Here’s a press release about the launch of a JISC-funded Guide to Web Preservation which will be announced during the opening talk at the IWMW 2010 event later today. The press release isn’t written in my normal conversation style but in discussions with my colleagues who worked on the JISC PoWR project in did occur [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/guide-to-web-preservation-launched/
Earlier today I booked a place on the Eduserv Symposium 2010: The Mobile University which will be held at the Royal College of Physicians in London on 13 May 2010.
The online booking for the event uses the Eventbrite service – and as this Cloud service is free for free events it is ideal for [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/the-quiet-room-at-conferences/
I have spoken at all bar one of the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conferences and for a number of years have been a member of the ILI advisory group. So I am pleased to announce that the call for speakers for the Internet Librarian International 2010 conference is now open. The theme for this [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/call-for-speakers-for-ili-2010/
The Linked Data Challenge
A week ago I issued a challenge to Linked Data developers – using a Linked Data service, such as DBpedia, tell me which town or city in the UK has the largest proportion of students. I’m pleased to say that a developer, Alejandra Garcia Rojas, has responded to my challenge and provided an [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/response-to-my-linked-data-challenge/
The Context
In response to my recent post about usage of JISCMail lists Nicole Harris pointed out some evidence of its popularity. It is clear that although in some sectors there may have been a migration to a diversity of communication and collaboration tools, other sectors are still well-served by email lists. This is particularly true [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/decommissioning-mothballing-mailing-lists/
The JISC-funded Shared Infrastructure Services (SIS) Landscape Study has published two reports which describe how Web 2.0 is being used in higher educational institutions in the UK and Australia. The two surveys allow comparisons to be made across these two countries. This work was coordinated by my UKOLN colleagues Ann Chapman and Rosemary Russell, who [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/use-of-web-2-0-in-australian-universities/
Back in October 2005 I gave a talk entitled “Email Must Die!” at the Internet Librarian International 2005 (ILI) Conference. The following summary of the talk was published in Elucidate (Vol. 3 Issue 1, January/February 2006 ISSN: 1742-5921 – PDF format):
“One particularly provocative paper was from Brian Kelly, Email Must Die!, in which he suggests [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/my-significant-drop-in-use-of-jiscmail-lists/
Part of the Plumbing
A tweet from @scilib alerted me to a New Year’s day post entitled “Why Twitter Will Endure” published in the New York Times. David Carr described how his first reaction on encountering Twitter, less than a year ago, was a feeling that “the last thing I wanted was one more Web-borne intrusion [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/twitter-part-of-the-plumbing/
What’s the Score?
What was the score in yesterday’s Chelsea versus Sunderland game? The final score was 7-2 – and according to the BBC Web site the score at one stage was simultaneously 4-0, 5-0 and 6-1!
I managed to capture a screen image showing this inconsistency. This was slightly cumbersome to do as for my first [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/whats-the-score-and-whose-score-is-it-anyway/
“Provide Case Studies”
Following my recent post in which I highlighted Glyn Moody’s concerns regarding “Threats to Openness” I received a tweet from @Brunella in which she suggested that she would prefer specific details based on case studies as opposed, I imagine, to a generic call to embrace openness.
The Spirit Is Willing; The Content is Complex!
Coincidentally [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/how-i-use-creative-commons-for-my-presentations/
May 1997 was an exciting time for many – the Labour party back in power after many years in opposition – and one of the key mantras back then was “Education, education, education”. And despite the many failings of the New Labour experiment we did see significant investments in education with even the Daily [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/cuts-will-bring-us-to-our-knees/
On 1 January 2010 James Clay published a post on “The Top Ten Blog Posts of 20” which gave the top ten posts from his e-Learning Stuff blog according to the statistics for the number of views. The new year provides a useful opportunity for such reflections and for observing annual trends. So I thought I [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/how-did-people-find-this-blog-in-2009/
To describe 2009 as the year Twitter came of age would be rather unremarkable and perhaps cliched – after all a month ago a headline in the Guardian announced “‘Twitter’ declared top word of 2009“.
