Vegemite Mashup

This morning I read in the Sydney Sun-Herald (yes, I'm old enough to read newspapers in hard copy) that the winner of the Kraft Foods competition to name Vegemite's new cream cheese-laced version is Vegemite iSnack 2.0 . The news is also widely reported on the web. Try http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/mp/6103975/wa-web-designer-names-new-vegemite/

The entry was submitted by Perth web designer Dean Robbins - maybe he's a graduate of Curtin? His entry was "tongue-in-cheek", borrowing from both the "i" naming phenomenon and Web 2.0. But applying it to Vegemite? I'm quite happy that Dean should submit such an entry, but for Kraft to award it the first prize is quite amazing and it adds something to my understanding of how modern marketing works!

Now, I'm even spreading Web 2.0 on my breakfast toast!

Random thoughts on wikis

The argument that blogs emphasise individual writing (but give others a chance to contribute in the form of separate comments) whereas wikis emphasise collaboration (all contributors are equal) is accepted, but the distinction (drawn by Tama) that wikis are characterised by the ability to "edit within browsers" is more doubtful. Surely blogs are as well (I'm editing it in the browser now), as indeed are all forms of webmail, discussion boards etc.

Wikis are at best a defective form of collective intelligence (as defined by Levy & interpreted by Jenkins) because while "everyone knows something", that something is not available to anyone else on request as the definition would imply, but only by agreement and participation of that someone.

The technologist in me has some trouble distinguishing between wikis and blogs - as far as I know they are both based on scripting languages providing interactivity to web pages. The differences are just in the execution, in how that interactivity is structured. The "rules" which characterise blogs (latest at the top, comments allowed, links to related blogs etc) differ to those for wikis (all can edit the main document, history of changes kept, watchlists and rollbacks, intense hyperlinking etc) are firstly, just details in design, and secondly, just rules which can be innovated away. I imagine (i.e. I don't really know this) that the rules were largely established by following the protocols established by early successful exponents (such as Blogger and Wikipedia).

Despite my scepticism above, the power of collective intelligence displayed by Wikipedia is truly amazing. To have Dr. al-Halawi's deliberate errors corrected so quickly is incredible. And, like everyone, I was aware of the comparison between Wikipedia and Britannica, but did not realise until now that the study was conducted by Nature, making it extemely credible. It is interesting to note that that Anthony, Smith and Williamson report that the quality of Wikipedia's content is greater for registered contributors, and that repeat contributors are motivated by the reputation they accumulate.

In previous OUA units, I have bumped into academia's reluctance to allow citations from Wikipedia in research activities, but failed to really understand it. Tama's explanation (supplemented by appropriate other sources, of course) has clarified this for me. With my hand on my heart, I resolve not to cite Wikipedia again (if I can possibly avoid it!).

I like the view of Clay Shirky that effectively means that all Wikipedia articles are drafts, always and continually subject to correction. There is never a final version. Thus the hoax assertion of the journalist Seigenthaler's involvement in Kennedy's assassination was eventually corrected, although, being in an obscure article it took 4 months to be corrected and only after it was noticed by the journalist himself! Even before I read Danah Boyd's blog on the topic, I didn't accept Seigenthaler's argument that his experience proves the Wikipedia concept is (uniquely) flawed - to me, all journalism is potentially erroneous and has been demonstrated to be so time and time again. That obscure errors take longer to fix is only an example of prioritisation in action.

The video "Wikipedia as a News Source" is amazing. Who would have guessed that an online encyclopedia would be so effective in this way? Showing the historical evolution of the article is an incredible demonstration of the power of collaboration in an interactive medium. I'm very impressed.

It looks as though Wikipedia may be the only really popular wiki application which is serious in nature. Many of the others mentioned by Tama are to do with entertainment, TV shows, song lyrics, comics etc. These are serious topics for some people, but not for me. I like to be entertained as much as most people, but I'm not interested in studing that entertainment. I am not a fan! (So it was against my better judgement, I did sit through the screen cast on the Heavy Metal Umlaut.) So, apart from the 'pedia and recipes (surely the perfect topic for wikis), it seems that collective intelligence is not a widely valued concept. Maybe Wikipedia covers too much territory?

The above subjective response arose from Tama's popular wikis discussion. But the video "Wikis in Plain English" shines a different light on the topic, and provides an excellent illustration of a wiki's value for groups to collaborate on projects and for special purposes.

Bloggy Activities

The early days of blogging were extremely optimistic about the potential of blogs to give everyone who wanted one a voice and a venue to publish. Now that blogging is over a decade old, to what extent have these early predictions come true?

The predictions of that statement have certainly come true, at least to the extent of people with access to the internet. Only the most basic of computer skills are required to set up a blog, and these could be acquired by talking to the staff at your local library if you're nervous.

