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Identity

There are starting to be building blocks for distributed identity, but you still have to put a lot of pieces together to get it to work.

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I was talking with Jude Yew today, a Ph.D. student at Michigan's School of Information. He's interested in facilitating learning via online forums and has been working with me on my learning blogosphere and learning remix projects. The conversation veered around a little, and we came to his idea of using threaded comments to blog posts to promote class interaction.

I won't go into what I think are the merits of that idea, but one of the key points that came up was identity. How do you consistently identify the commenters? Last November, Kaliya Hamlin and I had a conversation on that very topic, and she was convinced that establishing identity was key to community work.

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Bud posted this on May 19, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Small Business: The Internet Value Proposition

For most small businesses, I think the Internet is ancillary to their central economic activity. It's easy to know what to do in that case, outsource.

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Ken Yarmosh, Oliver Thylmann, and I have been having a nice distributed conversation about the value of the Internet and, a bit more specifically, blogging to small businesses. Cutting directly to the chase, I think Ken's central point is that Internet visibility is important to small businesses largely because Internet search drives sales. Further, Internet communication can be much more efficient. Oliver and I have countered that learning the Internet can just be too costly in time for people scrambling to make a buck, and actually Ken's original post gives us some credence. He was describing accessing some material about the Internet and small business that he had just not had time for up till then.

Let me state for the record that I pretty much agree with what I have outlined as Ken's value proposition of the Internet for small business. The real question in my mind is how to achieve it.

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Bud posted this on January 27, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Mashups are more than just using big company data

There is a real mashup business model in providing infrastructure for people to create their own ad hoc mashups. I agree that, if you are basing your business plan on a creative way to redisplay some large company's data, heaven help you.

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A lot of perspectives on business opportunities for mashups are just too driven by the idea of using big company data. The real value-add in any information business is the information, hard to easily duplicate if the business is viable. So, of course, companies are not just going to give this away for you to generate revenue off of. Matthew Hurst and Greg Linden state this well:

On the other hand, the commercial examples are, as Greg points out, making offerings with no guarantees. In fact imagine the following example: data is made freely available; everyone throws in their idea; whenever a killer app emerges, the data is suddenly no longer free (I believe Alexa has been very open about this strategy). Now what do you do with your users?

There is no business model for mashups. If Web 2.0 really is just mashups, this is going to be one short revolution.

Is Web 2.0 Nothing More Than Mashups

Data Mining: Greg on Mashups

But I think this misses a larger point.

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Bud posted this on December 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

SuprGlu — Corante Web Hub in a Box?

This may not be a Corante hub in a box, but it could be a cheap, quick way to set up a knowledge sharing, community site.

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As readers of this blog are aware, I've been running a sort of mini version of a Corante hub in class at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our hub, which we call a “remix” is different because it is meant to serve as a distributed blog space for the class to see each other, share information, and interact. There is no editor, it's sort of self-editing.

Well, just the other day, Lindsay, one of the students, came up with a real coup when she discovered suprglu. My cut, it's the 15 minute facsimile to the class remix (one guy has actually done this with his creative writing class). I've also done one so my bodybuilding personal trainer friend can track some relevant blogs I have found.

It lacks some things though. Let me provide a quick list:

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Bud posted this on December 1, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

A Tag Based Learning Remix

We attempt to crack the class participation nut by mandating participation in an online self-organizing space. Our aggregation mechanism is based on the tags participants provide for their contributions. This post describes our underlying concept and the variety of technologies we employ.

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A perennial classroom issue is student participation. Even if students are enthusiastic, limited time dictates that only a few will be heard in any single session. Limited participation limits instructors' opportunities to find out what students know and inhibits the potential discovery of useful information for everybody. This post outlines a web-based learning remix project at Michigan's Ross School of Business that is designed to remove classroom limits on student participation. The system operates according to a few simple pinciples:

  • Require that everyone participate.
  • Move the vast majority of class participation online.
  • Structure online participation so that it is self-organizing.

We believe our system achieves the first and second goals and makes good progress on the third. On the input side, each student makes fifteen tagged (informally categorized) microcontributions per week by bookmarking sites in del.icio.us and making blog posts in WordPress Multi-User. Multiple times each day, reBlog and the Movable Type publishing platform gather, remix, and present the student contributions based on the tags students supplied.

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Bud posted this on September 10, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Microformats in Business — Structuring Content for Search & Collaboration

In my reckoning, there are two business propositions right now in microformats: 1) Structuring data for search and business intelligence, already successfully demonstrated by technorati; 2) Structuring content for collaboration, likely monetized through a service similar to BasecampHQ.

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Microformats are really just a way to combine human and machine readability in one web page. Microformats are superior to similar infrastructure plays because the average web designer can incorporate them with very little work.

So, what's the business proposition for combining human and machine readability? Right now, I can come up with two.

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Bud posted this on August 3, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Follow-up to Greasemonkey & Microformats

We are nearing the point where we can write a full tutorial on microformats identification. In the next post, I'll discuss how all of this can fit into a business model.

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The point of my last, rather technical post was to start to provide a tutorial for newcomers to microformat development. The post led to a good amount of follow-up from the micrformats community. The basic strategy of using the user agent's (i.e., browser's) native ability to parse html and isolate parts of the markup based on attribute values is sound. That said, there are a couple of refinements in order.

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Bud posted this on July 31, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)