I had a great chat with Brian Lamb yesterday. He and his team are working to use WordPress to support learning communities at UBC. In case anyone else is sick of WebCT, Blackboard or the boring Moodle interface this could provide an interesting replacement. Anyway, as we were talking it made me realize that it…
Category: Social Software
Connected Communities
When Digg was new I spent plenty of time following the latest news ‘dugg’ up by the community. Now I rarely go back. Somewhere along the line Digg became an online Frat house and I am no longer interested in the 10 ten latest shocking things or in hearing about Scientology or in seeing pictures…
Niche Communities
Over the past few months I have talked quite a bit with Joel about online communities and about what philosophically makes a community. I think it is a group of individuals who collectively are interesting in something and need tools to facilitate communication and production of some artifact(s). The way the community interacts to make…
Note to Facebook, Myspace and Other Social Silos: DIE
I wrote three Facebook apps and I have ideas for several more. The most successful was the House Plans application I did for ThePlanCollection.com, but in the Facebook world you can’t count a couple thousand users as especially successful. When Open Social started up I felt like I needed to go sign up for a…
Utah WordPress Meetup
I spent this afternoon with some really cool and interesting individuals from around utah. Matt Mullenweg, the original developer of WordPress was in town and was willing to come and hang out, each lunch and chat for a couple of hours about anything. Matt is a very cool guy not only because he created the…
Another Social API – I might explode
Just as I finish my Facebook app here comes OpenSocial which is supposed to be an API that works with LinkedIn, Orkut, other Google services and the big recent addition, MySpace. I might just explode into a million pieces. I love that with these apps you get traffic almost as soon as you turn it…
Facebook as an Authentication System
I have been playing with OpenID for about a year now. It is a very cool, distributed authentication system. The concept is great and I love that I don’t have to create accounts everywhere. Instead, I just log in with OpenID and away I go. The biggest shortcoming for OpenID from a user perspective however…
Social Software is for the Young
An interesting study by business week shows who is doing what on line. The visualization helps to show what is in many ways obvious – young people are more likely to do social things online. I don’t think this is bad. I think it means that over the next decade social software is going to…
New Website for Academic Types
We have started a new site for those who are academic in nature. As part of what we do at COSL we have Brian Lamb helping us out with research. As we searched for good research questions our we had to ask ourselves if the questions had already been asked which means that we started…
Yahoo opens browser authentication
You can use Yahoo to authenticate your users if you want. http://developer.yahoo.com/auth/ This might be worth looking at. 500 million people have accounts at Yahoo. Numbers tend to overwhelm standards so this might be something to look at alongside OpenID, Sxip, Shibboleth etc