Technology

information & communication technology

Information overload or just the wrong tools?

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Information overload is supposed to be the scourge of 2008, reports Ars Technica, and one way to address it, according to this news article referencing the same report, is to be smarter with our e-mail.

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E-mail is like cars in an urban metropolis; neither effective nor efficient due to the fact that there are just too many of them. Instead of optimizing an almost-dead technology, I’d suggest using better tools. Set up blogs for one-to-many communications; have wikis for projects, teams and departments; and use instant messaging for quick person-to-person communications. Then keep track of it all with a feed aggregator. With these tools and practices in place, e-mail can be reserved for more official traffic, like sending an invoice or a proposal.

The kids know this already. E-mail is only used to communicate with your parents.

Some year-end stats

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Checking some of my stats for the past 365 days and thought they might be of interest.

Search Engines that direct readers here:

  • 95% Google
  • 2% Yahoo!
  • 1% Ask Jeeves
  • 1% MSN

Browser used:

  • 51% IE
  • 36% Firefox
  • 6% Safari

Screen resolution:

  • 37% 1024 x 768
  • 14% 1280 x 1024
  • 13% 1280 x 800
  • 7% 1280 x 768

If my stats are indicative, which they may not be as many of my readers are early adopters, then Google is still the dominant search engine, Firefox is gaining ground but IE prevails, and almost everyone has a high resolution screen.

Keeping life simple

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Are you the family ‘go-to’ geek that everyone calls upon when they have computer problems? You may want to give a Zonbu as a self-interested gift. I gave one to Andrea for Christmas and it was installed in less than five minutes. That means up and running with no EULA or anything else to sign. The Zonbu is a mini computer operating on a Linux Gentoo operating system that has been installed with a customized and user-friendly interface. The system updates itself when you go online. That means that you never have to add an update, patch, virus protection or anything else. The total cost for me, including shipping, taxes and duty was $140, less than my next RAM upgrade.

The Zonbu comes with a 4 GB flash drive, no fan, no hard drive (that means low power use), and 6 USB ports. It also has about 20 installed applications; enough for your ‘average’ computer user. I purchased a 2 year service agreement for $15/month that gives Andrea 50 GB of online storage that is automatically updated by the system.

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What I really like about the Zonbu is that no one can mess it up (including teenagers), because the OS is locked-down. You can buy an open version of the Zonbu, but that would defeat the purpose of paying for software as a service. For me it’s peace of mind :-)

Big Consulting Companies Jumping on Bandwagon 2.0

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It looks like social media (wikis, blogs & social networking) are going the way of e-learning and knowledge management (KM). That means big companies charging big fees for cookie-cutter solutions. Jon Husband reports on this phenomenon for 2008 and advises Caveat emptor:

Big firms either 1) develop standardized methodologies and practices (their business models depend upon it), or 2) if their business model does not depend upon the standardization, they will charge you a mint and a half (McKinsey ?)

The organization(s) [clients] will in my opinion get better advice rooted in critical thinking and experience and focused on results, as opposed to maintaining an expensive dependency on canned rhetoric that may not be based in much experience. For example, what exactly is “Advanced” Web 2.0 technology ? Blogs with lots of colourful widgets ?

As I’ve said before, Free-agents and natural enterprises are better. The upstart independents and small consultancies have Clayton Christensen’s disruptive Sword & Shield which the incumbents (large consultants) don’t have. With early motivation to enter this emerging field (Shield) and now with with years of experience and skills (Sword), we the “upstarts” should be able to hold our own.

When e-learning and KM first came out, it was difficult to market your services without expensive campaigns. On top of that, the IT tools were expensive. Now the best tools are open source, leveling the playing field even more. The rules have changed for 2008, and we upstarts can significantly engage in a conversation with our markets using our own tools with which we’ve developed a certain expertise.

The game is afoot!

Own Your Data

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The impending closure of the Eduspaces service has many people wondering what to do and several options are cropping up in the online discussions.

For those not in the know, Eduspaces is/was a free, social networking and blogging service built on the Elgg open source platform. It used to be called elgg.net but was changed to Eduspaces when it became obvious that the community came mostly from the educational sector. I’ve used Elgg for some of my clients and have had an Eduspaces account, but my main site has always been here. I pay for my hosting, own the data, and use an open source platform so that I can export my blog in the event that I want to move to a different service provider.

Anyone who asks me about blogging or setting up a community on the Web using wikis or some other application is given pretty well the same advice.  If the site is important and the data are of some significance for the long term, then:

  1. Use an open source platform from a stable and functioning community.
  2. Own your own domain, and have a Service Level Agreement for your hosting.

Using open source gives you freedom from vendors and ensures that you are not handcuffed to your technology provider. Having your own domain name and paying for a service provider (or hosting on your own server) ensure that you have control over your data.

The users of Eduspaces are in a much better position than would be those of Blogger in a similar event. At least the Eduspaces community can migrate to another Elgg host. There is no other Blogger platform to move to.

If I had to move a large Eduspaces account, I would find another Elgg installation. I migrated from Drupal to WordPress (which I don’t regret) a couple of years ago, but it’s a heck of a lot easier to stick with the same platform.

Open Source Social Networking Application

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I recently joined Xing, a business social networking site. In one of the forums I came across an open source social networking system (SNS). Dolphin is Creative Commons licensed, not the more typical GPL for open source, with the following restrictions:

Dolphin is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This means that you are free to use it the way you need, adapt it, change code, distribute, share with friends or even sell it. You must, however attribute the work as specified by BoonEx. And the specification is dead simple – don’t remove links to BoonEx and the Dolphin Page in the footer of all Dolphin pages, unless you paid for it.

