What is the Anatomy of an Application Site?

If you've been excited about the buzz in the past couple of weeks culminating in  yesterday's announcement that several big players - Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, IBM, etc. - all joined the ranks of others in the OpenID Foundation to establish a single identity standard for individuals on the internet, you might be just as geeky as me and have way too many accounts that you've lost track of. 

Actually, you don't have to be a geek.  If you've used any service on the internet over a couple of years, you'll recall over that time having visited other sites that required you to create a username/password combo, only to stop visiting it for some time - long enough to forget the password - and then maybe return to find that you need to "recall" or "reset" your password/account.  No biggie, right?  Happens all the time.   And you can just create a new (free!) account again if you really need to.

But these legacy usernames are really only a small part of the problem.  The question of establishing singular identity for individuals on the internet has vexed web services for a while now and there have been numerous approaches taken to resolve.  And some individuals have enjoyed the freedom that this allows you to create multiple identities in the same web space.  It's an interesting phenomenon of the medium that's not worth the space to discuss right now.  You can actually set aside the problem of ID alone (that's what OpenID is resolving anyhow) and you still have a wide breadth of content managed by web services.

Instead, let's take a look at the architecture/anatomy of a web service.  I should start by explaining that I'm not referring to web services here in the traditional architectural sense but in a broader front-facing "storefront" presence for a web site.  in other words, any site that is not just a series of flat content pages as much of the internet was say, 13 years ago.  If there are dynamic content, feeds, username/accounts/passwords, shopping, transactions, saved pages, tagging, blogging, etc. it's a web service.  This amounts today to Social Networks, Google, Yahoo!,  banking and financial sites, most newspapers and journals, shopping sites, wikis, blogs, polling services, etc. etc.

What's important to think about these sites?  Well, actually to get back to the point of web services, architecture.  There's a lot of thought an time put into the process of defining and creating a site that provides services - that's why the analogy to real estate development (commercial, residential) is appropo in  this medium.  The thing is that there are a lot of "out of the box" frameworks that makes it easy to mash up a site today.  If your security needs are low(er), your ambitions are not too high, you can craft up a pretty useful small web presence for your organization or business around the framework of a blog, wiki, or content management system these days - and the best part is that a good number of them are open source these days.  If you're a large corporation, institution, or have ambitions of growing to that size and presence on the web, there's a lot of custom in-house architecture and building going on these days to fit those needs.  Other corporations might go with an "Enterprise Content Management System" like Vignette, SocialText, CoreMedia, Plateau, etc. and engineer the process of making that ready made system fit their purposes. 

The point is, whether you're a small public blog on blogger or huge financial service with heavy security services, there's still a number of common features for all of these services.  I mean, both an outhouse and a skyscraper have at least one door, right?  They both have some kind of plumbing.  They both have some kind of stuff around (toilet paper, air freshener, file cabinets), and they both have transactions that occur in them (use your imagination, not mine), and they both have time limits (i.e. you don't walk in and never come back out).  Think about that last statement.  You don't walk in to Facebook without knowing that at some point in time, you're walking out;  same with Google;  same with the New York Times;  same with Amazon; same with Moodle. 

An interesting thing about these services is that, they evolve (rapidly; think about how often a building or home is remodeled) and they tend to rely on our returning to use their services often and again to stay familiar with who they are and what they do for us.  I don't do go Amazon all that often these days.  I used to buy a lot of books and stuff of them about once or twice a month or so, but nowadays, I can go three months without visiting their site.  Amazon is a great example of a site with web services.  Early on, they were a site that I was enthusiastic about creating an account registering all my shipping addresses, creating lists of content that I liked, etc. etc.  Now when I visit Amazon, some things don't always look familiar.  These days, you get greeted on the Amazon home page by a great big fat advertisement for the Kindle.  No problem - they do want to revolutionize the reading/book experience.   But eventually, I get back into looking at my "recommended lists," my "wish lists" my reviews, etc. - whatever I remember from my last experience at Amazon that was effective.

