There are quite a few situations where we want to engage people in an online social environment to create, sort, edit, share and if required to delete information. The popularity of Facebook and YouTube are evidence that people do engage with this approach. I'd like to use this entry to expand on the journey I have taken with two real uses of this technology and how it can benefit you as an educator, a parent, a club member or someone who needs a combined soapbox and filing cabinet out there in cyberspace - where it appears that now - everybody can hear you scream.

This article talks about about Microsoft's Office Live Workspaces which look uncannily like SharePoint and links to other tools that allow us to communicate and share information.

When I first created the website for the Top End Flying Club, it was an adaption of an intranet product called IntraZone. Here was a system that allowed me to create web pages, manage member profiles, store documents and publish timely news, videos and photographs. Over the last 10 years, elements of that  product have been replaced with better and free solutions.

So, what was the first function to be replaced by a product in the Internet cloud?

Editing

Back in 2005 when Oracle's web editor was a textarea, I integrated CKEditor into my website which meant that I could edit web content (as I am doing now) using a rich text editor like the one's that you see on Facebook and Ning. This meant that anyone who could use a word processor was now able to be a content contributor to our club websites. This was the first major change that moved the club website from being a one person (the web manager) role, to being something that more people could contribute to. Although this was not in the "cloud" - it was on the server that hosted the website, it was the first attempt of integrating a dynamic web application that resembled a software word processor that you might find on your local computer.

Photographs

The website had a comprehensive photo album tool and I used it to upload albums of our family and air planes. It was okay, but nowhere near as slick as Picasa or Flickr.

When I discovered Picasa from Google I discovered a photo management system that allowed me to store and arrange my original digital pictures locally on my backed up hard drives and publish albums to the Internet. Then I was able to write news items and stories, easily embedding the code (which I didn't have to write - just copy) into my web page editor.

With comprehensive tagging, face recognition and easy sharing (or hiding) - the rediscover-ability of my photos on the Internet was made easier - Type xsymetrix into google and select images.

http://www.xsymetrix.com.au/index.cfm?header=Photo Album 

RSS feeds and a little coding means that I can also provide things like a random album slideshow from the 1001 albums posted to the internet

Videos

YouTube provided a similar ability with video which gave me free space to upload videos into which it also converted for me, gave me the embed code I could paste into my web page and handled the tagging, comments and statistics associated with the number of views of each of my videos. In both the cases of photographs and videos, I didn't have to pay for the now gigabytes of online storage I use to host my videos and photographs (30 gigabytes at last count). YouTube also offers comprehensive tagging and consumption via RSS. 

News

The next function to be overtaken by a cloud application although this too is hosted on my ISP's server in Melbourne is a blog. This blog... and the two other blogs that I write (http://www.xsymetrix.com.au/tefc for flying matters and JoeBlogs which is  our family blog) are also an open source solution. Called Blogcfc from Ray Camden, the blog gives me an easy way of providing a chronological delivery of news, ideas and information that is easily rediscoverable through extensive tagging capabilities and the fact that it could be consumed as an RSS feed.

I would say that the blog has provided the best information management tool in my collection of tools that I use.

Extranet

Within a club or organisation, there are parts of the website you want to keep for club members. For example children's photographs or financial reports. Initially I maintained several instances of the modified IntraZone product but as the effort was unpaid and consumed a fair amount of time, I was looking for an alternative. Ning is that alternative. It is a Facebook lookalike that is really geared toward groups of individuals who share a common passion. The Top End Flying Club, Anula Family Karate and the Chinese Language and Culture Centre are three local Darwin entities that use Ning to provide a public welcome page and a member only social networking, event management and communication centre.

Document Storage

Initially, as Ning was very limited in document creation, storage and retrieval, I used Huddle workspaces. Huddle workspaces offered an add-on to Ning where people could collaborate on documents or simply go to the document to read it. Although it used the check-in check-out paradigm of SharePoint and other content management systems, it was a little harder to use than the next offering which I have adopted as the document control centre for a number of websites.

The Beta version of the Office Live Workspace offers me an easy interface to set up a workspace, add or create documents and folders and then share those documents with other people. Because it integrates with Microsoft Office, when I click on a spreadsheet, presentation or word processing document, or want to create one, the associated application starts immediately with dialogue boxes telling me or warning me about this and that. Another feature which I am yet to test fully is the ability to place a template up in the workspace which becomes the basis for a fillin-style document, so even the most macro challenged or infopath shy of us can create a work-flow around simple events like meetings.

There is some cross-over with the Ning product such as providing an events calendar, but its real strength is in the creation and organisation of documents online

What I am trialling Office Live Workspaces on is a storage area for minutes of meetings from our flying club and as a shared eportfolio repository for our son Joe. Because he writes stories which are then typed into the computer (correcting any mistakes along the way) we upload these stories into the eportfolio folder we created in Office Live Workspace and if need be share those stories with teachers and family. As it is "by invitation only" or completely public, you get to choose who can see your documents.

What's Next? Video Conferencing and Live TV Channels

For delivery of live TV over IP for training, seminars or simply networking, Livestream for TV and Acrobat.com or Live Meeting are two choices that I am exploring at the moment with a hope to integrate them into the website. My problem is have participants at the other end with the bandwidth to engage. I'll save a comparison of these technologies for a later date.

Conclusion

So what of the remaining skeleton of a website I started just before Joe was born? It is still there, but now it acts as an aggregator for various technologies out there in the Internet cloud and it too will probably be replaced by web 3.0 where each application (YouTube, Picasa, Office Live, Ning, Moodle, Connect etc) will have an OpenId which we as individuals will create and that will be our passport into the silos of information on the Internet. The OpenId will allow me to join together applications from different vendors and establish a trust relationship for the sharing and aggregation of information so my final website will appear homogeneous although in reality be constructed by sub-contractors.

This entry was posted on April 8, 2010 at 6:43 AM and has received 335 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.