http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/12/19/student-artists/

Stuart is a social networking site for student artists, sponsored by the Saatchi Gallery. This has the potential to be very interesting – I wonder what other social networking sites there are for young people to put out their art? DeviantArt immediately comes to mind, but are there any others?

Via Metafilter.

It’s perhaps telling that the two most commented-on posts on my weblog since we launched Elgg.net in November 2004 are one on MySpace proxies (sites that allow them to use MySpace on their school networks even when it’s been banned), and one about Facebook penetration. The comments in both cases are all from students complaining that those sites are banned on their school networks.

What I find interesting is that these students are going out and doing research with Google, and probably with other tools, in order to get around their problem. There’s no issue with their research skills, and they certainly know how to use the technology – they’re leaving messages to each other with their email addresses, asking each other to share viable proxies when they find them.

My mother is a K-12 teacher here in California. When her students have finished their classwork, they apparently all stick up their hands and ask if they can Moodle – not because they particularly want to look at their class information, but because Moodle allows them to message each other.

Part of me wonders if this is a particularly suburban American thing – children here are basically trapped in their houses until they learn to drive at age 16, and have to take what forms of interaction they can. It may also be a cultural thing to do with the style of teaching: my suspicion is that classrooms here are more regimented than they are across the Atlantic, and that perceived discipline sometimes crosses the line into imposed subservience. But at the same time, it may be universal, and this kind of communication may be providing something for the kids that normal teaching methods can’t reach. There is, after all, a lot to learn from social interaction.

From the teacher’s point of view, they can try and block as many sites as they want, but their students will always find a way through it. There’s always some kind of hole they can exploit; better, as with all types of discipline and walks of life, to build a cooperative community rather than ban things outright.

I’m leaving the comments on those posts up.

Elgg.net is now running Akismet for anti-spam protection. Hopefully this will be an effective solution for an annoying problem – however, note that this is experimental. If you experience any problems with comments, please let us know.

(Note that this is a GPL plugin – see the development mailing list if you’d like to include it in your own Elgg installation.)

One of the things I really like about America is C-SPAN.

If you’ve never sat around and watched TV here, you might not be aware of it: the cable TV operators in the United States got together and created public service channels that operate a bit like BBC Parliament in the UK: they show speeches by people in government, but they also show talks by authors promoting their books, and more general talks by academics and researchers. This weekend I saw a talk about the future of print on demand in bookstores and one about the propaganda surrounding the war in Iraq.

Right now I’m sat with my laptop in front of a talk at the Heritage Foundation about the differences between secular and religious communities in terms of how much money they give to charity. As it turns out, as a percentage, people in South Dakota give a huge amount more to charity than people in San Francisco – something I wouldn’t have thought about. Religious people are twice as likely to give blood. This is a very important aspect to our society, and something that goes against my personal grain. (I’m affronted, but then again, when I earn a salary I make sure I give 10% of it away to charity: a very religious concept.)

This is definitely a talk I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to see, but it’s very interesting, and I’m glad I’m sitting here and watching it.

It leads to an important question in the context of online communities: how can we build in the same kind of serendipity into systems where, traditionally, you search out specific pieces of information? Some of the most interesting things I’ve learned, I’ve learned through television or through people talking about stuff they happen to know about. If we’re filtering things down according to our interests, we may never find out about that same stuff: things that could enhance or enrich our lives, but aren’t what we’d go out and specifically look for.

Wikipedia has a very simple solution to this: the random button. It’s possible – and I’ve done this – to sit down and just read random Wikipedia articles all day. You learn about all kinds of different things, but what if you want to narrow the focus slightly? If you were to have a random button on an Elgg system, for example, you would get cartoons, pieces of personal blogging, links to educational texts and diagrams from education. This might be interesting for a while, but what if you wanted the C-SPAN (or NPR) experience? What if you just wanted presentations or documents about interesting things?

Google has half the solution to this: as most of us know by now, documents largely rise in search results due to the number of other sites that have linked to them. This assumes that if someone finds a resource useful, they’ll want to bookmark it and share it with other people; it’s a reputation filter. Unfortunately, there is a flaw in this approach, which was initially exploited by the Church of Scientology and is now routinely used by common or garden spammers: not all distinct sites are unrelated. Therefore, any organisation can create a bunch of different sites that run on different servers, tightly interlink them, and watch their sites rise dramatically. For similar reasons, social networking sites artificially rise to the top of the rankings, which is why, if you have an Elgg profile, it’s probably the #1 search result for your name.

We’re developing a ‘favourites’ system for a client, which will eventually find its way into the world as a GPL release for Elgg. Using an adaptation of the Google model, it’s possible to determine which resources in a social networking system are best on a particular topic depending on how many times they’ve been favourited. This is particularly useful if you want to look for, say, a really good presentation on pedagogy; but you can also use it to extract other information, like the resources on all topics that have been favourited the most – both in a system as a whole, and by the people you’ve connected to. Suddenly serendipitous discovery comes rushing back into play, and may become the most interesting part of an Elgg site. It’s something that I’d welcome in all social networking sites, particularly bookmarking tools like del.icio.us.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in C-SPAN, they’ve very cleverly made lots of their content available to stream online – something I wish the BBC would do in the UK. I love television, and I think, as Internet community builders, we have a lot to learn from it. If we can marry its menu of interesting content with the democratic elements of web 2.0, we will have created a very interesting kind of resource.

