More on Sidewiki

Having written about searching Sidewiki a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been  reading a bit more about it and I’ve also been been playing about with the API.

I’m approaching Sidewiki from the perspective of someone who is involved with a brand and wants to ensure I understand Sidewiki’s potential as another conversation channel before/in case it is adopted in a wide-scale way.

In order to help me do this  I created a couple of Yahoo Pipes that use the Sidewiki API – one takes a URL and checks the API for Sidewiki entries (in a similar way to Claude Vedovini’s  Sidewikirss) and then another which takes a list of URL’s in a CSV file.  I then thought about another pipe using an RSS feed (e.g. to easily pick up all comments across a blog) however by that stage I discovered the limitations of the API.  I saw someone selling commercial software that could be useful but they recognised the limitations – they were the people that put me on to the idea that the API only surfaces comments that have been liked.  From my reading around the subject I  think that the API is actually much more severe than this – basing what it shows on an alogorithm.  As far as I can tell this means that the only way of checking your site for comments is by visiting every page (and every variation of each URI – something that is impossible to do – see parameter-ised URI below) with a version of Firefox or IE with the Google ToolBar installed and Sidewiki operating!

My frustrations with the API combined with some of the very negative posts I had read and I started wondering whether in releasing Sidewiki Google had broken their “Do no evil” mantra. This is  something that would sadden me as I’ve always been a bit of a Google fanboy.

I’m not naive enough to think that a brand is in control of how it is perceived, nor that there is anyway that you can follow every conversation involving your brand.  So I thoughtsome more and decided, that excepting that potentially rogue content can be positioned next to your own within the browser, Sidewiki comments are no different from those found on Facebook (a truly walled garden in which conversations can easily be missed).  Then I came across this excellent Neville Hobson post and I felt that much of my thunder had been stolen.  However Neville’s post raises some interesting issues for me:

1. The idea of Sidewiki as a commenting platform.  I don’t think this is something that brand/website owners should encourage mainly because comment monitoring is so difficult.  For example Neville invites people to leave a Sidewiki comment on http://www.nevillehobson.com/.  People might see this and assume that Neville has got the monitoring in place for http://www.nevillehobson.com/2009/10/25/opportunity-knocks-with-google-sidewiki/ or for http://www.nevillehobson.com/2009/10/25/opportunity-knocks-with-google-sidewiki/#comments and other URLs.  However such monitoring may only be visible from your website logs – and then only if you know what you are looking for, e.g I’ve commented on this:. http://malleablemusings.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/searching-sidewiki/?putsomethingherejusttoshowthatit’snotthesamepagewithoutthisparamete.
2. Google have provided a mechanism for page owners to provide a top placed comment in the side wiki.  However you need to do this on every page on your site.  What’s more there is no such option on public sites in which your brands might be investing, e.g. think how much time and energy you might push into your Facebook Fan pages or You Tube Channels etc. (e.g. this video from UNSW has a Sidewiki entry).

I know that there are Sidewiki Policies which supposedly provides some protection against vandalism (I don’t like using that word – as I see them as comments that need to be responded to). However for me the bigger issue is that Sidewiki isn’t searchable (it looks like Google isn’t indexing sidewiki entries and may be removing entries that have already been indexed) and then there are the issues with the API highlighted above.

In it’s current state like others I’m left confused about Sidewiki. At the moment I think movement in this direction is inevitable but can only see it being gamed and as someone who is involved with a brand it scares the hell out of me. I guess that we all just need to keep watching.

Blog Action Day

Today is Blog Action Day and the topic is climate change – which is something I think about frequently but only in a peripheral way.

I was first introduced to this idea at university 15 or more years ago so I spent this evening seeing if I could search out one of the old essays I wrote back then.  The specific essay I wanted was about climatic history since the arrival of homo sapiens on the planet.  I remebered that it contained some predictive data and I was interested in seeing how this data stacked up today.  I was also interested to see what my thinking back then was.  I imagine I bordered on the radical.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

These days I’ve probably become too comfortable with life’s little luxuries and I’m sure I don’t do enough personally.  I imagine that there a lot of people like me on the planet.

