The JP Allen Blog

I gave two Instructional Technology talks recently, one formal and one spontaneous.

The formal one was a presentation to our USF Wikis and Blogs group on “Pro Blogging for Dorks Academics”. I talked about the main tradeoffs I see for academic blogging:

• The personal vs. professional balance
• The person vs. topic focus

I also talked about why academic blogging has been valuable for me:

• Self-expression – the usual reason to blog, but looking back over a year’s worth of posts, categories, topics and tags gives you a new perspective on your interests. Writing practice doesn’t hurt either.
• Republishing – I’ve had at least one example of a conference paper that was translated and published in a journal, after it was found on the blog.
• Connections – I’ve met people with similar interests, both academic and professional, that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. My biggest success was finding the designer of a web site I had used in a teaching case, with zero additional work on my part. I posted my case, and within 24 hours the designer, who I had never met before, left a comment with great behind-the-scenes information about the site.
• Media – I’ve had reporters find me through my blog, which can be good or annoying. I showed a recent example where my analytics data told me a reporter had spent almost half an hour on my blog before contacting me for an interview. That information gave me confidence this person was serious, and worth giving some time to.
• Explaining publications – hey, academic publications don’t make sense to a lot of people basically everyone, including people who might be able to use your findings. Blog posts give me the chance to explain publications and presentations in somewhat normal language.
• The living CV – I’m not sure if this is good or not, but I seem to do many things that wouldn’t make it to my academic CV.  The academic blog is a place to capture those. It’s great for those end-of-year reviews, promotion cases, and to quickly introduce others to my work and interests.

Two days later, I gave a spontaneous show-and-tell on my Moodle site (university.jpedia.org) that I use instead of our official Blackboard product. USF is considering Moodle as an alternative, but it will be another classic example of selling the unfamiliar benefits of open source to an institution that has spent serious time and energy on the proprietary path. In industry, open source can sneak in the back door on new projects, and gradually take over from within. Ripping out the existing system is a tougher sell, without some vision of the long-term innovation benefits.

The US has about 20 million businesses with only one person–the owner.  Except for rare cases like plentyoffish.com (the #6 online dating service in the US, and #1 in Canada, serving hundreds of thousands of love-seekers every day), one-person microbusinesses are small money individually, but together add up to $1 trillion per year in revenue.

The number of free or cheap online tools for running a business is growing (see this article from mashable.com with 270 tools for small business).  Open source tools for business are increasing in sophistication.  But what about those times when even an eBay shop or PayPal button is too complicated for the budding online business person?

Enter the blogshop, a term used in Singapore to describe teenagers setting up a free blog with items for sale, usually funky fashions or accessories.  Forget shopping carts or credit cards for most blogshops–buyers simply email or leave a comment for what they want, then do a bank transfer, or hide ‘concealed cash’ in an envelope.  The buyers pick up their goods by mail, or by meeting at a subway station.  Sometimes buyers band together for a ‘shopping spree’ to Taiwan or Korea to pick up the latest fashions.

Blogshop directories like blogshopr.com and emall.sg list over 300 blogshops in Singapore.  A survey in the Straits Times found that 30% of blogshop owners spend over 20 hours per week on their sites.  It’s not the route that I would choose for starting an online store, but sometimes ease and simplicity win over functionality.

The story quoted a young business school student as saying she learned much more about business from her blogshop than her ‘boring’ lectures.  I have a difficult time imagining a ‘boring’ business school lecture, but that’s just me…

While WordCamp 2008 attendees were likely impressed with the huge number of page views (6.5 billion per year – roughly one for every person on the planet) and monthly unique visitors (up to 160 million per month) being racked up by wordpress.com, I was focused on a different number.

2,604,288. That’s the number of people running WordPress blogging software on their own websites, with their own web hosting. You’d think that only a hard-core techie fringe would choose to pay for their own web hosting, and deal with the geekiness of it all, when they can get WordPress for free on wordpress.com.  But, as of this morning, 3,870,299 blogs were running on wordpress.com.  That’s a close race.

