A lot has really changed with the advent of Web 2.0

It only takes a 19-year old to teach educators about the benefits of Social Software. Read more here. You have to read Parts 1 and 2 as well. Note to students: Check out this game he featured on the sidebar.

Mainstream media takes notice of Friendster, Myspace, YouTube, etc.

Thanks in large measure to danah boyd's (lowercase intentional) pioneering efforts, FT.com dubbed her the high priestess of internet friendship. About time Social Software gets some "real" attention.

Paradox: comedy central videos looked better on YouTube.com than on comedycentral.com

No point comparing now because of a DMCA request. More here.

Too bad "when there is money and [agents] are involved" copyright issues come into play. Might as well forget about fair (Read:educational) use.

Blogging for Luddites

I have just been "stoked" with vox.com. Everything in this piece of Social Software seems to be more push-buttony than anything I've ever tried before. You can even ask friends to blog for you via their email. Try sending email to 4c8d04202880988e@moblog.vox.com to see what I mean. Talk about user-empowerment. Time to ask granny to pitch in for me. See my first few blogs there http://joelogs.vox.com/. While you are at it, why not create an account.

Have kids, will drink and wash

Very ingenious. More of that here. Validates the ideas behind Creativity in Product Innovation by Goldenberg and Mazursky. With "toys" like this, who needs inflatable slides?

Perhaps we should have something like this in poor regions of the Philippines.

I'd like to experiment with this

... using white board markers on what else ? whiteboard. More of the refreshing idea here. Thanks Jean Aw of Notcot.org.

Web 2.0 could also mean dot.com + dot.org

Espen Andersen's second law of the internet (the first being related to FOSS) states that "every dot.com should have a dot.org to watch over it. "

He explains: "A lot of companies are dot.coms, in the sense that they have an Internet presence with an address like companyname.com. I think their customers and other stakeholders in the company should organize and take command over the companyname.org, whatever it may be. So, let's pick a company, let's pick enron.com. If there had been an enron.org that watched over enron.com, perhaps Enron wouldn't have been in the papers quite so much. " (via Rajesh Jain).

Easier said than done. For huge enterprises, that is going to be a tad difficult to implement. Perhaps not as a matter of technology but because of rigid governance structures. Read this Harvard Uni op-ed for example. The story is altogether different for start ups like notcot.com. See how they are able to blend socially networked notcot.org (Read: community supported) with their business of churning out ideas+aesthetics+amusement. So how do we build a new new economy? Start looking away from moguls.

Narcissistic Search Engine?

I have just combined Google Blog Search, Google Customized Search Engine and Google Marker to produce a search engine for my Folk Knowledge Management Framework. "What diff does that make?", you may ask. For starters, the search engine can be populated by more relevant entries. Think: ability to upload items for more precise results. It should work for me. I stress-tested it with the keyword "joelogs" and discovered that 382 entries from diverse sources reference that item. Whether this really works for other users' purposes remains to be seen. I got the idea from Harry McCracken. You can access My Search Engine here. You can even help refine the engine. No wonder it comes labelled coop in its URL.

Web 2.0 takes the office out of the office

So wrote Edward Eliot on October 23, 2006.

I sort of felt this happening, so posted something along this theme weeks before. I just don't know if I should say more.

Online Communities and Social Networking Compared

Lee LeFever gives us the lowdown between BB, Forums, etc. and Friendster, Myspace, etc.

The differences play out on the following factors:

• Use of the Member Profile
  
• Identity without Collaboration
  
• Explicit Relationships with Forums and People
  
• New Forum/Group Creation
  
• Network Centric Navigation

More here. Bottom line for Social Web Applications is that they highlight the person in the context of a community. Whether this can solve the problem of spam is unclear. To be sure, we have options for broader user empowerment.

Technorati too much for you?

Use Google Blog Search. Very straightforward. Even allows you to configure search according to time stamp of blog post. Unless you want to count the number of links in and out of blogs. That one technorati can do for you.

Same topic, different modality

I'd like to call it "The Nature, Magnitude and Motivation behind Social Software: MySpace in Focus".

The following presents divergent approaches to a powerful thesis on the subject matter:

Dominantly Text | Dominantly Video

Tell me which side of 3Rs works best for you.

Thanks to Karl Richter.

Email is so old school

Perhaps even egroups may get lame soon. (I hear an echo: Are we ready for the Friendster generation?)

Karl Richter puts it more shockingly: Email is for the elderly

Point is, that schools need to see more of the fresh side of the 3Rs (Think: Real, Rich and Relevant) of learning.

I am told that some schools are even promoting podcasting already. I remember someone giving me a heads up on that somewhere. RSS could be a good place to start. Or perhaps downloading and using Flock. Are you a Flocker yet?

Here's an experiment on turning a 2D image to 3D

How to make money off your feeds?

Try TLA - a Feedvertising program that lets you advertise right in your RSS feed. I haven't tried it though. Tell me if you have any success with that.

How do you marry online games and education?

Build "Arden" - A game designed around Shakespeare's works. More here.

Now, let's see if we can figure out the context of "Two traded pilots 'twixt the dangerous shores Of will and judgment..."