But if 2009 was the year of Twitter what was 2009 not? That might provide a more interesting way of [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/2009-the-year-of-twitter/
About This Post
In this rather long post I describe some personal stories of benefits I have gained from my social networking communities. And rather than the focus on the professional benefits of such services which I have described in previous posts in my final post before Christmas I suggest that the main benefits of the [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/unlucky-in-lucca-i-think-not/
I’m currently in Florence, having spoken at the Cultural Heritage Online 2009 conference. In his conclusions Bernard Smith identified two main strands at the conference: the large-scale institutional developments, typically led by national libraries or museums or funding by the EU and the exploitation of Web 2.0 approaches and services. Between these [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/the-risks-and-opportunities-framework/
A Twitter Account For This Blog
A few days ago I created the @ukwebfocus Twitter account which will provide an automated feed of posts from this blog. But isn’t the point of Twitter the conversation and the community? So why have I created a new Twitter account which seemingly contradicts the reasons for Twitter’s success?
The Background
The answer [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/a-twitter-feed-for-this-blog/
Last week I attended another enjoyable CETIS conference. The event, which this year had the theme Brave New World?, provides a valuable opportunity to catch up with old colleagues, but faces to names Ive come across online and make new connections.
The conference theme alluded to not only the dystopian view of the future described in [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/signals-from-cetis09/
How long might it take to influence a national service?And what approaches would you take if you wished to do this? Well let me give an example of how Twitter can be used.
On Thursday 5 November 2009 Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) asked Joy Palmer a question about the RSS feeds provided by the COPAC service:
@joypalmer while you’re [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/influence-a-national-service-in-140-characters/
“Forecasting for the Future” was the title of an article published in the recent issues of the JANET Newsletter (No. 9, September 2009 – PDF format). It won’t surprise people that the byline for the article was positive about the future: “Outlook – sunny, with a good chance of videoconferencing“.
To be fair, the byline was a [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/forecasting-trends-backwards/
I’m now back from a few day’s at Aberystwyth University, where I had been invited to speak at the launch of the HEFCW-funded Gwella project and to give a seminar on “The ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’ Report: Implications For IT Service Departments“.
As this involved a long train journey I also sought to maximise [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/opening-up-institutional-training-resources/
RSS Usage On Welsh University Home Pages
Last year I published a blog post which provided a summary of usage of RSS feeds on Scottish University home pages. The survey was carried out in July 2008, shortly before the IWMW 2008 event was held in Aberdeen. The aim was to collate evidence on the extent to [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/rss-feeds-for-welsh-university-web-sites/
Top Technology Trends for Libraries and Information Professionals
Later this week I’m taking part in the Internet Librarian International (ILI) Conference in London. In addition to running a workshop and giving a talk on standards I’ll also be taking part in the closing panel session on Top Technology Trends for Libraries and Information Professionals.
What should I [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/top-technology-trends-for-the-twentieth-century/
After a gap of 11 months the guest blog post returns with a post by Jenny Evans, Liaison Librarian: Maths and Physics at Imperial College. Jenny provides a background to two blogs (to support the Physics and Maths and Engineering departments) which were set up by liaison librarians in 2006 and answers many of the [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/guest-post-blogs-at-imperial-college/
Last week I gave a talk entitled “From Web Accessibility To Web Adaptability” at the RNIB’s Techshare 2009 conference. I have already posted about this talk and described how I had created a slidecast of a rehearsal of the talk (containing an audio track synched with the slides) in order to (a) check the [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/reflections-on-web-adaptability-and-techshare-2009/
Tim Berners-Lee at the Science Museum
Last Monday I attended a talk on “The Web Revealed” given by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the Science Museum as part of the centenary celebrations for 100 years of the Science Museum. This was a last minute decision – I was about to head off to London as I was [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/what-no-event-hashtag/
Back After A Week Away
Last week was unusual – not a single blog post published in the week. Although there were suggestions at last week’s ALT-C 2009 conference that blogging is in decline with established bloggers making greater use of Twitter, my failure to blog last week was due to being away all week at [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/use-of-twitter-at-the-altc-2009-conference/
Martin Weller and I will be facilitating a workshop session entitled “Realising Dreams, Avoiding Nightmares, Accepting Responsibilities” at the ALT-C 2009 conference. Martin and I met over blog comments and Twitter posts and discovered we had similar interests. In particular Martin and I bounced around some ideas on the theme of “Even if we’re wrong, [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/realising-dreams-avoiding-nightmares-accepting-responsibilities/
The headline in the Technology Guardian supplement read “Skype’s nightmare weekend highlights peer-to-peer fears” two year’s ago back on 23 August 2007. The article described how “Skype’s popular internet telephone service went down on August 16 and was unavailable for between two and three days“.