The Baghdad Blog of Salam Pax is evidence of this proposition, and the fact that he managed to convey a credible inside story to the world in a way that international media could not is a delightful irony. Also ironic is that he never intended it for this purpose at all, but was just trying to communicate with a lost friend!

The writings of Blood (2000) and Rettberg (2008) have been highly interesting but also somewhat disconcerting. Interesting, because they took me to places I would not otherwise have gone, and they explained many of the blog phenomena of Web 2.0, categorising them most effectively. Their historical perspective is most illuminating, and helps explain why things are the way they are today. For example, Blood notes that in 1999, Blogger, with its ready facility to respond with comments and to link into other bloggers, turned blogs from ... into a very frequently updated short-form journal on matters of personal importance. Moreover, the style transformed from possible editorial to conversational.

Also fascinating is Blood's discovery that, through her blogging, she discovered what she was really interested in, and that it wasn't what she had previously thought. I think that this arises from the therapy of writing for pleasure, and is something shared through the ages by journal-keepers and diarisers of their lives. The difference with a blog is that all the world can see it, and this no doubt has appeal due to people's hard-wired desire for recognition and a degree of celebrity. The very existance of plazes.com, which can track users geographically, is evidence that many people want their privacy invaded.

Rettberg's discussion of Granovetter's theory of weak ties highlights one area where Web 2.0, through some of its exponents, may be actually failing the dreams of Berners-Lee and other web forefathers. Sites which encourage closed clubs (Rettberg's examples are Facebook and MySpace) actually tend to stifle creativity and innovation by excluding new blood which are necessary to provide it.

Rettberg talks about blogs facilitating ‘distributed conversations’ and even ‘distributed communities’; what do you understand these terms to mean?

When Rettberg mentions distributed conversations, she is arguing that, in blogging, no one person, organisation or authority is leading the conversation, as for example happens with traditional media. Instead, the internet, with no central hub, is a distributed network, and bloggers on that network can communicate without needing reference (or permission) from the central body.

The term distributed communities arises from the argument that blogging is not really conversing because the listener is not (necessarily) present when the speaker is speaking, so to speak. But Rettberg quotes blogger Danah Boyd (who has an affectation causing her to decapitalise her initials) that blogs have the advantage of persistance over conversation. Thus advantaged, blogs can maintain their perceived importance in social networking, even if the word 'conversations' has to be struck out.

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Blood, R (2000). weblogs: a history and perspective. Retrieved September 21, 2009 from http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Rettberg, J., (2008), Blogs, Communities and Networks in Blogging. Polity Press; Cambridge.

Is Web 2.0 Worth it?

Having read the Intro to Web 2.0, there is really no doubt in my mind that O'Reilly has it wrong. At best, it should just be Web 1.01 or something like that to highlight that the change is really just incremental at the most. The significant changes, as has been argued, are really just in the way designers are designing, and users are using, and I submit that that evolution doesn't justify the label of a whole new version.

When the web designers decided to use scripting languages like PHP to build interactivity into webpages (no doubt it started with forms, but soon expanded into blogs, which are just big and versatile forms), they probably didn't realise that they were relinquishing their monopoly on content. I'm saying nothing new here, but giving users control over the content of the world wide web is the most material aspect of Web 2.0, but only because it changed people's behaviour, not because it was a great leap forward in technology or engineering.

My grasp of where Tim Berners-Lee was headed is that he wanted a globally accessible and cross referenced database of all information. Parts of Web 2.0 would serve that objective - I'm thinking of Wikipedia here. But I can't see that he would see the rise in social networking as contributing to the goal - I suspect he would view it as a waste of time.

Corporation for National Research Initiatives

Today, when researching answers for our first Assignment, my surfing led me to the website of CNRI, and in particular, the 1999 paper by Kahn and Cerf entitled What Is The Internet (And What Makes It Work). This provided valuable insights for the Assignment, but what I also found fascinating was its predictions for the next ten years, given that it was written ten years ago!

Kahn and Cerf correctly anticipated huge growth in the internet, much higher transmission speeds, and the net's penetration into other devices like telephones, but they largely seem to have missed the evolution of what we now call Web 2.0. They anticipated issues with intellectual property (which immediately brings to mind the phenomenon of Google Books), but don't appear to have considered the interactivity and user-participation that Web 2.0 promises and indeed provides.

It's easy to have 20:20 hindsight, not so straightforward to have clear forsight, and I'm not meaning to criticise these authors for their lack of clairvoyance. However, it will surely always be interesting to look retrospectively at predictions made in the past of what our current world will be like!

