Web 2.0 history + lifestreaming

I completed a presentation about Web 2.0 at work, I would say overall it was about 60% successful.

First, here is a version I did at home, slides plus audio (SlideShare calls this SlideCasting).

Web 2.0 timeline and future

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2.0 ib2)

You can click through the slides as usual, but if you press the green play button (arrow) in the centre, you will also get audio.  (I will have a follow-up post about how to make a slidecast.)

If you have some background in Web 2.0 you may want to start on slide #46, "Social Netwhat?"

UPDATE 2008-12-15: Thanks to some great work by CISTI Communications, the video of my presentation is available.  The camera is only on me, so you may also want to bring up the slides to get an idea of what I'm talking about.  The lighting is not great so it's a bit murky, but good I think for a first attempt, the audio is clear.  It's about 50 minutes of me presenting, plus an additional 5 minutes or so of information from our head of communications about how government employees can use Web 2.0 appropriately for work.

Google Video: Web 2.0 timeline

In case you're wondering why GVideo and not YouTube, GVideo allows unlimited size and length of video (I think YouTube limits are 1GB and 10 minutes).

Note: I would really consider the SlideCast audio to be the "full" presentation, in the video I ran out of time at the end to fully cover the social networking and lifestreaming parts.

END UPDATE

UPDATE 2008-12-19: If you want just the 1.5 hours of audio narration (I'm not sure how much sense it makes without the slides), it's available as an audio stream or in various formats for download at

http://www.archive.org/details/Web2_December2008

ENDUPDATE

(Not) Fitting 1.5 Hours into 45 Minutes

When I ran through the slides at home, even with a big section of organisation-internal stuff taken out, it took an hour and a half, this should have been a warning to me.  I only was supposed to present for 40 minutes (40 minutes for me, 5 minutes of material from our communications department, and 15 minutes for questions in a one hour slot).

As a presenter it's really my duty to make sure I fall in that time constraint.  I'm there for the audience (otherwise they could just look at the slides online) and an important part of that is leaving time for questions and comments, because as we know from the Wisdom of Crowds, the audience is going to have more information and ideas collectively than even the best-informed presenter.

When I told my supervisor that my test run went an hour and a half, and that I had cut out 2.5 slides, leaving me with 45 slides (or 43 slides plus opening and closing title slides), he suggested that I cut ruthlessly but there wasn't any part I was prepared to lose.  I guess one of the consequences of picking a large topic and then spending time over a period of months preparing it is you grow quite attached to the form and content of your presentation.  I really did think that I could "just say less" for each slide to get under the time limit.

More realistically for my speaking style (which tends to be a bit detailed and digressive) I should have had about 30 slides for 40 minutes.  I was thinking about it and it really is two presentations, the first piece is reasonably general and takes you through the history of Internet and Web at CISTI and NRC, through a timeline of Web and Web 2.0, to the current situation with these technologies at the Government of Canada and CISTI.  The second part moves into more advanced topics, explaining the nature of social networking and finishing with the very recent development of lifestreaming.  (If there had been time beyond that, I would have talked a bit about how mobile devices are shaping web use, and how we appear to be moving into a more personal and real-time web.)

The logical cutting points for the presentation would have been to end on the slide just before the social networking section (Social Netwhat?), or end on the first slide of that section, or end with the first "Zero Degrees of Separation" slide.  Lifestreaming is a topic that really needs another 45 minutes of presentation all on its own.  I really should have done more runthroughs until I could get the material under 40 minutes, as it was, what happened was that I was watching my time carefully and made it through the first section of the material ok, and then looked at my watch at the start of the social networking section and realised I had another 30-45 minutes worth of material to present in 5 or 10 minutes before the absolute end of my time at 15:00.  I should have just stopped then in order to allow some questions.  Instead I gave a very rushed and probably neither very comprehensible nor useful sweep through the remaining slides down to "Web 2.0 Warnings".  (I should have realised when I was telling people online to *start* at slide 46 for the social networking section, that there was no way I would be able to reach and cover it fully in my presentation - anyway in the online version you can start there and hear me very unhurriedly go through the material.)

