Web 2.0: Buzzwords

 Presentations, Technology  1 Response »
Nov 072007
 

Like any hyped tech­no­logy, Web 2.0 has a lot of buzzwords. They include the tag (as in tag cloud), the folk­sonomy, the long tail (more about that in a later post), and social soft­ware.

Social soft­ware is there to sup­port net­work­ing and social activ­it­ies via the inter­net. Lots of people spend lots of time inter­act­ing with friends online, wheth­er they’ve ever met them in per­son or not. For people who are embed­ded in that world, it’s a nat­ur­al way to inter­act. For every­one else, it can be slightly creepy to think that com­plete strangers read everything you write and know a lot about you. Lots of real-life friend­ships have blos­somed from online activ­it­ies, and more than a few prob­lems have occurred as well. The social aspect, that is people inter­act­ing with oth­er people, is prob­ably the most import­ant aspect of Web 2.0 sites.

The idea behind tags is to label things, so they’re loosely related to cat­egor­ies or (even more loosely) onto­lo­gies. Tags typ­ic­ally aren’t applied by spe­cial­ists; in keep­ing with the Web 2.0 philo­sophy they are applied by the per­son writ­ing the blog post, or upload­ing the photo, or stor­ing the book­mark. So you get near-duplic­a­tions, mis­spellings, incor­rect usages, double mean­ings etc., but at least you do have some sort of cat­egor­isa­tion applied to these bits of con­tent. And many people go to quite a lot of effort to see what sorts of tags oth­er people use, and then pick the same ones where pos­sible. This then ends up being a folk­sonomy.

Web 2.0 Tag CloudThis image shows a tag cloud, which is a col­lec­tion of tags where the tags in big fonts are the more import­ant ones (usu­ally means they show up more often). Unlike say top­ic maps or RDF, the spa­tial dis­tri­bu­tion of the tags does­n’t usu­ally mean any­thing, although in the­ory you could use it to show rela­tion­ships between the tags. Since gen­er­ally there is no form­al rela­tion­ship between them (oth­er than that from nat­ur­al lan­guage) this would be tricky to auto­mate and most people just fiddle with the cloud to make it look nice. 

The oth­er buzzwords on the slide are the import­ant ones from a couple of years ago, these days there would be a few more. There’s also a ver­sion of the slide with the words linked to the rel­ev­ant Wiki­pe­dia articles.

One of a series on Web 2.0, taken from my talk at the CSW Sum­mer School in July 2007. Here’s the series intro­duc­tion. Com­ing up next: social and col­lab­or­a­tion aspects of Web 2.0

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.

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.

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