e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

Wikipedia: "A Work in Progress" (BusinessWeek article)

This article is a well-done piece of the recent troubles at Wikipedia but I recommend it for some of its comments. One of my favs:

“If lies were published in "Who's Who" (an anonymously authored work) how and when would Seigenthaler have had them corrected, assuming the author were malicious? Perhaps never. With Wikipedia, he could easily have corrected it himself in a minute. You just click on the "edit" button, delete the offending sentence, and save. Much scholarship has always been collective and anonymous. Wikipedia is not new in this respect. Anonymous and permanent--like your FBI file--that is dangerous. Anonymous and amendable instantly, that is pretty much harmless. Could S. sue? I think not, given the ease with which the slander or libel can be erased by the alleged victim. The most vociferous critics of Wikipedia seem to be the people who have been banned from editing it. Many of the rest are threatened by a rival who is "giving it away free," namely, fatuous, gullible journalists and academic bibliography stuffers.”

Poll on Hosted Software Viability

I wouldn't have changed the motto of this blog to "the Application Becomes the Platform" if I didn't believe that that was the primary mode in which we will see innovation and growth for the next few years. AJAX, 'software as a service', SOA - these will all become as familiar to us as "Web" and "Blog."

But here comes a little reality...here is a poll that asks about the confidence that people have in Microsoft's ability to deliver hosted software. 48% of the respondents when I voted, believed that either hosted apps won't work at all or that aren't yet ready for prime time. I wonder what the results will be in 6 months?

Slate Piece Poses An Alternative Future For GoogleZon

(Link to Slate.com Article)

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer has written a piece supposing a future quite different that the one shown in this video. In Shafer's world, Rubert Murdoch somehow becomes savvy enough to create a global classified ad databse that crushes the profits of Google's AdSense and AdWords. He just goes a bit nuts.

I mean, while there are some elements to Shafer's story that could ring true,  the overall validity of the piece is really hurt by the inclusion of such flippant and hyperbolic turns like

"Google had also lost its "don't be evil" cachet ever since founders Sergey and Larry had purchased a Boeing 767-200 and crashed it into Coit Tower while doing barrel rolls over the San Francisco Bay. They survived, but their reputations and that of their company did not."

Then somehow- and I'm not quite sure how - Amazon kills iTunes and somehow Shafer totally glosses over or just ignores the hardware side of the equation there. Another piece of over-the-top writing is this little snippet that  "Regulators throttled its local Wi-Fi initiative." I mean know this is fiction but even so, you should support a statement like this somehow.

While I'm not saying that Google couldn't be beaten and that it might not involve some of the very players mentioned in this piece, Shafer's style, flippancy and layering of improbable turn after improbable turn make this piece seem more like a boxer flailing wildly at a target that he can't seem to hit as opposed to an industry expert delivering well-placed blows to an over-inflated opponent.

TIME Magazine Forum on What's Next

A lot of times these forums don't really work - you know - you gather a bunch of folks, ask some questions and the sum is somehow supposed to be greater than the parts. This time though, I have to hand out some kudos to TIME Magazine; their article, The Road Ahead, gathered some great brains (Gladwell, Dyson, O'Reilly) but more importantly, gathered some great conversation and insights.

Fair warning - right now the whole article is available online - don't know how long that will last. I think that O'Reilly's initial idea that the most transformational thing happening right now is our growing ability to harness collective intelligence is deceptively powerful. Deceptive because I think most people will just see it and agree "Yeah, that's a good one" without pausing to think about it a bit deeper. As a historian, I know that there truly are transformational moments - points in the timeline when you can locate a sea change - an inflection - a movement from one thing to the next. This is one of those times.

Clapping Trees on the Rise of the Conference Wiki

(LINK)  I'm going to have to review all the other Wikis listed in this post but just from our recent experience with the Learning 2005 Wiki, I can say that there is a great deal of design work that goes in front of a productive release of a conference wiki and that if you place the technology without the design or the thought of creating the appropriate context, then you leave yourself open to either failing to realize the full potential of the medium or just plain failing.

MSN Grokking the Application to Platform Equation

Here is a Computerworld story about how Microsoft is now encouraging developers to create applications to tap into parts of the MSN network. I'd say that was good timing on my part changing the 'motto' of this blog to "the applicationbecomes the platform."

I think that this will be the dominant development paradigm for the forseeable future. Large-scale developers will understand that the real value lies in creating platforms which are open enough to grow a large-scale development community. Firefox and Google are probably the two best examples of this to date and now here comes Microsoft. I still say the genesis for this thinking lays somewhere in the early 90's, say somewhere around the release of the first version of DOOM. This groundbreaking game showed that a game could be a huge commercial success while allowing end users to create their own in-game content. Now almost all games embrace this paradigm and all its done is turn the game industry into an industry somewhere between $10 and $20 Billion in size.

I wonder about the learning market being able to make the most of this developmental shift. Is there a 'learning platform' on the market that I can build an LMS plug-in for? Or an assessment add-on?