An email message sent on 8th October 2008 to the Scotslink JISCMail list announced that “The Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC) and CILIP in Scotland (CILIPS) have just introduced Twitter to their suite of Web 2.0 services“.
When I mentioned this recently a colleague made the comment “if you Twitter in a library, does someone Twitter Shhhh! back? ;-)” But librarian stereotypes apart, I think this illustrates how information professions are now beginning to make greater use of Web 2.0 services such as Twitter, in this case to enhance communications with CILIP members and library professionals in Scotland.
As I mentioned recently UKOLN has launched a series of IntroByte briefing documents which aim to provide an introduction to various topics of relevance to the cultural heritage sector. We have started work on the production of a number of briefing paper which will covers the potential of micro-blogging services such as Twitter, as well as video micro-blogging services such as Seesmic for use in the library and the wider cultural heritage sectors.
We would welcome examples of organisations which are using such tools in the cultural heritage sector which we can include in the documents. So if your library, museum or archive is an early adopter of such technologies please get in touch with me, either directly (email to B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk) or by leaving a comment to this post.
Posted in TwitterMy colleague Paul Walk recently commented on developments to the COPAC services in a post entitled COPAC gets RESTful. Paul linked to a blog post on the COPAC developer’s blog which described how the COPAC service now provides Persistent identifiers for Copac records.
I was impressed with the COPAC blog when I came across a post which asked the question To Google or not to Google. This post raised the issue of the tensions between the user benefits of providing links to Google Books from the COPAC service and the privacy concerns expressed by “a vociferous few who questioned why Copac would give Google ‘personal data’ about them as users“.
I feel that raising these issues in an open fashion is to be applauded. And it is far better that this is done on a blog, rather than being trapped in the confines of a COPAC mailing list, which would probably only be read by hardcore COPAC users.
And this is my response to the comment made on this blog recently in which a software developer argued that “the fact that I choose not to talk about work on the internet should have no bearing on my ability to create scalable, secure, and accessible services“. I feel that the iT profession should be talking more openly with the user community and with other IT developers.
My thanks to the COPAC team for demonstrating how this should be done. Let’s hope that other national services in the JISC community follow COPAC’s lead.
Posted in Web2.0My recent talk on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference held in Singapore on 16-17th October (which was possibly the first Library 2.0 conference in Asia) brought back memories of the first time I spoke at a conference - the INET 94/JENC5 conference held in June 1994 in Prague in which I presented a paper entitled “Becoming an information provider on the WWW“.
I can recall how nervous I felt when I submitted my first paper to an international conference and wondered how I would cope with having to go onto a big stage (I later discovered that the auditorium held 1,000 people). While I was waiting to hear if the paper had been accepted I went on holiday to Victoria Falls. And wile I was there I decided to take a trip white-water rafting. After all, I convinced myself, if I can do this, I can do anything, including giving a paper at an international conference. So I did the trip - and even afterwards booked to go bunjee-jumping off the Victoria Falls Bridge (I was told it was the world’s highest commercial bunjee jump). However the jump were cancelled on the day due to bad weather, so I had to console myself with the fact that I had been white-water rafting down the mighty Zambesi. I went on to present my paper at the conference, and have subsequently spoken at international conferences held in France, Portugal, Hungary, USA, Canada, Japan, Taiwan and, most recently, Singapore. And all thanks to overcoming my nerves by going white-water rafting! (Although knowing bit about the Web probably helped too :-).
These thoughts came back to me after I’d given my talk at the Bridging Worlds conference. As I mentioned the talk was entitled “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” and in order to demonstrate an approach I take in balancing risks and benefits I described how the slides for the talk were available online with a Creative Commons licence. I also explained that I was happy for my talk to be recorded or broadcast or for the talk to be blogged live - and described that I was using a Flip video camera to record my talk, and would subsequently make this available on Google Video. I explained the reasons I was doing this. I was aware of possible risks - I might make mistakes in my talk which would be preserved for other to see, for example. However I also explained the benefits of doing this - I was speaking at the conference as I had a message I wanted to communicate, and I wanted to maximise the impact of the message and the audience - and I felt that this could be helped by the ‘amplification’ of my talk using a variety of networked technologies.
And it seems that this explanation was appreciated, with Ivan Chew (ramblinglib on Twitter) and a fellow speaker at the conference commenting:
“Brilliant: your explanation of how you weighed the risks Vs benefits of allowing others to vid/ blog/ record your talk“
Ivan went on to further summarise my talk in a subseqent blog post.
I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that many speakers do take risks when they give presentations - and that this comes with the territory. And participating in amplified conferences can then be seen as a natural extension of the risk-taking and not being fashionable or being rude.
