Posterous is A Good Thing.
But Friendfeed is better.

As part of my postgraduate scientific writing project I needed to set up a site for a student who has been identified as needing extended writing support. To minimize my workload, my first thought was to set up a blog and get them to write about life in general at least once a week. The student wants the blog to be private. The supervisor wants the student to read/write about plant biology. No worries.

Whenever anyone asks me how to set up a blog (not that anyone does), Posterous is my first call (and WordPress my second, depending on what's required). Posterous is simple, flexible, and the workflow is good. But not as good as Friendfeed. I've set the student up with a (private) Friendfeed account. Into that I've dropped the PubMed Arabidopsis RSS feed and a few hyperlocal feeds to give it a flava. Plenty to read and write about. The student picks a paper and writes a few hundred words about it once a week. I subscribe to the Friendfeed comments RSS to monitor activity and respond with corrections and suggestions. No need to fiddle about with multiple logins on Google Reader and Posterous. Attention is focused in a single location. Simples. And scalable across the College.

Over the past couple of months, I've found myself posting less and less content to Son of SoTI and more and more to Friendfeed. I think the time has come to mothball SoSoTI, at least for the foreseeable future. I've removed the SoSoTI feed from my sidebar and added my Friendfeed activity. I may add my Buzz network at some point, but we'll see how Buzz develops for a while first.

<snip>

4. For the Buzz "Haters"

Google Buzz not your thing? You can switch it off altogether, if you would like. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of your inbox and look for the link underneath your quota usage informational message. Click "turn off buzz" to be bothered no more.

I only know about first impressions of Google Buzz because once I saw what it did to my Gmail inbox, which is a mission-critical app for me, my mission became How do I turn this off?

This came after I learned that it made no attempt whatsoever to be Twitter API-compatible.

It violates the prime directive of new software. It starts turned on, and the way to turn it off is all-but invisible. And it invades a space that heretofore Google helped to protect. One of the big values of Gmail is its spam filter. Now all of a sudden it's as if the exhaust was reversed, and it was spraying dirt into my message stream, instead of filtering it out.

New software should be easy to try out, and there should be no penalty for doing so. Here, they didn't even give us an option, I was automatically signed up, and the way out was hidden. The first bit, which is fun -- create a new post -- is followed by a flood of new messages in a semi-sacred private place, my email inbox.

Bottom-line: There's no good reason why Buzz (terrible name, btw) should be integrated with Gmail. The company showed the worst judgment. It took what was the industry leading web mail product and turned it into a lab experiment. Once I turned it off (it's not hard, there's a switch at the bottom of the Gmail home page), Gmail went back to being Gmail, and not a nightmarish ad for Google's software design ineptness.

After all that, Kevin Rose's analysis is right on. He calls them feature requests -- clever -- but his concerns are so basic, it's another way of saying this should have been labeled pre-pre-beta and should have been opt-opt-opt-in with disclaimers and confirmation on confirmantion, instead of turned on by default for all Gmail users.

Five years ago, Gmail was just email. Later we added chat and then video chat, both built right in, so people had choices about how to communicate from a single browser window. Today, communication on the web has evolved beyond email and chat — people are sharing photos with friends and family, commenting on news happening around them, and telling the world what they're up to in real-time. This new social sharing is valuable, but it means there's a lot more stuff to sort through, and it's harder to get past status updates and engage in meaningful discussions.

Today, we're launching Google Buzz, a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting and share updates, photos, videos and more. Buzz is built right into Gmail, so there's nothing to set up — you're automatically following the people you email and chat with the most.

We focused on making the sharing experience really rich by integrating photos, videos, and links. No more fuzzy little pictures: Buzz makes it easy to quickly flip through photos and experience them the way they were meant to be seen: big and full-resolution. And videos play inline so you can watch them without opening a new window.

You can choose to share publicly with the world or privately to a small group of friends each time you post. And you can connect other sites you use, today there's Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, and Twitter, so your friends can keep up with what you're doing around the web — all in one place.

