Archive for the ‘Infrastructure’ Category
The Times paves the way with a video offering June 20th, 2007
The Times has expanded its online presence with a video site which showcases items of interest like this video of a tribute to the late Brian Wegerle:
The service allows visitors to the site to share the videos with their friends using tools like del.icio.us, Muti, Digg and more and, as you can see, embed videos in their own blogs. Users can also rate videos and monitor the popularity of those videos. This adds to the podcasts and blogs that are already available from The Times and comfortably places The Times ahead of their competition.
Vincent applauded the ex-Rhodes team and I agree with him. Ray, Colin, Carly, Gregor and the team are doing a fantastic job with their online offering and it is about time. Mainstream media is firmly entrenched in old media thinking and, to a large extent, their online presences reflect this mentality. Establishing an online presence creates opportunities to change the way we consume content and how it is presented on the Web. Video, audio and text can be presented side by side or in any combination that works best for the consumer.
That being said, I think The Times could integrate the content better. If you visit the multimedia page there are no links to the podcasts and blogs except through the link back to The Times home page. The multimedia page looks like it may as well be a different site altogether if you ignore the colour scheme so perhaps the videos could be more visible on the main site in some way. The same thing applies to the blogs and podcasts page but I would imagine this is the sort of revision that requires a redevelopment of the site as a whole and that takes time.
Technorati Tags:
the times, multimedia, redeveloping online media, online media, mainstream media
Posted in Infrastructure, Media, Sharing | Comments (0)
Social media innovation curve flattening? June 9th, 2007
I have been watching the local social media space for a little while now relative to what is going on overseas and there is no doubt local talent has done much to advance local sites and services. We are catching up with foreign services like Technorati, Flickr and more and yet I find myself wondering if the innovation curve is flattening both here and overseas. There has been some criticism that local services are really just clones of their international cousins and I think there is some truth to that, mainly because our local services have similar functionality to their international equivalents. Two examples come to mind and they are our video/photo sharing services and the blog aggregators/search engines.
Sites like Zoopy and Twac are fantastic local sites that really help promote local content but they are fundamentally the same as the likes of YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr. While some of the details vary (Zoopy handles photos and videos whereas the other services tend to specialise in one or another although I have heard rumours that Flickr will soon start hosting video too), these services are essentially very similar, if not the same. They are photo/video sharing sites with social networking components like ratings, comments and community services.
Similarly sites like Amatomu and Afrigator are variations of Technorati. Their focus and design may differ but the model is pretty similar too.
While I am in awe of the amazing work done by our local people, I find myself wondering when something truly innovative is going to come along and what that new advance will look like. Is there a technological discontinuity around the corner or are we going to see more of a flattening curve until the infrastructure doesn’t develop any further for a couple years? Will content become the new differentiator while the underlying platforms remain pretty much the same?
Technorati Tags:
social media, innovation, technology, local talent, technological discontinuity, innovation curve
Posted in Infrastructure | Comments (2)
Facebook as the platform June 7th, 2007
I have heard and read snippets that have clarified Facebook’s ambitions in my mind with the Facebook Platform. I heard a mention in some or other podcast I listened to in the last few days about how Facebook aims to be the operating system of the Web and it didn’t really make all that much sense to me until I read this post on Everything is Miscellaneous which talks about how Hot or Not (a dating/rating site) recently changed its model from being a fee-based service to being free. James Hong, the founder of Hot or Not made an interesting comment which helped me make the connection. He said:
“If I were starting from scratch today, I’d built on Facebook, not the Web.”
That is a really interesting comment to make because it implies that there could be a further layer on top of the Web as we know it in the form of Facebook or some other similar service which becomes the Windows/Mac OS/Linux of the Web and on top of which developers can develop their applications for the benefit of the community that makes use of the platform service.
Facebook, for example, is massive and the addition of these various applications to the list of available applications on Facebook has proven to be a tremendous opportunity to explosive growth for developers of popular applications on Facebook. Just as you can run 3rd party applications on your Windows/Mac OS or Linux computer, you can run a variety of applications on Facebook and if you add the social nature of Facebook to the mix, social applications like the Hot or Not Hotlists are primed for success. The Hotlists apparently reached 1 million views per day in just 4.5 days on Facebook, hence Hong’s comment above.
Put another way, here is a platform with a specific context and and a ready market for relevant applications. Wow!