The Venue, Presentation Technology and the Perfect Storm

I had a good venue and great support from the technical staff and presentation committee, who agreed to all of my unreasonable presentation diva demands, including a wireless clip-on mike and using my Mac to present using Keynote.  This was an additional complication for them because we use Adobe Acrobat Connect so that people in our offices across the country can see the slides, fortunately it installed and ran fine.  For audio we use a separate voiceconferencing service and a Polycom speakerphone.  To add to the tech mix, I was trying out Salling Clicker on my Nokia N82, it worked quite well, just a couple issues, one (that I was aware of in advance) is that the N82 has a sensitive position sensor, so if you're swinging it around in your hands while presenting, the screen tends to rotate, which also rotates which buttons move the presentation forward and back (I always used the "down" button to advance, since it works in either screen orientation).  It would probably be good to lock the screen from rotating before presenting.  Another issues was that for some reason a couple times it got out of slide-turning mode and into the general presentation selection mode.  It has a nice feature of displaying slide notes on-screen, but I found I didn't actually use the on-screen notes, I always present without notes anyway.  (As a sidebar, I didn't know Salling was an actual person, until with zero degrees of separation he contacted me to answer a Tweet about how to see more than one phone-screen of notes for a slide.)

The presentation was also video-ed, they were concerned about the video camera's audio though.  In retrospect, there are a bunch of other audio recording options we could have added, including:

• recording the audio from my mike directly somehow
• recording the voice conference either through the service itself, or through channeling it to some recording software/service
• both of my phones (K790 and N82) I'm sure can record an hour of audio easily
• I actually have a dedicated audio recorder that I never remember to bring.  It can also store over an hour of audio, has reasonably good pickup (I could have placed it next to the speakerphone) and is easy to work with since you can just plug it into USB when you're done and download the standard-format file it creates (I think it makes a Windows audio file).  It's an Olympus WS-320M.

The logistics side was quite complicated due to a series of unforeseen events.  First the number of RSVPs for the presentation exceeded the firecode limitations for our usual room, so in the weeks before the presentation they had to arrange for an auditorium in another building, which of course means different setup, (somewhat) different network, sending out a room change notice etc. etc. all of which the committee handled very ably.  Then, with everything arranged, on the day of my presentation the entire transit service (mostly buses) for Ottawa went on strike, plus there was a fairly big snowstorm (snowfall from 15-25 cm, later upped to 30cm, with risk of freezing rain).  How did the day go?  Well here's how the Ottawa Citizen put it: Strike, storm lead to commuter chaos.  (My workplace is about 35 minute bus ride from the downtown core where I live, and Ottawa is a very widely distributed city, so people come to my workplace from many different directions with often long commutes.)

I was grateful that anyone showed up at all, I was worried there would be about 5 people in the audience.  I (as usual) forgot to take an audience photo despite having both of my cameraphones, but I would guess around 25 people.

Part 1: History of Web 2.0 - Some Key Messages

The messages that I wanted to convey included:

• libraries were a little slow in some cases to embrace Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, but around 2006 there was a tipping point and I would consider that now e.g. library conferences are leaders in web-enabling (what Lorcan Dempsey calls amplified conferences, a concept which Brian Kelly has, well, amplified and extended).
• That being said, the academic sector, including academic libraries and some large research and technology organisations were early to the Internet and to the Web.  In fact it's not an exaggeration to say these groups were the Internet, in the pre-Web days.  USENET newsgroups were filled with scientists and students asking questions and having conversations.  The Web itself came out of CERN, and so it's not surprising that scientists were also early to the Web.  So when we say scientists aren't using Web 2.0, to some extent it's because they already have well-established communities online, and because science has always been about your peers, they already know their networks and connect to them online and offline.
• My organisation in particular was (based on my amateur USENET sleuthing), posting to newgroups in 1988, talking about xmosaic in 1993, and putting up websites in 1994.  That's about as early as you could possibly adopt - so I don't think we can say that (academic) libraries are necessarily always late adopters.
• Many libraries unfortunately got "stuck" in the mental model of the browse-based web that existed from (very roughly) 1995 to 1998, the pre-Google Web.  It was a very compelling analogy:
  • physical address-> web address (URL)
  • front desk -> front page (home page)
  • browse through stacks -> browse through web pages
  • library -> digital library
• Unfortunately this model of the web, where users type in specific URLs and then browse for content usually within a single site, the Yahoo model of locating information, the model that is even embedded in our terminology of "web browser", is completely false in the post-search world, the post-Google Web.  In the post-search world what matters, the only thing that matters really, is rich content that gives you PageRank.  The page that shows up may be many layers deep within your website, and people may stop there only briefly, before jumping to another site in order to satisfy their need for photos of rabbits with pancakes on their heads (err, or whatever particular topic you provide expertise on).
• Web 2.0 is about many things, including this rather awkward term of "user-created content".  (I kind of messed up my message here, I was trying to say, with the Communications team in the audience, that Web 2.0 is typically personally-identifiable, amateur content, whereas organisational communications are typically more anonymous and professional - I think I may have unintentially given the impression that Web 2.0 communications are "cool", when I just want to say that they're different modes of presenting information, they both have their pluses and minuses.)
• I also didn't have time to cover some interesting work that Alison Ball and others are doing with delicious bookmarks and the Federal Library Web 2.0 Interest Group