To make sure you don't miss out on the best part of sharing, Buzz sends responses to your posts straight to your inbox. Unlike static email messages, buzz messages in your inbox are live conversations where comments appear in real time.

You can follow the specific people whose posts you want to see, but Buzz also recommends posts from people you're not directly following, often ones where your friends are having a lively conversation in the comments. If you're not interested in a particular recommendation, just click the "Not interested" link and your feedback will help improve the recommendations system. Buzz also weeds out uninteresting posts from the people you follow — collapsing inactive posts and short status messages like "brb." These early versions of ranking and recommendations are just a start; we're working on improvements that will help you automatically sort through all the social data being produced to find the most relevant conversations that matter to you.

For all those times when you want to share something but aren't in front of your computer, Buzz is also available on your phone. When you're out in the real world, a lot of the information you want to share often has to do with where you are: for example, you may want to talk about a new restaurant you discovered or the score of the game you're watching. So rather than simply a small screen version of the desktop experience, Buzz for mobile brings location to the forefront and makes it easy to have conversations about places. In addition to checking out buzz from people you're following, you can also see nearby buzz from the people around you.

We'll be rolling out Google Buzz to everyone over the next few days; you'll see a new "Buzz" link under "Inbox" when it's on for your account. We're still working on some features to make Buzz work well for businesses and schools, so it isn't yet available in Google Apps, but stay tuned. If you want to learn more in the meantime, visit buzz.google.com.

If you are selling a scarcity — an inventory — of any nonphysical goods today, stop, turn around, and start selling value — outcomes — instead. Or you’re screwed. Apply this rule to many enterprises: advertising, media, content, information, education, consultation, and to some extent, performance.

<snip>

In education, we’re fooling ourselves if we think that we can maintain our scarcity-based economy: only so chairs to soak in the wisdom of that teacher. It’s a wildly inefficient system — especially in our industrial-age knowledge factories that try to turn out people who memorize the same answer instead of invent new ones.

Earlier, I’ve speculated about the idea of an educational ecosystem with star professors whose lectures are widely available (as is the case with MIT and Stanford) and who gain value (books, speaking gigs) through being broadly distributed. Then we have local tutors who give us the specialized instruction and consultation we need.

Thus we have performers and consultants. There is still value in unique performance. We will continue to buy tickets to concerts by stars (but we won’t pay for the Muzak covers of their songs on elevators). We will buy books. We will pay to sit in a movie theater with popcorn. The new competition in the case of media and performance isn’t that someone will make a good-enough version of what we do but that there is more call for the public’s attention.

Quality is a scarcity. But it is a real scarcity. You may think that your newspaper’s version of the Super Bowl is better than the next, but good luck trying to build a business on charging for it. No, you have to be recognized by enough people as being the best — so many that they spread the word for you — if you want to have a blockbuster. It’s still possible. But in an economy of abundance, it’s ever harder and thus riskier and more expensive to get that hit.

This is also why value shifts from creation to curation: in a world of overabundant content, it’s the filters we need.

If you’re not the star performer (or professor), if you’re the consultant (or tutor) who works much more locally, you do indeed have a scarcity: your own time. That scarcity works against you. So it’s in your interest to scale as best you can. That is why people like me blog. The more we share our ideas, the more attention we draw, the more business we can get, the more efficient we are. I’ve even tried to convince big consulting companies and headhunters and international organizations of this; didn’t get far.

 

The real story in nonphysical goods is one of deflation. Value in once-scarce — well, once-controlled — commodities like news, information, and advertising decline as the internet explodes creation and competition. The internet also destroys the ability of many to control distribution and thus value. But at the same time, the internet drastically increases efficiency thanks to platforms and open distribution and the ability — no, the need — to specialize and collaborate. The bottom line in many of these enterprises — as we tried to show in our New Business Models for News — is that they may be profitable, only smaller. Both sides of the ledger deflate.

This is why the old controllers of scarcity have such trouble rethinking and remaking themselves for the economy of abundance. Their reflex is to control more, when that only decreases value.

So stop selling scarcity. Scarcity has no value. Results and efficiency do.