Technorati Tags:
facebook platform, applications, facebook, operating system, Web, hot or not, hotornot, hotlists, james hong
Posted in Infrastructure, People, Sharing, Tools | Comments (1)
chilipod episode 8: Interview with Paul Walsh of Segala (part 1) May 28th, 2007
In this episode of chilipod I chat to Paul Walsh of Segala about how he came to found Segala and the web accessibility part of his business. I had a great interview with Paul and this is the first part of three parts. In the other two parts of the interview we discussed content labels and blogger codes of conduct. I would like to thank Paul again for the interview especially considering our total interview ran close to an hour, a bit longer than the 5 or 10 minutes I initially indicated would be needed.
As always, this episode is available in two formats:
- Enhanced chilipod (AAC/iTunes format); and
- Normal chilipod (mp3 format).
The music we have used in this episode (and which we may use in future episodes) is a track called YFM Late Remix by a crowd known as Deep Fried. The track has been published on the ccMixter:sa site under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Technorati Tags:
paul walsh, segala, web accessibility, chilipod, interview
Posted in Infrastructure, People, chilipod | Comments (0)
Not so fast May 14th, 2007
I was chatting to two people from Media24 at last week’s First Tuesday event (Aquila has a great post on the event itself) and we were chatting about how many mainstream media sites are built on content management systems that were set up a decade ago (give or take) and while there are many reasons to climb on board the Web 2.0 bandwagon and bring the community into the fold, there are some practical challenges which need to be catered for. One of the things I would love to see implemented on a bigger scale are blogs instead of static pages of text but that poses a dilemma. On the one hand you want to really facilitate community participation and on the other hand you really need to manage potentially hundreds of people commenting on stories. As much as it runs contrary to my “free love” theories about social media, moderation becomes a must when there is a brand to protect and a that mainstream paper enjoys massive readership. That is, unless the mainstream paper itself is a brave one. As the saying goes, fortune favours the bold …
Technorati Tags:
mainstream media, content management system, cms, moderation, challenges, social media
Posted in Blogging, Infrastructure, Sharing | Comments (0)
Don’t lose touch with the developers March 28th, 2007
I was chatting to Andre last night at the 27 Dinner at the Primi in Melrose Arch. He was pretty passionate about how tech evangelists (I’m using this as a broad category intended to include social media/new media evangelists and people advocating the use of technologies but who will likely hand the actual work off to a group of developers/technical people) promote the use of technologies in a variety of contexts and can often lose touch with the feasibility of these implementations and the actual requirements to properly integrate these solutions into an existing infrastructure. We chatted about the example of social media evangelists who advocate the use of social media elements in business and who don’t have a conversation with the developers who may be left to implement these solutions within the company, instead focussing on persuading the thought leaders to buy into the proposed solutions.
I agree with many of his arguments. I believe it is really important to include the developers in the conversation about implementing these solutions and to work out a realistic plan which takes into account the resources and time needed to properly implement the solutions, test them and release them for general consumption. It is also important not to create unrealistic expectations in the minds of the decision makers themselves. On the other hand I also think it is valuable to push the envelope and this is often where evangelists come in. We catch on to a new trend or solution and see the potential for it in a client’s business or generally and promote it. The solution may be outside or on the periphery of the developers’ frame of reference but that’s ok. If we don’t innovate then we don’t make any real progress.
Bottom line here is not to forget the people who will be doing all the work you talk about when you have those conversations. At least take them into account when you make your pitch.
Technorati Tags:
techies, developers, unrealistic expectations, evangelists, hype
Posted in Infrastructure, People | Comments (0)
BT does Enterprise 2.0 March 27th, 2007
BT has launched an Enterprise 2.0 service called BT Tradespace which is aimed at SMEs:
BT Tradespace provides small businesses with simple online publishing tools that allow you to quickly and easily create and post content to the web.
Each BT Tradespace member’s page includes blogs, photos, podcasts, contact information, maps, virtual business card, and Click to Call … and there’s more under development
Members can create vibrant pages of content related to their business that they can easily and quickly update every day.
The service also allows members to connect through channels based on their industry and areas of interest.
More popular content is presented through the community channels and members will have an opportunity to “plug” content (Muti-style) and the most plugged content will also be shown on the relevant community channel.
In short, this service is really a sort of Facebook/MySpace for business. It is a great idea because it seems to make it pretty easy for SMEs to get into the social media space. This quote on Vecosys by Ivan Croxford expresses it quite well:
“We’re trying to solve a number of problems for small businesses,” Ivan tells me. “We know people have had trouble getting online full stop. The difficulties of SEO etc are tricky and can be costly. Small businesses don’t have the time or skills. BT Tradespace exposes the utility of blogging as it’s simple and easy to create presence for an SME.
“Rather than static marketing copy, we’re trying to get them into using it as a conversational marketing tool. We’ll see a lot of people put up one post and that’s it, but we have a woman blogging furniture in manchester who does it weekly.”
