting people to con­trib­ute to the wiki or blog; not as easy as it may sound. Tracey Car­mi­chael talked about how the BC Secur­it­ies Com­mis­sion uses a wiki intern­ally to track new types of invest­ments, and poin­ted out that many people who have strong opin­ions in dis­cus­sions did­n’t want to com­mit those to a wiki. She thought maybe they were nervous of writ­ing some­thing that was later found to be incor­rect; I wondered how much is due to people not wish­ing to be seen to speak for oth­ers. These sorts of issues prob­ably also have a large organ­iz­a­tion­al cul­ture com­pon­ent to them — in Sun I haven’t noticed any reti­cence to using wikis (except for maybe a lack of time and motiv­a­tion for con­trib­ut­ing con­tent) so they are used a lot for pro­jects in my experience.

Northern Voice Weekend

 Conference, Vancouver  No Responses »
Feb 212007
 

The week­end is going to be full of North­ern Voice, I can just tell. The must-dos for me are the din­ner on the Thursday even­ing (sorry, sold out), the uncon­fer­ence day on the Fri­day (I’ll be going to the ses­sion on iden­tity and pri­vacy of course, and whatever else takes my fancy once I’m there), and mod­er­at­ing a couple of ses­sions on the Sat­urday after­noon (Nancy White and Alex Water­house-Hay­ward and Dar­ren Bare­foot). Some of the ses­sions I’d like to go to clash with oth­ers as is always the case at any half-way decent con­fer­ence, but unlike lots of con­fer­ences this one should be extens­ively pod­cast. Not quite the same as being in a ses­sion, but a good second.

I hope to have more blog­ging energy after this con­fer­ence. Recently I’ve felt like I’ve spent more time on meta-issues than actu­ally blog­ging; I’ve been trawl­ing for break-ins on my site and sift­ing through access logs most days rather than craft­ing prose. With all the pass­words on my site now changed, and the latest WP installed, all I need to get back to writ­ing is a bit of inspir­a­tion. In past years North­ern Voice has sup­plied that; hope­fully this year it will again. 

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