Part 2: Social Networking and Lifestreaming

Skipping towards the end of the presentation (as this posting is getting as over-long as my presentation itself) there are some trends that we can see.  One is that we have many new options for making social connections online - but you have to keep in mind that the solution you choose is going to depend on where your network already exists.  If, like is often the case with librarians, your colleagues, your social network is already in mailing lists, then it's going to be very difficult to get much benefit from new social tools.  I give a very simple example, which is that my generation (I finished my undergrad in 1990) is primarily email-based.  If I want to reach my friends, I send them an email.  I can send them messages in Facebook until I'm Faceblue, but they'll never get them, because they never check Facebook.  So this kind of "build it and they will come" idea ONLY works if either people don't have good ways to connect to their social network, or if somehow you convince enough of them to move over (which is tremendously difficult to do).

That being said, IF your connections (friends, work colleagues, whatever) are using social, Web 2.0 tools, you can see their lifestreams, their patterns of activity.  This may be in Facebook (which really was just intended for university students to tell each other where they were, what parties they were going to, and to share drunken pictures of themselves), in Twitter, which I think of as a kind of digital watercooler, and in FriendFeed, which is a sort of meta-site for aggregating all your activity in other Web 2.0 sites.

So your choice of social network online will be shaped by where your current (or desired) community already participates.  Additionally (and I'm grateful to Owen Stephens for this insight), your choice of tool may depend on how you consume the information, in particular, mobile device versus computer screen.  Facebook and in particular Twitter have mobile versions that work very well on a small smartphone screen, their "short snippets of stuff" design takes this environment into consideration (and Twitter can even be used entirely just through SMS).  FriendFeed, with its longer message fields, extensive comment threads, and more complex content, is not at all as well suited to this environment.

Additionally, as we move past Google at 10 Years, we're starting to see a change in search and information exchange.  In the Before Time, because looking up information was expensive/timeconsuming, we often turned first to friends or to reference experts like librarians when we had questions.  Then we had the era of keyword search.  But with the rise of Instant Messaging, SMS, and other more real-time social network interaction, people are again turning back to asking questions first.  That is, they will post a question to their social network, and use keyword search only as a supplement to the information they get from their peers.  This may seem like we've actually gone back to an old way of doing things, but as with all historical cycles, it's both similar and different.  People are asking others questions again, but now they can ask many more people at once than ever before (in theory, you can ask the entire Internet world - sometimes called "crowdsourcing").  There is, I think, an opportunity for librarians to re-introduce themselves into this new real-time question-driven environment.

Conclusion

If you're looking for an overall conclusion, for me it's that as someone who is web-based (rather than mobile), with a widely-dispersed web presence, and whose community is fairly intensive web users, FriendFeed is the best Web 2.0 tool for me.  Facebook I didn't like much at all, it mixes work and personal together and neither my work nor my personal community are particularly active users of it, so it doesn't make any sense for me to spend much time there.  So you can catch me Web 2.0 lifestreaming at

http://friendfeed.com/scilib

As a presenter, there's always a risk of putting yourself forward as the Expert, and I want to say that I very much don't consider myself a Web 2.0 Expert of any kind, I'm not even in the right generation to be talking about Web 2.0 (although perhaps being an outsider to this environment gives me a chance to see things that the Digital Generation may take for granted).  I invite your questions, comments and corrections (and I wish I'd made time to do so in my presentation yesterday).  You collectively know much more than I do.

Comments

[Michael Ireland]

Richard - Bravo on your presentation! As one of those in the audience I enjoyed it. The presentation of the material came out naturally and coherently. But the slides complimented the speaker's discourse rather than dominating it. All were good, all powerful in their way but the speaker and what he said was more interesting to me!

I did have a comment on the presentation of a somewhat philosophical nature about technology, sub-cultures and choices. It is interesting what messages one hears or chooses to hear coming out of the presentation. What I heard is the libraries and government organizations are perhaps conservative in terms of technology adoption and the case of Web 2.0 tools is cited as a case in point. I know that you would say your point was more nuanced than that and that you were trying not to make value judgments. But it is what came across to me during the presentation so I feel compelled to address this.

