Tag Archives: First Impressions

Sidewiki Demonstration

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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.

Data Gathering with Google Spreadsheets

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Google has added a new feature to its online spreadheet. Simple polls and surveys to be conducted by email or through web forms with the results saved in a spreadsheet.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=psO01OegcUAMYOdO1bTBNUw

Holiday Reading via kwout

The forms are easy to create and easy to complete. There is no authentication, which means that the same respondant can complete the form multiple times. This is not suitable for high stakes applications, or where identity issues are a concern, but it’s fine for simple data gathering, fun polls, suggestions boxes, guestbooks, ad listings etc.

Feel free to complete the sample survey on Holiday Reading.

Clearspace – First Impressions

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Clearspace is a well designed robust enterprise collaboration application from Jive Software. Out of the box Clearspace lives up to it’s name with a refreshingly uncluttered interface focused on the core tasks of communication and knowledge building.

The design has brought the aesthetics of social networking into the business community, with a relaxing use of space, profile pages, commenting, tag clouds and blogs. But beneath the surface is a pragmatic core.  Organization structures and hierarchies are represented, but they are also opened up easing communication across and between teams.

Architecturally Clearspace runs as a java servlet with clustering built into the design.  It is robust and scalable, capable of deployment to the largest organizations.

It is extensible through server side java plugins that can be embedded in the interface through a number of integration points. It works well with web services and also provides a range of outgoing feeds. This gives several strategies for smoothly combining Clearspace with other applications in your business by:

  • using a Clearspace plugin as an interface
  • implementing single signon
  • embedding Clearspace feeds in third party portal

In addition to targeting Enterprise users with a per seat licensing model, Jive encourages adoption of Clearspace in small business by distributing free copies of the software for installations with up to five users.

On its own, a technical solution will not fix communication problems in an organization. However Clearspace will help improve communications where there is commitment to do so.

Wikia Search

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Today Wikia launched the alpha version of its search engine. With a combination of technologies from the Wikimedia Foundation and the Apache Foundation (Lucene, Nutch), Wikia has some surprising features. When you conduct a search, in addition to the expected list of websites you get:

  • a collaboratively edited “Mini Article” with information about your search topic
  • a list of users whose profiles match your search terms

Wikia effectively combines three established web technologies:

  • search
  • wikis
  • social networking

with each topic becoming an ad-hoc social network.

This is an alpha release, and the gaps in the feature set are clearly visible.

  • no advanced search
  • missing documentation
  • a decorative, but unimplemented ratings function

This mix of technologies brings up some interesting questions. Will users participate? How effectively will the community deal with spammers? Where will the balance be reached between findability and privacy? Will the “People” results be dominated by domain experts, subject enthusiasts or spammers?

Wikia Search is innovative, with potential for business and personal networking. Its success will depend on the strengths of the communities it engages.

24IM Instant Messaging

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Inbit have released 24IM, a free group based Enterprise Instant Messaging solution.

The client comes in two flavors. The web version has a simple functional interface, while the (Windows) desktop client supports file sharing, message broadcasts and off-line messaging. The desktop client also has an integrated screen capture tool that, with the right permissions, can be triggered remotely by IT support staff as part of a helpdesk function.

On the server side, the system is modeled on users, workgroups, departments and chatrooms, with enough access control to fit in with most organisations’ needs. The free hosted service is simple to set up and administer. Where security, scaling or network performance is an issue organizations can opt to purchase a server license and run their own systems.

This is a good solution for small businesses and dispersed project groups, and is able to scale to meet enterprise requirements.