Social Software and Web 2.0

Thomas RybergPhD student

e-Learning Lab, Department of Communication and Psychology

ryberg@hum.aau.dkhttp://www.ell.aau.dk

Made with Web 2.0 Logo-creator: http://msig.info/web2.php

This work is published under a Creative Commons license:Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

Plan for today

• Presentation of Web 2.0 and Social Software 1 hour of CMS-exploration 1 hour of Web (2.0) surfing

• Work in small groups (2-3)

Outline

• Social software and Web 2.0 – core points• Some thoughts from Dalsgaards article• Demonstration and showcases of “Web 2.0

and social software” services and software The technological perspective The conceptual perspective Understanding the sociology of technology use!

• Interactive Innovation – my spin on this: User generated content, user driven innovation,

hackability, widgetality and the perpetual beta!

Web 2.0 and social software• Have you heard about and know the terms?• What’s the fuzz??

Web 2.0 refers to a second generation of services available on the internet that let people collaborate, and share information online. They often allow for mass publishing (web-based social software). The term may include blogs and wikis. To some extent Web 2.0 is a buzzword, incorporating whatever is newly popular on the Web (such as tags and podcasts), and its meaning is still in flux. Adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

• May be a lot of buzz – but it’s buzz that’s supported and developed by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft…

• Also the entire media landscape in DK is currently re-organising to accommodate to ‘user generated content’ or ‘citizen journalism’!

• Should we understand this as software and services or a conceptual framework?

Comments on Web 2.0:

• Computerworld podcast 12/10/06:http://www.computerworld.dk/podcast/events/36070 Web 2.0 er et tomt begreb (Web 2.0 is an empty

concept)...suggests that it should be replaced by ’social media’...that certainly added the clarity we needed

”Unge gider ikke social networking” (Youth don’t bother social networking) – apparently DR SKUM lost a lot of users the last year and Morten Bay argues – They should use mobile phones like Helio and MySpace...arto.dk has more than 500.000 profiles, 21.000 online (now...then) and they introduced ArtoD2 a mobile chat application app. a year ago...Maybe the problem lies with SKUM and not youth...

Big discussion on kommunikationsforum.dk

“Web 1.0” “Web 2.0”

Ofoto Flickr

Akamai BitTorrent

mp3.com Napster

Britannica Online Wikipedia

Personal websites Blogging

Web services publishing Participation

Content management systems Wikis

Directories (taxonomy) Tagging ("folksonomy")

Stickiness Syndication (RSS, XML)

Web 1.0 Web 2.0

Some Examples: www.furl.net, www.elgg.net, http://www.librarything.com

Matrice above adapted from: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Del.icio.us, furl, Bibsonomy, CiteULike

Youtube, Revver, Flickr, Riya

Digg, technorati, craigslist

Plazes, Myspace, arto, dodgeball, hi5

Live, Yahoo360, Google

Podcasting, Wikis, Blogs

Folksonomies, Architecture of participation, botto-up

User driven innovation & design, citizen journalism

Collective intelligence, sharing, exchanging

Aggregation, distribution

Hackability, Widgetality

Copy-left

Rich internet apps, Web-office/desktops

Livewriter, writely, reader, Flock

IM-integration, Calendars

Google Earth, Yahoo Maps etc.

“Standards”

Open Source, OpenAPI

RSS, CSS, XML, FOAF, XFN

AJAX

Mash-ups

Services

Web 2.0 and SoSo

Conceptual

“Software” RIA

Technologies

Some metaphors and “movements” on the internet

• Individual user: browsing centrally defined web-pages, or constructing such a webpage – webpages as information silos!

• Communities: With strong relations and common goals/enterprises – usenet, online communities (Communities of Practice) – Soap Opera, Computer Games etc.

• Networked Individualism: Constant traversing of different types of networks with strong and weak ties. Constructing an individual, but deeply relational network, through blog-rings, tagging, sharing links, aggregating or distributing news via RSS – social networking sites have become increasingly popular: Hi5.com, Friendster, MySpace, Arto.dk, dodgeball.com

• These types of use are of course co-existing and overlapping

Some web-trends• From communities to networked structures• From centrally defined content and static pages to user driven

content (Blogs, Wikis, Flickr, Wikipedia) – democratisation of Knowledge and content?

• “Web 2.0 either empowers the individual and provides an outlet for the 'voice of the voiceless'; or it elevates the amateur to the detriment of professionalism, expertise and clarity.” (Citation from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0)

• Potential Democratisation, de-centralisation and anarchy – “back to the future” – the original idea of the Internet according to Tim Berners Lee e.g. Creative Commons alternative copyright licences, The Open Source Movement, whole notion of sharing and collaborating

• Distribution, Aggregation and tagging of various media and content – from hierarchical directories and central ownership to distributed, user driven “folksonomies” and media aggregation

• From consumers to producers: a recent study from PEW internet research concluded that 57% of American teens are producing content for the web of various nature (blogs, fan-fiction etc.). But this might also be overstated – depending on the perspective.

