Year: 2007

User-Generated Content Sites See Exponential Growth in UK Visitors

I missed this comCast report at the time (September 2006).

Leading User-Generated Content Sites See Exponential Growth in UK Visitors During the Past Year

“Web 2.0 is clearly architected for participation, as it attempts to harness the collective intelligence of Web users,” commented Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe. “Many of the sites experiencing the fastest growth today are the ones that understand their audience’s need for expression and have made it easy for them to share pictures, upload music and video, and provide their own commentary, thus stimulating others to do the same. It is the classic network effect at work.”
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While uniformly demonstrating strong traffic growth, UGC sites are also adept at keeping users engaged.

File under 'fabulous resources that I doubt I'll ever get time to read properly': the Journal of Universal Computer Science, D-Lib Magazine ('digital library research and development, including but not limited to new technologies, applications, and contextual social and economic issues') and transcripts from the Research Library in the 21st Century symposium.

On the other hand, Introduction to Abject-Oriented Programming is a very quick read, and laugh-out-loud funny (if you're a tragic geek like me).

Young people are online

Ok, so we already knew that. But this comScore report confirms that if we want to reach younger audiences, the internet is the place to do it: "U.K. Teens and Young Adults Spend 24 Percent More Time Online Than the Average Internet User".

And, "The comScore study revealed that many of the sites with particular appeal to the 15 to 24 age segment fall into the Social Networking category, including Facebook.com, Bebo.com and Tagged.com. Other properties with strong teen and young adult appeal include ARTISTdirect Network and Alloy, which are news and entertainment sites."

The Power of Information

From the BBC:

Government must do more to embrace Web 2.0 tools and communities, says a report.
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The report said that some public data, such as post codes, was already widely used but much more could be done to open up access to official information.

It said public data should be published in open formats to encourage use.

The review, called The Power of Information, aimed to find out more about Web 2.0 tools and communities to see how the government can get involved to help Britons make the most of this "new pattern of information creation and use".
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The review was intended to "explore the role of government in helping to maximise the benefits for citizens from this new pattern of information creation and use."
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The report encouraged the government to do more to ensure a good fit between web communities and official information to "grasp the opportunities that are emerging in terms of the creation, consumption and re-use of information".
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The authors recommended that the government work more closely with existing sites and communities that share official aims; do more to help innovators use public data and work to ensure people know what to do with public data and how to get at it.

Among 15 specific recommendations the report said the government should not set up its own sites if existing web communities do a good job of getting information to people.

It also said it should speed up efforts to put data in open formats and publish under terms that let people freely use it.

They've linked to a PDF of the report at Power of Information report.

A nice article on the significance of the 'latest Roman burial and the earliest Saxon pot' found at St Martin-in-the-Fields, near Trafalgar Square: Bridging London's lost centuries. If you're in London, go see the skeleton at the Museum of London while it's still on display (until August 8).

And an article from an Australian newspaper on the possibilities of Web 2.0 for business: "Australian companies are starting to twig that Web 2.0 isn't just the latest trend for designing web pages – it can be a vital business tool."

Speaking of Web 2.0 business models, I noticed that Rough Guides have made free audio downloads available for some of their phrasebooks so you can practise with words and phrases recorded by native speakers. The audio files work best when you've got a phrasebook in front of you, so they're probably not losing much business by giving away the audio files; in fact they're probably gaining.

Computational thinking

I hadn't heard the term but before this is an interesting (in a geeky way, natch) BCS article on computational thinking:

Computational thinking could be considered to be a manifesto for computer science and is what every computer scientist has within them, without their equipment. It might be seen as being a common language for solving problems.

Computational thinking helps iron out the problems from abstraction – determining what it is that can be computed. Some felt that it was a form of intellectual property – a way of thinking which aids the 'user' in solving problems and tapping into their constructive imagination.

Computational thinking has an obligation to find a solution and is sometimes used to crystallise natural phenomena by naming things that haven't already had names in the past.

It was thought that it helps us to deal with systems, which generate too much data, complete with false positives and negatives and helps us to better understand the constraints to a problem.

Who decides?

I'm really not sure what I think about this Dear Internet letter from public.resource.org.

They've screen scraped the Smithsonian picture library and uploaded the images to Flickr. They've had legal advice that the Smithsonian's prohibitions on reuse were not valid, and state that:

This is not to say that the Smithsonian cannot obtain funds through creative means, only that the Institution should be cognizant of a special and unique status under our laws. One has only to look at the thriving Smithsonian Associates program or the wildly popular Smithsonian Folkways music site to see that there are many options for government entities to creatively raise funds. Privatizing the public domain is not one of those options.

Making geekdom accessible (and creating baby geeks)

An interesting point from this BBC article on a free programming tool called Scratch from the MIT Media Lab that's designed to be (intellectually) accessible and "allows anyone to create their own animated stories, video games and interactive artworks" by 'snapping blocks together':

"A program doesn't congratulate you for the 90% that you got right. It fails for the 10% you got wrong. So an environment where you are essentially assembling components that can only be configured in set ways takes some of that hardship away."

Learning to interpret obscure compilation errors that don't even necessarily relate to the line that contains the actual error really isn't the easiest way to get started (I'm looking at the C-like languages here, yes, even you, PHP). It makes the early stages of programming more about attention to detail than intelligence or elegance, and that puts off lots of people who could probably be great programmers.

The article also lead me to http://hacketyhack.net/, a site which "teaches children to code in a language called Ruby. There are seven free lessons, including one that allows them to develop a blog with just six lines of code."