Yuval Ararat

Continues lerner eager to explore

Requiem to comments

We all like reading posts on blogs, news sites and media. we like to see videos and pictures. some of us like to comment on them too. but those comments are not social, they are local and isolated. who saw this in his twitter feed?

i commented on _____ blog post http://bit.ly____

This is a hack with a hint to the future.

Comments are a social thing, an interaction of the reader with the blogger. Why should it not be a part of the social fabric?
There are a few first trials to weave the social tools to website, like the cmswire.com  reactions driven by disqus, but comments are still available. No one was bald enough to take the plunge yet and remove comments all together.

The Facbook social plugin gives another platform to replace the comments while adding the facebook aspect to it.

The risk as with all cloud services is the locking of the data to a third party and with the last Amazon EC3 shutdown, as with all risks the mitigation and the value it offers should be assessed, my view is that an integration of a twitter/facebook feed to your articles is much more engaging then the current comments structure. The value and exposure in the social networks will beat the search value, yes i think that search will crumble against the mighty social network information structure, information is ranked better in a social network to my oppinion but that is a huge article i have no time to deal with at the moment.

So what do you think about the comments death? is it inevitable?

Twitter is down – very very very down it seems

Twitter downAs my son will put it it is very very very very sad, seeing this great service suffering from this problem. and sadder to see all the services around it fearing their livelihood.
Hope it gets back up quick this time as it is not a welcomed crash.
The reason is unclear at the moment as to shy it is down but it seems to be a big thing as oppose to the quick drops from the past.
Time will tell what effect it will have on trust and especially of transition into buzz the main competitor.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. #Enterprise2 growing hiccups

Imagine you are a CEO of a medium company, or you might even be one, and you have chosen your Enterprise 2.0 platform, implemented it and trained every employee in the company to use it.

So you have your Wikies and Forums set up.

All of your groups have access and manage their content in the sysem.

You see usage growing in the company.

“All is good”, you think to yourself, i can tell the board we have succeeded and that benefits will be seen in the immediate future.

But nothing happens.
You start to question the reasons, but all you see is a good usage rate and lots of content.
What is wrong?

From my experiance in the last few months i have a few reasons.
First and foremost is that the initial flame is gone, your employees are not eager to play since the interest in the content has fallen and the content that was there is not as updated any more.
The second is that this is a business that has ranks not an open source project where you have respect, not everything is documented.
But these are all obvious things we all know about, whats your new pain-point Yuval?
I was just exposed to a problem in the way the content is managed, i have a client where he has 2 IT departments under different titles. they both use the same software for their Enterprise 2.0 solutions but they are separated by a security border and thus oblivious to the content of the other group.
They have no way of using the content that the other group have written even if it is most relevant.
Both of the groups use our software and use the same infrastructure, so they encounter the same problems and could use each other solutions.
But they have no exposure to that so they need to go and ask people, that have done the same 6-12 months ago, if they have seen this or that behavior.
Guess what, no one can remember so they either search the wiki for you or say they didn’t encounter it.

This is a major hidden problem especially with things that are cross deparmental.
But when is it safe to share and when is it not? i guess we are missing some sort of a rule of thumb here.
My guess is that more then 80% of the information is safe, very safe to go across departments to the whole company.
But who makes the decision? who is the person in charge?
The contributor is not capable of making the decision himself some times and needs to consult, who governs this?
I have seen a few debates going sour, and was introduced to this article onhow blogs solve the inter departmental communication gap but that is a singular solution to a problem in multiple communication channels.

Let the discussion begin!
P.S. if we get a good solution i am going to push it to the client as a pilot.

Goverment 2.0 Is the audiance ready? #oahack

Its been a great weekend in OpenAustralia Hackfest, first let me thank the organisers who have done an amazing job, Matthew Landauer, Alan Noble, Pamela Fox, Henare Degan and Tim Ansell who organised the event. And a special thanks to our amazing sponsor Google who gave us the space, the food and the great prizes.
A big get well out to Rob Manson, getting sick in the first day and missing out. Hope he gets better soon.
There were some great hacking done on government data and some nice things that have not matured to applications during the weekend.

There is one thing, that keeps blinking at the back of my mind.

Is the crowd we are serving the data ready?
Will they be able to use the interface we give them?

It seems there is a gap, a big gap, between the technology world and the political realm. there is always a gap, i was not aware of how deep it is. Reading License to Drive in the Digital Economy exposed me to a troubling figure, a quarter of the people in this land are social web illiterate,

“27% of those surveyed aged 14 and over were not currently participating online. These statistics give some indication that about a quarter of those surveyed would struggle to become active participants in the digital economy.”

This poses a big question about utilisation of the Government 2. and the usefulness of these tools.
It seems that the information gathered from these types of applications will be biased towards the more capable social layers, thus creating a worse situation to the social segments not represented.
What should we do?

How can you enable all the crowd to be part of this participation age?
This is a big questions that got some mentioning

My take is that we need to child proof our applications and match them to the profile of a non technical and non social aware person.
As we develop our systems we should strive to get the information to the users in the most simple to follow and understandable form, thus making it easier to consume and make available to all users of the web.
Keep your interfaces accessible, make them conform to WCAG 2.0, if you are not a front end developer DON’T develop the front end.

There was a cry from Tim Ansell, during free hacking sessions and later in the lightning sessions, to find any one who can prettify his interface.

Do the same, there are a lot of people that are very capable and would love to do so.

May the web be with you.

Facebook advertising

Bees

Reading newsweek i see that they have an article “Facebook???s Roar Becomes a Meow” by Daniel Lyons on Facebooks problematic business module of ad space.
But this model is pretty much all they had you might say.
Well… i think not. they could have add premium services or targeted businesses and organization at special services.
They could have added applications that you need to pay for and get the developer some premium on their work.
But the deal is that Googles business model is the one they chose.
Daniels point on the disturbance the ads generate in Facebook as oppose to the help they generate when attached to a searched and are relevant to the seeker is very important and might i say crucial.
The one model they might have benefited most of is letting external applications and developers connect through an API that carries a price tag on it so applications like Flock would pay a premium.
May be if you use the login API you pay nothing but only on other API’s? That could work and will open the net for a single peoples directory, a long needed resource.
This could generate?? that will benefit every user in Facebook with more quality and every developer trying to make a buck.
But the war on MySpace was too important to facebook that they forgot to believe in their application strength.
My thoughts for a better Facebook

  • Believe in your application.
  • Remove the integral ads.
  • Charge a premium for usage of applications and share it with developers.
  • give the developers the ability to choose the payment and structure of charging, they know their app best.
  • Develop more sophisticated ways to promote product, for instance get celebrities to become VIP fans of the products. Remember to coordinate the VIP user activities so they don’t slip
  • Listen!