David Delgado :: Blog

The most important thing for me in this days is that we all share our lifes with our families and friends, and that we all make the new year that is about to come a way to make our dreams come true. A big hug for you all. By the way, it seems like Eduspaces is not shutting down anymore, and so, this blog and home page will remain intact.

I have received an email telling me that Eduspaces is shutting down on January 10, 2008:

 Hi All,

We would like to inform all users of EduSpaces that we will be shutting
down the service on Jan 10th, 2008.

We have provided a mechanism for you to export all your blog posts in
either an RSS format or HTML. To do this, go to your blog and select the
submenu option you require. For those of you with files, you might want to
download those as well.

Thank you to everyone who has supported EduSpaces over the last three
years.

Best regards,

The EduSpaces team

As you can see, those of us having blogs here are offered to export our blog posts in html and rss. I am thinking to move this blog to an account in English at our Elgg installation in Spanish ( http://www.sociedadytecnologia.org ). Anyway, I will tell you what I will do with this blog before Eduspaces has shut down.

There is an important discussion on this topic in the site forum. there is also a how to on moving from Eduspaces to Edublogs. Stephen Downes and Graham Attwell among others have written about it at their blogs. You can look for information about it also at Technorati and Google blog search.

I am very sad about Curverider shutting down one of the most succesfull Elgg installations, anyway I am happy that Elgg continues to be a good open source project with such a good community. Thank you for providing such a good service. 

 Did you know? 2.0

An excelent reflection made by an excelent team with renewed ideas.

There are also some slides based on it, which won the World's best presentation contest at Slideshare.

You can know the whole history about it, and even join the movement at their wiki: Shift Happens.

One day, one man called "Juan Mann", from Australia, felt alone in an Airport and decided to offer "free hugs" to anybody. After being ignored for about 15 minutes, people started to think it was a good idea. Then, Juan decided that his sole mission in life was to reach out and hug a stranger to brighten up their lives.

In September, 2006, he was offering "Free Hugs" in the street when a friend of him, Shimon Moore, recorded him with his video camera. He made a video with the recording and added a song of his own music group (Sick Puppies) to it. They posted it in YouTube. This is the video...

Today, just 10 moths after the release of the video these are the facts:

• The video is in the list of the most viewed videos in the whole history of YouTube (16,615,621 views)
• The video won the "Most Inspirational" video award in the 2006 YouTube Video Awards
• There are 1,780,000 search results in Google for the expression "free hugs". 
• A "Free Hugs Campaign" movement has been created, with local groups all over the World.
• Juan Mann and his "Free Hugs Campaign" has 20,983 friends in MySpace.
• The group called "A Campaign for Free Hugs" has 26,126 members in Facebook.

It was a matter of minutes the time I had to wait to have "Juan Mann" as a personal friend in both, MySpace and Facebook.

Of course, business has also been affected:

• Initial distrust of Juan's motives eventually gave way to a gradual increase of people willing to be hugged, with other huggers (male and female) helping distribute them. After some time, security guards, then police told them they must stop, as Mann had not obtained public liability insurance worth $25 million for his actions. Mann and his companions used a petition to attempt to convince authorities that his campaign should be allowed to continue without the insurance. His petition reached 10,000 signatures, and he submitted it and was allowed to continue giving free hugs
  
• In Spain, a cable company called "Ono" used a very similar video to sell their products in a very popular "campaign". The Spanish "Free Hugs Campaign" organization (Abrazos Gratis, in Spanish) told everybody what they were doing and they had to quit that form of advertisement.
• Sick Puppies music became extremelly popular all over the World because of the video and the song they gave for it: "All the same". They moved to the United States and became famous.

I think it is a very good example of what can be done with Internet with the power of people with good ideas.

By the way, here is a BIG FREE HUG from John Lennon, he sent it worldwide in 1971, the same year the first e-mail was sent. He called it "Imagine", and it's coupled with some magic words.

Thanks to Joan Vinall-Cox, a friend in my personal social network here, I found a video that explains what an RSS is, what is it good for, why do we need them and how to use them, in a clear and even funny way. Here it is:

Here's the link to the original video.

Basically RSS, Atom, XML, and any of those organge square buttons () we see everywhere help us by keeping us informed of the changes in any web page, for example news in a blog or a newspaper. No more need to check the page again and again to seek for anything new. We can get the information we need from different sources, join them in an aggregator and keep being informed of whatever we need in a really fast and simple way. This is a way to fight information overdose. Here, in Eduspaces.net and Elgg in general, we have an RSS and Atom aggregator in what is called "Your resources". We can even get news from our own external blog and let it appear in our blog here automatically. We have such a good Web 2.0 integrated tool here!

I have found some excelent slides that explain how Web 2.0 has changed the Enterprise World creating Enterprise 2.0. Take a look at them:

You can find the original slides here. 

It is amazing how the Web 2.0 changes are told in an easy way there, changing desktop applications for web based ones and using social software to run business. The same could happen in any other context, including education.

Things are neither, good or bad, white or black. Always try to see the shades of grey...

Criticism on Elgg

Criticism on Moodle business (enter as guest)

Criticism on Google (enter as guest)

I would like to receive comments to this blog post telling me about other good criticisms that would be good to know about.

Everybody talks about Web 2.0, Elgg is supposed to be a Web 2.0 application, but few people knows what that really means.

I found a concise definiton of Web 2.0 from the creator of the term (Tim O'Reilly), posted by him in his blog on December, 2006:

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them."

I liked that definition, and added it to the Wikipedia article on Web 2.0. 

I also found a marvellous 5 minute video introducing the key ideas behind that term:

Here is the direct link to the video. (nearly 2 million viewers can't be wrong)

I hope this post makes things clearer for those confused about the term. :-) 

Here is the link to the original video.