I have a similar experience when I revisit something like bebo which I never really used all that much - I'm still not entirely sure what makes it useful and when I visit it on occasion, I get pretty confused finding my way around.  Facebook had an interesting idea when they released a piece of the framework API to make it possible to "embed" or wigetize applications from other sites into the Facebook architecture.  But nearly a year later, there have yet to prove to be any real interesting applications that fit the framework that make any real sense.  I mean, this is a stretch, but I'd much rather login to google (or better yet petechen.com using google apps in the back) and access my email, my calendar, and edit my docs than try to organize things with the applications made for facebook.  In short, what I've always been saying is that, Facebook is a wonderful social networking application that has found a niche that bridges the 20-40ish crowd but it's hard to envision it ever being a platform that makes business sense.

Which is a long way of finally getting to my point - what makes business sense is 1.  understanding the needs of business, 2.  being able to design and construct utilities (solutions, applications, programs, idioms, choose your businesspeak) that  addresses those needs.   I think that many internet services (often mistakenly) believe that they do the second point so well that they end up doing a marginal job addressing the first.   The frameworks and tools that are out there today are really cool and fun stuff - it's like  having  a lot of really powerful tablesaws and nailguns and great quality wood, but there's such a rush to create "great sites" that you end up with these "office buildings" that have too many toilets - all on the same floor; or too few elevators or no recycling bins for all the spam, you get the idea...

So what is the solution here?  Well, I think we've started to see a cresting of Enterprise applications that have been built in a really unwieldy manner.  Companies don't stand for expensing out an application that they only use 5% of because the other 95% is incompatible or does not integrate with existing datasystems.  We've been led to believe before that all data was transformable into different systems and that process has gotten much better but we're still dealing with very large applications.   I like the approach where application building is more modular and built around the front end experience.  The  thing is there's a lot of garbage in the middle of the experience but what people want is their food in, and their waste out.  It makes for a more complicated task between the UI/UE people and the architectural team however, that process is getting better with every iteration of software that we see out there.  We also see that there is a base framework for "social applications" that include "personal information" (photos, location, im handle, etc.) could carry over from app to app.  Shopping sites allow users to "save" shopping lists and wish lists etc. that could match up with what other retailers might be able to consolidate and increase savings.  Learning and content management systems (that includes blogs, journals, newspapers) keep content within their domain such that there isn't much portability even though a user might want to aggregate, organize, AND add to the informational "collage" that they collect.  You get my point here.  The experience of web applications actually needs to get away from the site itself and shift back to what the end user want to use and make of that information. 

Now I'm not saying that we need to build a "desktop application" that resolves these issues.  I have a great citation management tool that I've been using the past few months that sits in the corner of my browser window called Zotero that I use to "save" articles and such.  And I've used del.icio.us for a couple of years to bookmark sites - these things are close but not perfect to a real custom user oriented organizational experience that makes business sense. But I think that if we think closer to the anatomy of what a web application is - like we were talking about earlier - we can get closer still, and really make great applications that will be well used and embraced but the business an general community.

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Zotero - a GREAT citation management tool built for today's information

I posted to this blog over a year ago wishing for a citation management tool that is both better equipped for today's styles/methods of culling and managing articles for research support and support some form of intelligent aggregation tool to cull in newer (related) articles from a variety of sources rather than put the  burden on the researcher/reader.  We're getting closer there yet but I'm happy to report that I've found a citation management tool that I'm getting really excited about.  So long, EndNote, Refworks...

Zotero is a great new web plug-in for Firefox (also works with Flock and Netscape) that was put together by folks at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University with  grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the  Mellon Foundation, and the Sloan Foundation.  I mention this because you can see that it has been primarily an academic endeavor targeted at academic usage and not commercial property.

The tool is free and open source and it sits right in the bottom-right corner of you browser as you work.  When you come across an article/web page/resource, you can draw up the tool by clicking on it. Then you can do anything from drag the link to ask Zotero to capture the page for you.  It can either capture the reference or, cooler yet, take a snapshot of the page and save it to a local directory for you.  For standard journal articles, it will automatically capture the citation reference, URL, and provide you with options to enter notes and/or tags to maintain the reference in your collection.  If your citation is not a journal article, you have your choice of over 30 types of references - from artwork to email to podcast - by which you can identify the item.  This is a great expansion of resources that reaches out more to humanities and other researchers as well as non-academic type researchers who are searching for ways to better manage references through more than bookmarks.  Even if you want to record a citation that is not in a web page or electronic, you can easily do a manual entry and create a citation reference for something that you are reading offline and add it to your library.