Dalsgaards article• Resources are not learning materials, until they are used

actively by students. "Resources are media, people, places or ideas that have the

potential to support learning. Resources are information assets – data points organized by an individual or individuals to convey a message (Allee, 1997). For learning, resources must be contextualized to determine situational relevance and meaning. Resources also need to be recontextualized to enable the use of information gleaned from various resources. Once contextual meaning has been established, information becomes organized as knowledge (Dewey, 1933), operating in a larger context of meaning encompassing relevant patterns, biases, and interpretations.” (Hill & Hannafin 2001, p. 38)

• This is very much in line with the idea of networked learning as we talked about it last time

Different types of network• Networks between people working collaboratively:

Students working together in groups. Networks of closely related participants

• Networks between people sharing a context: Students and teachers within the same course. Also networks

of closely related participants, but individuals within these networks are not working together, though they might be using each other as resources

• Networks between people sharing a field of interest: Networks of more loosely related participants. Create and

participate in networks of people from all over the world. Subscribing to RSS feeds from a number of different weblogs without participating actively by writing comments.

• Pedagogical task: Facilitating networks between students within the same course, and facilitating networks between students and other people working within the field.

Dalsgaard• Using a management system

for administrative issues, offering students personal tools for construction, presentation, reflection, collaboration, etc.,

• A focus on students, providing them with tools to support: Self-governed, problem-based

and collaborative activities. • Differs from the sole use of an

integrated LMS. Focusing on empowerment of

students as opposed to management of learning.

Services!

Services• Sharing links,

bookmarks, references• Folksonomy –

information architecture “designed” by users

• Search, tags, archives – relies on the power of weak ties, networks of interests and trust – “collective intelligence” emerges

• RSS, Refer, Bibtex, Endnote

• Aggregation, distribution

Services• Sharing,

exchanging, watching, rating, commenting

• User generated content: video, pictures, audio

• Search, tags, clusters, popularity, mass, picture search (face recognition)

• Distribute, aggregate through widgets, RSS, links, Java-scripts

Services• Rating, sharing,

commenting, hot/not, promotion, electronic billboard

• Search, tags, power of weak ties, location (DK, US), placeness

• User driven rating and content, mass, popularity, no center

• Distribute, RSS, widgets, blogrolls

Services• Networking,

profiles, interests, strong and weak ties, communication, discussion, identity, sharing

• Closeness, placeness, locality discovering, networking

• Heavily widgetised, and mediatised – audio, video

• Distribute, aggregate, convergence, GPS, OpenAPIs, SMS, mobility

“Software”• Like regular apps –

but they’re online – web-office, calendar, news reader, Web OS etc.

• Also stand alone apps – Google Earth

• Discover, search, location, placeness, closeness

• Collaborative editing, sharing calendars, Social networks – sharing placemarks, layers

• Integration with maps, wikipedia, external sites

The technological perspective

• Some of all this stuff are new technologies; some are older technologies, which have been popularised e.g. blogs, wikis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Web20buzz.png

Technological perspective

• Some of the tech-stuff: AJAX that allows web-office – live editing

updating (maybe some of you know more?) Standards and exchange ’protocols’: RSS, XML,

CSS, java-script, Flash OpenAPIs and Open Source Software – not the

same, but OpenAPI and exchange mechanisms open for MashUps

This results in: aggregation, distribution, widgetality and hackability

Aggregation, distribution, Hackability

• Agg/Distr: This refers to the interoperability of systems e.g. How one through RSS or XML document can import content from other sites or streams into one own page e.g. One page with all blog-posting, Flickr pictures, sport-results, news etc. create a tapestry of microcontent

• Hackability is the notion that code is open or there is a freely available API, one can create services that draws on Google Maps e.g. Findvej.dk. That profiles on Arto and Myspace supports HTML, javascript where one can customise the looks, import video from youtube, bookmarks from del.icio.us, create tag-clouds and so on.

• It is also becoming available in gadgets and OS’es – one can tamper with the coding, hardware and so on to create new services or functions (Chumby, Xbox, MacOS is full of widgets, so Vista will be)

• Widgets are the easy way of doing this – mashups are a little harder but great fun!

Widgetality• A Web Widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and

executed within any separate html-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications. Other terms used to describe a Web Widget include Gadget, Badge, Module, Capsule, Snippet, Mini and Flake. Web Widgets often but not always use Adobe Flash or JavaScript programming languages.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_widget

Mash-ups

• By using the possibilites of exchange, distribution and aggregation (refers both to aggregation, but also to specific software mashups) new services/software are created

• E.g. 10 best flickr-mashups:http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/06/08/index4a_page2.html?tw=commentary

• Or: http://www.programmableweb.com/mashups

• http://www.bashr.com/

MashUps

The conceptual perspective• Sharing, collaborating, connecting, networking, identity work –

harnessing the power of both weak and strong ties in networks• Hive-intelligence (stupid term!) – Two heads are better than one -

one million heads are even better – Wikipedia; no central expert, but distributed intelligence (though questionable)

• Folksonomies – the bottom-up approach – the structure and what is important are decided by the users, not a central categorisation unit, what is hot news depends on the users, not an editor

• User-driven innovation and user generated content – people upload and share their homemade pictures, videoes, bookmarks, calendars etc. creating ’creative’ personal profiles through use of scripting, widgets, light-weight coding, mashups and so on.