In other words, the do-it-yourself web crowd is looking mainstream, not fringe.

The one-click install revolution on web hosts has made this possible.  The amount of software/web services power at your disposal with today’s inexpensive web hosting is ridiculous.  Take a look at a typical menu of open source software choices (this one is from Simple Scripts).  Blogs, wikis, forums, serious content management, e-commerce, CRM…often the best software in its category.  We know people are using install scripts, because of the growing number of blogs that are launching with slightly out-of-date versions of WordPress.  (Script services are often behind the latest version, one of the downsides of using one-click installs vs. slapping it together by hand.)

Not all is perfect in one-click install land.  Upgrades and backups are nowhere near as painless as getting started.  But it’s been good enough to compete with free, and it keeps hope alive for a more open web future:  not everything has to happen through Google, Yahoo!, MSN or even wordpress.com.

Our paper on Web 2.0 and Social Informatics has now been published in issue #8 of the Journal of Social Informatics (JSI). JSI happens to be an online magazine published by the West University of Timisoara in Romania.

How’d it get there?

Simple: global ambition meets free global publishing. A university somewhere in the world decides to make a name for itself in a specialized niche they consider up-and-coming (in this case, Social Informatics). They start an online journal. They search the web for content. They find entry #17 on the J.P. Allen Blog, and the rest is history.

Another strategy for universities looking to make their mark on the world is to build a high-quality information portal. I fired up my google analytics yesterday and saw, for the first time, a visitor referred by a site called social-informatics.org. I clicked, and was surprised to find myself at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

The good ol’ U of L has put together a quality information source on Social Informatics that I had no idea existed. And I’m not just saying that because they link to my blog! The publishing houses and established universities might own the big name journals, but what’s to stop a university on the other side of the world from having the premiere web destination for an academic topic?

Thanks to a humble blog, and free analytics, Romanians now know that Web 2.0 este un obiect de studiu important pentru cercetarea sistemelor informationale. And Slovenians can find out how to get people to invest in emerging technologies.

What really impresses me about the big Web 2.0 sites is how they use familiar metaphors in new ways. By starting from what we already know (such as profiles, groups, ratings, and ‘friends’), people naturally understand why it might be useful, fun, and easy to add their own online contributions. Kind of like how the blog metaphor liberated personal websites from the more difficult and foreign notion of the ‘home page’.

I’ve written a short exploratory paper on the contrast between the ‘abundance’ of knowledge sharing in Web 2.0 communities, and the ‘scarcity’ of knowledge sharing that is predicted by much of the academic literature. The academic research, mostly done inside organizations, usually finds that people are really, really reluctant to share any knowledge online–what’s in it for me, they ask? So they see it as a ‘public goods’ problem. According to this thinking, there’s no reason to share valuable knowledge when you can ‘free-ride’ off the contributions of others. People have to be rewarded, or else they won’t share.

Web 2.0 communities don’t have that problem–people share, a lot! So it’s time to change the knowledge sharing problem from ‘how to bribe people’ to ‘how to turn all this peer-based sharing into useful knowledge’.

(As an aside, I think this is one reason why wikis are still challenging–there are plenty of empty wikis out there. Our ‘shared document’ and ‘version control’ metaphors aren’t nearly as widespread, or as well-developed, as simple metaphors like comments or ratings.)

A version of this paper will be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS-08) in June.

After attending the Web 2.0 Expo and SaaScon this week, I realize that I need to get serious about having an online presence.

Of course, I’ve had my web site jpedia.org up for almost a year now. It’s simply a page that points to specific items done for classes or research projects. But it is still very much in the old model of putting stuff up on a web site for people to download. It isn’t statements or ideas that are part of a larger conversation, or a larger community, and that is where I need to be.

I’ll admit that I’ve started a few blog experiments in the past, only to have them die out after a few weeks or months. The difference this time is that I will try not to have the classic ‘diary’ model of ‘what’s up with me?’. Every piece of content should be about sharing information in a way that moves a conversation forward.