Web 2.0: rubbish name, great idea

Web 2.0 is a crummy name -- patronising, cloying and irritating. It presupposes that there is a clear generation gap between the first set of web technologies and the second set, as if the latter had been distributed like manna from heaven. It attracts get-rich-quick jerks, gimmicky marketeers, serial startup merchants, venture capitalists, conference organisers, insta-pundits. Even, ahem, bloggers.

Whatever you might find to dislike about Web 2.0 though (and that capital ‘W’ as if it equated to God, the Queen or some such, is one of them) it is a very interesting concept indeed. Catch-all term that it is, it has become a useful shorthand for software that relies on the wisdom of crowds, peer review, user-generated content, hyper-interactivity, friendlier user interfaces. It has even transcended the web to become a familiar aspect of client-server software too. It’s like classical music: we might not all have the vocabulary to describe it, but we know it when it’s there and we know what we like.

Web 2.0 has changed the way we use the consumer web and even performed the miraculous job of reinvigorating somnolent software categories such as human resources systems. But its ultimate business home is in enterprise content management systems.

The dirty, dark secret of many ECMs is that they are woefully under-used and, when used, badly. Non-existent or generic tags, systems that wither on the vine, training sessions that failed to get users moving, new silos that replace the old silos... these are common problems and an indictment of the usability, or lack thereof, of many an ECM.

Web 2.0 (that cringe-worthy name again) gets around the problem with technology-light tricks that encourage the user to participate, vote and swap ideas, or at least not lose valuable documents. Little wonder that companies like Vignette, Documentum, Open Text and Alfresco are all sprinkling the fairy dust on their most recent programs.

It’s probably still a little early to know whether Web 2.0 (last time, I swear) is the elixir that fulfils ECM’s huge promise, but it is a phenomenon that fundamentally changes the usability and, to dig out an ancient term, user-friendliness of software. Some elements will pass by the wayside but supporters can already show that it is rewiritng the face of what were unwieldy, ugly programs. Now, if only we could think of a new name...

Exploit the gaps, not the silos

Toby Moores is a visiting professor at the Institute of Creative Technology and founder of videogame company Sleepydog. His company is best known for creating Buzz!, the hugely popular quiz for the Sony Playstation. He finds opportunities in the gaps between silos and traditional structures which are not good at communication and collaboration.

Of course, the barriers will fall over time and he will end up looking in new places for his opportunities but, as you might expect from a creative person, he has absolutely no shortage of ideas.

Loosely connected with this was the transcript of an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, done by Talis' Paul Miller. It's scheduled to go online next Wednesday (27th) and you might find it interesting. It gives a glimpse of how information can be liberated from its silos and encouraged to flow to where it's needed and to be aggregated and annotated in new ways.

And also connected, IBM is a company which has unleashed a swathe of communication and collaboration tools on its employees over the past ten years which, once again, can liberate information from its silos to the benefit of those who are able to re-use it.

As you know, everything digital can be easily copied and moved. Hoarding is more likely to diminish a person's reputation or, worse, make them completely invisible. Creativity is easier than ever before. Sure, the average person can't create a Harry Potter film, but they can create interesting YouTube movies, machinima animations or screencasts. And, of course, information mashups get easier by the day.

Abundance is the key here. And the more abundant information (in whatever form) becomes, the less value it has in its own right. What adds value is doing something new with it. The Berners-Lee semantic web stuff can ensure that information carries its provenance around with it. The stuff that Sleepydog produces indirectly promotes the films and singers whose clips are used. Oh and the IBMers who give are more likely to do themselves good than those who simply consume.

Potentially, everyone who originates useful, interesting or entertaining raw material can gain in some way from sharing rather than hoarding. But the real winners are those who are able to innovate through original blending of existing material.

And that's where you and I come in. Everyone of us is different. We each have our own take on the world and most of us are multidisciplinary to some degree. We speak one language at home and another at work, one when we're with the engineers another when we're talking to the chef. It's a natural human thing. If you find yourself able to talk the language of each of two different groups then you are surrounded by opportunity.

It strikes me that operating in the gap between IT and management is a fine starting point.

Undermining Gowers?

Should the UK law on copyright fall automatically in line with the European Union? One of the major advantages of the EU is the effort to create a single market for goods and services stretching across much of Europe. Of course it sounds a nice idea but the detail is the killer. Writes Peter Williams

As many readers of this blog will know (probably in some detail) the UK is in the middle of a hefty consultation on copyright as part of the long-standing review of intellectual property (IP). This is a serious business as it has become a familiar refrain that copyright underpins the success of a whole range of culturally and economically important sectors in the UK.

One of these sectors is music. In an earlier round of the copyright review in 2006 the British government commissioned review of IP decided that an extension to the 50-year term for performers’ copyright protection was not necessary. The decision at the time provoked understandable disappointment but the argument was effectively over. Well it was until this week when Charlie McCreevy, the European Commission’s internal market chief, said that he was minded to propose an extension to the protection enjoyed by performers by shifting the 50 year to 95. This move would bring Europe in line with the US.

Announcing the plan – which of course has numerous hurdles to negotiate before it would become law– the long-standing commissioner, put forward two reasons for the move: helping the poor artist with no pension and the simple idea that the current law isn’t fair.

Let’s forget the details of this particular issue of whether the British government decides to abandon the Gowers review and the 50-year limit in favour of falling into line with what may turn out to be the wider will of Europe on this particular issue of session musicians who were in a recording studio in the 1950s or 1960s. There is a wider principle at stake. Why is the information profession spending so much time and effort on responding to consultation to British law if IP needs to be sorted at a Europe-wide level? The McCreevy speech suggests it’s time for proper consultation on a thorough review of IP European law.