IBM is getting ready for the MySpace (Friendster, if you will) generation

Deborah Rothberg reports that Big Blue and the University of Arizona will announce on Oct. 19 a Web 2.0 classroom curriculum designed to "introduce some level of education where students get an understanding of the tools—those from wikis, those for blogging—and familiarize themselves" with questions relating to social web environments, as well as those on "how to launch, populate and grow communities." More here.

Quote of the day.

"Most workplace rumors are 95 percent accurate." "A strong motivation we have as humans is to connect with a group."

- Nicholas DiFonzo

Time to listen to wisdom of crowds?

How do you make money out of your videos?

Switch from Youtube to Revver.com - A video social network that brings together Makers, Sharers, Watchers and Advertisers. This I gotta see.

How to make a coaster.

May also happen if you are experimenting with Blu Ray.

Inq7.net seems to have seen the writing on the wall.

... well, almost.

To see what I mean, read "Of newspapers, vinyl records and phones you actually dial" and "Are days of newspapers numbered."

Joey Allarilla admits "The world is changing. Evolve or die."

How not to die? Some areas they can improve on: allowing online comments (which can be moderated anyway) and inserting more hyperlinks in articles (not to worry, they can keep readers on their website if outgoing links launch in separate windows.)

Oh and perhaps trawl the Internet for references to their articles (I think it's called trackbacks). Yes, and while they are at it, build an rss of those "feedbacks" from their readers. Here's one. There's got to be a lot more out there. Some people might have gotten tired of sending comments the old fashioned way, couldn't wait any minute longer to get a response and just decided to post their thoughts the Web 2.0 way. I sort of felt that way when I wrote letters to the editor once or twice.

You know what comparison shopping is

... but do you know what comparison writing is?

Here's a social blogging site to watch. It is called Helium Exchange.

Marshall Kirkpatrick provides an interesting review of the site which has just ended beta.

Goofice vs. MS Office vs. OOo

How much functionality do we actually need?

Go here then here to see what I mean.

If you are plain curious, follow this link.

On a side note, "can we put Quake inside MS Word to make word processing addictive?"

We must have read a lot about Social Software

Now how about Social Conferences? The foto below should give us an idea of how it looks like. More fotos here.

This just in (27).

Ryan Blitstein reports that Big Business is now taking Social Software and allied tools more seriously. About time. More here.

Actually the piece of news that deserves more attention is perhaps the jaw-dropper of an announcement that Google has agreed to buy Youtube for US$1.65 billion. More discussion here.

Seen a Creative Commons licensed board game?

It's called Dugi. Combines the simplicity of checkers and strategic design of chess. More here.

The Sysiphus Syndrome of Upgrading

... or why we are stuck with Windows, yahoogroups, email, or anything we have gotten so used to.

More here including some useful prescriptions.

Want to share your slides ala youtube?

Slideshare allows you to do that and more (e.g. tagging). So you don't need to eye the latest 4 Gb thumb drive. Techcrunch gives a good overview feed here.

I did not know that Sayyid Ali Khameini blogs

You'll find very interesting insights from him. Boingboing has more here.

Wisdom of Crowds in action, again.

Test your ability to predict the market and put your money where your mouth is (well almost), any market. Yes even predicting the most popular word for 2006 (2004: blogs, 2005: podcasting).

It is called inklingmarkets.com. Go to this site. More of similar sites here.

I don't know about you but sometimes ...

... I'd like to believe in inadvertent sticky confluence of minds.

On the 2nd of October, I posted this asking whether Education 2.0 is in sight yet. Then the next day, Mark Wagner, wrote this, posing a similar question, "Administrators and Technology - Are We Seeing the Signs of Change?". I don't think he even knows about my earlier post.

Perhaps it is time to tame Social Software

Suw Charman documents, in beta mode (Read: draftish, perhaps because of this), Danah Boyd's talk at the BlogTalk Reloaded Conference.

One major point I managed to glean follows:

The language of techies differs radically from those of users.

Techies | Users

beta: testing | not profitable yet

great software: user-friendly | can I add you as a friend?

context: what context? | do I know you?

Read more here: BlogTalk Reloaded: danah boyd. Strange Attractor: Picking out patterns from the chaos that is the blogosphere.

technorati tags:DanahBoyd, socialsoftware

Blogged with Flock

Is Education 2.0 in sight yet?

Volumes have been written and spoken about ICT's role in economics, politics and society. Education being at the intersection and a subset of those domains cannot resist the "onslaught" of the transforming power of ICT. Run a search of your favorite school in places like Myspace, Flickr or Youtube to see what I mean. I tried it once. I keyed in [ateneo grade school] in Friendster's search tool and got more than 1000 entries. It seems like the venerable 3Rs are taking a new form: from Reading, 'Riting, 'Rithmetic to Real, Rich and Relevant. Would be nice to see how educators manage this evolution.

Just thought I'd share this

I conduct a course on Business Systems Simulations and found Beer Wars a rather interesting game (my students may think otherwise though). Revolves around the theme of Supply Chain Management. Sources are here and here.