Tech Joy

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

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:36:56 -0500

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

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:16:00 -0500

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

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:38:36 -0400

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

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:05:00 -0400

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.

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 11:01:51 -0400

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?

brit: How Much is YouTube Worth to Obama and McCain?

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 11:01:15 -0400

brit:

How Much is YouTube Worth to Obama and McCain?

The Global Social Media Network - Social Media Marketing

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:05:00 -0400

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!

Some post-midterm levity at the expense of Web...

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:49:00 -0400

Some post-midterm levity at the expense of Web 2.0…

Dailymotion - Here_Comes_Another_Bubble_-_The_Richter_Scales, a video from kingofdoper. richterscales, richter, scales, acappella, aquiestlemonde

Facelifts, functionality, and SaaS (oh my!)

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:34:00 -0400

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!

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 16:17:00 -0400

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….

New Social Text look: You call this a facelift?

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:41:00 -0400

So our class wiki has a new look that is a decided shift away from the old user interface, which had a spare, DIY (Do Internet Yourself) feel. I can’t complain that we weren’t warned that this was coming, but I’ve been blissfully ignoring the “Changes coming to Social Text” notification at login. “Yuck” pretty much sums up my initial reaction to the “facelift.”

There seems to be a lot of space “above the fold,” that is, what you can see in your browser window without scrolling down. Much of this space is taken up by the mutiple dashboards used to navigate Social Text and the class wiki. Surely these could be consolidated—or perhaps the designers should ask themselves if all of these buttons are even necessary. I, for one, have no interest in following the wikis of classes I’m not enrolled in. Another issue for me, which may have more to do with the way our class’s wiki is set up than Social Text’s redesign) is the color of the text, especially where it appears on that icky taupe background. It’s pretty hard on the eyes. What’s wrong with a white background? Very few web pages can successfully use a colored background to display a lot of text.

While these continue to be issues for me, I found that the longer I spent on the wiki, the more I started adjusting to the changes and feeling better about them. How people adapt to new technology and user interfaces is particularly interesting to me because I work marketing for a software company. My understanding of the work that goes into a well-designed user interace probably makes me more willing to embrace software or technology changes then the average user (because I believe that software and technology companies are not evil, but ultimately want to make money, which means not doing anything to deter people from using their products).

For instance, I love the new Yahoo! mail (except when it malfunctions, which has nothing to do with the design, but the technology) and I maintain that its features work better for me than Gmail’s (except for chat—I dig that). I’m also apparently one of the few people who truly loves the new Microsoft Office 2007 user interface. Sure, there are a few issues, but I honestly feel that the Ribbon, contextual tabs, and floating toolbars help me work faster! I’ve discovered loads of tools that I didn’t even know existed. I don’t feel as stupid using Excel!

I suspect that I had an easier time migrating to Office 2007 because I followed the redesign pretty closely through the designer’s blogs, so I understood the rationale behind many of the decisions that they made. Most people are not so nerdy, however, and my reaction to the Social Text changes today reminded me of that. It just goes to show that no matter how great your redesign is, how many usability studies you’ve done, or how well you’ve marketed the new look and tried to prepare users for it, users will nearly always resist change—initially. And you’ve got a good thing going if they put up with it while they adapt.

What do you think of the new Social Text user interface? How do you normally adapt to new designs? Have you ever stopped using a product because the user interface was poorly designed?

No link for LinkedIn and Facebook

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:04:00 -0400

The topic of Social Networking sparked a lively discussion in class last week. It seems that many of us are still trying to figure out how to balance the power of being connected with concerns about privacy and unwritten rules of social ettiquette. While many of us enjoy the benefits that these sites offer in terms of staying in touch with those on the periphery of our lives, the fact that the Internet is no longer a place where one can be anonymous and free means that we have to be ever vigilant about how our thoughts and activities are chronicled for all to see. Now that employers are treating a Google search as just another step in the interview process for job candidates, and schools are researching applicants’ My Space and Facebook profiles for evidence of incriminating and inappropriate behavior, judgments about one’s the personna one projects online can easily overshadow one’s real world accomplishments and qualifications.