Then again, people are spending big money — billions — for a virtual market with a virtual scarcity in virtual goods: pixels on a screen. It’s absurd, of course, that anyone can create a scarcity and market value for fictional food for fictional cows, but it’s making money. In this economy, I think we see both the dying gasp and a parody of scarcity.

 

 

You might call it babble… you might call it context
After i posted an upcoming book chapter (article 2 of the rhizomatic education series) Nancy White asked me what the same article would sound like with a 16-year old audience. This isn’t going to be that… but her comments reminded me why i went on the journal writing odyssey in the first place. I was trying to get clear in my head about what I had seen on the internet, what my experiences meant and how I saw things moving. The intention was ALWAYS to be able to explain in plain language what I was trying to say. To be clear. This is my first try… how do you buy tech for rhizomatic learning.

Catch 22 – I’m buying but for what?
This is the trick. You either have the money… or you have the plan. People interested in education will probably smile at that line, and have probably been in that position many times. They have been approached by people with money (i have $500 i need to spend in the next week… I just got $150,000 to do research), or been approached with the money itself. This doesn’t happen all the time, but I’ve probably had the conversation 8-10 times. More often, you run into the need. Before things like Ning, we (at worldbridges) used to host these kinds of projects (personallearningspace.com (now defunct) youthvoices (still running under excellent new management)). Excellent learners, or educational practitioners, community members and idea havers just looking for the resources they need to do a specific thing.

If you have the money, you generally do not have a clear idea of how it is going to be used. You cannot line up hundreds (thousands/millions) or folks without any way to promise them that the technology will come through. You can have an extraordinarily detailed plan but if you do… that means that you’ve already pretty much decided what the needs are of the people that you are going to teach… and probably what they are going to learn. It is much, much easier to have a clear idea of the things you wish to purchase if what you are going to do is rigid, top-down – read: clear.

If you have a plan, this probably means that you have already gotten into a learning situation, you are a real learner amongst learners and you know what you need. Then comes the rub… it can take years to identify funding, apply for funding, wait for approval and actually get it in the bank. It can take 100s of hours to do the work, you need partners (who might not have been part of your initial vision) you need, usually, to make concessions to the needs of the funder (it is, after all, their money) and then you can only hope that the needs that you identified is still there and you haven’t lost the hours you spent on the project funding application.

Rhizomes to the rescue
We’ll need to set up a couple of premises

• In the rhizomatic model, experts do not create curriculum, it is co-created by the learners
• Educators prepare the context and the scaffold (maybe the syllabus, depending on the situation)
• There is a surplus of information (lets call them open educational resources) that can be used to provide the content of curriculum, there need not be A resource… any resource will do
• As we move passed a ‘knowledge economy’ towards one where being creative with that knowledge is more important (or put another way not knowing, but, knowing how to know) facilitating access to collaboration and collaborative skills is key (I might want to say community rather than collaborative)

If you take these things as given, all of a sudden buying the technology becomes a little more interesting. You can look at the affordances provided by each of the technologies and ask yourself if these are the kinds of things that fit with what you are trying to do.

ex 1
The IPad is at the middle of a number of debates right now, but the general consensus is, in its current release (sans camera for instance) it is primarily a consumption/ticking device. It will do an excellent job of allowing you to consume media. It will also do an excellent job allowing you to ‘tick’ things off a pad. I was thinking, for instance of my trainer who constantly has a paper pad he carries around with reps and weights and excercises which he then collates back in his office. Ipad is perfect. If you want a student to be able to write a professional paper, the lack of being able to hold a pdf, an email a website and an image open at the same time is going to be a real impediment. Impossible? no. But the affordances are mainly consumpion/ticking related.

ex2
A headset is one of the most useful tools anyone can have (when they already have a computer). It is critical for collaborative participation on the internet. In 5 years of running web based conference type events (webcasts/conferences) the “are you wearing a headset” question is still first and foremost. It allows you to participate in an online discussion without irritating the community that you are participating in and also allows for things like VOIP. It’s cheap and allows for that critical audio connection.

