Born On The Web

I’m a heavy reader of Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Rough Type. I mostly don’t agree with his rather controversial statements, but he does always bring up some interesting points.

In his article the death of wikipedia, he attacks wikipedia and its stricter rules about editing articles. Read the article but also read the interesting discussion going on in the comments. They are at least as valuable as the post itself. Jimmy Wales founder of Wikipedia goes into discussion with Nicholas.

If you’re interested in the evolution of communities and user-generated content, this is a must read.

My comments on Nicholas his statement:

Try looking it from the end-users perspective, Wikipedia is a great source of information, I use it a lot and it never disappointed me. I’m not part of the community, I don’t care how they come to such great content. But the content is very useful to me and that is what matters for me.

With the world cup 2006 in Germany starting on the 9the of June, maybe it’s fun to have a little competition on each match. You can’t win anything you can just show of your football knowledge or luck :) !

So I stumbled upon Pickdee. It allows you to make a simple competition that everyone can join. You have to fill in the score of each match. You have time to add or change your score until the match begins. You don’t need to fill in each score already. Start with the scores of the first day of the world cup: Germany vs. Costa Rica and Poland vs. Ecuador.

I’ve created a competition over here : http://worldcup.pickdee.com/belgium/, if you want to join my little competition, sign up and join my game. Currently it is public but if you all joined I’m gonna make it private. So we can have our own cosy little competition. Be sure to give in your correct email, so I can keep you updated during the world cup.

When you join the competition make a small comment who you are on Pickdee, so we know who’s who.

Here are some more rules from Pickdee:

Ok, here’s how it works in a little more detail. Right now there’s two types of game:

* Simple
* Bullseye

With simple, you get five points for predicting the result of the game, win, lose or draw. With bullseye, you get four points for predicting win, lose or draw and an additional three points for predicting the correct score. For each game, you also pick an overall winner, if that comes up, you’ve earned an extra twenty bonus points.

You can change your pick right up to the start of the game, or the start of the competition for the overall pick. Then after each round, the results are tallied and you get to see how everyone did.

That’s basically it — though there’s one peculiarity with games that don’t allow for draws, like the final stages of the world cup. For those, if you predict a simple draw, or a bullseye exact score draw and that’s the score after normal + extra time, you score as usual. If you predict a winner or loser then its based on the overall winner, penalties and all, and there’s no bonus for the correct score.

You don’t have to be an expert to join the competition, I’m not an expert either. Invite others too !

*Update: for the full schedule of the world cup, outlook agenda, iCal, RSS, … check http://www.worldcupkickoff.com/

With the upward spiral of syndicated content in mind, I can’t understand bloggers / news platforms who only publish a small abstract from their blogpost into their feed.

The whole syndication story gets absurd when you only put the first 3 sentences of your blogpost into the feed. I understand you like people to see your nice site design and your google ads, but I believe the value of your content goes down if you only publish an abstract. Look at feedburner or other services and put the ads in your feed.

Ok, half-bred feeds still notify me when you have posted something new, but what if you wrote something really cool that I want to save in my feed reader: impossible. The reason for you to provide a feed has to be the user. You want to make your content as available as possible for anyone, don’t degrade your feed to a promotion tool for your site. It’s much more than that. For your readers your feed is probably the most important part of your site.

Users who like your design, will still choose to go to your site to read your content, but let the user decide how to interact with your content.

This is one thing I talked about in my presentation at Barcamp Brussels, I will put the complete presentation online. But the presentation itself isn’t that clear without my explanation. Smetty recorded my talk so I’ll make the presentation available when I can get hold of the podcast.

Every theory I’ll talk about on the blog, can later be found in my thesis paper.

What do I mean with syndicated content? It’s a pretty broad meaning, it is not only content in RSS or atom feeds. It can also be content you interacted with trough a web service / API.

As Peter Bailey notes on his blog you can interact with online content on different ways. Consuming has always been possible on the net. But thanks to the syndication of online content it has become much easier to interact on different ways with your content:

• Creating: it has never been easier for the end-user to publish content to the web. You don’t need technical skills to make content and publish it to the net. A few examples of very easy content publishing: Flickr Uploadr (just drag photos in a window and hit upload), google page creator, the very user friendly CMS wordpress …
• Collating: A lot of tools made it easier to collate online content. Most feed readers give you the option to save a feed item. You can bring together relevant content for later use. But the simplest form of collating online content is simple bookmarks. Examples: My FeedDemon feed reader has the feature to drag feed items in saved categories. Every feed item that can be useful for my thesis I can collate in my thesis saved category. A lot of content platforms give you the possibility to add the link to del.ico.us, you can tag it collate it and order it the way you want.
• Commenting: A lot of blogs, news platforms give you the possibility to add comments directly to a article. Even if this isn’t possible, you can simply use the quote the online content and make your own blogpost on it commenting on the article. Examples: the add comment box in a lot of blogs, news platforms, flickr, youtube, … The ease to reblog a feed item to comment on it in a lot of feed readers. Easy to blog items on digg.com or flickr: a button “blog this”.
• Collaborating: Easy to remix syndicated content. I can bring together my own blogpost with a used flickr photo. We group our flickr photos with a same theme in a flickr group. We link our del.icio.us bookmarks together with the del.icio.us network so we can share valuable information.