However changes are happening to our planet and for once I find myself agreeing with Gordo…

“Like every parent, I want to leave a safe and secure world for my children. And I want to be able to look them in the eye because our generation stood up for their future.”

Although I wish it went further (in terms of an earlier peak for ommissions) I’m actually quite proud of the UK bid for Copenhagen and I pledged support online tonight.  The pledge is copied below in full.

‘I call for a global deal on climate change, and I want it to be:

• Ambitious – no more than 2 degrees temperature rise, developed-country emissions to peak in five years; the whole world in ten
• Effective – keep countries to their word, and let money flow to where it will make most difference
• Fair – support the poorest countries to cut their emissions and adapt to climate change.’

Searching Sidewiki

I got around to hearing about, reading up on and having a quick look at Google Sidewiki last week. I actually quite like the idea of Sidewiki but as I’ve taken to using Chrome as my usual browser I’m unlikely to be using it that much. (Bizarrely the Google Toolbar with Sidewiki currently only works with Firefox and IE).

To illustrate what Sidewiki does lets consider Seth Godin. He’s recently just launched a service called Squidoo. As an aside this is well worth a look as to what a listening post can look like for a brand, link is for MailChimp. This is Seth’s post about launching the service. Strangely he normally doesn’t allow comments on his posts so what’s happened is that comments like this are appearing in Sidewiki.

I’ve seen some tools out there that claim to block Sidewiki although I haven’t investigated these properly yet.

Sidwiki may cause brands issues because it’s another place where conversation can happen, so it’s another place that needs to be monitored.

I mentioned on Friendfeed last week that we’ll need to see if and how Sidewiki takes off.  However this looks like it’s going to be difficult to monitor.

There is a Google Sidewiki API however I can’t see that it’s going to provide the one thing that brand owners with large websites are going to need which is notification of comments that could be written on a large number of pages across their website, e.g. look at this university press release and the comment that was made on the Sidewiki.

I therefore wondered how far I could get with searching for Sidewiki comments on Google.  The comments are of the form:

http://www.google.com/sidewiki/entry/userid/id/entrykey

but a quick search of site:http://www.google.com/sidewiki/entry/ on Google only reveals 2,190 results, which I think must be too small a number.  What’s more none of these seem to have been made in the past week.

Therefore it makes me wonder how accurate or useful more complex searches are e.g. search of “ac.uk” site:http://www.google.com/sidewiki/entry/

I think I need to think about this and explore it some more as I haven’t been able to produce a search that produces the 10+ comments shown on Seth Godin’s blog post (linked above).   Maybe what’s needed is to engage with the API.

Sidewiki is a secret hidden world but there are bound to be ramifications in all sorts of areas, SEO springs immediately to mind.  Sidewiki is definitely a technology I’ll be watching.

Percy Endrizzi doesn’t quite make it to FOTE’09

Tim and Frank, a couple of friends (ex-colleagues) of mine, put on a conference on Friday - The Future of Technology in Education (FOTE’09). Given Friday was my first day without meetings for about a month I thought I might be able to follow along. (I find that I can follow audio reasonably well without it distracting me from filling in spreadsheets, working on databases or carrying out other administrative work.)

Video was being streamed into Second Life (SL) so on Thursday evening I downloaded the SL client software on to my netbook set up a new account (Percy Endrizzi) and I checked that I could get in to the virtual lecture theatre.

Percy Endrizzi in the FOTE Lecture Theatre

Unfortunately on the Friday I wasn’t able to login to SL using my netbook on the wireless network at work. Neither was I able to access the audio via @kwameoh’s quicktime link. I presume that all of the necessary ports for Second life and RTSP are blocked by default on the university wireless network.

So whilst Silversprite Helsinki was able to “closely follow #FOTE09 while in a branch of Ladbrokes”, Percy Endrizzi couldn’t listen in from within a university!