But but but what about training and what about…
Training and support is critical. Just in time technical support is critical. Clear models for how to succeed are critical. These things are also ephemeral. Training and support programs don’t really seem to last, good technical support (that can actually assess the needs of a learner and give them confidence) is tres hard to find, there is NO ONE CLEAR MODEL for success.

You need to be flexible, you need to plan projects with a strong focus on problem solving by the learners. You need to plan your systems for perfect simplicity… complexity is easily added if its necessary (and it rarely is). If the focus of any learning activity is centred directly on the leaners and those learners have technology that provides the affordances they need… you’re going to be able to find solutions on the fly that are far better than pre-planned responses for presumed problems.

A few more affordance examples
For instance…

technical
• opening documents (gmail will open anything – open office)
• voice (headsets… can you say headsets)
• video (a decent webcam takes pretty good video/mino HD provides the simplicity etc)

You could argue forever about what audio recording software to use, but, really… what do you NEED it to do. There are very few cases where someone needs to record awesome audio. Reasonable audio designed to share people’s thinking/learning is cheap and easy to use. Ease of use encourages use.

Closing
I’m not sure this has been a very strong start to my attempts at being clear… but, to put things simply, you need not buy (stuff) directly for the plan… but

buy(stuff) for the kind of learning you believe in. I believe in collaborative/community learning.(depending). I need/want to allow people to create, to participate and to understand that they can be part of what they are interested in.

Following the ScienceOnlien2010 conference, librarian Dorothea Salo wrote on her blog:

This disconnect is the number-one threat to science librarianship today—perhaps to all academic librarianship. How can science libraries persist when scientists haven’t the least notion that libraries or librarians are relevant to their work?

These are serious questions, and of course I don’t have the answers. But I would like to add my thoughts from a researcher perspective. The role of libraries in providing teaching material for students (textbooks, etc.) is another story that I will not touch today.

Flickr image by Radioher

I’m old enough to remember the time (maybe 15 years ago) before literature searches were possible via the internet and scientific papers were available in electronic form. I had to go to the library to use Medline or Current Contents in printed form (and later on CD-ROM), or to flip through the newest issues of the most interesting journals. I would photocopy the papers I would then read at home, and then file away for later use.

PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar now allow me to search the literature from my desk at work (or from home). Most researchers (including myself) probably don’t have the skills for sophisticated searches, but these tools more or less get the job done. Electronic publishing means that I can obtain a paper directly from the journal (as long as I access the journal from a computer in the university network), and licensing is handled (almost) transparently by the library.

These developments have dramatically reduced the time researchers spend at a library. This is good, as this saves them a lot time. But interactions between researchers and librarians have also been dramatically reduced. Publishers and other companies (e.g. Thomson Reuters, Mendeley, Faculty of 1000, to name just a few) have used the opportunities to adapt their offerings to the internet (e.g. electronic-only journals), and to create new products that weren’t possible (or even thinkable) before. Although libraries have in many ways adapted to the internet as well, they probably haven’t ceased the opportunity to the same degree. The homepage of my university library is a place I visit much less often than PubMed or the pages of my favorite journals. Some ideas of how this could be changed are listed below. Most of them are not new, but maybe at least some libraries haven’t gone all the way to make their pages an attractive destination for the researchers of their institution.¹

Provide and support online reference manager
Institutions should support at least one online reference manager, possible options include (in no particular order) Zotero, Mendeley, Endnote Web, Refworks and CiteULike. RefWorks and Endnote Web are commercial products and require a private (Endnote) and/or institutional license. The institution should either pick a free reference manager as their primary choice, or buy an institutional license in order to allow every researcher and student to use these tools without additional cost.²

As we can’t expect everybody to use the same reference manager, libraries have to help with several products. The easiest way to do so is via an online forum (see next paragraph), as this is more efficient than one-to-one support and allows experienced users to help out. Online reference managers provide additional features (e.g. they can be used from different computers, allow shared folders for groups of users) and should therefore be preferred over standalone applications.

