Entries Tagged 'Webgeeking' ↓

I recently ran across the web based Mindmeister while reading about the proceedings of a recent NZKM conference on the blog of the prolific Michael Sampson. The map seen there that inspired me was drawn by my old friend Julian Carver who I really must get back in touch with. It’s very cool, and it imports Freemind files, which is the free app I used for the map I did for my 2.0 talk. I feel much better having the map in a web-friendly format :-)

It’s pretty impressive how you can drag the nodes around and actually do one or two things you can’t do with Freemind, but there are definitely a few kinks to be worked out, eg I had problems when one node was on top of another, and kept selecting the one underneath. Printing also wasn’t too flash.

It’s way too big to use as an embed really, but I can’t resist playing around, so here it is. You can zoom from the bottom left and click through to the larger version from the bottom right.

[update: removed it - slowing down the page a bit much, I should probably get in touch with them with performance tips for embedded javascript widgets... Here's a link to it tho - and if you haven't seen Mindmeister in action, seriously check it out. Most impressive Ajax I've seen in ages]

Actually I’ve thought of another thing I could say when people ask what Web 3.0 means….Wittgenstein says “Meaning is Use” (roughly speaking) and therefore Web 3.0’s meaning is bound to whatever use people put that phrase to. In general, I think they use it to mean “Some funky web stuff that supposedly wasn’t part of Web 2.0″

Unfortunately the meaning of Web 2.0 is vastly more complicated, because people use the phrase for all sorts of purposes.

Fortunately more organized minds than mine are pushing things forwards on BarCampChristchurch after I kicked the ball into motion.

Ben Kepes has signed up as co-planner, so I’m only half as stressed about it now :-)

The chaps from OnlineGroups.net set us up a free discussion group using their wizzo ad-free groupmail system. They’re making the same offer to anyone running a barcamp anywhere in the world, very much fitting in with the “gift economy” that Barcamp encourages. The discussion there is taking over from the TVIC mailing list, which you should also be on if you’re in Christchurch. There will be a BarCampChristchurch2 at some point, so you might as well join the list even if you’re not sure if you’re coming to the first one!

Lots of people have added their names to the wiki. Despite the fact that it seems to barf every time you try to edit it (just hit refresh…)

I’m particularly looking forward to Joel talking about the Singularity (trivia: I met Joel after looking for something to link from the word “Singularity” on my Technoprogress page), Ben talking about SaaS, and Marek on OpenID. I’m sure there will be many more topics of interest, so anyone who can make it, should do so!

Anyone is also welcome to come to a meeting at CII, 200 Armagh St, 11am Friday 31st where we’ll confirm as many details as we can, then go have lunch somewhere.

If you’re thinking you’ll be coming, make sure you add yourself as a participant on the Wikipage! It seems to me that every time I try to edit the page it throws a 500 error and I have to hit reload, but it works on the reload. Weird…I will have to ping Chris about that…[update: I found the issue thread about this on the PBWiki Bugs forum and posted there]

Along with Carl from e2-media I gave a talk on Web 2.0 tonight, to 20 or so folks from the Canterbury Software Cluster. Just 20 minutes each, and it was frightening how fast those minutes wizzed by.

I was particularly pleased that a few folks there told me that they’d been been using Interclue and enjoying it. Thanks very much to Dave Tinkler of Holliday Corporation for inviting me to speak and helping to steer me in the right direction as I began to run out of time!

It was good to have an excuse to talk about the 2.0 Big Picture for once. Normally I lose people in the first few sentences…for a more gentle introduction, I’ve got some great videos on my 2.0 page linked in my menu above.