Posted in Events, Web2.0 Tagged: bw2008Back in September I presented a paper on “Web Accessibility 3.0: Learning From The Past, Planning For The Future” at the ADDW08 conference in which I described my criticisms of the WAI approach to Web accessibility and argued the need to explore alternative approaches. Shadi Abou-Zhara, who works for W3C WAI was in the audience and after I gave my talk he said that he didn’t disagree with many of the points I had made in my talk, but didn’t see what relevance they had to the WAI approach to Web accessibility. Shadi had made a similar point after I presented a paper on “Accessibility 2.0: People, Policies and Processes” at the W4A 2007 conference.
But if Shadi has no fundamental disagreements with the holistic approach to Web accessibility that myself, David Sloan, Lawrie Phipps and other have been developing over the years how does this relate to the ongoing work of Shadi, his colleagues in W3C WAI and those involved in WAI working group activities over the years?
Reflecting on the comments Shadi made and the discussions I had at the ADDW 2008 conference with David MacDonald, an invited expert to the WCAG 2.0 group it seems to my that there is a mismatch between the work being carried out by WAI and the expectations of users of the WAI guidelines.
In response to a question about the relationships between usability and accessibility it seems that WAI’s interest is in usability only as far as it affects users with disabilities significantly more than most users. And I think this view which focusses purely on the needs of users with disabilities results in an approach which is blind to real world complexities and to the actual take-up and effectiveness of their solutions.
The developers of WAI accessibility guidelines seem to have a narrowly defined scope for their work. This seems to cover the development of technical guidelines which will enhance accessibility for users with various types of disabilities. In is not in scope for people at WAI to address the resource implications of conforming with their guidelines, the complexities of implementing the guidelines or to consider alternatives ways in which accessibility challenges can be addressed.
If these issues are out-of-scope for WAI, then there’s a need for the issues to be addressed by the user community. And this will include addressing these difficult issues. It is the user community to decide when the WAI guidelines may be the best way of providing accessible services, when other solutions may be relevant and to ensure that cost-effective and sustainable solutions are provided.
The WAI guidelines have an important role to play in helping to enhance the accessibility of networked services - but the user organisations have to make the more challenging decisions of deciding when to make use of WAI guidelines and when other solutions may be relevant.
Posted in AccessibilityI succumbed! Well, I partly succumbed, buying myself an iPod Touch, rather than an iPhone (which is illustrated, but the user interface for the two devices is similar). But I have to admit that I am impressed.
I’m particularly excited when I speculate about the digital environment we’ll be living in in a few years time. Imagine what it will be like when most people have a device like this as a replacement for the current generation of mobile phones. And combine the richness and ease-of-use of such devices with, it is to be hoped, a more pervasive and affordable networked environment. We with then have the personal information access point (Google, probably!), communications tool (such as Twitter) and location-aware tool (such as BrightKite) together with links with a desktop environment (I’m using the Netnewswire application on both my iPod Touch and my desktop PC). The digital world will be very different, I feel.
Of course the device will have its critics. Unlike the Google Android the device, the iPod Touch/iPhone’s operating system is proprietary; Google have made the operating system for Android available as open source.
And applications can only be (legitimately) installed from Apple’s walled garden - the iTunes Store.
But I think the world has moved on from the time when we seemed to prioritize certain aspects of the development environment over satisfying the user - we’re no longer dogmatic about open source and open standards, I feel; rather we seek to exploit open source and open standards if doing so can provide a satisfactory user experience. I think it’s good that we have moved to a more pragmatic approach rather than the dogmatic views we had in the past.
Yes, I like my new personal learning environment, personal research environment and personal social environment. Everyone should have one, I feel.
Posted in Web2.0The recent UKOLN workshop on “Introduction To Blogs And Social Networks For Heritage Organisations” was based on a half-day blog workshop which has been run for the library sector (on two occassions) and the museums sector at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference. The workshop has recently been updated to include a session on the potential of social networks, micro blogs and video blogs.
I described the potential of Twitter - and, indeed, made use of Twitter during the workshop in order to “ask a friend” for suggestions on how to respond to a question I’d received at the workshop: “Do you have any evidence that blogs provide a ROI for museums e.g increased visitor nos.?“. I’m pleased to say that I received a number of speedy responses on Twitter (with more in-depth responses from Mike Ellis on Skype). Phil Bradley suggested that I “smile at them and just say ‘yes, I was asked the same thing about the internet itself 10 years ago“ and Mike Ellis told me to “remember that one (actually, two, I believe) of the DCMS measures are virtual, i.e. not just physical that “counts“.
