A Reflection on Web 2.0.

One of my friends, after years of resistance, finally succumbed and joined Facebook, which then compelled me to tag 50 photos of him, leave him messages on his wall and post a link for him to look at. He nearly punched me in the face when I saw him yesterday. With the confidence I gained doing these exercises I told him it was his age showing. He is only 30. I was so smarmy, if he really punched me I would have deserved it.

Like it or not, these web technologies are becoming more a part of our lives. I'm still not sure I like Twitter, someone called me a 'Twitface' (someone that uses Twitter and Facebook) the other day, and I wasn't sure if I liked that or not. I do like the instant messages of Twitter but more for the informative aspect, like Beth Ditto announcing a new album cover for the Gossip, or programs at the State Library of Victoria.

I really love the learning aspect of Youtube which I had never thought of exploring, it help me set up my Mac Mail, which I had put off for years because it was just too confusing reading instructions, and forums were just not very helpful. The visual aid of a video clip is worth a 1000 words sometimes.

I think I've learnt to embrace these tools more and have really tried to cement myself online. I feel more plugged in to this great platform for information, and the tasks given has equipped me better for making some order out the mess and chaos of the Internet. I'm worried that now I've been exposed to these great tools, if I don't keep up I'll just fall so far behind that it will soon be 'Web 3.0', and I'll be a year older and won't know what's going on. I feel like if I blink everyone will be using 'Twitface' or something new and better.

So many of these great tools are online, I came across Zoho, an website that offers online applications, so you can use it to create a word document or other types without the use of Microsoft, send it to yourself, and email or blog it. All online. So if I was half way across the world and needed to type something up quickly, I could just log in, type it up and send it to myself, all from some dingy Internet cafe. I'm just giddy with excitement, it's so geeky.

Yahoo Pipes was a challenge, but the mash ups available, some great ones that me and my fellow groups members looked at, were fantastic, particularly Mashpedia and Google Maps. With all these avenues for information, it's become easier to help people at work. I could, not only show someone an address on Google maps but, show them a street level image that could tell them what the building they were searching for looked like, and Flickr is great for this also, particularly for overseas places.

Searching and deploying information is made so much easier, but because of the high volume of  user-generated content, and lack of infrastructure on the World Wide Web, setting things up can be time consuming, and remaining engaged can also eat up a lot of time. I won't let it deter me though, I'm really loving it, especially the social aspect of it, and everything's so useful, the RSS feeds, my growing number of bookmarks, my LibraryThing.

It's hard to imagine that it's only been six weeks, I've learnt so much but it feels like we only touched the tip of the iceberg. I wished I had engaged more with my group, we seemed to chug through it okay, I think, and reading everyone's post was great for support and tips.

I haven't made myself ill with information overload yet, I'm just too excited by the prospects of web technologies for information management. I might even start to love Twitter.

Mash Ups! Yeah!

I had that grandma moment. You know when your nan or mum looks at you when they want to tape a program and can't operate the VCR? I had that moment looking at the Yahoo Pipes interface. What is this fetch data? Fetch RSS? Fetch site feeds???

My first attempt was at 3am in the morning. I thought 'I can do this, I grew up in the era of Windows 3.1, I can program my HDTV, I'm fond of my PS3, I like shiny stuff, yeah Pipes, that doesn't seem too hard...'

EPIC FAIL. I couldn't do it. I couldn't make sense of it. So my second attempt is just a feeble design news feed, trickling through on the side there. It contains just the basics, because the rest is just beyond me. If I was more tech savvy, I could make it more interactive, give it a search function or something but it really is better understood by a programmer.

For a more easy on the eyes look at my Pipe, check it out here.

Given more time and help I think I could be awesome at it, because it could be really handy. You could custom-make any kind of mash up, mixing tools like Google and Amazon, to tweak a pipe for your subject of interest. You could have a information source solely dedicated to reporting items on Chuck Norris, for example, or have a pipe displaying all books ever written with the word 'ham' in the title and where to buy them, or borrow them.

Google Maps is a great mash up, combining its search results with location. You can get reviews of restaurants even as you search for where they are. Your own map is customisable, and you can search and look at other people's maps.

 Alrighty then, I'm gonna try and be awesome now.

Frequent Coffee Stops

View Coffee Stops in Melbourne in a larger map

Places I frequently stop for coffee, most are in Melbourne, except for the anomaly in Collingwood.

Braun and Apple

When I visited Braun in Frankfurt last year, they had an exhibition showcasing the last 25 years of their designs. Most notable, and even acknowledged by Apple, was a comparison of Dieter Rams designs for Braun in the 1960s and Apple's contemporary product designs. I took a photo of Rams T3 pocket radio beside 2 generations of the iPod. It isn't the only thing to be ripped off, er, I mean *influenced from Braun.

Searching Flickr, I found that stumrob had uploaded an image of the Braun Loudspeaker Model No. LE1 and iMac G5 2004 Model side by side. These I had seen in the same exhibition in Frankfurt only my photos of them were a bit crap. I don't think the images belong to stumrob, but other photos of both products were easily found because of the name and tags the user had attached to each photo, here is the speaker again taken by An Unseen Ruler, and the iMac 2007 Model taken by Robert Scoble. In a historical sense, photo sharing sites like Flickr are a great way of documenting and archiving events and objects, and even people, making available images that you would be unable to access otherwise.

It can be used to for navigational purposes, to compliment the functions of Google maps as you can get often get better views of a destination by searching image sharing databases like Flickr. If you want a view of Kastanienallee in winter, chances are someone has gone to Berlin in winter and walked down that street and taken photos of it, and if they are caring, they will be sharing it on something like Flickr. 