Of course lots of folks wanted to know what I thought Web 2.0 really is, and I put forward my opinion that “Web 2.0 is what Tim O’Reilly says it is“. I’m at least half serious about that. Tim and his company have been the thought leaders of this revolution, almost as much as they’ve just been “Watching the alphageeks” as Tim calls it. Of course they wanted specifics, so I gave them Tim’s compact definition, which is:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

If I’d tried to give them the long version I would have been there all night…

Of course, I live in a slightly different universe to most folks, so I was somewhat thrown by the followup question “So, who is Tim O’Reilly anyway?”. This is why I love the web. We can explain these things with hyperlinks, and not slow down the information flow for the people who already know. Interclue makes it even better because you can view the main body content at the end of the hyperlinks in the context of the current page, without all the cruft around the outside of the page that could distract you off into the distance.

I wasn’t quite sure which bits of 2.0 the audience was going to be interested in, but I had faith in my ability to wing it, so I prepared a little mindmap of the various things 2.0ish that have caught my attention over the past couple of years (distracting me and slowing down the progress of Interclue quite considerably as a result). Unfortunately it’s a bit large. Click the image for a version large enough to actually read!

Also please note that this certainly isn’t a map of all things 2.0 - just the people, projects, platforms and protocols that I think I know a little bit about. And it’s not a complete map of those either.

I wish I’d had time to highlight the bits I find particularly interesting/important, hyperlink relevant articles, and add some more detail, but I’ll regard this as a starting point and post an update later. If anyone sees something they want to have a chat about, feel free to get in touch, or just leave a comment about something they’d like me to blog about in the future.

Last weekend they held what might have been the world’s largest unconference - BarCampBlock, which essentially took up a whole block of Palo Alto. From the look of the photos, and the bloggance around it, everyone had a great time.

I think it’s about time we bought the Barcamp meme to Christchurch, and the people on the TVIC mailing list, and others I’ve talked to, all seem pretty keen on the concept. You can read (and add to) the plan on the BarCampChristchurch wikipage here, or just put yourself down as an attendee.

Unconferences are a neat idea. To some extent they’re an “agile” methodology - but for conferences, not software. They don’t require a lot of upfront planning, and they can work around hiccups quite well.

The Barcamp model of unconference is based on the Foo Camp model, like the one I went to earlier this year, the main differences being that Barcamps not invite-only, anyone is welcome to turn up, if they feel they can add to the occasion. As with the SCA, and Burning Man, there are no spectators, only participants.

Everyone turns up at the beginning, registers, and introduces themselves - using 3 words only. At Kiwi Foo I chose “Attention Deficit Infojunkie.” while Rod Drury picked “Stock Options, Hiring.” - while most other people had at least one programming language of choice in their 3 words!

Then everyone writes down on a big sheet of paper what they’re going to talk about and when. So the agenda is set on the day, but you can announce what you think you’re going to be talking about on the wiki beforehand, and you can also make suggestions of what you’d like to see talked about. I’ve made several over on the wiki, and wll be contacting those people in turn. A few of them have already indicated interest.

But the organisation is very much a shared effort. Anyone who thinks they can contribute is very welcome to do so. Something that would be great to get early on is a logo :-)

Barcamp is a worldwide phenomena, and there are more and more of them being run all over the place, but somehow New Zealand seems to have missed out so far. There’s one coming up in Wellington, but I was thinking we might pip them at the post and host the first one here in Christchurch. I’ve talked to several people about it and there’s a lot of interest.

Everyone who attends should do a presentation, even if it’s a short one. I think we should make the default time 30min, but some people may want to go 15min instead, or 45min, or an hour. You don’t have to do a demo or bring slides, and you can leave as much time as you want for chat. Depending on how many people we get, we’ll do up to three streams.
Some sessions could be in panel format, if people want to run them that way.

You do not have to be as interesting as a TED speaker.

You certainly don’t have to do as much prep as Steve Jobs does.

But if you want to get a standing ovation, I recommend reading this article by Guy Kawasaki.

I’ll post some more links to articles about giving presentations once I dig them out of my notes collection.