This example proved a useful way of demonstrating to the workshop participants how Skype can be used to support a community of peopkewith shared interests, and is less intrusive than email. I also mentioned how Twitter can be a useful tool for listening to what people may be saying about you and your organisation - and this use seemed to be of particular interest to the marketing managers at the workshop. So I was particularly pleased when I noticed that my TweetDeck client’s search window for recent tweets containing “UKOLN” listed a tweet from Steve Ellwood which said:
admiring UKOLN briefing docs on Web2.0/blogging etc. http://is.gd/7kcY - as usual worth a look for explaining “What’s it all for?”
Case proven?
Posted in TwitterOne Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago I observed a brief Twitter discussion between Paul Miller and Paul Walk which I found interesting. Paul Miller began by tweeted his thoughts:
Pondering… ’semantic web’ as ‘data cloud’? Cf COMPUTING Cloud metaphor
Paul Walk responded:
@PaulMiller not sure…. cloud works for processing cos we want it to be invisible commodity… want data to be more visible?
Paul Miller replied:
@paulwalk - but shouldn’t data be commoditized too? Or at least AVAILABLE for ad hoc use
and Paul Walk concluded:
@PaulMiller not commoditized - we *care* about data, it’s provenance, accuracy. I don’t want to have to care much where my cycles come from
Paul Miller then expended on his views in a blog post on “Welcome to the Data Cloud ?” and the following day Paul Walk responded with his post on “Any any any old data“.
This discussion got me thinking what should be in the cloud or, more generally, what aspects of IT can be provided outside the organisation? Some thoughts on the benefits of using a variety of outsourced services are given below:
CPU cycles: As Paul suggested, nobody cares whether the CPU cycles are provided by the computer in front of you, a server hosted within the organisation, a national service or a global service. And if those CPUs cycles are provided by an organisation which can minimise the heat losses to the environment and provide cost-effective and energy-effective delivery of the CPU cycles then this will ensure that the organisation exploiting the service is addressing its own green agenda.
Applications: It’s not just the CPU cycles which can be delivered across the network, application software need no longer by tied to the desktop PC or institutional server. We are seeing examples of this ranging from bookmark management tools such as del.icio.us through to word processing and other office applications such as Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, Adobe Buzzword, Zoho, etc.
Data hosting: As Paul Miller has suggested the Semantic Web can perhaps be regarded as a data cloud. But if this is a vision for the future, remote storage of data is very much a part of today’s IT environment, ranging form the personal data management services provided by companies such as BT through to institutional use of services such as Amazon’s S3.
Software development: Moving on from the IT infrastructure itself, we can also outsource IT development work. We are familiar with this from JISC’s development activities in which software development is funded by project money to develop software which is intended for deployment across the community.
Data creation, input and management: I recently read a press release entitled “Amazon Mechanical Turk Launches New Web-Based Tools That Bring the Power of an On-Demand Workforce to Businesses Worldwide” which announced the launch of “a new set of web-based tools for Amazon Mechanical Turk that make it easy for businesses to use Mechanical Turk to outsource work to an on-demand, scalable workforce via a simple graphical interface - in just a few minutes and without writing any code“. So yes, data input, metadata creation and management, etc can now be more easily out-sourced. There’s now need to have large teams of data preparation staff in your organisation - although, of course, this has been the case for some time now.
Policies: If institutional or sectoral policies are too onerous to comply with, you could choose to outsource your services which are more flexible. Consider, for example, the terms and conditions which cover registration for the UK Government communities forum which I blogged about recently. If you feel these terms and conditions are too stringent you can also make use of an alternative environment for hosting discussions.
Now there will be many issues which need to be addressed if organisations wish to make greater use of the out-sourcing options which are now available (sustainability, reliability, security, legal and ethical issues, etc.). But is the future, I wonder, a world in which organisations focus on their own strengths and the services which only they can provide, with the chore activities being provided by others? After all, as Andy Powell reported in his live blog summary of a talk by Sam Peters, Google, “does anyone get a competetive advantage by running their own email system?” (posted at 09.57). But if this future does appear to have much to offer we will need to develop a framework to support institutions in making such policy decisions. Out-sourcing metadata management to an environment which is more flexible, responsive and provides benefits of scale sounds great - but not if the work is out-sourced to children working in IT sweatshops. We will need, I feel, an equivalent of Fair Trade which ensures that the benefits are provided by more effective use of technologies and better management and not by exploitation.
Posted in Web2.0Earlier today I ran a half-day workshop entitled “Introduction To Blogs And Social Networks For Heritage Organisations“. This workshop was commissioned by ASVA (Association of Scottish Visitor Attractions, following a seminar I gave on “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs And Social Networks” at the Museums and Heritage Show.