The essential part on interaction of content is:

The better your content is syndicated the more possibilities you create for users to interact with your content. Syndicated content is easier to consume, collate, comment on, collaborate with, (re)create..

Syndicated content added to the web can potentially make every other piece of syndicated content more valuable (=in analogy with Tom Coates “future of web apps” statements)

This is what I call the upward spiral of syndicated content:

When you create online content and syndicate it. It can become part of this upward spiral, the more people consume, collate, comment on, collaborate with your content, the more valuable it will become. If your content leads to new creations, those creations become part of your upward spiral and can be consumed, collated, commented on, …

1. More interaction on your syndicated content means more value of the content.
2. The more it leads to new creations, comments, … the wider the spiral becomes, the further the reach of your content.

Can you find more examples when syndicated content becomes more valuable? Or examples when it doesn’t ?

• Yahoo! Search – Video Search
  aol video, google video, youtube, now also yahoo video. A lot of bloggers wonder if youtube will survive.
  (tags: search yahoo tv media web videos video)

• South Africa – BEWARE!!! – Topic Powered by Groupee Community
  This post in a forum really made me emotional. I’ve been to south africa and I also fell in love with the country. This sentence especially made me want to go back: “Getting out of bed every day is a risk. Don’t let fear stop you from discovering the pass
  (tags: southafrica africa country)
• FlickrBlog
  Wow some major flickr changes… it was a while ago the site updated, but this seems a big change.
  (tags: flickr features change)

• Google Operating System: Listen To Pandora In Winamp
  desktop <-> web mashup. This comes in handy for a die hard winamp user as me.
  (tags: music pandora winamp software cool)

• Atlas – powered by Fresh Logic Studios
  New maps service on the block, with great interface and functionality. A lot of bird’s Eye coverage. Check it out.
  (tags: maps ajax map atlas)

• pukkelpop 2006
  After a great Werchter line-up, pukkelpops line-up is looking good too… Radiohead, daft punk, massive attack, mylo, dj shadow, ….
  (tags: belgium Music festival festivals)
• Why your laptop won’t replace your TV. By Séan Captain
  The problems of IPTV… bandwith
  (tags: broadband internet technology television IPTV)

Clo hitted me with a stick. I’m pretty honoured to get hit with a stick by the BBM, which stands for the Belgian Blogging Momma!
So momma here you go … ;)

One year ago, 21 years old
I was following the module infotainment in my third year C-MD. We had to communicate very difficult information on a simple and entertaining way. We worked in a team of 7 persons (Johan – Hoi Yan – Daniël – Lev and Frits as freelance consultant). Like always we saw us project very ambitious, maybe a bit too ambitious. Me and Lev were the Flash developers in our team. I think I never flashed that much as last year. Well it ended in an online game with a lot of video. When I look back at it a year later, I’m still pleased with the way we integrated the video and how we bring information to the viewer on the other panels.

5 years ago, 17 years old
I was already into web developing. When I started flash really was “the shizzle”. Long flash intros, the skip intro button. I had to be part of it, I probably had my part. I could make websites in flash, but never heard of html :p . Because I eventually needed to publish the intros I had to learn some HTML.
I had my first community named “forumfun” based on a phpBB RC1 forum. We had a sponsored hosting and the board was actually pretty popular, we almost had like 100 members and like 30 really active members. It shut down because our sponsor cancelled our PHP – Mysql hosting. It was hosted by siteraiders who have a site that is soo old and soo flash that its getting cool again. :p

10 years ago
In 1996 I was almost 12 years old and ready for the big jump to high school. We shared a dial-up internet connection with a friend. Pretty illegal huh ! The company who provided us the lightning fast 33.6 kbps internet connection called Tornado. Tornado later became Ping, where we got an official login and payed around 12.000 BEF (300 EUR) a year + the always-frightning telephone bill, crazy internet times. Ping became Planet Internet and Planet Internet became Scarlet and we’re still customer, we still have the same internet login and password for our internet connection. They should reward faithfull customers.
I remember my sister was a IRC fanatic, #belgium on undernet (not sure of the network). So she actually got me hooked to the net. Back then, almost nobody of my friends had the internet. Some didn’t even knew what it was, so you see how fast it got adopted. I think I can say that I grew up with the internet, for some reason it was always there.

I will pass the stick to my friends and talented collegues Hoi Yan, Lev and Frits. Next year when we’re graduated we’re not going to see each other that much, so I need to stimulate them to seriously start blogging. I want a decent RSS feed to subscribe to.