Small software implementation details result in big differences in the way the community develops. Interesting reading.

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Apologies for rambling

As I talk about the WYSIWYG editor and RSS cache specifically, I think it’s important to credit the programmers involved: Misja Hoebe and Sven Edge respectively did the work required to bring those features to Elgg.

Moodle have just released a documentation wiki which, like our very own Elgg Info, is presumably designed to be a living document that grows with time.

Excuse me while I geek out: this set of web authoring statistics is required reading for web developers. Google sampled over a billion documents and discovered the kind of markup being used, and how it relates to the proposed HTML5 standards.

Please excuse my dodgy camerawork, but this is Elgg on my Nokia:

Pretty cool. Opera Mini is a great browser, and the new CSS/div based template engine makes life very easy for it.

From the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

Internet users have somewhat larger social networks than non-users. The median size of an American’s network of core and significant ties is 35. For internet users, the median network size is 37; for non-users it is 30.

This survey (PDF) concentrates on email being the main Internet social glue, but it’s worth noting within the context of e-learning. People who use Internet tools for communication have a larger core social group; in education this means a larger number of people to discuss, share ideas and learn together with.

I think this bit is also important:

Contrary to fears that email would reduce other forms of contact, there is “media multiplexity”: The more contact by email, the more in-person and phone contact. As a result, Americans are probably more in contact with members of their communities and social networks than before the advent of the internet.

In other words, using Internet tools to communicate is not going to preclude offline methods of communication, which hopefully will put to rest some fears about e-learning tools (and use of the Internet in general). In fact, the survey can be read to suggest that they will be beneficial to outside social interactions.

The Oxford Internet Institute website is worth a look. Their mandate is to “focus on Internet-related research and education that will shape policy and practice”. Some things worth a look include:

• Stop Badware, the first anti-spyware site run by a university (in fact two: Oxford and Harvard) that I’ve seen.
• Innovative pathways to the next level of e-learning (PDF), a paper from 2004 that’s still relevant
• Economics of trust in the information economy: issues of identity, privacy and security (PDF) that, while about e-commerce, could just as easily be transferred to the flow of ideas and knowledge rather than money. (Is there a word for the “economics” of knowledge, reputation and reliability on the Internet?)
• Their webcast index, which currently features lots of lectures from the Oxford Media Convention 2006, held here least week.

I’d be very interested in links to other similar institutes at other universities.

Via Om Malik, a recent survey (PDF) of key Silicon Valley players revealed that over 90% of them believed that unique technology was an important asset of start-up companies in the current market.

Interesting stuff, because honestly, how much new technology is there? They say there are seven main storylines, and I think similarly there’s a finite number of ways in which people communicate. I think the rate of computer-related innovation is slowing down; for sure, there’s a space for a world of further development, but we now have systems that everyone can use. We’ve come a long way since my first computer, the Sinclair ZX81, which loaded programs from tape and spoke BASIC at the command prompt. These days, Microsoft Word – which is still 70 or 80% of what people use computers for – starts up in a second or two, and software can be installed very easily. The web is equally as simple: all I have to do is click three buttons on my mouse and I can read the New York Times.

This isn’t to say that something as revolutionary as the web isn’t yet to come. But everything we have now has been a slow development from the early nineties; there’s nothing we have now that we didn’t have in some form in 1991. Therefore, the difference can’t be in terms of core technology. The key to a successful startup has to be about ethos and company culture – to put it simply, it’s social. It’s not about creating something new and amazing, it’s about taking something that already exists and working out how to make it friendly. People had been keeping online logs of their thoughts and activities for decades before Blogger and LiveJournal came along, but those services turned it into a movement. Voice over IP existed for ages before Skype, but that software made it seem new and easy.

There’s a lot of interesting potential out there – at this stage, as the Internet starts to become ubiquitous, the successful tech companies will be the ones that put that power in the hands of ordinary people.

Oh, and for good measure, here’s an entry posted from my nokia. I’m using opera mini, which is a tiny java download and really quite fast. Much better than built in phone browsers, and free, to boot.

Pardon me while I blow our trumpet for a little while.

I think this is the best release we’ve done, and the closest we’ve come to fulfilling the original vision. If you don’t mind me saying, Elgg is pretty damn good web software, and performance tests on this new version back me up when I say that not only does it do more, but it does it faster than ever before. As usual, I’m posting this from my Windows weblogging client, which sits on my taskbar. Before long, I’ll be able to keep a blog using WordPress, or Movable Type, or LiveJournal, Blogger, b2evolution, MSN Spaces, Typepad, or whatever else I could possibly think of and have the content automatically populate my blog here, with custom tags depending on the source. So my Flickr photos could automatically become part of my blog, tagged with the word ‘photo’, and my del.icio.us links could be automatically posted, tagged with ‘link’. Then I can add whichever extra tags I need from within the blogging interface.

Trackbacks were a big part of the original vision, and they’ve been conspicuously absent until now. This is because trackback spam is notoriously prevalent, and I didn’t want to make Elgg susceptible to unwanted advertising. Lately, though, I’ve been playing with other software, and I’ve come to realise that they really are an important part of the blogging experience. If someone posts about something you said, you want to know about it; if you post about someone else’s content, you may well want them (and their visitors) to be able to link back and see what you have to say. I’m always talking about decentralisation, and this technology really decentralises the conversation; it makes it possible to follow discussion over several different installations of Elgg, or from Elgg to WordPress to MovableType to Typepad and back again. This is worth the risk of spam – which in any event is reduced with the new anti-spam functions.

As Terry Wassall suggests here: “Beware ‘mission creep’. Be true to the philosophy.” This is really important. While it’s exciting to have a WYSIWYG editor, a new RSS engine, a social calendar or Moodle compatibility – eye-catching trees to be sure – we have to maintain sight of the forest. It’s all about connections; learning is not a solitary pursuit; the Internet is people. Everything we do has to have the vision behind it; we have to be doing it for a reason, to enable people to communicate and reflect and connect more easily, otherwise it’s just done for the sake of technology. I think we’ve done a good job of keeping that ethos so far.

My end vision for all of this, as regular readers will know, is a decentralised network where anyone can connect to anyone else and it won’t matter what server you’re on; you’ll be able to join communities, share resources, restrict information and link up with people on any server. I want it to be seamless: you won’t know you’re using FOAF, RSS, ECL or whatever else ends up powering it, and you won’t care that the professor you’re sharing papers with hosts his profile in Spain while yours is in Australia. It’ll just work; you’ll just connect, whether you’re sharing blog posts, a paper, podcasts, audio, video, presentations …

This is a big job; it hasn’t been done before, and goes beyond limited standards like IMS, beyond the field of education to the cutting edge of the World Wide Web. For it to happen correctly, it’ll need free and open standards; simple ones, that people will be able to implement easily. I have an idea how it will work, but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a while to see it in action. But we’ll certainly get there, one step at a time.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy using Elgg, either here on Elgg.net or on one of the other services springing up all over the place. It’s a bit cheeky, but I feel I ought to remind you that Curverider Ltd is there if you need support, hosting or custom development. If you have any questions, let us know; we’ll help you out as best we can.