I remember this incident as, with people’s attention focussed on the [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/skype-two-years-after-its-nightmare-weekend/
This Year’s ALT-C Conference
I will be attending the ALT-C 2009 Conference at the University of Manchester in a couple of weeks time where I’ll be facilitating a session with Martin Weller on “Realising Dreams, Avoiding Nightmares, Accepting Responsibilities” – a title chosen to reflect the conference theme of “In dreams begins responsibility“.
Yesterday I was involved [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/hashtags-for-the-alt-c-2009-conference/
I have been asked to give a talk at a workshop session to be held at the Dublin Core DC-2009 conference on “Semantic Interoperability of Linked Data”. The invitation arose after my recent posts on the use of Twitter at UKOLN’s IWMW 2009 event. The talk is intended for a session on “feral data”. This, [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/feral-event-data-twitter-at-iwmw-2009/
I recently posed the question “Are University Web Teams Too Large?“. The context to this question was a suspicion that the UK HE sector is lagging behind smaller US colleges in exploiting the potential of various Web 2.0 services. And maybe organisations with well-established IT Service departments try to develop services in-house because of the [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/if-not-too-large-are-university-web-teams-poor-communicators/
This year, once again, we provided a live video stream of the plenary talks at IWMW 2009, something we have been doing since IWMW 2006.
But how many people watched the live stream? Last year 160 remote viewers watched the final plenary talk given by Ewan McIntosh. The statistics provided by the University of Essex are [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/the-live-video-streaming-of-iwmw-2009/
Does The Ownership Of Social Networks Really Matter?
In my most recent post entitled “Facebook Buys FriendFeed; Identica is Open Source; Does It Matter?” I asked “But how relevant is this dogma?” in response to the apparent suggestion on a mailing list for an international standards body that since “above all laconi.ca is Open source“ the standards [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/social-networks-open-source-and-risk-assessment/
As described on TechCrunch a couple of days ago, Facebook Acquires FriendFeed. The Monkey Bites blog advises “Let’s Be Friends in its article on how Facebook acquired FriendFeed. But the reaction in the Twitterverse seems to be negative, with concerns that Facebook’s walled garden mentality will be applied to FriendFeed and that the ownership which [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/facebook-buys-friendfeed-identica-is-open-source-does-it-matter/
Mike Richwalski was very busy at IWMW 2009 (and beyond). Mike, Assistant Director of Public Affairs at Allegheny College, submitted a proposal to run a workshop session on “Using Amazon Web Services (AWS)” which we were happy to accept. In subsequent discussions with Mike I discovered that he was not only a techie who knew [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/are-university-web-teams-too-large/
IWMW 2009
This year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop, IWMW 2009, is now over. Despite being the 13th in the series on annual events aimed at members of institutional Web management teams, the event was not unlucky! The largest event audience for an IWMW event (200 registered delegates) arrived at the University of Essex campus which began [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/event-amplification-at-iwmw-2009/
Recently the FireFox browser has been crashing on me. But because FireFox is a Good Thing TM I’ve tending to gloss over the problems (we do this for our loved ones, don’t we). But when the browser started to crash consistently when embedded images in this blog I decided enough was enough. I’ve moaned a [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/firefoxcrashes-or-firefoxisfine/
The JISC is funding a landscape study on the UK HE sector use of content, communication and social networking services developed by commercial companies (or, perhaps more accurately, outside of the JISC sector).
