Category: Fun

Microformats and Firefox

Joss Winn / / Fun, Standards & Specs, Web

When I have time, I like to read about new and developing web standards and specifications. Sad, you might think, but it’s a way of learning about some of the theoretical developments that eventually turn into practical functionality for all users of the Internet.  Also, I am an Archivist (film, audiovisual, multimedia) by trade, and am somewhat reassured by the development of standards and specifications as a way of achieving consensus among peers and avoiding wasted time and effort in managing ‘stuff’.

So, while poking around on Wikipedia last night, I came across ‘Operator‘, an add-on for Firefox that makes part of the ‘hidden’ semantic web immediately visible and useful to everybody. If you’re using Firefox, click here to install it. It’s been available for over a year now and is mature and extensible through the use of user scripts.  It’s been developed by Michael Kaply, who works on web browsers for IBM and is responsible for microformat support in Firefox.

Operator leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services.

In practice, Operator is a Firefox tool bar (and/or location/status bar icon) that identifies microformats and other semantic data in a web page and allows you to combine the value of that information with other web services such as search, bookmarking, mapping, etc. For example, this blog has tags. Operator identifies the tags and then offers the option of searching various services such as Amazon, YouTube, delicious and Upcoming, for a particular tag.  If Operator finds geo-data, it offers the option of mapping that to Google Maps and, on this page for example, it identifies me as author and allows you to download my contact details, which are embedded in the XHTML. Because it is extensible through user-scripts, there are many other ways that the microformat data can be used.

Of particular interest to students and staff are perhaps the microformat specifications for resumes and contact details. Potentially, a website, properly marked up (and WordPress allows for some of this already), could provide a rich and useful portfolio of their work and experience which is semantically linked to other services such as Institutional Repositories or other publications databases where their work is held.

After using it for a few hours, I now find myself disappointed when a website doesn’t offer at least one piece of semantic data that is found by Operator (currently, most don’t but some do). Microformat support will be included (rather than an add-on) in Firefox 3.1 and IE 8, so we can expect to see much more widespread adoption of it. A good thing.

There’s a nice demonstration of microformats here, using the Operator plugin.

Wikipedia : Google Docs : Yahoo Pipes Mashup

Joss Winn / / Fun, Tips, Web

First of all, this is not my work. All credit should go to Tony Hirst from the Open University for posting an explanation of this to his blog. Brilliant stuff.

Tony is doing what we’ve been meaning to look at for some time, which is create ‘Learning Objects’ out of mashups. In Tony’s example, data is 1) taken from Wikipedia, 2) imported to a Google Spreadsheet, 3) output as a CSV file and 4) mashed up in Yahoo! Pipes.

The process of creating an object like the map below is so transparent that both teachers and students, with a specific outcome in mind, could achieve something like this and the results are very satisfying, as you can see.

UK WordCamp (Ed)ucation?

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Fun, Learning Landscapes, Software, Web

Having heard about the WordCamp Ed event in Washington DC, I’m thinking of organising a WordCamp, focussing on the use of WordPress in HE and FE in the UK.  Would anyone be interested in helping with the organisation of this? 

There is some support for organising WordCamps from Automattic. A lot of the items listed there would be easy to facilitate with support from one of our institutions.  I’d be happy to ask the University of Lincoln. We’re just off the main North-South East Coast rail trunk, but the access isn’t bad from London up to Edinburgh, and it’s a good, modern university, with decent facilities in a historic city worth visiting. 

I’m sure there would be a lot of interest in attending. It could appeal to teachers, students, researchers, ICT and web dev staff.  We could appeal for the involvement of edubloggers who have a lot of experience in advocating the use of blogs in HE and FE. 

There was a WordCamp in Birmingham in July 2008. We could contact the organisers of that event for advice as well as the organisers of the DC event.