Online user training and support
User support is obviously one of the central functions of science libraries. This has two aspects: helping with a specific problem (e.g. finding scientific literature), but also training users to do this on their own. The required skills include use of PubMed and other databases, and reference managers such as Endnote or Zotero. Skills in evidence-based medicine are critical to find and appreciate the appropriate medical literature, but in my experience many physicans and medical students would benefit from additional training in this area.

Introductory classes, help in person or a phone call are sometimes the best way to do this, but often users require quick help for a specific situation that can best done with online tools. Appropriate tools include email, online forum, Twitter, Yammer (a microblogging tool similar to Twitter but for institutions), SlideShare, FaceBook (and StudiVZ in Germany), FriendFeed, and Wikis. Every institution should make a decision about the services they plan to support, with emphasis on tools that are easy to use.

Institutional bibliographies
A regularly updated listing of all publications of an institution is not only a valuable PR service, but is often also required by administrations to evaluate research output. Librarians are often involved in this, but there is probably a lot of untapped potential. As unique identifiers for researchers become more widespread, there really no longer is a need for researchers to compile publication lists themselves.³

Article deposition in institutional repositories
Most journals allow researchers to post their accepted papers in institutional repositories of their institution. But because this requires technical skills and extra time, many researchers aren’t particularly eager to make use of them. Institutional bibliographies can obviously be nicely integrated with institutional repositories, thus reducing redundant work.

Help authors with article submissions
Article processing charges for authors are often handled by their libraries, and sometimes libraries have membership deals with publishers that give authors a discount. But researchers often are left alone with the article submission process. Most authors submit at most a handful of papers each year, and they have to deal not only with different article formats between journals (most notably different reference styles), but also different article submission systems (e.g. Editorial Manager, eJournal Press, Manuscript Central or BenchPress). The total number of papers submitted by an institution is much larger, and thus at least some recurring problems could be avoided or at least the time required reduced with centralized support from the library.

Help with Web 2.0 tools for scientists
Libraries don’t have to reinvent all the Web 2.0 tools for scientists that are already out there, but they are a good place to help interested researchers get started with some of them (e.g. ResearchGate, Nature Network, or Academia.edu). Ideally, these tools could be integrated into the library webpages via an API.

¹ I would like to be proven wrong by great examples of libraries gone Web 2.0.

² My university picked RefWorks as their primary reference manager.

³ Scopus is already pretty good in this.

Three events from last week inspired me to write this: a blog post by (and short Twitter conversation with) Dorothea Salo (Science Online 2010: Scientists and librarians), a meeting with the other organizers of BibCamp Hannover (“a BarCamp for librarians and other hackers” in May 2010), and a discussion via email with Oliver Obst from the Medical Library, University of Munster.

In our recent report on Social Media in Australia, ‘The Rise and Rise of the Social Network”, I highlighted Social Networking and Forums growth and predicted that it would overtake Search Engines in visits during the weeks either side of Christmas.

The chart below confirms that during the week of Christmas (week ending 26 December 2009) the Social Networking and Forum industry category overtook Search Engines share of visits for the very first time. While this looked like a short term lead, we are now seeing continued growth of Social Networking and Forums to now sit just 0.4% share behind Search Engines in week ending 16 January 2010.

A daily pattern that has emerged over the past three months is Social Networking and Forums attracting increase share during the weekends, predominantly on Sunday. The first daily lead by Social Networking and Forums compared to Search Engines was on Sunday 15 November 2009, and the first full weekend was Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd November 2009.

In week ending 26 December 2009 Social Networking and Forums gained its highest market share for the year peaking at 14.8% on Christmas Day. Search Engines highest market share day of 2009 was Saturday 10 January at 14.5%.

Underpinning Social Networking and Forums’ growth has been a number of key websites, including Facebook and YouTube. Facebook and YouTube both had their highest share of visits for 2009 on Christmas Day (25 December 2009) with shares of 8.0% and 2.2% respectively.

2010 is set to be another year of strong growth for the Social Networking and Forums category, and for marketers the challenge is to effectively participate and generate word of mouth that has measurable and effective business outcomes.

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