Tech Joy

Throw out the books, Web 2.0 is the way to learn

I’ve wanted to comment on this article about textbook publishing since it appeared in the New York Times in September, but in retrospect, I’m glad that I waited until I had a semester of using our class wiki to comment. I’ve long noticed similarities between the textbook publishing and pharmaceutical industries—both have the enviable power to be able to influence peoples’ lives for the better, but both are susceptible to abusing their position in efforts to maximize profits. It’s true that textbooks expensive and publishers seem impervious to market forces to keep the prices down. However, what students and professors may not realize is that publishers are increasingly pressured to provide more robust ancillary materials that are expensive to produce. While these ancillaries can often make or break a professor’s decision to adopt a book, they are often not used once the semester begins. Sometimes the textbooks themselves offer little complementary value to the class.

While students, parents, administrators, and professors have complained about textbook prices, they continue to rise. However, it’s not just the prices that are the problem. In today’s technology-driven world, the printed textbook seems downright antiquated. College students today don’t remember a time when high-end, photorealistic graphics weren’t a possibility. Studies have shown that students today learn and process information differently than students did less than a generation ago. The learning materials, however, haven’t kept up.

We are all aware of what happened to the record industry when it refused to change its business model to adapt to new technology. I fear the publishing industry is susceptible to being taken down by a disruptive new technology. We’ve had the opportunity to interact with two interesting new directions in this class—the wiki and the online textbook produced by Flat World Knowledge. While these worked well for our graduate class purposes, I think these technologies could be extended to create something a lot more interactive and stimulating.

Imagine an online “textbook” that’s an amalgam of Web 2.0 tools—part blog, some wiki thrown in, a bit of YouTube, a smattering of Podcasts, and a dash of Facebook. Wouldn’t students be clamoring to log in and learn? As the economy goes south and more people invest in higher education, this may be one new web business opportunity worth funding. Anyone?

How Barack Obama Used Web 2.0 Technologies to Win the Election

Ad Age recently awarded Barack Obama the title “Marketer of the Year.” So how did Barack Obama beat out marketing powerhouses Nike, Apple, and Zappos to win this award? More impressively, how did Obama go from a relatively unknown senator from Illinois to the Democratic presidential candidate in less than two years? By using a powerful combination of web 2.0 technologies to mobilize, organize, and recuit volunteers, fundraise, virally spread his message, and connect with his constituents. Should the election results come in tonight with Obama as the winner, Internet-based social media will clearly establish itself as the most influential form of media, above television. His campaign has much to teach marketers who will no doubt try to emulate his successes in establishing a fervent community of proud supporters in the important 18-25 demographic.

As Jon Fine, marketing and media columnist for BusinessWeek, said in the Ad Age article about Obama’s win: “It’s the f—-in’ Web 2.0 thing.” Here’s how he did it:

Central Desktop
During the primary season, Obama’s campaign workers in California started using a wiki-based collaboration platform called Central Desktop to successfully organize the first grass-roots campaign effort that the state has seen since Bobby Kennedy.  The campaign first used Central Desktop internally to manage information, documents, tasks, calendars, and train and organize volunteers. They then opened the platform up to 6,000 precinct volunteers to access and manage information. When the Obama campaign moved from California to Texas, it took the Central Desktop platform with them. Central Desktop made it easier for Obama to connect with his volunteers, and provided them with a tool that they could use to organize themselves, which made his grass roots efforts scaleable.

MyBarackObama
Obama didn’t just use established social networking sites to get the word out about his campaign: he created his own social network called MyBarackObama.com. Once registered for on the site, users could create a profile, add friends from the site, discover events to attend, sign up to volunteer, read Obama’s blog, create their own blog, and become a fundraiser.

Twitter
Obama’s Twitter account has over 115,000 followers to whom he has sent 262 messages during the campaign. Obama frequently twitters about his most frequent stop on the campaign trail and provides links to videos of his speeches. Interestingly, when you request to follow Obama on Twitter, he follows you back, so Obama is one of 3 people following me right now on Twitter. I’m sure he enjoyed hearing that I ate oatmeal for breakfast on Sunday. Incidentally, John McCain didn’t send his first text message out until the week before the election.

MySpace & Facebook
If anyone needed further evidence that Facebook has eclipsed MySpace as the social network of choice, consider this: Obama has about 20,000 friends on MySpace, and well over 2.2 million on Facebook. Obama uses his Facebook group to issue updates to his supporters, mobilize them to take part in events, donate money to his campaign, and link to his YouTube videos and blog. When Facebook users become Obama supporters, their friends are alerted through the Newsfeed feature, which then places a link on all of their pages to the Obama support page.

YouTube
Obama has relied heavily on YouTube to spread his message over the web. Obama seems to understand that younger voters would rather watch videos than read lengthy emails, and video is the ideal format to show off his excellent public speaking skills and natural charisma.  Obama has over 117,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, and has logged over 18 million channel views.

Flickr
Obama even has his own Flickr account with photos from the campaign trail.

How have these tools helped Obama? Exit polls are showing the voter participation among young people may be at its highest ever. While other presidential candidates have been able to win over young people, they haven’t been as effective as getting them out to the polls as Obama has. Saying that people are passionate about this election may be the understatement of the year. People have a lot of reasons to be passionate.  I suspect that for young people who support Obama much of this passion comes from a feeling of being connected to Obama like we’ve never felt connected to a politician before, and that for many this connection was established and fostered over many months by using the Web 2.0 technologies that have become a part of the fabric of our lives.

