www.mimas.ac.uk

Web 2.0: what’s it all about?

Jane Stevenson

Archives Hub

Mimas, University of Manchester

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Web 2.0Technologies and tools

• RSS• Mashups• Blogs• Social

bookmarking• Wikis• Social networks

Mindset

• Openess• Experimentation• Trust• Participation

There is no authoritative definition

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Web 2.0 (based on O’Reilly)

An attitude (not a technology)

Perpetual beta

Rich user experience Trust your

users

Small pieces loosely joined

The right to remix

User control of own data

Play

The web as a platform

The long tail

Web 2.0

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Web 2.0 underlying drivers

‘Web 2.0 is more than just a set of “cool” and new technologies and services, important though some of these are. It is actually a series of at least six powerful ideas or drivers that are changing the way some people interact.’ (Anderson, P. ‘What is Web 2.0’, Feb 2007)

•User generated content•Harnessing the power of the crowds•Data on an epic scale•Architecture of participation•Network effects and the long tail•Openess

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Web 2.0 in education

‘profound potential for inducing change in the HE sector…the possible realms of learning to be opened up by the catalytic effects of Web 2.0 technologies are attractive, allowing greater student independence and autonomy, greater collaboration and increased pedagogic efficiency.’

Franklin, T. and van Harmelen, M, Web 2.0 for Content for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (May 2007)

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Some Web 2.0 tools

• Blogs• Wikis• Sharing content• Mashups• Social networks• Tagging

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Entertainment blogs

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Educational blogshttp://piclib.nhm.ac.uk/antarctica/http://piclib.nhm.ac.uk/antarctica/

This blog tells what it's like spending the winter in Antarctica conserving artefacts from the explorer's hut left behind by Ernest Shackleton in 1908.

This blog tells what it's like spending the winter in Antarctica conserving artefacts from the explorer's hut left behind by Ernest Shackleton in 1908.

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Work blogs

Blogs can be used to describe and promote a service and provide news. http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/blog/

User generated content - personal publishing

Openess: sense of sharing

Conversation

Immediacy

Informality

Accuracy?

Quality?

Quantity!

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Blogs

Blogs: social phenomenon of the 21st century

Need for information professionals to:• Understand Blogging & related technologies• Be able to find resources in the

'Blogosphere'• Explore how blogs may support users, staff

& the organisation• Have awareness of effectiveness of blog

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Reading blogs RSS: one of the most significant advances in the architecture of the Web

rather than just linking to a page can subscribe to it

Permalinks important to be able to identify each blog entry

Allows for ‘conversation’

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Technorati

Currently tracking 93.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media (user-generated content) July 2007

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Searching blogs

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Blogs

• Often interconnected (discuss other blog postings)

• Many people use Technorati and Google blog search

• Bang up to date• Range in quality of content enormously!• Danger of overload

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WikisW

eb 2

.0

Collaborative authoring toolsCan use wikis for: Dissemination Collaborative papers Note-taking at events Social discussions at events

Follow-up Level of use? Trust

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Wikipedia

User generated content

Power of crowds

Sharing

Huge scale

Current

Trust, accuracy?

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Wikipedia

Wikipedia entry for the Society of Archivists:

• Easy to create• Provides high-

profile information (Google-friendly)

• Allows community to enhance & develop content

• Created in 2004 (and improved since)

Op

po

rtu

nit

ies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Archivistshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Archivists

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Sharing - Flickr

User generated content Share photos from conferences and other events Community-building Openess: sense of sharing Copyright? Searching issues

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Sharing – del.icio.us

Manage your bookmarks Make connections Build reading lists Allow lists of bookmarks to

be repurposed Find good material Rely on tagging Organisation

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Mashup: Devon Museums

devonmuseums.net provide an interactive map showing the location of museums in the area.

http://www.devonmuseums.net/...http://www.devonmuseums.net/...

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Mashups: google mapswww.archiveshub.ac.uk/inst/contmap.html

Sharing

Right to remix

Rich user experience

IPR?

Time/use

http://www.housingmaps.com/

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Social networks

• Engage with potential users of services through social networks•APIs enable them to develop their own applications• Can (i) develop application (ii) enable others to do so• Set up own social groups

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Examples

http://www.leodis.orgSearch for ‘bawn lane’ – comment added to photograph

http://www.academia.edu/A tree of academics around the world(http://manchester.academia.edu/JaneStevenson)

Building Applications: Facebook http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/revisiting-development-of-facebook-applications/

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Facebook application: Suncat

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Facebook applications: Copac

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Google Videos & YouTube

Google and the US National Archives have entered into a partnership to make historic footage from the National Archives collection available on the Google Video server

http://video.google.com/nara.html

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Aggregation of data: personalised home pages

Bringing information together in your own way

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The need to let go!

Information professionals: Think they know better than the user Think that users should be forced to

learn formal search techniques because this is good for them

Don't want the users to search for themselves (cf folksonomies) because they won't get it right.

Want services to be perfect before they release them to users.

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Deployment Strategies

Address organisation objectives Low-hanging fruits Encourage the enthusiasts Staff training & development Address areas you feel comfortable with Risk management strategy…

Dep

loym

ent

Ch

alle

ng

es

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Risk Management

Be realistic, recognise limitations Use of well-established services: Google

& del.icio.us are well-established and have financial security

Use and build on what others have done Notification: warnings that services could

be lost Use in non-mission critical areas

Dep

loym

ent

Str

ateg

y

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Web 2.0 in archives

Engaging with users Taking advantage of users’ knowledge New ways to communicate Encourage collaboration Raise the profile of archives Provide instant news and comment Use in teaching and learning environments Help keep archivists up-to-date with developments and innovations

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From the very ambitious… Crowdsourcing

Collaborative

Trusting

Creative commons

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…to the pretty damn ambitioushttp://demo.openlibrary.org/

Internet Archive

Entries from any source

‘the people’ as curators

‘…a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data.’

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Oxford Celtic Coin Index

View location on map

Add a comment

Rating system

Tag cloud

Links to Web 2.0 services

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Harnessing the power of crowds

Success increasingly requires service providers to embrace the power of the web to harness collective intelligence:

• Google: link structure• eBay's: collective activity of all its users • Amazon: made a science of user

engagement and uses user activity to produce better search results

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Harnessing the power of crowds

• Flickr, del.icio.us: use folksonomies - collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keywords, often referred to as tags • Collaborative spam-filtering products• The collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value – collective intelligence

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Who owns the data?

“The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be … a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.”

http://www.oreillynet.com: What is Web 2.0?

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Control of data

• user concerns about privacy and their rights to their own data • early web applications - copyright loosely enforced (Amazon reviews)• control over data may be chief source of competitive advantage for companies - heightened attempts at control• countered by ‘free data’ movement (Wikipedia, Greasemonkey, etc.)

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Conclusions

To conclude:• Web 2.0 can provide real benefits for our users• However organisations tend to be conservative• We therefore need:

Advocacy To listen to users' concerns To address users' concerns e.g. risk management

• We can all benefit by adopting Web 2.0 principles of openness and sharing. So let us: Share our advocacy resources, risk management

techniques, etc. Develop your own social network based on openness,

trust, collaboration, ..

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