Introducing Google Maps (Personalized)

Google has gone ahead and just introduced to us a new feature which is eerily familiar to what a simple mashup can do: in fact, it's pretty much what a mashup is. Using Google Maps, Google has saved us the trouble of using API coding and programming and simply allowed us to personalize our own "Google Map." Give it a try: first, you need to have a theme (e.g. vacation areas you'd like to go to). Second, fill in the required information (addresses). Third, add photos, pictures, descriptions, anything you'd like to "customize" your map. Voila! A personalized map that you can share with your clients, acquaintances, friends, family, and just about anyone you can think of to. Yes, this is Web 2.0: we're doing just fine, thank you very much.

Wrapping Up on Five Weeks

The Five Weeks to a Social Library course wrapped up on March 17, 2007. In being the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries, Five Weeks to a Social Library provided a free, comprehensive, and social online learning opportunity for librarians interested in learning more about Web 2.0 technologies.

The course’s strength was the very fact that it had appropriately used social software to run much of its content. Not only did it use a wiki (hosted by Drupal) as the platform for its main page, it also capitalized on blogs for allowing discussion virtually anytime anyone felt like posting a message; this allowed for a two-way communication among participants and instructors. Moreover, presentations creatively combined streaming audio, text chat, and presentation slides which truly made online learning an interactive experience; even better, much of the materials are archived for access, thus allowing anyone with an interest to take the course long after its completion, anytime and anywhere.

However, if there are drawbacks to the course, it would be some of the content. For a more experience user of social software, some of the course content might be considered somewhat basic. Because blogs, wikis, Flickr, and social bookmarking are becoming ever more commonly used, focusing too much on them runs the risk of narrowing social software to just these tools. What the course could have done was emphasize more on “theory” and “concepts” such as collective intelligence, open platform, open collaboration, than on the actual tools themselves.

With the advent of the so-called “Web 3.0” or semantic web, blogs and wikis will come and go and will likely be replaced with newer and even more advanced tools in the near future. While the scope of Five Weeks to a Social Library is certainly limited due to its relatively short time frame and also because it is meant to be an introduction of social software for the novice, I felt that the course could have provided a “glimpse” at things to come by offering a presentation or two from a more advanced “techie”, be it a librarian or not, that would have summarized that we are only on the cusp of something great, and that social software phenomenon will look vastly different even a year from now, let alone many years from now.

Nonetheless, the course was an ambitious first step for providing the necessary knowledge that librarians need to advance the profession and provide better services for patrons. While it could have done more to maximize its potential, the course nonetheless passes with flying colours in terms of meeting its goals and expectations from Day 1 when it had announced such an exciting venture of an entirely free online course for anyone interested in social software.

Happy April Fool's

The good folks at Google pulled a wonderfully brillant and witty April Fools joke which certainly pulled my leg. The joke is Google TiSP, a new FREE in-home wireless broadband service that includes a self-installation kit, which includes setup guide, fiber-optic cable, spindle, wireless router and installation CD. What do you need to do? Simple. A toilet. And a pair of gloves. Then you're ready for high speed internet. According to Google TiSP, actual speeds will vary, depending on network traffic and sewer line conditions. Users with low-flow toilets may simultaneously experience a saving-the-environment glow and slower-data-speed blues. Here's more:

How can Google offer this service for free? We believe that all users deserve free, fast and sanitary online access. To offset the cost of providing the TiSP service, we use information gathered by discreet DNA sequencing of your personal bodily output to display online ads that are contextually relevant to your culinary preferences, current health status and likelihood of developing particular medical conditions going forward. Google also offers premium levels of service for a monthly fee.

Best of all, there is also great technical service support, including on-site technical support in the event of "backup problems, brownouts and data wipes."

Let's Build a Mashup (Or at least see how one works)

Let's take a look at how a mashup works. Take a look at this one. This Proto mashup brings Craigslist, Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo! Maps, and Microsoft Outlook together into an effective apartment hunting and tracking mashup application.

Introducing Web 10.0?

Are you still confused about Web 2.0? Well, it's time to move on to the next stage, according to some. How about Web 10.0? Can you imagine? Ray Kurzeil, DeWitt Clinton, and Nova Spivak have, and they see a very different Web than the one we're using right now.

To date, next to Tim O'Reilly's seminal article, DeWitt Clinton's "Web 2.0" offers the best and most concise definition of Web 2.0. (It's really well worth a read). But he also offers an intriguing glimpse at the Web many years into the future. What will the world and the Web will look like in 2046? Imagine this:

All data . . . can be instantaneously streamed anywhere at anytime. Your very experiences, your senses, perhaps even your thoughts, will be broadcast and archived for anyone to download and view. All human knowledge will be publicly accessible — all music, all art, all media, all things. The distinction between human thought and computer thought will be blurred. We will be part of the network, the network will be part of us. We will be the hive mind, and we collectively will have evolved into something quite unlike anything the world has ever seen.