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Listphile – a man thing?
(via Dan Taylor) I have had a play with Listphile a site that lets you (yes you’ve guessed it) create and share lists. Yes, that’s it – it never ceases to amaze me how small some of the ideas behind these web 2.0 startups are. You create a list which you can pull different media in to and others can edit it. Although it’s a small idea, you can see how this might grow. Rather like the real world, in the online world there is an almost infinite variety of very small ecological niches that some company (organism) will exploit. Making and sharing lists won’t change your life, but it…
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Teach the people – would you sign up?
Teach the People is a social networking site with an emphasis on learning. It’s not up and running yet, so I’ve registered for a beta invite. It has more of a content focus than a lot of the other sites, claiming that "Instead of just messaging with other users like on traditional social networking services, users on Teach The PeopleSM are creating their own communities for fun, education, innovation; whatever! User can then fill those communities with as much content & media as they desire" I hope it works, but I’m not sure myself, and this was based on my initial reaction – I didn’t instantly get the point as…
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Shaming yourself in to action
I like this: in an attempt to shame himself into losing weight, Kerry Buckley has a Big Visible Belly graph showing on his blog, which shows his fluctuation around his ideal weight – over and it records in red and under it shows in green. This use of the blog to expose some aspect of yourself to the audience and thus force action got me thinking. What else could you use it for? I would probably like to record my running, with a weekly target. But anything you procrastinate over would be a contender – you could go for study hours, progress through Remembrance of Things Past, number of alcohol…
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Facebook and Twitter – the status wars
I’ve decided to give Twitter another go (you can see it on the sidebar there if you’re reading this in the blog). What inspired me was a couple of posts – from David Warlick who relates how Twitter was used at a conference and Ewan McIntosh who asks for the Twitter details of people attending the Scottish Learning Festival, so they can create a page of reflections on the conference. It seemed to me that maybe having a Twitter identity was a professional requirement, a component of the essential modern identity an educational technologist should construct. But my problem is I’ve tried before and not established it as a habit…
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The nature, and limit, of friends
My (real) friend from university, Will Reader, has done some research on Facebook friends recently, which the Guardian and others have picked up on. They are all running it as an ‘online friends aren’t real’ type story. But I think this isn’t what Will was saying. What he actually says is "Although the numbers of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the actual number of close friends is approximately the same in the face to face real world," Previous research suggests that the maximum number of friends you could manage socially or cognitively was around 150, known as Dunbar’s number. What Will’s research was doing was looking…
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Why headlines don’t matter
A few people have blogged about this report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism. They compared what constituted the headlines for online stories, and traditional media. They put it like this: If someday we have a world without journalists, or at least without editors, what would the news agenda look like? How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people? Which they did by looking at the top stories on sites such as Digg compared with those from traditional providers. The takeaway (amongst some interesting stuff) is "In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three…
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My first slidecast
As part of the broadcast strategy review at the OU, I wanted to show the different types of outputs that academics can produce which might be considered broadcast in some sense. One of these is slidecasting (the combination of powerpoint and audio). I upload my powerpoint files to Slideshare regularly, so thought I’d try adding the audio to one too. It’s a bit fiddly – you have to upload the audio to a different site, as Slideshare don’t host it (yet). Synching the audio with slides took a bit of getting used to (I even had to look at the help splashcast), but once I had the hang of it,…
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FB – It can’t be private and not a walled garden
(Warning – this post contains some dangerously stretched garden metaphors). There have been lots of mutterings about Facebook being a walled garden recently, for instance danah boyd ponders I am utterly confused by the ways in which the tech industry fetishizes Facebook. There’s no doubt that Facebook’s F8 launch was *brilliant*. Offering APIs and the possibility of monetization is a Web 2.0 developer’s wet dream. (Never mind that I don’t know of anyone really making money off of Facebook aside from the Poker App guy.) But what I don’t understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook. What am I missing here? Why…
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Apple used to be so open…
I’m reading ‘Founders at Work’ at the moment (quite an interesting read, I’ll probably summarise the key issues in a later post). I know (or knew anyway) a lot about the start of the computer industry, having created a course on it, so I was more interested in the net start ups. But there is an interview with Steve Wozniak in there, in which he says of the Apple II (my italics) "It was just open to all these things. We made it easy for anyone to do what they wanted to do. And I think that was one of the biggest keys to its success. We didn’t make…
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NYT enters education market, and the changing nature of newspapers
The New York Times has announced an inititiative that will provide content and social networking to students and educators. They claim it is "a new online initiative that pairs Times content with faculty course material for both credit-bearing and continuing education courses. Educators will now have the opportunity to select Times articles, archival content, graphics and multimedia content, including videos and Webcasts, gathered around specific subjects, and make them available to students online, along with other course materials" Perhaps more interestingly they edge towards a ‘Facebook for learning’ when they propose "In addition to enhanced course offerings for college students and lifelong learners, the Knowledge Network will serve as a…