Twitter's Business Model

Blog posting by a VC who has invested in Twitter on Twitter’s lack of a business model doesn’t concern him—yet.

Netflix and TiVo to Partner on Movies - NYTimes.com

How’s this for timing? Today, Netflix and TiVo announced a partnership to further both companies’ goals to deliver more movies and content over the Internet. An article published in The New York Time’s didn’t provide a reaction from cable companies or movie studios.

How newsworthy is this announcement? In class last night we mentioned that providing content on demand would be the next big thing for Netflix, and the TiVo partnership moves Netflex in the right direction for delivering on this. Now Netflix can deliver content directly to subscribers’ TVs over the Internet much more easily. Of course, customers have to be subscribers to both TiVo and Netflix to take advantage of the new benefits, but there are no added subscription fees. The content available is limited to the current library of Watch Instantly content on Netflix, so it’s not comprehensive. However, delivery through TiVo might provide movie studios with the added security they need to relax their positions on streaming their films over the internet.

I’m not all that impressed with being able to stream movies from the Netflix site to my laptop. Laptops remind me too much of work and I like to watch movies and shows on a bigger screen with better sound. But having a Netflix content library on tap for instant delivery to my home LCD would certainly have me training for a marathon on the couch. It’s a good thing I don’t have TiVo!

Being evil when you’ve got the whole world in your hands.

Poor Google. The company can’t even close down a café on the far side of its campus without Valleywag citing it as more evidence of the company’s supposed corporate stinginess. It seems like everyone is looking for evidence that Google has the second evil empire.

When Google adopted the motto, “Don’t be evil,” it criticized the way that other technology companies, namely Microsoft, leveraged their power and influence to maximize profits. But now that Google is in the position of answering to shareholders, the definition of evil may become more subjective. This article in Wired from 2001 describes how Google founder and moral compass Sergey Brin made decisions to alter Google’s search results and pull ads from sites he found questionable. While many people might believe that prohibiting links to hate sites is the responsible, good thing to do, I think that Google has stepped onto shaky ground here. In fact, some of Google’s interventions seem questionable—like its refusal to display ads on Anita Roddick’s blog—and when these more subjective decisions come into play, the fact that Google is playing the role of censor seems the greater evil to me.

The Wired article made me uneasy because it made it clear that Google’s definition of evil is entirely determined by Sergey Brin alone. This kind of power reminds me of the Bible school song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”—because potentially, he does. Sergey determines how Google is going to work with the governments of China and European counties to meet their demands for censorship. And because the article in Wired is so old, it doesn’t even address the increased access to our personal data that Google has now that they’ve got our mail, calendars, photos, RSS feeds, etc. all stored somewhere in the cloud. Just try going a day without Google.

Even with all of these concerns, I have to believe that Google is not yet evil.  Sure, it’s creepy the way Gmail seems to be able to read your email with its display of contextual ads. Google Maps knows exactly where I live and where I’m going, and Google Reader knows exactly what I’m reading over my morning coffee. But if I weren’t using Google for all of these services, I would be using a variety of disparate web services that I would know even less about that Google, and who’s to say that these companies would be as protective of my personal data as Google?

The Global Social Media Network - Social Media Marketing

Here’s a great list of examples of companies using Social Media Networks in their marketing—covering everything from Facebook groups and blogs, to crowdsourcing and podcasts. Would have been a great reference for some of the questions on our midterm!

Facelifts, functionality, and SaaS (oh my!)

Socialtext - more than a facelift « Prof Kane on Computers in Management

I was excited to see responses from Claire and Jerry to my recent post on Social Text’s recent facelift and redesigns rollouts in general. Jerry’s response gave me more food for thought on this topic.

Apparently, the ST is undergoing much more than a redesign—they’re backing up the new look with some functionality our prof is pretty excited about. I’m guessing that things might have started to go fuzzy for some folks when Jerry started talking about platform changes. Jerry’s excitement about the new functionality brings up another point about how users react to software changes. More technical users, who may be administrators or power users, often follow what’s going on with the software closely. The software products I market have an avid user base who blog about every aspect of the product, provide support for other users, and generate constant activity on the user groups. While these technical users may be the most vocal supporters and critics of the products, the fact that they follow every feature and release so closely makes them more prepared to adjust to new releases.

The vast majority of their users, however, are silent users who could care less about the technical aspects of the product. (Who reading this got excited when Microsoft changed the file format for its Office 2007 products to an XML-based format?) The trick for software companies is that the silent users may not gripe about the product on blogs or user groups, but they will react with their wallets—or in the case of freeware, they’ll simply switch providers, which ultimately hurts the company’s bottom line, too.

Many software companies really do have to think about two user bases when creating their products, and make sure that there are clear benefits to both. In the case of SaaS, where new releases are pushed out, companies have to be more aware of which user group the new features or functionality are designed to help—the administrator, or the end-user, and plan awareness campaigns specifically aimed at the user group that is most impacted.

Hooray for XHTML!

Through mastering the art of cutting and pasting XHTML in just the right spots in my Tumblr, I’ve managed to add comments and the image of myself in the left sash of my Tumblelog. I won’t admit to how long it took me to figure out how exactly to cut and paste the right script to make this happen, however. And I can’t figure out how to make that little icon to the left of my picture go away, but baby steps….