Microsoft wants it all in ECM

Open Text’s announcement this week that it will work with Microsoft to create services that sit on top of the latter’s SharePoint Server is a classic example of the realpolitik that currently characterises enterprise content management (ECM).

SharePoint has created a seismic shift in the category to the extent that ECM heavyweights realise that it makes more sense to make nice with the software giant than to try and stare it down. Open Text is not alone in realising this, and firms like Documentum, Interwoven, Vignette and others have done much the same. Fair enough, but the catch here is that Microsoft has a long history of turning the tables on its erstwhile partners.

The SharePoint strategy is straight out of the Microsoft playbook.

Step One: start out with a product that integrates with other Microsoft programs, and looks and feels just like them, even if it is a little rough around the edges.

Step Two: Create licensing that provides the illusion that the program is free or very low-cost.

Step Three: Get channel partners to work with the product in order to create traction.

Step Four: Adopt the marketing message that “this is [insert product cartegory name here] for the rest of us”.

Step Five: When traction has been gained, build up capabilities over subsequent versions to challenge, and usually beat, specialists.

Microsoft has pulled off this trick in server operating systems, systems management and many other areas. The likes of Open Text can argue for a while that SharePoint won’t scale, isn’t appropriate for certain verticals, doesn’t have top-end sophistication and so on. But when Microsoft enters a market it wants it all and software history is strewn with the names of companies that learned that the hard way.

Getting at their real needs

I've noticed that when looking for something - a house, a car, a solution to a business problem, whatever - a lot of people arm themselves with a checklist of criteria to be satisfied.

Today, I came across an interesting variation on this theme. Someone from BT was explaining how they decide whether someone is seriously in the market for what they offer.

If you know about this, my apologies, I'll be blogging again on Friday. If not, then it's a set of 'sliders', each with an opposing statement at each end. All the user has to do is place the pointer somewhere between the two extremes. At a glance, the sales person (I'm sure they're called business consultants or something) can see whether they're in with a shout or wasting their time.

I could imagine automating this. Have a little box at the bottom of the sliders which tells you "give it a whirl" or "don't bother". It would save so much of everyone's time. The example we were looking at today concerned implementing IBM's Unified Communications and Collaboration wrapped up with BT services. Here are the extremes (or 'discussion points' as BT optimistically calls them):

When asking the people you serve what they really want, it seems to me that such an approach, using your own criteria, would a) force them to think and b) give you a realistic idea of whether you might succeed.

Tackling the plague of plagiarism

Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V is one of the simplest keystroke operations you can perform on a PC. (For readers of the blog who are Mac people, you will also agree that apple-C apple-V is equally straightforward). And yet that two-sequence action is causing a huge amount of concern in educational establishments across the world writes Peter Williams.

Plagiarism has become a plague and one which the teaching profession seems powerless to control. One blog by a Canadian teacher asked what could be done to try to curb the way that students appeared to think that writing an essay was no more than an exercise in cut and paste. The answer according to one correspondent was to assign a 0 for the work and hand out a detention. A few detentions, it was claimed, soon brought the class to realise that passing off other people’s work as your own is nothing more than cheating. Of course, the big headache is to distinguish between the deliberate cheat and those who misunderstand or misuse academic conventions.

News from Germany this week added a new twist to the debate over plagiarism. In an apparently carefully worded statement the Proteomics editor-in-chief and publisher Wiley-VCH announced that following an agreement with the authors they had decided to retract an article from online journal Proteomics. The article would now no longer appear in print. The announcement stated: “The article has been retracted because it contains apparently plagiarised passages from several previously published articles.”
IWR will be covering this news in more detail in its March edition.

It has to be considered good news that this incident has been brought out into the open and it seems that all of the parties concerned have attempted to deal with the issue in an open and transparent way. But what does this incident tell us? Is this a one-off or is it the tip of an iceberg? How should information professionals react to incidents of apparent plagiarism that they encounter? This is a difficult tightrope that must be walked. But some help is at hand. In 2005 JISC produced a briefing paper on how to deter, detect and deal with student plagiarism. All institutions now need policies in place to deal with this problem. Not to have such procedures is just poor management. 

Net Neutrality and a Green Paper

Information World Review covered Network Neutrality a fair bit in 2006. It was a time when congress was thinking of reworking the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement (COPE) Act 2006. Over a million Americans wrote to Congress demanding that net neutrality be enshrined into the new laws. That was the last thing that major telco and cable companies wanted. They hankered after a two-speed internet: fast for them and slow for everyone else.

What happened? Nothing. No-one won except, of course, the status quo was maintained. Oh, and as far as the FTC was concerned, the market could sort itself out.

A couple of days ago senators Ed Markey (Democrat) and Chip Pickering (Republican) reignited the debate by introducing their Internet Freedom Preservation Act 2008. According to Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, this will "ensure that open, free and accessible Internet we have known for years will continue to be open to innovation, free from the control of telephone and cable companies and accessible to everyone."

Brace yourself for a bumpy ride as the various special interest groups restart their lobbying activities.

Thus far Congress has not prostrated itself before the communications giants. What would happen, I wonder, if these proposals were put in front of the UK government? We might get a clue soon as the DCMS unveils its green paper on internet piracy. It wants ISPs to monitor traffic and take action against anyone downloading copyright material.

Hmmm. To do that successfully, wouldn't they happen to need exactly the same packet sniffing capabilities that could act as the basis for a multi-tiered internet? As I say, it must be a coincidence. What isn't a coincidence is that the drivers for this initiative are large media and entertainment corporations.

Isn't it interesting that the US bill is for the people and will be attacked by the corporations with vested interests. But in the UK it is exactly the other way round. Quite regardless of this fundamental distinction, it will be interesting to watch the progress of the two proposals through their respective administrations.