As we know although JISC has developed a number of services specifically for use within the UK higher and further education sector (e.g. Jorum, JISCmail, [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/the-jisc-sis-landscape-study/
On Friday I gave a talk on Benefits of the Social Web at the Association of Independent Museum’s (AIM) annual conference. In the subsequent workshop sessions the issue of the sustainability of the services provided by companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr was raised. In response I asked “Which do you think is likely to be [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/06/08/wholl-last-longer-gordon-or-google/
Whilst reading the Guardian’s RSS feed on my iPod Touch on the bus yesterday I came across an article entitled “The internet – a threat to free speech?“. The opening sentence was intriguing “It’s probably not the best time to be seen defending an MP, but here goes“. In the article Padraig Reidy described how [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/defend-this-tory-mp-yes-really/
I have previously suggested that although I feel that the Social Web has much to offer that doesn’t mean that I would want everyone to have a blog, to Twitter, to record talks and make them freely available on video sharing services. Rather I feel that these approaches should be available to people who wish [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/the-social-web-and-the-belbin-model/
I recently commented how Twitter provides a means for not only finding out and discussing new ideas but also establishing and developing new professional relationships. And sometimes the contacts may take place initially in the blogosphere which can then be supported by discussions, or even just listening, on Twitter.
But how easy do we make it [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/you-care-about-innovation-then-tell-me-what-you-think-not-who-you-work-for/
Yesterday a leader column in The Guardian suggested that the current global economic crisis is “Not your father’s recession“. Rather than being simply the latest downturn in a economic cycle which has been with us since 1945 the leader writer feels that this recession is very different from those we (and our parents) have experienced [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/not-your-fathers-it-innovation/
Yesterday morning I wrote a blog post about the report on “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” published by the Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience (CLEX). In the afternoon I went to the Barbican Centre London in order to attend the official launch of this report. It was good to meet [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/the-launch-of-the-clex09-report/
For the past few months my colleague Marieke Guy has been working on the “Good Practice for Provision of APIs” project. As described on the project blog “the ‘Good APIs’ project aims to provide JISC and the sector with information and advice on the factors that encourage use of machine interfaces, based on existing practice“. [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/the-good-practice-for-provision-of-apis-project/
I have previously described a risks and opportunities framework which I will be presenting shortly at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference.
At the Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists conference I described a slightly updated version of the framework, which includes ‘Critical Friends‘ as a means of ensuring that a degree of [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/further-developments-of-a-risks-and-opportunities-framework/
On the same day that I came across a thread on “Ask a Librarian” on the LIS-LINK JISCMail list, Chris Sexton, Director of Corporate Information and Computing Services at the University of Sheffield, was sharing her 5 interesting things found on my Twitterfeed today… which included:
Ten years of The Guardian on-line plotted in expletives - [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/ask-a-librarian-no-thanks-ill-ask-the-world/
The April 1 Joke
Yesterday (1 st April 2009) I received a couple of email messages from Slideshare which stated that some of the slides which I have uploaded to the Slideshare repository have “been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours“.
Now back on 25th July 2008 I received an email informing me [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/youre-a-slideshare-rockstar-not/
Being brought up in an Irish Catholic environment in the 1960s meant that life was full of religious and moral absolutes. If you were good you’d go to heaven (with some time in purgatory a likelihood) whereas protestants would go to hell. Black babies, who never had the opportunity for redemption, would go to limbo [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/standards-are-for-catholics/
Background
Bath University Computing Services (BUCS) is planning engineering work from 4:30 pm on Friday 27 March until 9:00 am on Monday 30th March 2009. This means that no UKOLN Web sites or services will be available for that period. Further information is available on the BUCS Web site.
Dissemination
As a variety of UKOLN services will be [...]
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/attention-services-unavailable/
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