Coming to Grips with Web 2.0

Having read our course materials and watched the iLecture on "Intro to Web 2.0". I've realised that Web 2.0 is a concept to be grappled with. No wonder I've never been able to make head nor tails of it from what I've read in newspapers and the odd computer magazine. Merely defining it as "interactive websites" is way too simplistic O'Reilly's remark "Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core" puts it into a good perspective for me. The YouTube video on Web 2.0 is also helping crystallise this concept.

Both of the above sites were found after joining Delicious and searching for net11_test, so thanks to those other students who had previously bookmarked these sites. Using other search terms in Delicious wasn't so fruitful, and I found a lot of irrelevant content. Maybe, with experience, I can get better at finding useful material in Delicious, and hopefully I can achieve Tama's target of bookmarking 5 new sites. I haven't found anything really good so far that doesn't have the net11_test footprint already.

So, what is this Delicious thing? It's got a delectable name certainly. My first thought is that it is a "WikiGoogle", i.e. mainly a search engine but one where we, the users, collectively dictate the ranking rather than the secret mathematical algorithm adopted by the conventional search engines. That term has no doubt been use elsewhere, but I haven't seen it personally. (Searching for that tag on Delicious produces mostly links about Google Maps.) I haven't yet cottoned on to the social nature of Delicious - that might come later.

I liked Tama's presentation on McAfee's SLATES, so searching for that produced the blog by Hinchcliffe, 2006 which had a cute graphic but didn't really seem to add much to my undertstanding of Web 2.0, other than that you can buy a PDF of O'Reilly's report on its Principles & Best Practices for a mere $US375. For less than double that, I can get to see and hear Tama's almost certainly more entertaining expositions on the subject.

Module 1 Activities

Name Check
I haven't encountered namechk.com before, but it was interesting to test it out with a variety of candidates for my web presence names. It's quite difficult to find a "normal" word which is generally available, but I tested a few of my favourites and found a couple of suitable names. I'll decide later what to use.

Routing in Action
The visual trace tool is a lot of fun. After a while, I tried skype.com which I thought was based in the UK, but their web server at least must be in Canada, by this account. I tried a domain that I maintain with a host in Melbourne, and the trace ended in China. Is my hosting company outsourcing?

Then I tried another that I maintain but don't host, and it went the full circle via China back to Australia (see image).

Going Way Back
How interesting! I bet some designers and organisations cringe to realise that their old websites have been captured in this way. It's scary enough looking at old versions of my own sites.

The Initial Questions

I've been really slow getting started on this unit, too much work, too much travel, but here's my responses to the initial list of questions ...
How many of you have used email this week?
I use email all day every day, and only get a break when my travels take me out of range of a wireless signal, like I had last weekend. I feel that my life revolves around email!

How many have used a social networking site in the last week? I'm fully aware of social networking sites but have steadfastly avoided getting involved with them. I fear they are a huge waste of time, and pose a risk to your privacy. From what I've read so far, this Unit will require me to get involved with social networking sites, so I guess I'll break this drought soon. Maybe, I'll become addicted, but I hope not. I value my time too much!


How many of you have watched video content online? (YouTube, Facebook Video, etc.) Occasionally at most, usually to research a topic. Already in this Unit, I've used YouTube more than ever before.

How many of you have created media in the past week? (Share a photo, video, posted to a blog, or Twitter, etc?) Quite a lot, apart from this blog. I create and maintain websites and online databases for some Clubs and Community organisations, and maintaining + improving these sites is a reasonably heavy workload.

Opening my Ongoing Portfolio

Today is the last day of the first week but it’s the first day that I have been able to do any real work on this unit. Last Wednesday night I finished my SP2 examinations, and what little time I had on Thursday was spent on downloading materials for NET11, knowing that I would have time to review them on the weekend, but that there would be no connectivity.
So, it’s ironic that here today I am starting a unit on the Internet but I’m in a location, Riverwood Downs, 20km into the Barrington Tops from Stroud, some three hours driving out of Sydney, where there is no connectivity via my Telstra 3G card, in fact not even any mobile phone reception at all! As if to compound the isolation, this 4.5star resort has no telephones in the rooms and cabins, and the only public phone is “out of order”.
So I read through the downloaded material for Module 1. No chance of accessing the links or doing the activities – that’ll have to wait until I get home, including the only first week activity of accessing www.namechk.com.
It dawns on me I know a lot of this stuff, and maybe I should have considered applying for an exemption from NET11. But I come to the same conclusion as previously that my whole purpose in doing this and other units is to get formal training in subjects that I have a reasonable informal understanding of. I have found in other units that my informal understanding was patchy at best, and the rigour of undergraduate coursework together with the discipline of assignments and examinations has rounded me out considerably. So I decide, as before, that it’s the right thing to continue.