Lulu August 4, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, Long Tail, web2.0, Wiki , 2commentsI’m very interested in Lulu, so even the slightest mention in one of the RSS feeds I read is worth noting:
Engineers without Fears: Open Publish (1): The Keynote Cops
Then there was Andrew Pate from Lulu. AP told us about Lulu - on-demand publishing and its role in the Long Tail. Lulu is an interesting service so hence AP’s talk was interesting. Two comments:* AP noted there is a growing interest in self-published material by book sellers whereas 5 years ago they wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.
* From an audience of over 100, only 2 of us had bought anything off Lulu.
Blog Friends growth accelerates to 10% a day August 2, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, blogs and community, London, web2.0 , 1 comment so farSomething seems to be working very well with Luke and Jof’s Blog Friends Facebook application, announced last month. The functionality has been increased to catch blogs from friends of friends, which makes the ‘discovery’ aspect a winner. ( Hint: I already my friends’ blogs anyway, unfiltered). There’s also an easy one click link to a blog post to be read from within Facebook. I hesitated about that for a second, but decided it’s a good thing - just like providing full posts in RSS feeds - as long as they don’t start enabling comments right there within Facebook, because then a blog on blog friends will have the potential to evolve as a split community - part inside Facebook and part outside on the internet. Maybe some people will figure out that’s OK, but I’ll be wary.
I’ve been tracking the membership growth with another Facebook app called “appsoholic” which today produced the graphs below. The previous time I noticed the growth was at 8% a day, which is very fast by most standards, but this has now increased to 10% a day which may indicate an accelerating rate of expansion. Well done!
That 10% puts blog friends in the top 40 of Facebook applications for daily growth rate, still according to appsaholic, whilst being ranked at 740 for size.
I18n coming to Google apps August 1, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, web2.0 , add a commentAny global organisation needs to cater for a multitude of languages, and the percentage of English speakers on the intenet will continue to decrease as the technology spreads faster to the rest of the world. So you can have a business which restricts itself to the english speaking world and still have a vast potential customer base, but to be the world leader in any general market it needs to be fully multilingual, internationalised, “i18n” as some write it. (because the word ‘internationalisation” has 18 letters). And it’s not just human language, but also currencies, character encoding, dates, time zones, local spelling, postcode formats, weights and measures - the list goes on.
According to Google:
- Fact 1: 65% of Internet users around the world speak a language other than English.
- Fact 2: The Internet’s top 10 languages still only account for around 85% of users — and the remaining 15% represents almost 200 million people.
So they have set about making the paid-for google apps service i18l and have just announced six more languages:
Official Google Blog: Google Apps goes global
Here’s the full list: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Turkish, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic, Hebrew, Indonesian, Hungarian, UK English and US English.
On another aspect, automated language cognition is always going to be a case of diminishing returns but it would be nice to see some extrension and improvement to Google Translate.
Blog Friends app on Facebook July 18, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : theory, facebook, blogs and community, web2.0 , 2comments
Introducing ‘Blog Friends’, a new application on Facebook which fills an apparently simple yet imporant niche. This is what it does:
- Track blog posts by your Facebook friends—on topics that interest you
- Showcase those posts on your Facebook profile
- Watch your friends grow your blog readership for you in return
It’s just been launched as a public Beta by Luke Razzell, who has been blogging on the topic of “Identity” for several years now, so we can expect the theoretical underpinning of the application design to be a sound one. It certainly seems to have all the makings of a succesfull Facebook app, including the capacity to spread virally, and appealing to the needs of bloggers to attempt to reach wider audiences. Every thing has been well thought out including the name, logo, taglines and this graphic:
And this is what it looked like from inside Facebook over the weekend:
Notice the RSS icons - this is one application which allows you to take your data outside of Facebook instead of just sucking things in. So it drives a small hole into the ‘walled garden’ criticism of the fashionable Facebook fad.
Outside in my feedreader I’m suddenly discovering a number of new blogs and posters, within my specified areas of interest, all thanks to my blog friends. And no, I don’t have any financial or other stake in the enterprise, I simply volunteered to alpha test out of of interest and because I’ve known Luke as a blogger for a long time. The fact that the whole application was developed from specification to working Beta in around three weeks has staggering implications for the future of web apps and Facebook.
Creativity as a social act July 10, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : theory, Art, Community, web2.0 , 1 comment so farI was going to write something about creativity based on Matt Moore’s article but Jack beat me to it. I know some people are trying to think hard about exactly what is the nature of creativity. Well if “human knowing is fundamentally a social act” (Wenger) , and creativity is a social act (below) , not to mention work rest and play, software and media all being social these days, when do we get to have 2 minutes to ourselves?!? It’s a convincing argument though:
Engineers without Fears: Creative Ecologies (or why my genius is unimportant)
We have tended to view creativity as personal act. The creator sits in their garret (or mansion) & comes up with the goods. As the previous posts on work by Bob Sutton, Teresa Amabile et al indicate, I believe more and more that creativity is a social activity. The relationship between a creator (be they professional or amateur) and their audience is not one way. Comments, references, tags, bookmarks, private emails & words face-to-face can all feed into the outcomes (a post, a video). But we only see the tangible outcome not the intangible exchanges between participants in the creation conversation.
To understand the inputs into and impacts from social media, we have to see these invisible ecologies of creation that form & reform. These ecologies have long pre-dated the internet but now we see them more.
To repeat, co-creation is not an option, it is the default…
As a creative writer and musician, I do need to sit in my garret (yes, I have an upstairs room) and come up with the goods by myself, although it does help to have a sense of audience at some point, and of course plenty of previous social experience feeds into the creative process, but the role of the individual should not be dismissed. There’s a dialectical relationship between the individual and the social so I would say that neither can be accurately described as the default.
How we build successful websites June 18, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, London, web2.0 , add a commentAnother reduced instruction set recipe, this time from Last.fm’s Hannah Donovan
- Get your idea out: put perfection behind you.
( because not everything worth doing is worth doing well) - Don’t release new visuals without new functionality
( because form should always follow function ) - Designers and developers work on the same team
- Do the hard stuff first, use iterations
i18n - internationalisation - Use broad brush strokes
Joomla 1.5 and the limits of open source development June 18, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : web2.0, tools , add a commentMiguel explains the complicated open source licensing controversy in which Joomla the CMS has becom embroiled:
Joomla 1.5 and the limits of open source development « eme ká eme
Yet it’s in trouble.Either Joomla thrives (and changes the world a little bit more), or it sinks.
MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed June 14, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : web2.0 , add a commentIs Twitter just an
ongoing Haiku contest?
Pointless irony
MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed - Yahoo! News
Twitter is popular now because the Web cognoscenti are using it. This bunch of eggheads prides itself on irony and witticism. They treat the site like some sort of ongoing haiku contest.
Facebook is the platform June 13, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : web2.0 , add a commentNot everybodty has been affected by the sudden upsurge in takeup on Facebook by large numbers of people other than the original student communities it used to orient towards, but a heck of lot of people have.
This article explains why:
blog.pmarca.com: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in
The world wide web is shrinking May 18, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : web2.0, Wiki , add a commentThe world wide web is shrinking says Nicholas Carr in today’s Technology Guardian
but he’s only referring to the distribution power law which is making popular sites more popular.
In the end, though, the internet seems to be following the same pattern that has always characterised popular media. A few huge outlets come to dominate readership and viewership and smaller, more specialised ones are consigned to the periphery.
I’m just not sure this is the inevitable conclusion from the observation that Wikipedia is eating Google
Ho hum.
Thanks for reading Andy Roberts articles about web2.0
on Darnet
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
