Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

The News in Print compiles a listing of 40 word processing applications for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Online use, with reviews for each. And while you’re there, you might check out 30 Alternatives To Adobe Acrobat.

The Association of Virtual Worlds has published The Blue Book: A Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds. This free, downloadable book provides a guide, with links, to over 250 virtual worlds along with a glossary. Included are virtual environments for every age group ranging from Disney Fairies Pixie Hollow, Creebies, and Frenzoo, to one of my faves - Neopets, Planet Cazmo, and Scions of Fate. Coming soon: The Green Book: A Business Guide to Virtual Worlds.

Todd Zeigler at the Bivings Report comes up with 9 Ways to Improve the Quality of Comments on your Website. If you have a blog or website on which you allow public commenting, you may want to check out some of these useful suggestions:

1. Have moderators (or other staff) maintain an active presence in the comments
2. Force users to have one pre-approved comment before they can post freely
3. Filter out the profanity
4. Report Comment feature
5. Bury/Promote Comments
6. Require users to register before posting comments
7. Enable threaded comments
8. Give users ability to ignore other commenters
9. Implement a comment policy

Imagine making a change to your profile on MySpace and having it automagically update on the other social website communities to which you belong. According to an announcement made by MySpace yesterday, this functionality will be available in a matter of weeks. The initiative called Data Availability will enable social networkers to share not only profile data between websites, but content such as photos and videos as well. So far Twitter, eBay, PhotoBucket, and Yahoo! have all signed up to participate and partner in the project.

Not to be outdone, Facebook announced today that it will be releasing a similar functionality called Facebook Connect which will also enable members to share their data, friends lists, and content with other websites. Although no partnering websites have been announced, it is rumored that the social news site Digg may be an inaugural partner.

MySpace, Facebook, and Yahoo! all joined the Data Portability Workgroup (DPW) earlier this year whose mission it is to facilitate just this type interoperability between social networks enabling members to access friends and media between all of the social communities to which they belong. For a quick (2 minute) tutorial on what data portability is, check out this video.

Illustration by Max Scratchmann

Anastasia Goodstein offers some pretty sound advice for attracting today’s tech-savvy, multi-tasking teens to the library in her article What Would Madison Avenue Do? Marketing to Teens: To attract today’s teens, think like a marketing pro in the May 1st issue of School Library Journal. From her experience studying young people’s online habits Goodstein shares the following lessons for dealing with the Millenial generation:

• Teens are multitaskers.
• Teens prefer byte-sized entertainment.
• Teens expect content on demand.
• Teens want to participate.
• Enlist teens to manage your social media.
• Don’t try too hard to be cool.
• Know your audience.
• Don’t sweat the design.
• Support causes that kids care about.
• Use text messaging and IM appropriately.
• Teens love making mixtapes… online.
• Tweens like to break virtual worlds’ rules.
• It’s not just about MySpace and Facebook.
• Beware of anonymous gossip sites and applications.
• Dance videos are all the rage.
• Miley’s YouTube channel.

Marketing Vox has come up with a how-to guide for podcasters including 10 Tips for Launching a Solid Podcast. They note that podcasts are projected to reach an audience of 65 million users by the year 2012 and offer these suggestions for launching an engaging podcast:

1. Plan your podcast schedule.
2. Make it RSS-accessible.
3. Keep it short.
4. Don’t waste time hard-selling.
5. Segment your podcasts.
6. Simplify podcast management.
7. Submit your podcast to popular directories.
8. Build a compelling podcast website.
9. Let website visitors commune with one another.
10. Measure and analyze.

via Micro Persuasion

Looking to go beyond Google for Web search? If so, you’ll want to check out these eight search engines listed by Web Worker Daily as viable alternatives to the search heavyweight including interfaces which allow you to search web forums, video, images, and people. Here are their suggestions:

• Addict-o-matic
• Redzee
• Omgili
• Dogpile
• Truveo
• Blinkx
• QnA search
• ZabaSearch

Aliza Sherman at Web Worker Daily discusses the rules for Building Online Community Brick by Virtual Brick and then provides some suggestions for social networks and other online destinations which offer community building opportunities. According to Sherman, the rules of online communities include:

1. You can’t own a community.
2. Communities aren’t free.
3. Every community needs leadership.
4. A community dies if it is all about you.
5. At some point, organic communities need roots.
6. Community building is not all about the tools.

The speaker presentation files for the recent Web 2.0 Expo which was held April 22-25, 2008 in San Francisco, CA are now available. If you weren’t able to attend the popular O’Reilly conference, you can still access the 50+ sessions including:

• Games 2.0: Why the Future of Games Looks More Like Zombies and Scrabulous and Less Like Halo 3
• How to Create Successful Unconferences, BarCamps, & Meetups for Almost No $$
• Social Data: Collecting, Mining, and Using it in Your Applications
• Taking Web 2.0 Offline and On the Desktop
• The Next Generation of Tagging: Searching and Discovering a Better User Experience

In response to the new WebShare initiative which is offering free access to the complete online Encyclopaedia Britannica to bloggers and Web publishers, I had a chance to ask Jorge Cauz, President of Encyclopaedia Britannica, a few questions about the program.