I know you were thinking about web 2.0 tools when you said "technology" but I would argue that there are different communities and sub-cultures in our society, each with their own technology priorities driven by their needs. Web 2.0 tools are in my view born out of the 'consumer marketplace' sub-culture (or dominant culture depending on how you want to look at it) where posting photos and sharing with friends dominates and is supported by technologies that facilitate these interactions. By the same token, in the 'research marketplace' sub-culture the priority may well have been elsewhere. Two anecdotes come to mind to show how these different parts of our society address technology to meet their specific needs and may well bypass technologies used by others.

ex. 1. Scientific researchers want as much as electronic information as they can get their hands on and in about a decade have displaced the print article with its electronic equivalent. Libraries have responded to that need by licensing the electronic and cutting print journal subscriptions. Contrast this development with poor uptake of the the e-book in the consumer market where print books still dominate. Go figure?

ex. 2. Collaborative tools which include wikis as well as commercial versions such as SharePoint and Oracle UPSS have seen steady but modest growth in the scholarly communication environment compared to the explosion of their use in the consumer market with sites like Wikipedia. Moreover, talking about librarians, researchers and the adoption of collaborative tools, my recent experience is that librarians have actually been in the position of facilitating/encouraging researchers to use collaborative tools and not necessarily the other way around.

Clearly the influence of the consumer market on the researcher market is there. As newer generations of researchers move into positions of influence in their organizations they have an easy familiarity with Youtube and other web 2.0 oriented sites and will want to see how that same kind of functionality applies to their work-lives. Consciously or unconsciously I am not certain researchers were crying out for Facebook when it first came out to solve their scholarly communication problems. They may admire its easy networking capability and use it in their private lives, but would be scratching their heads wondering how a site that started with the goal of connecting university buddies could replace current ways of sharing information with scientific peers like scholarly publishing. he paradigm change is quite there yet.

All to say that when talking about "technology" or "early and late adopters"; by putting values around these concepts we do need to understand why in different segments of our society, technologies are adopted at different speeds, depending on the need, not simply by a choice to adopt or not adopt by someone. It is not that researchers or librarians are behind the times or unaware of what is out there in the wider market in terms of web 2.0. They may well be responding effectively to what they believe are the conscious or unconscious needs in their world. Putting money on electronic information has been a good investment for research in general. But it is not a value judgment necessarily on web 2.0 in general by doing so. It is just deciding priorities.

I perhaps make an overly black/white argument here to prove a point. The world is grey. Researchers will indeed be using their 'own facebooks' now and in future but they adopt when the timing is right for them. When they do, librarians will be waiting, ready to help them do so.

Mike Ireland

[Richard Akerman]

Michael I think your points are well taken. I tried to make it clear in my presentation, that there are overlapping waves of technology adoption, and levels of technology use, and there isn't one stage that is "better" than the others. Early adopters take on tremendous risk. Heavy technology users invest tremendous amounts of time in mastering particular systems. The point of the timeline, which I probably didn't make as well as I should have, is that as new technologies come out, you first get the wave of early adopters, so for Web 2.0 that would be right in 2004. General adoption will take several years. So we shouldn't be surprised that we are still working on Web 2.0 technologies in government, considering that they were only invented 4 years ago - one of the striking things about GCPEDIA is how quickly it has come on the scene, given all the many government web constraints.

We can always learn from early adopters, but we don't necessarily want to be them. The key is technologies that are appropriate to your needs. As I said at the beginning of the presentation, NRC and CISTI, along with many academics (particularly in the hard sciences), were early to the Internet and early to the web. Public libraries were later, but that only make sense because their patrons were also later to the web.

There were so many different angles I was trying to cover, the main body was about Web 2.0 fairly generally, with some reference to use by libraries generally. The Web 2.0 and technology space as it impacts academic and research libraries specifically is somewhat different. I had to revisit the text above to see whether I had covered the social networking space as it relates to scientists - I didn't have time to cover this, it's a slide at the very end of my presentation. The particular social networking aspects of the web I don't think are going to get wide adoption by the current scientific community - Outsell lists at least 40 such sites, many of which are a solution in search of a problem. Working scientists, like working librarians, already have existing social networks supported by technology. As you say, the key is for us to watch what the early adopters are doing, because they point the way to a potential generational change, as people enter the workplace with social networks in e.g. Facebook, rather than keeping in contact with friends using email.

With the beginnings of adoption of Web 2.0 technologies internally, CISTI is taking the right steps to explore this space. Our decision to create an internal MediaWiki-based CISTI wiki positions us well to participate in GCPEDIA. As well, the library community in general had a slight and understandable lag in adopting many web and Web 2.0 technologies, but as I said in my presentation, they are now leaders in many ways, particularly in the use of the web to support conferences.

That being said, there are always aspects of different organisational cultures that adapt at different rates to technological change. One of the key points that I made in the recorded version of the talk, but that I forgot to make in the presentation, is that sharing information openly brings tremendous benefits. The simple decision I made to share my Internet Librarian 2004 notes publically, in a blog, has led to all the subsequent developments and opportunities that I have participated in on the web and at conferences. That's just one aspect of culture change that doesn't have anything to do with a specific technology.

Thanks again for your comments.