Steve Lee :: Blog

As we gear up for the first release of the next generation of Elgg, we are inviting those who are Elgg users into our test site to help with debugging etc. Not all the features have an interface on them yet, but there is enough there for people to get an idea of what the new Elgg is going to be like.

Elgg is the open source social networking software that powers this site, Eduspaces. 

If you would like an invite, please send an email to info at elgg dot com

Cheers.

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008022915

Last week I had a great time visiting Innsbruck as part of the TenCompetence Winter School, which is a sort of retreat for postgraduate students. I had one slot for presenting, which as it was 90 minutes I split into two shorter sessions, one on OpenID and one on Presence.

The OpenID session was a lot of fun, mostly for getting people using it and seeing how it works. At the beginning of the session we had maybe 2 people who had used OpenID in the room; at the end we had about 20, a good mix of people who discovered pre-existing OpenID accounts offered by services they used (Yahoo mostly) and people creating new accounts. As proof of success I created some Jyte claims for people to vote on using OpenIDs.

| View | Upload your own

Presence is a tricky one - its such a major feature in applications today and yet there is very little literature out there about it other than a few bits in HCI journals. Anyway, I've been doing some research as part of a chapter I'm contributing to a book on social networks, so I presented some of that in the other half of the session. I don't think people quite got what I was on about, to be honest, or maybe its just not that exciting if you aren't me!

(The slides would go here, but Slideshare ate them)

A big thanks to Milos for inviting me, for Christian for arranging the whole snowboarding thing, and to Martin and Chris for a very interesting discussion in the Treibhaus (more on that in the FeedForward blog soon).

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008012915

My new project...

Hi All,

We are in the process of testing out the next generation of Elgg (the software which powers this network) and are looking for people to help with the testing. If you fancy helping out, send us an email to: info@curverider.co.uk

Cheers.

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008022114

Its always fun to have a look back at future predictions from the 50's and 60's. And while we may not have flying cars and jetpacks, it seems like they got e-learning in 1999 bang to rights back in '67.

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008041614

This week sees another milestone in W3C's effort to standardize the use of Widgets across platforms with the release of the Widgets v1.0 working draft documents. The specification aims to offer a single way of creating and distributing widgets on a range of platforms.

The current scope of the W3C work is set out in the Requirements document. W3C defines Widgets simply as:

mall client-side Web applications for displaying and updating remote data, that are packaged in a way to allow a single download and installation on a client machine, mobile phone, or mobile Internet device. Typical examples of widgets include clocks, CPU gauges, sticky notes, battery-life indicators, games, and those that make use of Web services, like weather forecasters, news readers, email checkers, photo albums and currency converters.

Another document, the Widget Landscape sets out the lay of the land in terms of what Widget platforms are out there, and how they approach the different aspects of Widget functionality.

The specification is targeting platforms such as Apple Dashboard, Microsoft Sidebar, Yahoo! Konfabulator, and mobile platforms such as WidSets. Web widgets, such as Google Gadgets, are not currently in scope, although when you dig into the details of the specification, its obvious that web widgets can potentially be developed in a similar manner.

After requirements, the first specification document is Packaging and Configuration which defines the zip-based format used to package the content of a Widget, the structure of the XML configuration document that goes inside it, and other aspects such as discovery and internationalization.

A surprising omission at this stage is the API specification. All Widget container platforms supply an API, typically accessed via JavaScript, that offers the Widget a way of storing and retrieving preferences, calling remote services, and executing various kinds of commands. Presumably this will be released next; currently there is only an Editor's Draft of "APIs and Events". Currently a developer of a Widget needs to make different API calls based on where the Widget is deployed to do very basic things like save and retrieve user settings.

Another aspect of a Widget API is extended features, especially in the case of web Widgets. The Google OpenSocial API is an example of an extended Widget API - in this case to enable Widgets to access things like friends lists and status information. Another is the widget collaboration API we developed here as part of our EU TenCompetence project, that enable things like activity-based chat and voting widgets to be developed using the draft W3C specification. (More on that in another post sometime).

Overall I think there is some great work going on in this W3C group, with a very practical focus that is based on taking a consensus view of "what is" rather than a more purist "what should be" approach (which has characterised some of the W3C's other recent work). I hope that once this spec is finalized the focus will move onto taking a similar approach to web widgets, for which there is an even more pressing need for interoperability. Our own work has shown that, with a few minor modifications (e.g. the addition to the API of a proxy method for safe tunneling of external Web API calls around cross-site script access restrictions), exactly the same model of packaging, manifest and API can also work within a web framework.