• Funny tension: Copy-left, Open Source, Free software foundation – information should be free vs. We make shit-loads of money on idiots freely giving their videos away and all their personal information (Google, Youtube, MySpace etc.) – hence some call it loser-driven innovation

Understanding the sociology of technology

• Some of this stuff is pretty nerdy and funny; but some of the thoughts surrounding all of this is quite philosophical/academic: Are blogs the savior of modern democracy or are they the

biggest attempt till date to flatten our culture with superstitious narcissistic babblings?

Are moblogs and videoblogs the liberation of consumers in a process of making them into content producers or are we witnessing an overflow of reality TV addicts gone crazy in exposing themselves online?

Provocative (and purposely wrong questions from Søren Mørk)• What we need to realise:

This is just part of people’s lives – it is a way of being in the world, which is social, banal, mundane, meaningful, purposeful; it is part of people’s identity, friendships and social networks

Maybe wrong to speak of ’content’ – maybe better to take about events, situations, life-bits

Social fabric of everyday life• Online/offline – makes no sense – the web and web 2.0 for that

matter is a continuation, overlap, extension of everyday life• Virtual/Real – makes no sense: people are real in the virtual, some

identity play, but identity is very often tied to location, everyday doings, interests, friends and so on – quite mundane

• The notion of virtual networks as non-places (Christopher Lash) is nonsense!! Place, space and location is ALL – closeness, personal, close social networks, intimacy

• Here are some citations from Danish Arto users – why they use arto: ”that I have more contact with my friends… also when we’re

together… because then we might talk about something that happened in here…” (Girl, 15)

”That I won’t lose some of my IRL-friends!” (Boy, 17)• The social fabric of the web is tightly closed to the local, the place,

the location and the creation of a personal, but relational identity• Barry Wellman terms it: Glocalization – we do become more

global, but we do not become less local or grounded

Location based technology

• Space, Place and location - Plazes.com• Location based games – PacManhattan

http://www.in-duce.net/archives/locationbased_mobile_phone_games.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_based_game

• Intermixture between virtual/real• GPRS, GPS, mobile location (moblogging

tied to places, coupled e.g. With google maps) or services like Dodgeball

User Driven Innovation?• User generated content and innovation –

Understanding how technologies speak into people’s lives, identities and connects to their streams of experience, their being in the world and connection to others – the social fabric of life!

Creating architectures of meaningful participation, opportunities for engaging with peers, networks and developing situations, events, life-bits

• Hackability, widgetality – keep it open, modifiable, listen to and understand the users, let them play, hack, modify, develop

• The perpetual beta! You’re never done, people’s needs will change, their practices and ways of using the systems will develop and change, which in turn will mean you’ll have to change the systems to accommodate to emerging needs

Some references

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Social_Software

Group Work: Exercise 1 – CMS exploration

• 1 hour of CMS-exploration Case: Use your own case or alternatively this one

• Informationsvidenskab needs a webpage so that it can promote itself to students at hum.inf – it should be a CMS that would allow different functionalities and users at different levels to provide content (secretaries, researchers, students etc.)– what would be the needed features e.g. Forums, chats, podcasts, RSS, news etc? What should be the role of the system – dissemination, communication, interaction?

• Choose a CMS to explore from http://www.opensourcecms.com/ e.g. Typo3, Joomla, Mambo, TikiWiki maybe plone via plone.org

• Check also the CMS’s own homepage – what are the requirements, what are the functionalities, what extensions does it feature, is it easy to use, is it well-documented?

Would it be a feasible system for inf.vid to use – describe pros and cons in a blog posting in the Læring and Samarbejde community blog

As Inf.vid’ers you should be able to carry out such analyses and give recommendations that are also based on a sound knowledge of the organisation and its needs

Template for Blog Posting

• Your requirements of functionalities The system’s technical requirements Does it meet your requirements? Can

these be met otherwise – through extensions?

Ease of use Documentation Describe the pros and cons as you see

them!

Group Work Exercise 2 – Web 2.0 and SoSo exploration

• Add at least three interesting RSS-feeds to ’your resources’ in Elgg

• Browse different Web 2.0 and SoSo services – either those I have presented or preferably find alternatives: Make a blog-posting describing at least three different services with different functionality (just a link and a short description of what it does + possible pedagogical use – how could it support (networked) learning)

• Widget competition – find the best widget for Elgg – Win some candy! The group that finds the best/coolest/Funniest widget and

implements it in Elgg wins some Candy – we’ll do a collective voting afterwards – you present briefly your widget – after all presentations we each vote for a group (you can’t vote for yourself :-)