Now the cool stuff.  After you have built your citation library, Zotero can export your library to yo desktop in a variety of formats including ZoteroRDF, Endnote, BibTeX, RIF, and Dublin Core RDF. This can then be used to build your citation list in your word document article.   Interestingly enough, Zotero can also import citation lists from your desktop as well.  Zotero also uses OpenURL resolvers for uniformity across citations.

For anyone who is struggling with citation management or even wondering about why they would want to manage citations, Zotero is a great tool to look into for organizing your references and ideas.  For a guy like me who juggles multiple blogs, this thing is priceless... Now if we could only build in that feed/peer tool...

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Louisiana State University Moves to Moodle

On Saturday, November 3rd, MoodleRooms Michael Penny reported that Louisiana State University would be moving to the Moodle Learning System. LSU is a Major research university enrolling more than 30,000 students, including more than 1,600 international students, and nearly 5,000 graduate students. LSU has more than 1,200 full-time faculty members and a staff of more than 3,000.

Because their process was public, we have access to valuable details that are not often available for institutional decisions such as this one.

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Read the rest of Louisiana State University Moves to Moodle (1,031 words)

I thought this was a particularly interesting article chock full of links to other resources (including the LSU report) that says a lot about the types of choices that Higher Education learning infrastructure are choosing LMSes these days.  Never mind the position that LMS as a "bolt-on" part of the Higher Learning infrastructure are a foregone conclusion these days.  Now there are a variety of institutions scrambling to get their online presence firmly established for their existing brick and mortar classrooms because it's an accepted and done part of instructional design and the teaching and learning process that every class needs some kind of online presence whether it's just a syllabus, contact info and a few links to learning materials. 

A few years ago, there was this big scramble to get Blackboard and/or WebCT set up.  Then around the same time, a group of universities already torn between these rapidly expensive and unwieldy and incompatible Enterprise systems and their own home-grown efforts, agreed to put forth an open source effort that would fit ALL their needs and formed the Sakai foundation and Sakai project.  Now, the big players appear to be a (diminising) Blackboard (ate up WebCT), Sakai, moodle, a host of enterprise competitors like Angel Learning, Desire2Learn, etc.. 

Everyone's scrambling to do learning "solutions"  and it's not just higher education. Corporate entities are discovering that LMS are part of a strategy to both shore up expensive sales and client training for their products, manage and improve internal and corporate training, and provide Human Resources/performance management tools.  But institutional academia is interesting because, as I noted earlier, they're often trying to bolt-on a technology tool over an existing learning model that has been highly dependent on interaction as part of an iterative process for success.  Of course, as a chemistry professor once told me, all these technology tools - what they need to do is help shorten the time and effort spend doing administrative tasks such as managing grades, distributing handouts, preparing notes and slides, and so forth.  If it ends up taking me more time to do it online, then I've just wasted valuable time that I could have spend improving my teaching. 

So established institutions do need to think a little corporatively - or at least see the business model - as they approach committing and rollout of their LMS.  The commitment that they make is also much larger than the business world since their ultimate product (and thereby the production quality) - learning - has much more at stake here.  It's too soon right now to start evaluating and ranking schools based in part on the effort and approach that they take towards their LMS however, the time that USNews and other college reporting guides weigh the value of this is not far off the horizon. 

I also watch some of these newer "schools" particularly the technical/vocational and  continuing studies type programs and how the faculty seem to embrace the inevitability of online learning or "hybrid learning" and tailor their instructional design to fit that model.  Many of these types of institutions recognize how LMS are their CPU and really figure out how to make effective use and design around it.

