Jared Spool: Web 2.0 The Power Behind the Hype
Here's another important and well written article on Web 2.0 by Jared Spool. He says, “
Web 2.0 isn't a 'thing',
but a collection of approaches, which are all converging on the
development world at a rapid pace. These approaches, including APIs,
RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking, suddenly give application
developers a new way to approach hard problems with surprisingly
effective results.
Then he looks at
each of these approaches–APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking
and explains why they are so important. Here are some highlights that I
think are relevant to Learning 2.0:
APIs:
This new
generation of APIs, from Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, the BBC, and
others, is at a higher level of abstraction for more niche information.
For example, Andale
produces reports of the hottest selling products on eBay, using eBay's
API to extract the data, to help sellers identify and price their
products.
It isn't just the big boys who are creating these APIs. The designers of Kiko,
a new AJAX calendar application, are promising to have APIs available
fairly soon. Even specialized niche applications are starting to make
APIs available.
Years ago, the inventors of object-oriented systems and standardized
libraries made a promise that, someday, we could quickly assemble
applications out of their component parts. Until now, that potential
has remained at arms' length. It's possible that this new generation of
APIs could help us finally fulfill that promise.
As learning
moves outside of applications onto the web as its platform, APIs become
a very important part of building learning networks. It will be
possible to build niche applications for learning and performance
support that combine components of web services.
RSS as an Interface
RSS (which stands
for RDF Site Summary, but often referred to as Really Simple
Syndication) is a computer-generated data-file format that sites use to
communicate their contents to other sites and applications. Using a
really simple definition structure, (thus the name,) RSS makes it easy
for developers to extract and integrate data from other sources into
their own.
For example, Airtight Interactive's Flickr Related Tag Browser
takes an RSS feed of a user-supplied search term and generates an
alternative interface to browsing pictures on Flickr. Alternatively,
the Marumushi Newsmap reads the headlines from Google News and displays topics to explore patterns in how stories are emphasized in the media.
This is an interesting idea. I'm not sure if RSS is the interface, but I do believe the aggregator will become the interface.
Folksonomies
Every time
Infoworld.com publishes a new article, which they do a dozen times a
day, the editors post the URL to the InfoWorld user id on the
del.icio.us bookmark service. With each article, they add relevant
tags, such as “IBM”, “blogging”, and “search”, based on the content of
the article. Anyone can use del.icio.us to keep track of the latest
InfoWorld stories on their favorite topic, such as Microsoft Office.
In addition to giving users quick access, the editors gain other
benefits from having tagged each article. The tags give them an
immediate, informal information architecture for categorizing related
articles. They can also inspect the tags that readers give the same
topics and get a quick measure of an article's importance by seeing how
many different people post the article to the del.icio.us bookmark
archive.
This style of community tagging, commonly referred to as a Folksonomy,
allows a site to create an alternative categorization scheme, created
by the users of that site. While less accurate than other styles of
organizing a site, it's appealing because it involves the entire user
population in the categorization process. You can think of it as a
continuous, full-site card sorting exercise that produces a dynamic,
live navigation scheme as the users sort the cards.
I am in a
“wait-and-see” mode about how adaptable the concept of folksonomies is
to learning. The key, of course, is getting people to tag their
entries. I just started using del.icio.us to tag links for
presentations. Yesterday I gave a presentation on B2B 2.0
to a group at a local advertising agency run by a friend. So that the
people in the audience could access all of my source material, I built
a delicious set and tagged each entry with PJA, the name of the agency.
So now they can easily access the sources by going to: http://del.icio.us/kgilroy/PJA.
What I did not do was tag these bookmarks in any other way. Unless
the tagging serves some important business function, I am skeptical
that people will take the time to do it.
Social Networking
In a typical networked
application, there is just your data and everyone else's. You can
browse your data and you can ask to review all the data everyone has
entered.
However, when you introduce a social network into the mix, you can
separate out the people in your inner circle from those people you
don't know. And sometimes, that separation adds tremendous value.
The photo sharing, Flickr, probably has the simplest social networking
capabilities we've seen. As a user peruses the images of other users,
they can designate those users as a “contact”. Once a contact, Flickr
makes is easier to see any new images from those users. Contacts can
also be designated as “Friend” or “Family”, allowing users to have
images that they only show to close connection. (Images of the baby
taking a bath may only be of interest to family connections, whereas
images of last night's toga party may only be of interest to friends.)
This
is a very important “approach” in the world of Learning 2.0. I believe
it is going to happen through your aggregator. Sets of feeds will be
published to your aggregator from people in your social and
professional networks. We are thinking about building big public
aggregators for groups of professionals. Imagine that you are a
librarian and you would be able to publish your feed collections to
this public aggregator. As in the Flickr example, cited above, you
would be able to designate people in your network to see and share your
feed collections.
It is possible to put all of these ideas to work now and to make
powerful new web services very fast and relatively inexpensively.