The day might be organised like this: 

  • Registration and welcome
  • Keynote 
  • Live WordPressMU install and set up. A useful overview for both administrators and users. Also introduces the language of blogging which people will hear constantly throughout the day. i.e. ‘posts’, ‘pages’, ‘tags’, categories’, ‘blogroll’, ‘plugins’, ‘themes’, etc. 
  • Two or three presentations with Q&A on how people are using WordPress in education (maybe one from a marketing perspective, the others from a teaching and learning perspective) 
  • Lunch 
  • Keynote 
  • Special interest group sessions: research groups, teachers, students, marketing, administration, development, etc. 
  • Group feedback 
  • Presentation on forthcoming WordPress features. Integration of WP with other (social) services. Intro to BuddyPress and BBPress as extensions to WordPressMU.
  • Close 

Is anyone interested in helping organise a WordCamp(Ed) in the UK? Please leave comments below and join our new Google Group.

Collaboration is beautiful

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Fun, Open Source, Projects, Software

While trying to sleep after posting about MOOCs, I lay thinking about massive distributed collaboration and about code_swarm, amazing visualisations of key open source software projects. Here’s a beautiful example of successful, distributed collaborative effort. Do watch for the explosion of participation in 2000 as the network effect really kicks in. As the product matures, it attracts more users and greater use attracts increased participation and a better and more popular product. All made possible by the open source license which acts as the basis for participation. There are more examples on the code_swarm site.

[vimeo 1093745]

I know, it’s not a MOOC, but there are some similarities such as mass, distributed collaboration led by one or two individuals, surrounded by a core of active participants and hundreds of occasional contributors.

Flickr Commons

Joss Winn / / Commons, Fun, Tips

There’s a slice of Flickr reserved for images that are ‘in the commons‘. Effectively, this means there are “no known copyright restrictions” and the images can be enjoyed, used, and distributed in the public domain.

The Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institute and George Eastman House are among the participating institutions which make it an excellent resource for images of American social history.

Here are a couple of images that a commons search for ‘New Mexico’ returned. Click on each image to go to the Flickr page.

Jack Whinery, homesteader, and his family, Pie Town, New Mexico

 

Jim Norris, homesteader, Pie Town, New Mexico

 

 

Web Trend Map

Joss Winn / / Fun, Web

Following their predictions in January, the Web Trend Map 3 from Information Architects, offers an interesting overview of the 300 most influential websites, illustrated along the lines of the Tokyo train map.

To get the full picture you need to either view the PDF or buy the poster.  Cast your eye over the PDF and you’ll see that among the big names that stand out are Yahoo!, MSN, Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, eBay, WordPress and Friendster. No real surprises there.

The layout is meaningful in that the train lines correspond to different web trends and Google sits in the centre because it is “slowly becoming a metaphor of the Internet itself”. Each of the 300 sites occupy different train stations in Tokyo, depending on the current status they’re deemed to have. The cool sites can be seen in cool parts of Tokyo and likewise the boring sites (i.e. Facebook) have been moved to the boring areas of the city. The creators are clearly having fun at times, too.  Yahoo News, for example, is located in Sugamo, where old ladies go shopping, because Yahoo News “recently hijacked the online advertisement revenue of around 250 local newspapers and locked them into a binding contract. Who reads local news? Old people.”

Despite the sarcasm, it is a genuinely useful and interesting illustration of who the players are on the web and what spaces they dominate. There are also two forecast and branding plates which, as the names suggest, illustrate where the weather is turning for some sites and how certain brands are resonating with users.

It’s good to see WordPress being in the centre of it all; an open source product (which the Learning Lab runs on), not far from the centre of everything, located between the Google Vatican and the News district, on the Technology and Social Networking lines.  The popularity of WordPress is no doubt due to it’s focus on usability and good presentation but also because as an open source product, it attracts a large developer community who write plugins to extend the basic functionality of the blogging platform, making it attractive to people who want their blog to integrate with sites like Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. WordPress leverage this voluntary manpower by enhancing their commercial product.  Integration between sites is key as each compete for our time so it’s not surprising that dataportability.org, despite being a recent initiative, sits in the Brains district among all the big players.

The DataPortability Project is a group created to promote the idea that individuals have control over their data by determing how they can use it and who can use it. This includes access to data that is under the control of another entity.

In practice, this means that we should expect to be able to login to WordPress, select images from our Flickr account and publish them in a blog to Facebook, painlessly and securely. Web applications, including those sold to the Education market, that inhibit the secure but effortless portability of data are digging themselves into a hole.