Ellyssa: The WebShare initiative comes fast on the heels of Wikipedia’s 10 millionth entry, was this new program a response to the growing popularity of the free online encyclopedia?

Jorge Cauz: No, we’ve been in business for almost two and one half centuries and have been publishing on the Web for almost 15 years. We develop new plans, products, and features based on what our customers want, our judgments about where they are headed, what technology is available, and what makes sense for us to fulfill our mission, which is to be the preferred resource for people seeking and sharing learning, knowledge and understanding. Britannica does best when people are engaged with our work and use it in discussions on issues that concern them. Today, the people who are publishing on the Web are helping to shape and drive those discussions as never before, and we want to see our products and valuable knowledge in their hands. It’s good business for us to do this, and it’s good for web publishers to have access to our products. That’s what the WebShare program is about.

Ellyssa: Why did Britannica make the decision to focus on “Web publishers” to receive free access?

Jorge Cauz: The Internet is increasingly the place where public discourse and discussion happens today, and the people who write and publish there are an important force in driving public conversations. Since Britannica has a great deal to offer in the way of context and background for these discussions, we want to make our work easily accessible to the people who can make good use of it in their own work and by doing so let the world know what kind of accurate, trustworthy and up-to-date information Britannica has.

Ellyssa: Does this include professional journalists and writers for major publications such as The New York Times, or just bloggers and citizen journalists?

Jorge Cauz: Yes, we’ve generally given free subscriptions to mainstream journalists who want them. That’s been true for some years.

Ellyssa: The Britannica WebShare program is offering quite a collection of widgets for blogs and websites offering non-account holders access to subject-focused encyclopedia articles, as well as a daily tweet from Twitter - are there any additional plans in the works to incorporate other social tools or emerging technologies?

Jorge Cauz: We do have a lot of plans already in the works, though nothing that we are ready to announce just yet. But please stay in touch with us or come visit us to our site(s) over the coming weeks and months. We’ll have plenty of innovative features!

Ellyssa: WebShare is opening up access to a lot of Britannica’s content, could this be a first step in making this a free resource, open to everyone, at some point in the future?

Jorge Cauz: No, we are not planning for that.

Mike Eisenberg writes about The Parallel Information Universe: What’s out there and what it means for libraries in the May 1, 2008 issue of Library Journal. In his article, Eisenberg discusses several different 2.0 technology types and conducts a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis for each, as well as provides some advice for taking those next steps.

“The major lesson for librarians from all this is that “it’s an information world out there!” More and more, it’s not about the technology; it’s about information—finding, using, creating, combining, sharing, and evaluating it. There is an underlying information base to every aspect of life and a need for information institutions in society—that is, libraries. Libraries must continue to play our traditional role, but we also need to assume responsibility for being the information institutions in our communities and organizations.”

The U.K.’s Guardian, in association with the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc), has published a special supplement titled Libraries Unleashed featuring 18 articles on libraries and technology. They have categorized the articles into the following topic areas:

• Colleges, universities and the digital challenge
• Learning spaces
• Library 2.0
• New business models
• Digitisation
• The new user
• Librarians

This chart from Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, written by analysts at Forrester, illustrates some interesting trends dealing with who people put their trust in when it comes to information about products and services. The data shows that people trust friends as information sources above traditional media and expert opinions. Experts are relied upon only slightly more (3% more) than the reviews of strangers on websites. Josh Bernoff gives some suggestions about what this might mean for your brand in his post Data chart of the week: who do people trust?, including a tip that there might already be reviews of your organization on websites such as Yelp and the Consumerist.

This trend of placing trust in one’s peers over industry experts is echoed by the Edelman Trust Barometer 2008:

“In Brazil, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United States, “a person like me” is considered the most credible source of information about a company.”

The Spring 2008 edition of the Top 100 Tools for Learning has been published by Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT). Earlier this year, they gathered the top 10 tools used by 155 learning professionals to compile this massive list. Their analysis and individual lists are also linked within the document. Here are their top 10 tools:

1. del.icio.us
2. Firefox
3. Google Reader
4. Skype
5. Google Search
6. Wordpress
7. PowerPoint
8. GMail
9. Audacity
10. Blogger

What are your top 10 tools? List them in the comments!

The nearly 3,000 members of the Library 2.0 community on Ning will be familiar with the online service which allows users to create their own social networks without technical know-how. Educause has created another of its 7 Things guides which provides a quick overview of the Ning technology by addressing the following questions:

1. What is it?
2. Who’s doing it?
3. How does it work?
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?