For more information on this and related activities, also check out the rest of the Web Application Formats Working Group pages.

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008051322

While a lot of recent attention has focussed on the issue of social graph portability, there are a couple of other interesting developments in social metadata I've come across lately.

APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) is a means of sharing an individual attention profile. While other specs (such as the seemingly-dead AttentionXML) have focussed on the tracking of attention in terms of individual clicks, APML is concerned with the mobility of a more coarse-grained profile, consisting of a collection of weighted concepts, either self-asserted or aggregated from services.

The spec is generally simple enough to implement, despite a few odd design choices, consisting basically of a list of "concepts" (keywords or labels) and "sources" (URLs) that are of interest to the subject, all of which have a weighting from 0 to 1 and some additional metadata about where the weightings come from.

APML is currently undergoing revision to reach 1.0 status, and so we can see quite a few possible changes, but its worth having a look at if you're thinking of developing applications that make use of individual interest profiles for personalisation. It should be fairly trivial to support users exporting or importing such a profile.

ULML (User Labor Markup Language) is a specification for tracking the metrics of user participation in social web services. A ULML document provides statistics on a user's interactions with the service; as the developers put it:

"User labor is the work that people put in to create, improve, and maintain their existence in social web"

ULML provides a way of presenting the volume of user activities such as generating content, tagging, voting and commenting. It also allows for the sharing of metrics concerning reactions to their participation - incoming views, comments, bookmarks and so on. Overall the intent is to quantify in some fashion the economic value of social participation, potentially to enable greater transparency about how user's participation with a service is valued to advertisers and other services that support (typically free) social web applications and to power things like meta-markets.

Some rather simple metrics are already used on forums to rank the value of contributors and encourage more participation - typically based on the number of posts alone. Using the more comprehensive - yet still quite simple - metrics available in ULML may allow better comparisons of relative levels of commitment, engagement, and value generation with multiple social web services.

Its an interesting concept, and could possibly have some use in evaluating engagement and participation in more general terms for services without such an economic rationale such as elearning applications. For example, to quantitatively compare the relative commitment of students to VLEs versus Facebook, or to measure the value generated by staff in shared services. It may also be possible to find a way of using it to quantize the work of researchers who share their work by blogging and using social networks as well as by traditional academic publishing.

I think its fair to say neither APML or ULML is going mainstream anytime soon, but are sufficiently simple to implement that they may be worth exploring if you're developing applications that have a social angle.

My blog seems to have stopped being updated from an external source. I've had to change the feed (it seemed to go off the last one).

The feed that I'm now using is showing the posts if I look at it via " View Content". I've ticked the "publish to blog" - (and checked that the tick is still showing). However, it doesn't seem to be picking it up.

Clearly the function is still working, as I can see the multiple posts in Portuguese on the home page, as we've commented about before, so it's clearly me. Any suggestions? 

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008031414

I've waxed on about fabbers and the like for some time on this blog and elsewhere, so I was suitably impressed by this presentation on open source hardware by Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone. It sets out the various aspects that make up the "source" of an object, from bill of materials to circuit design, and the standards for exchanging them.

Of course this is at the rather more technical end of the fabject continuum. At the other there is the amazing Ponoko site, which enables users to create their designs from regular EPS files, pick the materials, and then have them laser-cut to order. Designers can choose to sell the cut and/or assembled product, or to sell or give away the design as EPS files.

Currently the custom fabjects are a little pricey compared to their mass-produced compatriots, and the processes limited in terms of materials and processes. But add in cheaper 3D printing and other fabbing technologies, and simple programmable wireless platforms like SPOT and Bug, and we'll soon be churning out spimes on demand.

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008031410

Its interesting how we've gone beyond the backend aspects of OpenID and the focus is now on honing the user experience. Clickpass aims to streamline the login process by prefilling the user's OpenID URL within a single login button.

Its a nice idea and seems to work pretty well, but I think that CardSpace is probably a better bet in the medium term. Clickpass gets over the "remember the URL" problem, but doesn't have anything to say on the anti-Phishing issue, whereas CardSpace could in principle tackle both at the same time. Still, in the short term this could be a really good way to increase adoption.

A more pragmatic solution was presented by David Recordon of SixApart in a speech at EduServ last year, which is to ask users not for their OpenID URL, but for things like their AOL Screen name and other easily-remembered identifiers which can be used by a service to easily construct the OpenID URL based on the patterns that providers like AOL use to create OpenIDs.

Finally, there is also the option to have this kind of functionality built into the browser itself - put your OpenID URL into the browser preferences, and have it populate the login button rather than have Clickpass as an intermediary.

Via OLDAily