So unable to listen in to what was going on at FOTE’09 I looked in on the twitter stream every now and then.  Actually I dipped in to @andpowe11’s coveritlive page every now and then and when I got home I also read a few blog posts and worked through the twitter stream. In doing so I found a few things that made me stop and think, for example this on Hallucination, Virtual Reality, and Reality.

However I as an off-site participant I would have loved it if it would have been possible to:

1) feed audio and video in to uStream, Dim Dim, Elluminate or various other more accessible services than Second Life – as an aside I think Percy Endrizzi may have made his last outing for a while.

2) discuss technology in relation to other areas of education – teaching and learning seemed to be the main focus and research and, most importantly for me, the administration of education seemed to be lacking.

That said, I’m definitely looking forward to seeing some of the videos when they eventually get posted.

Newsnight vs Question Time

This evening I was slightly torn. Should I watch Newsnight or Question Time. I settled on Newsnight but had Tweetdeck open and one of my search columns was #BBCQT so I didn’t feel that I was missing anything.

Bizarrely I received this tweet.

A Tweet from BBC Have Your Say

Hhmmm, #BBCQT was trending at the time!

The tweet is obviously trying to bring people to the official BBC QT discussion page which has moderated comments. Two things struck me:

1) Why didn’t @BBC_HaveYourSay use the #BBCQT hashtag?
2) The conversation was happening on Twitter and elsewhere – so why not use this on the discussion page? You could even moderate it if this was really necessary!

Xtranormal

This week has been a whirl of meetings so I feel like I’ve not managed to get anything done. Yesterday in particular was one of the longest days I’ve ever had at work. Luckily this evening I got home just about early enough to see the kids before they jumped in to bed.

Later on in the evening I discovered xtranormal.com. It looks like a fantastic little tool for creating animations directly from text. This is my first attempt at using it. (Shame I can’t embed it directly here.) I was amazed at how simple it was to use and how it only took a few minutes to render. Amazing!

>Post Alan’s suggestion<
I created a ScreenR version but then realised I’d run in to the same problem because of the embed on wordpress.com. However I then remembered you can embed from YouTube and you can make the YouTube video directly from xtranormal or from ScreenR.

So here we go. I can see a lot of fun to be had with this tool and so can others.

Brumtwestival

I had a really great time at brumtwestival. I met a whole load of really good people (far too many people to mention). My personal highlights were:

1) meeting @citizensheep who has written probably the most accesible introduction to RSS that I’ve ever seen

2) buying a drink for @joannageary (although I think she might prefer @timesjoanna these days). I’ve been a long time fan – she was the person who unknowingly introduced me to tweetgrid.

3) buying a raffle ticket from @ellielovell who I’ve followed on Twitter for quite some time but whom until tonight I’ve never met in the flesh. Thank God she didn’t sell me a winning ticket – my YMCA dance really isn’t up to much.

The only thing I wish I’d managed was to say hello in the flesh to @paulbradshaw whose work I have admired.

Things I’ve learned in the past couple of weeks

Being new to a job does mean that you can take three and a bit weeks out of the office without coming back to email overload. However even without an email backlog I’ve seemed to have plenty to do and I’ve learned quite a bit since my last blog post. Including some of the following bits of trivia:

Antigua has 365 beaches – one for every day of the year.
Fermanagh has 365 lakes. (Guess who was in Ireland on holiday during the wettest August on record!)

Facebook advertising seems to be determined by your ISP location in addition to the networks that you are part of.

You can now get on the internet anywhere (although the positioning according to Google Maps seems a bit out). I’m sure I first saw this technology at work in Abuja eight years ago.

There are more chickens than humans on the planet. Although trying to get an accurate number for the chicken population is pretty difficult.

More significantly I found out that Shell no longer operates in Ireland. People were boycotting the Shell branded petrol stations (for eco-reasons) so they re-branded under the Topaz marque. However as this blog shows a re-brand may not be enough.

Facebook Courses

On the surface my new job has very little to with social networks however it’s been an interesting week in terms of social networks and web 2.0 tools.

I attended a really interesting presentation by Ross Parry on Tuesday in which he talked mainly about using common web 2.0 stuff instead of Blackboard. He’s a really engaging presenter!

