We’ve all had a play with Google maps. It’s fun to zoom around the globe and try to locate your own house. But the developers at Yahoo have managed to adapt their map technology to interact with current fuel prices and help you shop around for the cheapest service station in your area.
http://au.maps.yahoo.com/fuelwatch/
Pretty cool.
This is a very nifty little thing – Bitty . . . I’m already thinking of the possibilities of ‘web feedback’ . . . . like the old 70s video feedback.
Seriously, though, this could be implemented in so many nifty ways.
So, finally, Microsoft have realised that the world needs a better selection of fonts than Arial (which is not the same as Helvetica however much you might argue it is) and Verdana and Times New Roman.
Even more so now that we are all spending a lot more time reading screens rather than printed paper.
Poynter have some interesting, but brief, discussion of the various pros and cons of these new typefaces.
WikiMapia is a project to describe the whole planet Earth. The developers have combined a wiki with Google Maps to create this amazing resource that allows you to highlight any spot on earth and describe it in your own words. You can even tag these locations so people can find them using keywords. Try doing a search for “Powerhouse”.
http://www.wikimapia.org/
Such a nifty visualisation of history.
But what a shame it isn’t printable.
New web 2.0-ish site called Krunch.
As of now, Krun.ch enables you to
» Upload and compress files
» Pick and compress files from the web
» Upload and un-compress a compressed archive
» Un-compress a compressed file from the web
What is particularly neat is the ability to supply a URL of a compressed file and use Krunch to open and download selected contents from it . . . .
This lovely little HMTL visualisation applet is doing the rounds at the moment. It is built in Processing and the source code is already being hacked by others to build variants.
Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web. Your browser’s job is to render the HTML according to the specs (most of the time, at least). You can look at the code behind any website by selecting the “View source” tab somewhere in your browser’s menu.
HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph. I’ve written a little app that visualizes such a graph, and here are some screenshots of websites that I often look at.
(from Aharef. Source code available there as well.)
Everyone is talking about Scott Karp’s article questioning whether MySpace is experiencing a downturn. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence both from Karp and others, but I think the strongest argument for the MySpace hype eventually running out of steam is that teens are always a very fickle market, and they are getting increasingly fickle.
As I (amongst many many others) keep pointing out in presentations, the real pull of MySpace is/was its stickiness as a communication platform/site. Once you set up a MySpace page then you had to keep going back to it to check if your ‘friends’ had ‘added’ you or you’d gotten mail etc. While this was genius while MySpace was/is ‘hot’ it will quickly become a big turnoff when/if it falls from favour.
The problems with ‘monetising’ MySpace through advertising versus, lets say advertising on Google, is that when people visit a MySpace page their motiviation is purely conversational – versus a Google search which is likely informational/information-seeking. The informational motivation can more easily be monetised through well placed advertising – advertising which offers to make easier your search for information (or cut through the plethora of choices with a simpler option).
Monetising the purely conversational is difficult.
I’d be fascinated to know how successful the advertisements that pop up in those ‘free telephone services’ that were written about a few years ago actually were . . . these were advertisements that interrupted your telephone calls (effectively the advertiser paid for your free calls by forcing you to listen to their advertisement).
Of course, these advertisements that intruded on your phone conversations were not able to be customised/personalised to the conversation topic in the same way that is now possible with conversations over the internet.
Google have been doing this very thing with their advertising that appears in your Gmail account – supposedly tailored to the conversation topics (content) in your email.
But does anyone actually click (or see) those advertisements?
Maybe the value of MySpace for its owners is purely as market research. But even that relies on its continuing dominance.
Interesting post by Ross Mayfield which begs the question of where museums fit in the spectrum of controlled/centralised-to-open/decentralised in terms of IT and knowledge control. And in terms of cross-enterprise, cross-departmental teams, museums are ideal environments (much more so than traditional companies), at least on the surface of things, to encourage a decentralised and more open approach.
Are any museums using wikis for their intranets?
The second front, that Enterprise 2.0 is Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities, not only flys in the face of enterprise culture and convention, but previously encoded political bargains. For example, a primary property of social software is easy group forming — but most enterprise systems expressly prevent it. To form a group, you not only need permission from IT, but complex configuration and in many cases even software development. Beyond applications, ever come across an LDAP implementation that supports easy group forming? This runs counter to the way many enterprises actually work today, where ad hoc cross-functional teams drive more than professional services organizations.
A second example is fine grained security. Content management, document management, portals and poorly designed wikis highlight per object/page permissioning. Certain expert users have the ability to control access and rights for a specific document. This harms productivity — when a user needs to access a document to perform a task and has to incur the overhead that can unlock it, plus the overhead of locking (structure upfront) and unlocking itself. This harms knowledge sharing — documents go undiscovered and are decidedly static, despite how the knowledge in the document is never finished. This harms competitive advantage — any system that exhibits inertia compromises a firm’s ability to adapt to it’s dynamic environment.
While .pdf is where knowledge goes to die, there are some documents that benefit from being static. But they are a fraction of the documents in a given enterprise. And with the discovery afforded by hypertext and tagging, documents have the potential to exist in a social context. Even a locked down document, if viewable, can be annotated through linked messages.
Imagine how useful Wikipedia would be if a handful of admins could lock down links to articles indefinately and without oversight, their ability to be discovered through Google, let alone edit them. Then imagine the same thing behind the firewall, where there is less risk (you can presume a greate innocence of users and know their identity). Utility is decidedly compromised.
This is why enterprise systems have low adoption rates, little user generated content, high quality metadata and email is used for everything. Every sacrifice made for sake of control reduces network effects, assumes a static environment you can design against and is designed by supposed experts outside the context of use. Contrary to the most disruptive pattern of social software — sharing control creates value.
MacKenzie Wark’s new ‘interactive’ book called Gam3r 7h30ry (yes, l33t speak), is now online at Future Of The Book. Written as a range of short chapters it invites participation, comment and play.