Perhaps because they’re dealing with a clearer television metaphor, the sites that handle this the best are Youtube, Google Video, and Odeo. Splashed across their front pages are the most popular content, both streamed into channels and generally – it’s very easy to stumble across content you might not ordinarily have watched. In the case of Youtube, these are videos generally popular to the 14 year old set, so they might also be videos you may never wish to watch again. Nonetheless, for their audience, it works. I think this would be a very interesting concept to harness across all types of content.

I’m in glorious Turlock, California right now, spending time with the family and winding down a little after a particularly high-octane year. There’s Elgg stuff going on (in fact, I’m going to make another microrelease tonight), but less extensively than it does when I’m in the office. If it takes me a little longer to reply to emails or get back to people, please be patient. I’m also going to be completely offline for a week from next Friday, which, I’ve got to confess, I’m really looking forward to.

It was interesting to see Time Magazine’s person of the year (and to see the editor grilled on ABC this morning). If you haven’t seen it, it’s you: the cover is a mirror, and the story is all about sites like Youtube, Myspace, et al. The talking heads on the ABC news show thought this was a cop out, and downplayed the impact of blogging with a refrain we’ve heard many times before – it’s just a bunch of teenagers writing diaries nobody cares about, isn’t it? – but the trend is clear. I think 2007 will be a very interesting year for the gamut of personalised publishing, from those personal diaries through to citizen journalism and personalised news sources.

It’ll also be a very interesting year on the web for other reasons. Adobe Apollo looks to be very exciting indeed. Very soon, I think we’re going to hit that singularity point for most home users: it won’t matter, at all, whether you’re using Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris or whatever else you might happen to have under the hood. For my part, I seriously doubt I’m upgrading to Vista. I really want to try owning a Mac, but I tend to waver: there’s something about the combination of design fetishism and price point that I find unsettling, to the point where even if I could afford a top of the range model, I’m not sure I’d get one. Not that it will matter; we’re all going to be running the same applications.

Meanwhile, the Internet aside, it’s the time of year when I start thinking about New Year’s resolutions. These are daft, of course; you can resolve to do something at any time of year. But New Year is a kind of metaphor for turning a page, and while I’m acutely aware of the ridiculousness, at the same time I find it useful. So, a little bit early, here is my resolution: I am going to, finally, write my novel.

Okay, so this must rank #2 on the all-time list of failed resolutions, but I mean it this time. I do. There will be an hour each day – and it will be the same hour every day, so it turns into a routine – where I get out my fountain pen, open my notebook, and write. I have a story and a serious desire. Unfortunately, I also have a blog, which means that (assuming you’re still reading now) you will be subjected to my thoughts on that subject from time to time as well as the usual Elggy stuff. I know it’s not what you expect to read from me – but at the same time, this is my personal space. So, no apologies are offered, although I will attempt to tag appropriately.

Personally, I think those Internet diaries the editor of Time was being teased about are both interesting and healthy; I don’t buy the cultural snobbishness that suggests we should be dictated to by an elite, and I’m more than happy to share aspects of my life with the world. It’s not that I expect the world to read them – but it’s therapeutic for me, and the feedback from anyone who is interested is useful.

We’ve just released Elgg 0.672 – as ever, go grab it from Elgg.org. Elgg is a free, open source social networking platform available for anyone to run on an Apache / PHP web server environment. (If you don’t have one of those, you can also get a free Elgg social networking site from Elgg Spaces.)

I was interviewed for an article by Steve O’Hear with Marc Canter (PeopleAggregator), Andrew Anker (Six Apart) and Tim Spalding (LibraryThing) about data ownership. This is something I care deeply about, and have written about before. It’s excellent that the big web players are beginning to consider these issues.

Click here to read the full article, or click here to Digg this.

{{video:http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=3401620932746978816&hl=en-GB}}

It’s worth checking out the comments to my last post, which include contributions from Martin Dougiamas and Christopher Mackie from the Mellon Foundation. Thanks to everyone who commented on what was a deliberately contentious post.

Alas, Elgg was unsuccessful in its bid to the Andrew W Mellon Foundation Awards for Technology Collaboration, which awarded $650,000 in prizes on Monday. I’ve got to confess that I’m a little disappointed that some of the awards included things like a $50,000 prize for translating Sakai into Catalan, and for “providing consistent internationalisation support”.

Not that including internationalisation into Sakai isn’t an important thing to do (for Sakai users). It’s just, $50,000 bears absolutely no relation to the cost of doing it, if it’s done properly. Elgg contains robust internationalisation support using existing and well-maintained open source libraries, and you can translate it by filling in fields on a web page. Our Catalan translation isn’t completed, and it would be great if a Catalan speaker could help out if they had a free afternoon – but I’m sorry, we’re not going to be able to pay you fifty grand to do so. That amount vastly exceeds the amount of money that’s supported Elgg development since it started March 2004.

Another interesting award was $50,000 to the Open University here in the UK for work on Moodle. This is, after all, a drastically underfunded effort, which currently only has