You own that site and I own these comments.

Standard | Posted on September 26, 2009 by Phil

The following is a comment I left in a SideWiki on Phil Windley’s Technometrica article “Claiming My Right to a Purpose-Centric Web: SideWiki“. I’m repeating it here as I’m basically quite proud of it.

I’m intrigued by the question of ownership of engagement and discussion. I’m seeing a lot of successful bloggers expressing a lot of outrage, and yet normally receiving comments is something that bloggers love, excepting spam, unless it’s really good spam.

As I’m typing this I don’t see what I’m doing as a defacement. My comments are clearly divided from your site. They are in a separate part of my user interface that I have chosen to switch on. When I publish they will appear:

- on one of my blogs
- on my Google Profile
- in my FriendFeed stream
- in my Twitter Stream

These are locations where I like the text that I’ve written to appear.

My choice.
My control.
My browser.

Sidewiki is not the first 3rd party technology to enable the annotation of site, and it won’t be the last. It has a high profile and a high distribution because it’s embedded in the Google Toolbar. It’s not unique, but it is a nice implementation that complements traditional threaded comments. You’ll note that this comment is about a highlighted phrase. That’s a very useful feature for those of us who like to fact check, or to limit our expressed opinions to the narrow scope that we’re comfortable with.

I’d really urge your readers to try before condemning.

Tags: Sidewiki, ownership, conversation

Sidewiki Demonstration

Standard | Posted on September 24, 2009 by Phil

This is a demonstration of some of the key features of Sidewiki, Google’s system for leaving public comments on any web page. I’m paying particular attention to how your Sidewiki comments can be brought into other systems. Your comments automatically appear in your Google profile. You can also automatically post to Blogger if you choose. I also demonstrate entering a Webmaster’s comment, which is given a highlighted prime position at the top of the comments list.

Background

Background information on the development and philosophy of Sidewiki is available on Google’s announcement post:

Help and learn from others as you browse the web: Google Sidewiki

Transcript

With Google Sidewiki you can add public notes to web pages. Sidewiki is part of the Google Toolbar and can be enabled and disabled as needed.

You can vote up helpful notes.

You can find out more about a note’s author by clicking through to their profile.

In my profile you can see the notes I’ve made so far and get an RSS feed of the notes.

Here I’ve got the feed appearing in my blog.

If you follow a link in the feed you get back to the original page where the comment was made.

Here’s where I commented on a BuzzMachine article.

And you can choose to see everyone’s comments – not just mine.

I really like the way the page scrolls to show which text comments refer to.

Comments can be made about snippets of text as well as the article as a whole.

Here I’m leaving a comment about Rapla. An open source booking system that worked well for me.

As soon as I highlight some text an edit button appears in the sidebar.

Bear with me here while I find some text to paste.

And lets give it a nice title.

How about “Implementation at Oxford Medical Sciences Teaching Centre”.

At the bottom of the post you can set up links to your blogger account, and choose whether or not to post automatically. I’ve set up a demo blog so you can see this in action.

Once a comment is saved it can be sent to your social networks. I’m tweeting this one.

You get a pop-up twitter window, and the system generates a draft message for you.

Here it is on my Twitter profile.

If you’re the webmaster of a site you can leave a special comment that will always appear at the top of a page.

I’m setting this up for the home page of my Loosing Site blog. I’m already registered as the webmaster so I’m given an extra checkbox to write as the site’s owner.

My comment is then highlighted green and pushed to the top of the list.

Semantic Web comes a step closer with Ubiquity

Standard | Posted on August 27, 2008 by Phil

Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs is a Firefox plugin that bridges simple user commands, semantic data embedded in a web page and standard API to make life a lot easier for users.

Some examples:

getting a map of craigslist rentals
dropping restaurant reviews into an email
forward the translation of a web page to a colleague

Ubiquity is about working with information rather than being a passive recipient. Building on microformats, semantic markup and natural language processing ubiquity is still in its early stages, but in the long term will become integrated into Firefox.

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to: * Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.) * Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.) * Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility. * Extend the browser functionality easily.

Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Getting Chatty with Google Talk

Standard | Posted on June 12, 2008 by Phil

Some new Google Talk features make it much easier for site owners to keep in touch with their visitors.

You can now embed a “chatback” badge in your site that lets visitors see whether you’re available for a chat session. A simple wizard lets you choose between different badge formats, including a version that can be sent by email. When clicked, the badge launches a simplified web based Google Talk client.

The full version of the client now features group chat and media embedding.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: GoogleTalk, chatback, chat

Sprout Your Media, Feed Your Sprouts

Standard | Posted on February 12, 2008 by Phil

Sprout Builder is a web application for creating and managing Flash content. It gives users the power to assemble rich media without having to deal with the complexity of Flash, Flex or Silverlight.

Live rss and ical data feeds can be displayed along with images, videos and audio streams. More specialized components bring in Google Charts, Yahoo Maps and ChipIn payments.

The multi-page widgets can be embedded in any web site. They also have viral marketing features built in, with distribution to MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, WordPress, NetVibes and others handled automatically via Gigya, Clearspring and SpringWidgets.

The embedded website and social network widgets link back to your original content on the Sprout server and in your feeds, which means that when you make changes to your content, those changes are cascaded through the entire distribution channel. The combination of RSS and Calendar components in an easy to use widget framework provide an good solution for keeping members, fans and clients up do date with your latest news and offerings.

Google Apps Team Edition – A Wise Move?

Standard | Posted on February 9, 2008 by Phil

Welcome to Google Apps via kwout

The release of the Team Edition of Google Apps has been met with a mixture of delight and hostility. Google’s decision to assist and encourage the ad-hoc implementation of externally hosted groupware solutions has not been well received by some IT Managers who have expressed concerns over security, reliability, regulatory compliance and the ownership of organization’s IT strategy.

Others acknowledge the frustrations experienced by end users of unresponsive IT departments.

Web Worker Daily » Archive Collaborate and Subvert Your IS Department with Google Apps Team Edition « via kwout

An overview of the Team Edition features can be seen in this video.

A component of Google’s strategy appears to be the encouragement of bottom up adoption in large organizations leading to Premier Edition upgrades at $50 per user per year. Case Studies of SF Bay Pediatrics and Arizona State University who were early adopters of the Premier Edition are included below.

Security concerns about the team edition should be set in the context of current common practices which includes:

sending documents as attachments in unencrypted emails
carrying documents on data pens
carrying sensitive documents on laptops
mailing and loosing data CDs

The question is then whether security is endangered or enhanced by the use of encrypted web applications. The recent addition of Postini in the Premier edition provides a useful security enhancement, checking emails and messages to enforce regulatory compliance when social security, credit card and other sensitive information is detected.

The wisdom of adopting a bottom up approach to entering the enterprise remains to be seen. Once the dust from the hyperbole surrounding security and authority issues has settled the real work of evaluating functions and risk can begin. If nothing else, the launch had underlined the importance of engaging users in the process of managing their technology and security; particularly when expedient options are conveniently available.

I imagine some IT Directors may envy smaller organizations where budgets and staffing levels constrain the choices to a narrower set of options.