principles and tools of the social web - an introductory seminar

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Principles and tools of the social webAn introductory seminar

Dr. Konrad U. Forstner

February 19th, 2010 @ EBI, Hinxton, UK

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Table of content

1 Preface

2 Principles and terms

3 Important technologies/services

4 Applications

5 Problems

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Table of content

1 Preface

2 Principles and terms

3 Important technologies/services

4 Applications

5 Problems

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Preface

You get no handouts as

... we want to save trees

... you will get these slides as a PDF file

... links work pretty bad on paper

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Preface

Terms

“Social web”, “Web 2.0” (strongly promoted by O’Reilly),“Collaborative web”

Very fuzzy definition

No big difference to Tim Berners-Lees basic idea of aread-and-write web

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Table of content

1 Preface

2 Principles and terms

3 Important technologies/services

4 Applications

5 Problems

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Everybody can be a sender

Improved usability

Low technical and financial barriers

Easy to use rich desktop-like applications (e.g. due to AJAX)

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

User generated content

Collaborative creation

“Wisdom of crowds”

“Crowd-sourcing”

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Network effect

More participants = more value per participant

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Reusability / Mash-ups

Open standards + APIs

The web as platform

E.g. RSS “Really Simple Syndication”

Content + meta dataMakes following and sharing of content easy

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The importance of data

... increases

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Open licenses

Classic copyright limits the sharing and extension of culturalgoods

Creative commons licenses (a.o.) free content

⇒ “Share, Remix, Reuse - Legally”

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Functions/user groups change

Many web services / tools are used in a different way and bydifferent people than planned in the beginning

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

The long tail

Critical mass easier reachable

Solutions for niche target groups become feasible

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Folksonomy

Social classification and tagging of items

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Social graph

Abstraction of human relationships

Node - individuals or groupsEdges - social relationships like friendships

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Some business models

Advertisement

Freemium - basic service for free, extras for a fee

Trend spotting

None - waiting to be bought by big player (e.g. Google)

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Some more recent developments

The real-time web

Location based services

Add-on: combined with augmented reality

Semantic markup

Data portability / distributed networks

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Table of content

1 Preface

2 Principles and terms

3 Important technologies/services

4 Applications

5 Problems

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Blogs

Web log

Structure of a blog post

TitleAuthor(s)ContentCommentsTags/CategoriesPermalink

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Blogs

Blogroll

Linkback (Refback/Trackback/Pingback)

Example types of blogs

EdublogTravelblogArtblogOpen lab journalCorporateblog

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Blogs

Self-hosted software like Wordpress, Habari

Blog services like Blogger.com, Livejournal

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Podcasts

Blogs/Feeds that mainly/only link audio or video files

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Wikis

Collaborative content generation and management

Examples: Wikipedia, Wikitravel

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Social network services

Some examples

Managing your social graph

General: Facebook, Friendster

Business: LinkedIn, Xing

Science: Nature network, BiomedExperts

Hospitality: Couchsurfing, Be Welcome

Mobile: Foursquare, brightkite

Create your own one: Ning

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Media sharing platforms

Images: Flickr, Picasa

Videos: YouTube, Vimeo

Slides (and publications): e.g. Slideshare, Nature preceedings

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Social tagging

URLs: delicious, simpy

News: digg, reddit

Publications: CiteULike, Connotea

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Microblogging

Usually limited number of characters per messages

Real-time updates and searches

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Microblogging

Best known - Twitter

140 characters per message

Tweet, retweets

Hashtags

Connection not necessarily bidirectional

followers and following

URL shorteners like bit.ly or is.gd gained popularity

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Aggregators

Bundling and sharing of users’ online activities

E.g. FriendFeed, Cliqset

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Table of content

1 Preface

2 Principles and terms

3 Important technologies/services

4 Applications

5 Problems

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Source of news

Easy individual selection of info streams

Social filtering

Serendipitous discovery

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Getting solutions

Asking question at general or specialized platforms

“Dear lazyweb ...”

E.g. Aarkvard, Sciencestack

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Knowledge exchange and management

E.g. a wiki in an institute

E.g. shared link and publication collections in a group

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Building and maintaining communities

Spreading news

Harvesting feedback and proposals

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Identity building and reputation management

For individuals or organisations

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Open Science

Publishing raw results

Open lab journals

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Table of content

1 Preface

2 Principles and terms

3 Important technologies/services

4 Applications

5 Problems

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Walled gardens and data lock-in

Missing data portability

Users give rights to the site owner

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Private data, privacy, identity

Once in the web - hard to get out again

Identity theft

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Community management is tough

Critical mass, rules, permissions, work flow, complaints, consensus,vandalism, conflicts, attribution, discussion ...

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Interruptions

Frequent notifications = perfect productivity killer

Solution: Have fixed times for checking news

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Image sources/attribution

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179910918/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/72949751

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikinews_Broadcast_Studio.jpg

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Criminal_brains.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/truthdevelopment/2249491026/

http://www.flickr.com/photosm/stylianosm/3989939286/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/86399392@N00/109404222

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/images/6/62/Creativecommons-informational-flyer_eng.pdf

http://www.flickr.com/photos/96302395@N00/2514147406

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Long_tail.svg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marksurman/3604105727/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2162922839/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marksurman/3604105727/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tinfoilraccoon/197640807

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Future73nb.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30360780@N02/3420795034/

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

Image sources/attribution

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:His_Master’s_Voice.jpg

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chiodini_wiki.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2163151837/

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burmese_music_casette_tapes,_Yangon,_Myanmar.jpg

http://flickr.com/photos/marksurman/3604105727/

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neunt\protect\grmnU@D1ex\setbox\z@

\hbox\char127\dimen@-.45ex\advance\dimen@\ht\z@\fontdimen5\font\dimen@\accent127\

fontdimen5\font\grmnU@Do\penalty\@M\hskip\z@skipter_gr.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179931690/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bravenewtraveler/2278115499/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ccacnorthlib/3554628032/

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Team_touching_hands.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fazen/3778408/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/3807807369/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/128239619/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/russellbernice/261188642/

Preface Principles and terms Important technologies/services Applications Problems Sources

About this document

Created in LATEX using the beamer class, TeX Live, Emacs and gimp.

All these programs run on OpenBSD.

http://www.latex-project.org

http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net

http://www.tug.org/texlive/

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs

http://www.gimp.org/

http://www.openbsd.org

Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (*)http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

by Konrad Forstnerhttp://konrad.foerstner.org

(*) Excepting the EMBL Logo

Document version 1.0 2010/02/19