From The rules of BarCamp

• 1st Rule: You do talk about Bar Camp.
• 2nd Rule: You do blog about Bar Camp.
• 3rd Rule: If you want to present, you must write your topic and name in a presentation slot.
• 4th Rule: Only three word intros.
• 5th Rule: As many presentations at a time as facilities allow for.
• 6th Rule: No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists.
• 7th Rule: Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation slot.
• 8th Rule: If this is your first time at BarCamp, you HAVE to present. (Ok, you don’t really HAVE to, but try to find someone to present with, or at least ask questions and be an interactive participant.)

Ben, a very smart fellow Cantabrian who’s blogging up a storm about SaaS lately suggests my prediction of 5-10 years of useful life left in the standard email platform might be a little er, optimistic. Perhaps. But we live not just in interesting times, but accelerating times. Things change faster than they once did. I’ll stick by my aggressive prediction because I know I’ve been vague enough about what I’m really predicting to get away with it. ;-)

There are essentially two reasons I suggested that email as we know it, ie as based on SMTP/POP3/IMAP, will be gradually replaced with something better and browser/HTTP based. The first reason is that email is a significant source of pain for users and even worse for systems administrators. The second reason is that the existing plethora of clients, servers and gateway applications that deal with email means that it’s more or less impossible to make any significant upgrades across the ecosystem.

Ok, just looking at the pains for users, here are some things that are wrong with email at the moment. The list of pains for the poor benighted sysadmins is just as long, but I just don’t have time right now (and may not have time for weeks, already wasted too much time on this really, Interclue really needs 150% of my attention at the moment)

Security - it’s too much hassle, and most people just can’t be bothered. Microsoft, for some unknown reason, doesn’t want Outlook to have PGP, most PGP/GPG solutions for Windows are either flaky or a pain to set up, and they’re not all compatible with eachother. Alternative mail security solutions exist but aren’t as common and are probably just as hard to set up.

File Attachments - The brokeness of email attachments has led to about a bazillion online services that try to make this bit easier.

Confirmations - you can ask for a confirmation that someone’s read a bit of mail, but they don’t have to send it. Frankly I’d just like a confirmation that they *got* the mail and it didn’t end up in a spam/virus filter somewhere.

Lock-ins - using your ISP’s provided email address locks you into that ISP, because they don’t want to risk losing emails from long lost friends. ISPs love this. Ditto hotmail/gmail/etc. Switching mail clients can be just as much of a pain due to the problems of getting all your mail archives in one place so you can search them.

Mobile email - a pain, and remarkably inconsistent. Email from a friend of mine in the UK will usually end up in my spam filter because it has some unusual stuff in the headers or whatever.

“Rich” email - if you use HTML in mail it can trigger spam filters, and you are less able to rely on it getting to the other end. To make matters worse (well, actually there are pros and cons) Outlook 2007 changed the layout engine it uses for rendering HTML mail, to something more secure but it increases the difficulty of getting something in the right format.

Viruses - Existing email protocols make it to easy for them to spread - for instance by allowing them to fake the sender header so that you have no idea who sent you the virus.

Spam - The problems regarding spam, well, you could write a book on them. Sure, if you want people to be able to contact people who aren’t already on their list of contacts, or you want the ability to contact people anonymously, then there will always be spam, but existing email protocols and practices just make it way too easy.

Antispam - Almost as irritating as spam is all the problems that can result from the security measures taken by various users and systems to stop spam from getting in, which often get in the way of legitimate email as well.

Depending on the situation you’re in, you might also have trouble with Search, Archiving, Backups, Filtering, File corruption, Software Updates, Virus Checkers…there are a lot of things that can go wrong or were designed wrong with desktop email clients. Some webmail clients are just as bad. I’ll save them for another post.

I have a pile of MoCo bloggers in my feed reader, and I’ve noticed that most of the chatter around the call to action that inspired my post seems to be about what they’re going to do with Thunderbird and why. Only Myk appears to have picked up the thread of building “something better”. But I suspect the seed has been planted and we shall see more of this particular meme.