Will this create a "technology gap" between traditional universities that find different ways to embrace and implement LMS?  Will some schools take a defined minimal approach while others build out much more sophisticated integration with information systems such as digital libraries, student resources, portfolios, etc.?  It will also be interesting to observe how different faculty embrace the challenges and rewards of technology as new types of pedagogy are explored and instructional/learning design is thought about more thoroughly. 

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The Mobile OS plan

The Achilles' heel in Google's phone plan | Perspectives | CNET News.com

Interesting perspective on Google's plans, which I think still aren't totally clear yet despite having said that they're "not making a cell phone" or even becoming a carrier, etc. etc. The picture that is painted right now is that they'll partner with carriers and cell phone manufacturers to release their open source platform. It remains to be seen just how that that business partnership will work since cell phone carriers are notoriously well, bad at answering customer's needs. They just push out what they think you should have and what fits their needs as far as profitability. It's a volume industry meaning, like credit cards, they potentially make small margins on the "good" customers that pay monthly and don't exceed their limits, but they rely on volume and the minority of limit breakers to feed their coffers.

I think Google's goal, while on one face appears noble - how can open source not be - is still the bottom line of making money with the best product out there. Certainly no problem with that. And Apple left that door open by making the iPhone a pretty closed environment for developers and Windows Mobile is just not what it calls itself. RIM is altogether another beast closer to Windows Mobile, and Palm OS is now a weak joke just waiting to go the way of the Commodore 64.

So of course I support Google's position here, and Michael, in no way says that it's a bad one. He just thinks that Android puts Google in a business position that they're not used to and not very good at. I think he's underestimating the bankability of open source paired up with the Google name. Also, for us old timers, we're still so tied into the idea of the cell phone being a cell PHONE-FIRST and thereby beholden to the very structure that comes from from years of the FCC controlling bandwidth licensing, and that nothing happens without reception to a cell tower.

Ah, might that be a possible alternative. I know this is pie-in-the-sky here but, why wouldn't Google try to exploit wi-fi as an alternative way in to the general communications spectrum? Ever since it's become apparent that we're using cell phones less and less to talk, and more time to text, view photos, videos, mp3s, etc., I've been referring to these things as Persistent Mobile Devices (PMDs) which I think is a more appropriate moniker and gets us out of the thinking that it is a PHONE. (Yes it is still, but a phone alone never solved ALL our communication/productivity needs and neither would a laptop...) Speaking of, I also pity those who are banking on the laptop as the center of the mobile universe - it is for now, and slipping, but really in a few years will be seen as a more unwieldy device for mobile professionals. It's also going to become a failure in the developing world the way the One-Laptop-Per-Child effort is going but that's a subject for another post. (Years from now, archaeologists will dig up these oddly plastic things labeled "XO" that were build into the foundation of a home in southwestern Kenya...)

But back to the Google's approach. I have no doubt that with Skype, free and open wifi, and open source, a total back door is open here for Google to really define the PMD and kill the cell phone moniker. The devices will still provide phone communication the way our phones do now, but also provide easy internet access via wifi and/or 3G/EDGE/etc. (a-la-iphone-ish) productivity tasks, integrated text communication (email, im, texting), entertainment (streamed, cached, synced, etc.), information and education (direct wikipedia access, LMS, others), maybe even cooler personal management tools like for finance and banking.

So for now, I really wouldn't worry about how Google deals with the position of being a subservient sales partner. Google's PSO program already proves that they're interested and motived to work with other companies towards an end goal of profits for both that is probably a bit less overbearing and "entangling" as Microsoft's. In business, if you can approach your partner convincing them that they have a good idea, that the partnership is worth both your investments, and you show them the respect that they can innovate on your platform as much as you can on theirs, they'll respond accordingly. There's no need to kowtow unless you're trying to sell a bridge to someone with a serious inferiority complex.

RSS Feeds... Citation managers... the missing link

I've been wondering lately, as I've spent a little time going back and forth here between two diferent types of applications associated with information literature - RSS feed readers and Citation management software - what it will take to link these two types of applications together to create a truly powerful tool for researchers, academics, scholars, journalists, or even the lay person who is interested in learning and discussing a specific topic, to provide and manage information.

