I was raised on the most successful initiatives from Public Television, or ETV as it was previously known (E standing for Educational of course). Sesame Street, 3-2-1 Contact, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Reading Rainbow were my bread and butter as a kid.
I couldn’t agree more I too grew up with Educational Television as a child. In fact in the Northeast corner of South Dakota there was a huge transmitter just outside our little town. It was a PBS tower and sometimes that was the only station we could get. In between days at school and dinner time I watched re-runs of Gilligan’s Island or old Hanna Barbera cartoons on Captain 11 on KELO-TV. Those were the days. I used to thoroughly hate the adult shows my parents watched like Masterpiece Theatre. They must have seen every episode of Upstairs, Downstairs three times. But then I too loved watching repeats of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood and Sesame Street. I was one of the chief beneficiaries of Newton Minow’s speech to the National Association of Brodacasters back in 1961. For me television might have been a vast wasteland, but there were some bright shining spots along the way.
Did anyone watch the demo video from Google Australia? A number of key members from Google Maps set out to address the task of communication and collaboration. Lars and Jens Rasmussen decided now that Gmaps is a killer, mash-up enabled web app, it’s time to design the Next Big Thing. Enter Google Wave, it is the be all end all paradigm shifting cloud application of all time. It combines all the breathless handwaving and fits of pique that Web 2.0 encompassed 5 years ago. I consider Web 2.0 to have really started the Summer of 2004 with some blogging and podcasting efforts going on and slow but widespread adoption of RSS publishing and subscribing. So first I’ll give you the big link to the video of the demo by Lars Rasmussen and Company:
It is 90 minutes long. It is full of every litte UI tweak and webapp nicety along with rip-roaring collaboration functionality examples and “possible uses” for Google Wave. If you cannot or will not watch a 90 minute video just let me say pictures do speak louder than words. I would have to write a 1,000 page manual to describe everything that’s included in Google Wave. First let’s start off the list of what Google Wave is ‘like’.
It’s like email. You can send and receive messages with a desktop software client. It’s like Chat, you can chat live with anyone who is also on Google Wave. It’s like webmail in that you can also run it without a client and see the same data store. It’s like social bookmarking, you find something you copy it, you keep it, you annotate it, you share it. It’s like picture sharing websites, you take a picture, you upload it, you annotate it, you tag it, you share it. It’s like video sharing websites, same thing as before, upload, annotate, tag, share. It’s like WebEx where you give a presentation, everyone can see the desktp presentation as you give it and comment on it through a chat back-channel. It’s like Sharepoint where you can check-in, check-out documents, revise them, see the revisions and share them with others. It’s like word processor, it has spell checking enabled live as you type. It can even translate into other languages for you on the fly. It’s like all those Web 2.0 mash-ups where you take parts from one webapp and combine them with another so you can have Twitter embedded within your Google Waves. There are no documents as such only text streams associated with authors, editors, recipients, etc. You create waves, you share waves, you store waves, you edit waves, you embed waves, you mash-up waves. One really compelling example given towards the end is using Waves as something like a Content Managements System where mulitple authors work, comment, revise a single text document (a wave) and then collapse it down into a single new revision that get’s shared out until a full document, fully edited is the final product. Whether that be a software spec, user manual or website article doesn’t matter the collaboration mechanism is the same.
So that’s the gratuitous list of what I think Google Wave is. There is some question as to whether Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets will go away in favor of this new protocol and architecture. Management at Google have indicated it is not the case, but that the current Google suite would adopt Google Wave like functionality. I think the collaboration capability would pump-up the volume on the Cloud based software suite. Microsoft will have to further address something like this being made freely available or even leaseable for private business like Gmail is today. And thinking even farther ahead for Universities using Course Management Systems today,… There’s a lot of functionality in Google Wave that is duplicated in 90% of pay for, fully licensed software for Content Management Systems. Any University already using Gmail for student email and wanting to dip their toes into Course Management Systems should consider Google Wave as a possibility. Better yet, any company that repackages and leverages Google Wave in a new Course Management System would likely compete very heavily with the likes of Microsoft/Blackboard.