An example website built with Dolphin is the German/English language LearnTube! Community, though it doesn’t have many members yet.

I get a lot of hits on this website from searches looking for open source alternatives to Facebook. I have recommended Elgg, which hosts Eduspaces, or sometimes Drupal, and now I know of another one. I’d appreciate finding anyone with first-hand experience of a Dolphin installation.

Update: It looks like Eduspaces will be shutting down its free service as of 10 Jan 2008. It’s too bad, but a free service still has to pay for the cost of hosting hundreds of blogs :-(  More on Eduspaces at IncSub.

Taking action for fair copyright in Canada

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Following up from Copy Leftovers, here are some resources focused especially on the Canadian perspective. We should all be concerned and get informed before the Canadian DMCA is allowed to pass.

First off, you can join the Facebook group, Fair Copyright for Canada, which already has over 10,000 members. I have also been saving articles on del.icio.us relating to Copyright. Consider that Canadians pay for their RIGHT to copy digital media every day, according to Michael Geist:

The Copyright Board of Canada last week released its proposed tariff for 2007 for the private copying levy. The numbers remain unchanged: 21 cents per CD-R. As prices have dropped, however, the levy now frequently comprises a significant percentage of the retail price. Consider the purchase of 100 blank Maxell CDs. Future Shop retails the 100 CDs for $69.99. The breakdown of this sale is $48.99 for the CDs and $21.00 for the levy (even worse is a current Future Shop deal of 200 blank CD-Rs from HP, which retails for $59.99. The levy alone on this sale is $42.00 (200 CDs x 21 cents/CD) which leaves the consumers paying $17.99 for the CDs and $42.00 for the levy).

According to Steve Jobs, the music companies sell more DRM-free music than anyone else:

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

On a lighter note, you can watch this video of a puppet saying why we should Stop the Canadian DMCA, with some interesting recommendations on what to do with our politicians.

Copy leftovers

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Rather than including consumer concerns such as flexible fair dealing, time shifting, format shifting, parody, and the future of the private copying levy within the forthcoming bill, Prentice [Canada’s Industry Minister] will instead strike a Copyright Review Panel to consider future copyright reforms.

Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, once again shows that corporate interests trump the public interest in Canada.

It seems that this 2002 Supreme Court ruling is being completely ignored by the powers that be:

Excessive control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and embellish creative innovation in the long–term interests of society as a whole, or create practical obstacles to proper utilization.

Consider that before movable type, we didn’t have copyright laws because there was no available technology to easily copy text. Monks and scribes did the heavy lifting and shared within the literate world. Minstrels, troubadours and town criers passed on information orally to the non-literate. Enter the printing press and we see the Stationers Company with a comfortable monopoly on printing from 1556 until the Statute of Anne in 1710, which gave rights to authors and book buyers. Are we doomed to face the equivalent of the Stationers Company monopoly for a century before we get laws that reflect the realities of the digital age and give more power to individuals than corporations?

The early American economy blossomed by ignoring British copyright and patent laws, so that American goods could be produced and sold cheaply. If our government restrains our collective creativity through stringent copyright protection, will our economy be threatened by some country that cheaply produces the desired goods of the digital economy? These “business-friendly” government policies may be setting all of us up for a big fall.

The blog is dead; long live the blog

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Hugh Macleod says that blogs may be considered [by some media pundits] as a dying form of expression, with Twitter, Facebook, Digg and other micro formats on the rise, but for some people, blogs are still a powerful medium:

So that’s why I have a blog, I suppose. I like the control. I write something, I post it, it gets read, hopefully good things happen as a result, somewhere on this small blue planet of ours. Unlike a book or a movie or a TV commercial, there’s no waiting around for somebody else to greenlight it. The only light is the greenlight.

A blog can be the primary marketing tool of the free-agent or micro-business. It is cheap, simple and can have a far reach. My blog is the only time and money I spend that could be defined as “marketing”. I don’t pay for advertising, I don’t pay to get a speaking gig and I don’t even hang up a sign (not really necessary in Sackville).

This blog, started in February 2004, now has +1,000 posts and +2,000 comments.

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Depending on which statistics software I use, I get somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 actual visitors per month, which doesn’t include anyone reading my posts in an RSS aggregator or all the bots and stuff. That is more reach than I could possibly have purchased in advertising. Like Hugh, I really appreciate the fact that I can publish something immediately, or even time-delayed, without waiting for permission, approval or the presses to start.

Vive le blogue libre!

Semantic Web Applications

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When I last mentioned Radian6, they didn’t have much information on their website. Now you can see screen shots and get more detailed information on this New Brunswick company that is focused on “social media monitoring”; or basically finding out who’s saying what about your stuff.

A post today on Read/Write Web  covers 10 Semantic Web applications to watch, showing how this field is growing in leaps in bounds. These applications do things such as semantic tagging between databases; tagging of an individual’s Web habits; tags on your website to add more context (or is that spam?); sentence analysis instead of keyword analysis; and even natural language analysis.

Just as Google revolutionized Web search, there probably will be a new player coming on the market soon to do the same to make more contextual sense of the Web. Semantic applications, as opposed to the Semantic Web, are practical tools to make someone’s work easier. According to R/WW, they are able to :

… determine the meaning of text and other data, and then create connections for users. Another of the founders mentioned below, Nova Spivack of Twine, noted at the Summit that data portability and connectibility are keys to these new semantic apps – i.e. using the Web as platform.