If you're not quite following my line of thinking, or don't know enough about these types of tools, I'll give a little background. If you're on the web these days and reading news, articles, i.e. anything published and generally attributable to a journal and/or author, you've seen the little orange 'RSS" or "XML" boxes at the bottom or side of the page. If you use them, then you may know that an aggregator is a tool or application (or web page) dedicated to aggragating or pulling together timely feeds from a source into your reading tool. MyYahoo, and Google Reader are two good examples of web pages that function as RSS aggregators. There's a whole host Aggregator/Reader applications such as Feedreader and RSSBandit are examples of app readerds. Regardless of what tool you use, the point here is that these tools are supposed to save you the trouble of hunting around the web and checking for new articles (or blog updates) from time to time from all your commonly read sources of information. Selective feeds help narrow in the topics such that you don't get alerted and fed every single news article that gets posted to CNN but rather a more specific topic such as "Technology news." It's also worth noting that feeders don't just feed out text articles but can also say, podcasts or videocasts. If you "subscribe" to a podcast in iTunes, iTunes is functioning as your aggregator.

So basically what the reader/aggregators here do is collect (potential) articles of interest to you. The "portal" people saw this as a way of customizing the information that you get on your home page to be stuff that you'd likely find interesting.

At the other end, scholars and researchers have a habit of reading a lot of articles and information related to a specific set of ideas and/or problems that they're interested in. Often these come to them in journal articles, books, serials, and other types of sources dependent on the type of academic discipline that they'reworking in. Similarly, many journalists, being writers themselves, are voracious readers and researchers gathering background information and sources to synthesize in their reporting. In the past, it was up to the individual to devise a system of remembering what they read, where they read it, and maybe keep some notes on the matter for recall when they later needed to cite their source. From working with some academics who have been at this for 50+ years, I know some who keep stacks and stacks of notecards that they file with records of every article that they have read important to their research or work. Others may keep a running list in a word document or excel spreadsheet that they have been adding to for years and years.

Enter the Citation or Reference Management software applications also known as Bibliographic management solutions. When I first started using EndNote about 6 years ago, it was an application that sort of pluged into Microsoft Word as something of a side-database that allowed you to create entries and categorize citations that you had read. As you wrote your paper or article, you could "cite" or reference articles to support or provide evidence for your arguments. At the conclusion of writing your article, you could, with a few clicks, build your bibliography and it would get added to the end of your article automatically.  In a few years, thanks to a bunch of librarians and Information Technologists, the Citation management standard has gotten better and better.  Even though there are disparities between some of the popular Citation manages such as EndNote and RefWorks (worth noting too that EndNote is an application tool and RefWorks  is web based), journal publishers who provide their articles online (both public and fee-for use journals) nowadays provide "citation links" that import the citation directly into your citation manager - no longer do you have to retype the whole citation and make sure you get the author's name spelled correctly, etc. etc.  With a click of the mouse, it's in your manager waiting for you to later cite in your article and build into the bibliography.

So at this end, what citation managers do is help organize the content that you have read so that you can recall and reference them in your own writing later on.  For the individual who may read dozens of articles a day or hundreds a week, this is a tremendous time saving tool.  Even if you're not a writer yourself, just having a tool that organizes anything that you have read into the ideas and categories that you are thinking about is powerful and a great tool for shaping your thoughts and ideas.  While citation standards tend to be most important at the scholarly level right now, where the scientific method demands that claims should be verified and referenced, you can create a citiaton i.e. bibliographical entry for any source of information. 

I tend to think of Citaiton Managers still as a bit clunky.  Feed readers, also a bit of "here today, gone tomorrow" in the way that they present information - readers tend to push out stuff based on volume so you can lose an article if you wait too long between times you check your reader.  So thinking as a consumer of information who consumes a lot in a breadth of disparate categories, and as someone who constantly needs to reference back to stuff that I've read about a day, a week, a month, or year or so ago, I tend to think that the builders of these types of tools really need to get together to build a true personal information management tool which simplifies the process of aggregating as well as maintaining and recalling citations to that information. This would be a tremendous boon to academics, scholars, researchers, and scholars.

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