The workshop made use of a series of briefing documents which have been developed to support the cultural heritage sector. As well as the documents which have been published the workshop also provided an opportunity to receive feedback on a number of additional documents we have produced, including An Introduction to Twitter and An Introduction to Seesmic (the video micro-blogging tool).
A number of other briefing document were used in two day-long workshops which were commissioned by CyMAL to support staff working in museums, libraries and archives in Wales. These events, entitled Sharing Made Simple: A Practical Approach To Social Software, provided a broader overview of the potential of Web 2.0 in cultural heritage organisations, and also addressed barriers to the take-up of Web 2.0 and strategies for addressing such barriers.
The feedback we receive on the documents (and on the need for additional documents) is an important part of the quality assurance processes for the resources. It should also be noted that we are making these documents available under a Creative Commons licence and encourage their reuse.
This approach to use of Creative Commons for resources I’ve created over the past few years has been taken primarily in order to maximise the impact of the content of the resources. And I would encourage others to do likewise. However, as Scott Leslie has recently described in a blog post on “Planning to Share versus Just Sharing” there is a real danger of encountering “frustration with ineffective institutional collaborations“. The summary of Scott’s post exhorts readers to “grow your network by sharing, not planning to share or deciding who to share with“.
This approach reflects the views expressed by Mike Ellis and myself in a paper entitled “Web 2.0: How to Stop Thinking and Start Doing: Addressing Organisational Barriers” presented at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference. As I described in blog post back in July 2007 back then the cry was “Just do it!“. A year on, despite the economic problems we’re facing, the recent US election result seems to have resulted in a more positive approach to the world and a willingness to makes changes. So perhaps our cry should now be “Set up a blog? Use Creative Commons for our resources? Yes, we can!“
Posted in Blog, opennessIn my post on Openness in HE but not Elsewhere I suggested that requiring users to agree to complex terms and conditions in order to respond to (and, even worse, view) discussions on government policies was counter-productive. A post entitled It’s not a blog if…… on the JISC Access Management Team blog is in agreement with these sentiments.
Mark Williams describes another barrier to the use of blogs for effective dialogue. In his post he complains about his “wasted effort on writing replies on a couple of blogs this week only to find that after a suitable period for much needed moderation (after all IT forums are hardly the place to endorse male vitality products) the sites are clearly not putting any replies / comments up“. Marks feels that “If a an opinion piece doesn’t have scope for comments then that’s what it is - a magazine style opinion piece not a blog“.
I would agree with that. Yes, there may be a cost in deleting inappropriate comments, but this need not be onerous, and I think it is worth spending some effort in allowing users to give their thoughts and comments.
Posted in BlogPublished back in September, Martin Weller’s post on Twitter, microblogging and living in the stream included an embedded presentation from Slideshare which contained a number of analogies for Twitter including suggestions that Twitter is:
- A digital watercooler
- A stream you dip into
- A cocktail party
- A virtual office
- What knowledgement always wanted to be
- Networking for Agoraphobics
Some of these examples had been floating around the ‘Twitterverse’ for some time. Indeed several months ago I coined a number of analogies for Twitter and when Martin (and others) recently asked for such examples I tried to find my tweets on the subject. I thought this would be easy - I’d just have to either browse through my old tweets or search for a tweet from me containing the string ‘analogy’.
However with some further searching I discovered I discovered that I could use the search interface on my Friendfeed account to find a number of my missing tweets, as illustrated.
So I can now create links to the copy of my tweets which can be found in Friendfeed including Twitter is:
- Spouting off to strangers about the state of the government, trains, repositories, … [link]
- The family conversation [link]
- The digital watercooler for teetotallers who don’t talk to strangers in pubs [link]
- The bar where everyone knows your name; you’re greeted by the coffee drinkers’ footie fans share moments of joy [link]
What have I learnt from this? I now realise that the tweets which summarise ideas I might wish to expand on or the tweets from others which I may want to follow up will not necessarily be easily found again, and not because of problems with the Twitter service itself but because it may not provide access to the data.
Does this mean I shouldn’t be using Twitter, because of these limitations? I would say no - in many cases I don’t care about the old tweets. Indeed I regard Twitter, like an increasing number of Web services, not as a well-defined and reproducible IT service but as a blended service, which has more parallels with real life. And as I don’t lose any sleep over the pearls of wisdom which I may have shared with others in the pub which I then find I can’t remember, so this is how I regard Twitter. And if I do want to keep a record of useful tweets I’ll do what I did for the list of tweets on useful Web 2.0 music sites and document the resources somewhere.
Posted in Web2.0