Did you know that recently Wikipedia banned editing articles on the Church of Scientology? This reminded me of a project where Jon Udell showed an animation of edits done to a Wikipedia page. Only through animating and visualizing the process did one really understand what had happens to a Wikipedia article over time. Each bit of phrasing, verbiage and links goes back and forth with paragraphs and sentences disappearing then reappaearing. We don’t think of editing words as inherently visual. Compared to film or music recording, writing prose or technical writing is a mental exercise, not a visual one. Yet, when shown a compelling example like Jon Udell’s we inherently just ‘get it’.
After that article was published by Jon Udell and since the wikiAnimate example coursed its way through the Internet, there hasn’t been much noticeable follow-up action. Lots of good ideas are left to wither in the Internet Archive. I don’t see a lot of Slashdot activity on visualizing wiki edits. The biggest problem Jon points out with the original wikiAnimate solution was that it would do a round trip of HTTP GET for every step shown in the animation. This loads down the network way too much and hits Wikipedia with to many HTTP GET requests. Jon Udell, ever the vigilant writer/researcher decided to revisit the original idea. Jon is a kind of pragamtist who readily adapts what already exists. He suggests a couple of ways existing projects could be adapted to the purpose of visualizing changes in text as it is written.
The Wave toolkit from Google is one example. Google Wave has the ability to “playback” conversations back and forth over a period of time. Maybe that ‘playback’ feature could be re-used by an enterprising developer using the Wave APIs. Another possible solution Jon Udell gives is FeedSync which is implemented in the Windows Live webservice. My assumption is there is some kind of flight recording like ability to track each step, then play it back. I don’t write software or develop software. I barely do scripting. however Jon Udell is big on prototyping and showing full examples of how a Social Bookmarking service like del.icio.us could be adapted to the purpose of aggregating community calendars and transforming their contents into multiple output formats for re-consumption. And he’s willing to write just enough middleware and glue code to make it work. It’s a kind of rampant re-usableism. I would characterize the philosophy as this: Sure there’s enough good ideas/products out there one must only decompose the problem to the point where you see the pattern fit well with an existing solution. That’s the true genius of a guy like Jon Udell.
Now that Ruckus has shut down a number of Universities in the U.S. have been caught unawares. No one had forewarning that their attempt to provide a legal alternative to file sharing was going to be taken away. Worse yet RIAA who said they weren’t starting an ‘new’ legal suits against students back in August has continued filing new suits since that time. So what is one to do?
I was asked recently to do a quick rundown of legal music services or retail outfits. I think information gathering at this point is the only sane approach to such a sudden cut in service. At the University where I work we posted an announcement that Ruckus had shut down and we were looking into it. What I noticed at two other Universities who had Ruckus was they put up notices that indicated while Ruckus was shutdown there are still other legal alternatives to Peer to Peer filesharing. So the question becomes does an institution still bear the financial responsibility to provide a legal alternative to file sharing?
In these tight financial times, University provosts an chancellors are going to have to really reconsider how much legal protection they need from the RIAA. There may have been a vain hope that students would be encouraged to use the legal music services. But most stayed away and either continued filesharing or buying music from iTunes.com. So in this second phase of Universities dealing with the peer to peer filesharing, I think we are at the point of advocacy ONLY. Providing a legal alternative at reduced cost and little to no choice is now too costly (in terms of Full Time Equivalent users). It is also too costly in terms of broken contracts when your music service goes out of business overnight. I did find one listing at a University website that had been a Ruckus customer pointing to our old friend Wikipedia.
What better way to provide an alternative than to permit the wisdom of crowds to prevail. Rather than me write up a review of all the possible alternatives, why not let the contributors to Wikipedia collect and edit all the reviews/stats on all the services. Then each and every individual can make the rational choice as to whether or not they want to buy music or steal it over the Internet.
There was a time I rode the bus in Junior High School where the older black kids brought a boombox onto the bus. I didn’t have a choice but to listen. However I got so used to it being there I didn’t know I would miss it. Work yo’ body, work yo’ body, work yo’ body. All the way! Pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, pump, pump pump iit up! Those were the days. I wonder what those band names were called. I never really found out what was on those old cassette tapes. I just remember it being loud and very rhythm heavy.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 