Like many social sites, if you decide to have a Flickr account, granted you need a Yahoo ID to join, you can tag your photos for better cataloging, and searching. I came across this rare photo of the interior of the Nagakin Capsule Tower, which they say will be torn down pretty soon. It's such a shame because it's a real beauty.

Before you get too trigger happy with tagging, there's an obvious flaw in all this. Upside is it's handy, and connects you to similar or same information easily. Downside, you are the authority, the tags are subjected to you, and you are at the mercy of the tagger. If you tag a photo of your dog as 'Major Bleed', it may not be a very helpful tag. Should we be the authority? If I tag this blog as 'the most awesome-adrenaline-inducing-punch-in-your-face blog ever', is that wrong?

Some Awesome Infographics

Some very nice infographics aired on Hungry Beast, ABC TV on 3 March 2010. Which a friend sent on via his Tweetdeck on Facebook, that I saw while getting my daily fix of the Sartorialist and at the same time giving in to a guilty pleasure of getting a top weekly score on frikkin' Bejewelled - the bane of my existence, that I got hooked on when I played it on my sister's iPhone 3 weeks ago while we were looking for directions via Google maps for a place to eat, which we used to access Wikipedia over dinner to find the name of the man who wrote for the sitcom 'Alf' who was played in a movie by Ben Stiller. His name was Jerry Stahl, and I stuck it in my Facebook status and in reply, someone uploaded a photo of Jerry on my wall, which they found via Google image search. By this point in time I was trying to figure out the theme song to Full House without resorting to Youtube because, you know, that's just cheating.

I thought this video oddly appropriate.

Social Bookmarking & Tagging

I had a look at Delicious and Diigo, and settled on the latter only because it gave me the option of running an applet instead of installing stuff into my browser, and didn't require me to have a yahoo account.

Diigo is very handy, it allows you to take your bookmarks with you to pretty much anywhere you can get a computer with internet access. The tagging helps to organise all your bookmarks, a lot like subject headings in cataloging. You can further order the pages into lists. I haven't accumulated enough for lists yet but have been making a conscious effort to mark interesting pages I visit a lot, so the list feature is nice. Diigo lets you highlight portions of pages and bookmark only that, which is handy especially if it is a text heavy page. It won't bookmark a highlighted image or table and translate as it is formatted, and it won't bookmark some images, e.g. if i find an image through google image search it doesn't bookmark the image itself but will bookmark the page it is from. I'm not sure how this can help in terms of bibliographic software like End Note as I've never used it before, but I'll see how it goes when I do eventually use it.

Now LibraryThing is a great excuse to unleash my bad taste on everyone via the widget I added on the side. LibraryThing itself is fantastic, it's great for reader advisory. I've been using it to get recommended reads, and it's handy to see all the tags associated with the books and authors you like, you can add your own and catalog your own library that way. Socially, it connects you to people that read the same things you read, and it opens up a world where you can create discussion boards and chat to groups of like-minded people. In a lot of ways it works like Fiction Connection or NoveList, but free, without being joined to a library that has bought access to these databases.

GuruLib is okay, I guess. Navigation-wise it's atrocious, it is not user friendly at all and the display is so PC, the layout is not user friendly and is kinda ugly to look at. Oh, who am I kidding? I really don't think it's okay. The purpose of the site is what I'm guessing to be similar to LibraryThing, only navigating it is really hard because so many things are just not very intuitive. I would click to a point where I couldn't find my way back to my library only to realise it was my usename up at the top, in really small writing. Aside from the fact that you can add other mediums to your library like movies and music, it's just such a pain the ass to add stuff and go back and change its settings. The widget is a standard one but unless you can adjust the HTML, you really can't custom it much from the site. You know what GuruLib reminds me of? See if you can navigate website for the Melbourne Museum of Printing. Might make you want to gouge your eyes out... Thank god they have a new site (under development).

Microblogging, it's Twitterrific!

I'm not sure I like Twitter. It is information O-VER-LOAD, like someone shoving pavlova into my mouth, my eyes and my ears, while speaking to me in reverse to the beat of a Toto song. It's not in big readable chunks but a lot of snippets, some hard to see in context without previous tweets, and the language of Twitter takes some getting used to.

It's a great marketing tool for getting information out quick. I'm following my favourite bands at the moment and one has tweeted information about canceled shows and additional shows they've added on last minute. Melbourne Open House tweeted previously about their open days for 2010. Organisations that need to relay information fast can use Twitter for such a purpose, but the tweets are limited in word space, so if the message is short and sweet it is ideal, and with the use of shortened links, more information is being squeezed into 140 characters.

The big down side: I made the mistake of following too many people. There was just too much going on from Neil Gaiman's trip in NZ to Neil Patrick Harris sitting in Singapore Airport. When Twitter is like reality TV in the palm of your hand, it's not really useful unless you want to stalk them. This bombardment of information is like static, where maybe 1% of tweets have information I want to read. It's like someone giving you just 140 characters of their state right now, or now, or wait a minute... now. It's either too much or not enough. Following friends is great too, but following too long is like overstaying your welcome. I like my friends but I don't want an update about their life every minute of everyday.

I'll see how I feel about it in a few weeks. I wish I could just channel that bit of Gen Y and say I hate it and quit it, but here is my Twitter Page, which you can follow. I'm not sure if what I tweet will be very poignant but I promise I won't regale you with a blow by blow post vindaloo episode.

I'll save that for my facebook.