Incorporating new media elements into your business is not a prohibitively complex process. There is a lot of jargon going around but the principles guiding the adoption of these technologies are pretty straightforward - have better conversations with your customers and employees, listen to what is being said about you and share your knowledge (incidentally, this is what we are all about). From there it is really a matter of picking the right tools for the job so chat to people who know the tools, tell them what you want and go from there.
Technorati Tags:
sme, bt tradespace, new media, social media, enterprise 2.0, for business
Posted in Applications, Infrastructure, Tools | Comments (1)
Fun things to do with your OpenID: Jyte March 26th, 2007
I listened to a great episode of net@nite on the weekend in which Leo and Amber interviewed Scott Kveton of JanRain which is a purveyor of OpenID enabled services and providers. One of Jan Rain’s services is something called Jyte which, according to the Jyte blog -
is a place to make claims about yourself, others, or just about anything. It’s a place for web surfers to see what you are up to and what you’re thinking. It’s a place to learn more about friends, and for others to learn about you through your claims, votes, and cred. It’s a place to build out your social network and share it with other sites. It’s a place to use your shiny new OpenID, and a place for people who see your OpenID around the web to discover your world.
I am still a little unsure what the value of this sort of service is except as a great way to receive some validation for yourself and your ideas and assertions. I made an initial claim that I am a chief chili and co-founder of chilibean and the majority of the people who voted on my claim disagreed! It turns out the claim wasn’t properly formatted and it has now been resubmitted.
While publishing claims are fun and all, the interesting thing for me is the integration of OpenID into the site. It is the only way you can log in and if you don’t have an OpenID, JanRain also runs MyOpenID which is an OpenID provider. We’ve talked about OpenID a couple times on chilibean and the more I hear about it the more excited I become about it. It really would go a long way towards resolving the problem of having all these login credentials on all these sites we use. What we could really use is more widespread adoption of OpenID and a way to then convert existing login credentials to OpenID (at least change the way we log in to those sites). Certainly I would like to integrate OpenID into chilibean and my other sites (I have an OpenID trial running on Wired Gecko) so if anyone knows of a reliable Drupal OpenID module, please let me know?
Technorati Tags:
openid, single login, authentication, jyte
Posted in Infrastructure, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (3)
ClaimID goes a little social March 22nd, 2007
ClaimID, the awesome "Identity 2.0" site I use to assert my online identity has gone a little social with a new feature that allows you to add contacts. I just tried it with Stii (who has a blank public profile) so if you are reading this Stii, say "yes" so I can see how this whole thing works. The feature runs on OpenID and that is pretty nifty (to paraphrase Mike):
We™re the first ones to admit it, when we designed ClaimID, we expressly stayed away from making it a social networking product. Why? It didn™t make sense - ClaimID is about you. But over time, we realized that just like your links and OpenIDs make up your online identity, so do your friends and contacts. Identity is social, and there™s really no way to avoid that. So this morning, we™re introducing a very lightweight feature that enables you to add contacts in ClaimID.
…
So we thought long and hard about this, and we realized that OpenID provided us a solution. As a result, we™ve made our new contacts feature OpenID-based. This means that you can add contacts directly in the service, or you can add OpenID contacts. If your boss doesn™t have a ClaimID, but her blog is an OpenID, she can still be your contact in ClaimID. Why hasn™t the internet been like this all along?
Tags: claimid, contacts, openid, social
Posted in Infrastructure, People, Sharing | Comments (2)
PBwiki and WordPress.com join the OpenID club March 8th, 2007
Two notable services have tied themselves into OpenID in the last few days. Vecosys has a post about PBwiki’s support for OpenID. In other news WordPress.com has announced that you can now use your WordPress.com url as your OpenID credentials. All you need to do is the following:
Look for sites with sign in forms that look like this:
Enter your OpenID - that™s the URL of your weblog:
Click the button, and you will be redirected to WordPress.com. If you are already logged in, you will be asked if you want to pass your identity to the site:
Click Yes; just this time, or Yes; always if you don™t want to be asked this question again for this site.
You will be redirected back to the site and logged in, all without using a username or password!
How is that for an intelligent service. However, as Anne Zelenka on Web Worker Daily points out, ideally you may want to map a unique url to your WordPress.com account (take a look at your Dashboard options). Anne also shows you how to use your url as your OpenID credentials even if you don’t point it to your WordPress.com site.
Tags: openid, wordpress.com, pbwiki, credentials, single sign-on
Posted in Infrastructure, Tools, Tutorials | Comments (0)