The Community Engine Blog: LearningRemix Archives

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.

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)

IA Summit Presentation

A quick link to presentation slides

I gave a talk at IA Summit yesterday on the work we have been doing on architecting self-organizing knowledge communities. Just a quick link here.

Bud posted this on March 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

(almost) All blogging is local

The long tail is crap for most bloggers. They're happy enough just to communicate with micro-audiences.

Over the past month, I've come to the conclusion that all of this discussion of the long tail is crap. The idea of the long tail is that there are a few winner main stream sites that receive the lion's share of attention. However, there is hope for lesser niche sites because the Internet audience is large enough that they will still be economically viable. So, for instance, digg may be the winner for now in technology sites, but there is still room for specialized sites like the Corante web hub.

Well, maybe, but for the most part, I think it is the wrong point of departure. Most (real, not SPAM) people who write blogs are not writing them to capture some piece of a larger pie. Rather, their point of departure is to communicate with some local audience. Oh, it would be nice to gain greater general visibility, but that is not the motivator. In fact, it may be distracting from the real value creation process. Here are two illustrative cases:

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Bud posted this on January 5, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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.

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)

The Real Work of Blogging and Technical Wizardry

The real work of blogging is in posting. The value of any technical wizardry tracking blog conversations or searching for nuggets of information in blogs really depends on post quality. I'm going to make these points in a presentation at Quinnipiac University. Slides attached.

I'll be giving a talk at Quinnipiac University this Saturday, home of the famous Quinnipiac presidential poll. They're interested in some of the things I have been doing with High Octane Blogging Bootcamps and our current Learning Remix projects.

In the first half of the talk, I'm going to introduce people to the basic value proposition of blogging. Even though blogging appears to be taking off in the corporate world, I agree with Shel Holtz that a lot of people have heard the term without really knowing what it could do to help their business. Further, it may be inapparent at first glance that the real work of blogging is in generating posts, not in technical wizardry. These slides attempt to cover these points succinctly.

The next set of slides show what technical wizardry is possible if you have done the real work of blogging, making posts. Here, I focus on things like search and conversation tracking. If we get time, I may talk about our attempt in the learning remix to use tags to mark conversations (I sense this is it own presentation). Here are the slides for the second half of the conversation.

Bud posted this on October 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

FeedDigest.com — Feed Remixing for Geeks & Resellers

FeedDigest seems to be one of the better services oriented towards geeks and designers for incorporating RSS feeds. I suspect there are still some holes to be filled in this market.

I discovered a service called FeedDigest today. Launched in July, 2005, it has over 10,000 users with each one generating approximately 3 “digests”. Digests are web pages or RSS feeds generated from aggregations of other RSS feeds. Currently users integrate digests into their sites either through javascript or PHP. There is no hosting of digest newspapers, likely due to load and bandwidth issues. The site blog has detailed how they are dealing with the capacity issues brought on by exponential growth over the last few months. Though nothing has been announced publicly, certain of the blog posts suggest that outside investment was secured in the second-half of August. Ten thousand users is a benchmark that Silicon Valley VCs often cite for seed investment.

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Bud posted this on September 21, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

What Really Makes a Learning Community Happen?

Community sites are aggregations of people who are interested in what each other has to say.

In his post, Remixable Web: Public RSS Aggregator, John Tropea makes this point about our current learning remix project at Michigan's Ross School of Business:

This newsmastering portal is aggregating blog posts as well as del.icio.us bookmarks, with categories/tags intact…it’s the best I’ve seen yet!
John Tropea

which is an incredible compliment, and I thank him for it. But I see the real challenge here as creating a community site, and a simple aggregation site is just not enough to achieve that.

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Bud posted this on September 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

A Tag Cloud Interface for Community

Here's a little user interface enhancement that I have created for the tag-based remix learning site.

So, we've launched the remix learning site. The idea here is that students in a class about databases and information contribute by making blog posts and bookmarking web pages. Students tag each blog post and bookmark based on the class conversation topics they feel they contribute to. Posts with multiple tags contribute to multiple conversations.

The remix learning site gathers student contributions several times a day and archives them in a movable type blog. The interface allows people to view contributions grouped by tag. That's great, but the question is how to present these topics to people in a way that they can view: the most recent, the most talked about, the whole universe.

To do that, I have come up with this tag cloud:

The key element in the default view is that items are sorted in reverse order by recency. Frequency is indicated by size of the tag in the cloud. Visitors also have the option of sorting alphabetically and by pure frequency.

Bud posted this on September 13, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | 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.

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)

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