Then having seen some of the stuff from #IWMW2009 (the link is Mike Nolan’s atom feeds) I found something about the top UK HE Twitter accounts. I found it funny that an account I started had ended up top (at least in the initial post – see Friendfeed for my reaction and for this Facebook post that I found from one of my old colleagues).

On Friday I ended up in a discussion about amplification that I would never had been invited to, if I hadn’t been involved in social media.

I was also asked on Friday to do a guest post on how HE/FE use social media to engage with prospects, current students and alumni. I was asked if I could come up with something thought provoking or even a bit controversial to get a discussion going.

Social networks, and especially the behemoth that is Facebook, are important advertising and communication platforms. I read a tweet sometime earlier in the week – sorry can’t remember who from – that suggested that Facebook might eventually replace Admissions pages and LinkedIn will replace Alumni pages on institutional websites. Whilst I’m doubtful that this will happen. They will probably remain as critically important tools in the work that I do – even though social media forms no part of my job description.

Therefore, in the end I thought it was best to point the person who asked me to guest post at a few other people whose blogs I read. Although I’m now having second thoughts and think it’s important to write something around how crucial it is to appoint the right staff and then trust and support them well when wanting to engaging with social networks.

The reason for this is the self-reflection that I did on Saturday when Tony Hirst tweeted about COURSE PROFILES – A Facebook Application for Open University Students and Alumni.

I was thinking about something like this for quite some time when I was in my last job. My intention was to produce something very, very similar to both the Course Profiles and the My OU Story application that Tony talks about in his Google doc.

For me, this idea was a no brainer. Just look at this Facebook Page or the comments/discussions in the student-created student group on Facebook and you can see why applications like this are so important.

Unfortunately I never got around to implementing an application like Course Profiles properly. Although I did manage to create an application, uolcourses, that would add a badge with some self-declared text on to the user’s profile, that was all it did and I was miles away from releasing something into the wild.

I can’t remember what it was that eventually stopped me, or even when it happened. I’m sure it was probably that I hit a snag in a piece of code, and couldn’t find a way to get it working. If today you were to look at the application I created it simply returns some debugging data.

I remember approaching some of my more technically minded colleagues about incorporating a course unit list but I couldn’t persuade the techies (or rather their managers) of the importance of developing Facebook applications.

So the only resource I was able to push in to this was my own time, late at night outside of working hours, using my limited technical skills.

I’m really pleased to see that Tony and his colleagues at the OU were able to provide a mutual platform of support to each other to enable an application like Course Profiles to be produced and I can’t wait to see the new applications they are working on.

However one thing I don’t understand is why they aren’t linking the Course Profiles page from their main Fan page.

BTW: if anyone reading this thinks that they have a thought-provoking guest post in them about how HE is using social media to engage prospects, current students and alumni please let me know and I’ll pass on your details.

Playing with KML and Google Maps

This week I’ve not managed to do that much playing about online. I just haven’t had time in the evenings and then this weekend I’ve not been feeling that great (and I ended up doing some DIY – replacing the taps on the sink, re-turfing the garden today etc). So the only bit of play I’ve managed has been reminding myself a bit about how Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and the Google Data Visualisation tools work.

In the past I’ve used the Google Maps Data Visualisation tools to build things like this.

However what I want to try and do this time around doesn’t seem to fit in to the standard visualisations. I want to display a list of geographic markers containing rich text (which I envision being drawn from a database) as well as some shaded country territories which again have some form of text assigned to each country. It sounds like it should be easy but I still haven’t figured out the best way to do this yet. My current thinking is that my best bet is KML or GeoRSS imported in to Google Maps rather than playing about with the code or going through the API. This is partly because I seem to get things working in the playground that I can’t get to work in the wild.

I’ve found a KML list of rough country boundaries and am testing the files within the KML Interactive Sampler. However I can see that this is going to require a fair bit of manual work, so I keep looking for shortcuts – I’m guessing I’m left wondering how much time I might waste on this and how frequently I might need to update the map.