The Economist published an article this week titled “Facebook for Suits” in which it describes the success of the professional networking sites LinkedIn and Xing. With thousands of Wall Street and other professionals on the hunt for new jobs, and recruiters now beginning to use them as a powerful recruiting tool, activity on these sites is higher than ever. Unlike some social networking sites, LinkedIn and Xing are actually making money, and primed for future growth. The Economist concludes the article by saying that this could be threatened, however, if Facebook decides to, “grow up and decide to do serious business.”

As Facebook and MySpace struggle with how to monetize social networking, moving into the increasingly lucrative professional networking space may be tempting. While Facebook is well-positioned to become a one-stop shop for personal and professional networking, a move in this direction would need to be managed very carefully, and I’m not convinced that it could be pulled off successfully at all. Everyone has a different comfort level with mixing the work and private lives, and Facebook already threatens the boundaries many would draw. Many Facebook members struggle with what to do about friend requests from colleagues and managers. However, if one can deal with the uncomfortable position of declining these requests, Facebook makes it fairly easy to keep work and personal boundaries firmly drawn.

Opening up Facebook to prospective employers and recuiters would drastically change the way that many professionals use the site and would likely deter many of the people responsible for LinkedIn’s success. Even if Facebook allowed users to maintain separate personal and professional personnas, users may not trust Facebook to not blur the two. Facebook users decried its implementation of the Newsfeed feature when it was introduced. Now imagine what would have been the result if Facebook broadcasted the same type of information in a newsfeed to recuirters and employers. An error in judgment about how to handle its user’s personal information could ruin the site.

Employers would also have to be cautious about the information they learn about candidates through Facebook profiles to avoid discrimination suits. Information learned about a job candidate’s personal life, such as their marital status, sexual orientation, even hobbies could influence a hiring decision even at the most well-intentioned firms.

Screenshot of the Tumblr dashboard. When creating a post, you...

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:55:31 -0400

Screenshot of the Tumblr dashboard.

When creating a post, you first select the kind of content you’d like to post—either text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, or video. Tumblelogs that you follow appear just below, so you don’t have you leave your dashboard to view them.

"Squint hard, and textbook publishers can look a lot like drug makers."

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:26:39 -0400

“Squint hard, and textbook publishers can look a lot like drug makers.”

- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/technology/15link.html?ref=technology

Why Tumblr?

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:11:00 -0400

Noncomformist. Is that what you’re thinking? Yes, I rejected the recommended blogging tools for this assignment, but I did so with good intentions.

You may not have heard of Tumblr until now, but I believe that Tumblr is a better form of weblog for most people who want to have a presence on the Web. Why? Because many of us like the idea of sharing our musings, quotes, photos, videos, conversations with others, but don’t want to commit a lot of time to the effort. Traditional blogging tools like WordPress and Blogger, while relatively easy to use, feel too oriented to the written word. They’re great for writers who have something to say and want say it well. But that’s too intimating and time consuming for many of us.

Tumblr is perfect for those savvy Web 2.0 users who have come to view their lives as an amalgam of digital photos, IM conversations, videos, comments, text messages, etc., and want a quick and dirty way to share all of these forms of communications. The folks at Tumblr draw this analogy to explain the concept: “If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.”

While it’s possible to share the same kinds of things on Blogger or Wordpress, Tumblr is distinct form both of this because the presentation is simpler and more visual. Tumblr’s user interface is ridiculously easy to use—so easy that it practically beacons you to add content. Setting up a Tumblr tumblelog takes less than a minute, and you can customize the design and post your first piece of content in under 5 minutes.

Another Tumblr feature is that you can follow other people’s tumblelogs and see who is following yours right from your dashboard. This feature lead to the concept of the “reblog,” where you post content from another tumblelog on your own, adding your own comments. Every post in tumblelogs that you follow has a “reblog” button to the right of the post. One feature that Tumblr lacks is a built-in commenting system, however one is available through a third-party. I plan to add comments to my tumblelog soon so you can let me know what you think.

I hope to convert you all by the end of the semester!