Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

Did my first purchase on Amazon. Normally, I buy books at the local webstore proxis.be. Amazon is great, don't get me wrong. Their referencing, recommended books, your reading wish list, various APIs that sites can use to plug into Amazon, etc... It's just that I don't live in any of the countries Amazon set up a site in (USA, France, Germany, UK). I live in Belgium so I can never benefit of any of Amazon's free shipment offers. Proxis is a Belgian site and doesn't charge for local shipments. Actually, I had to figure out what Amazon site to use best because they all have different shipping cost calculations and tariffs. Strange for an international company... I choose the French one. The reason I did buy my books at Amazon this time is because one single book on my list was only available via Amazon. It's 'Informal Learning' by Jay Cross.

The experience to buy books from Amazon is as good as with any book shop I guess (never had a bad experience with any). Easy to set up a profile, put books in your shopping basket, pay and wait for delivery.

These are the books I am going to read in the coming months:
- The Speed of Trust (Stephen MR Covey)
- How to Sell Yourself (Arch Lustberg)
- Informal Learning (Jay Cross)
- Lies about learning (Larry Israelite)

Most of these were speakers at the Learning 2006 conference (organised by Elliott Masie). It is not a coincidence :-) .

WeHow.com is the beta web2.0 experiment from the ehow.com site. On both sites you can find articles with answers, tips, warnings and step-by-step instructions for many problems. Both sites work with a fixed taxonomy, not a 'folksonomy' with tags. The difference is that on ehow.com experts write out the articles. On WeHow.com this is done by Average Joe who thinks he is an expert in some domain. The tag line of the site is 'share what you know'? As a concept it is close, but more limited than about2findout.com.

Related sites are answerbag.com and wikihow.com.
As an example, this is an article on how to ask for a raise. This is a similar article on the wiki version.

I've enrolled in the beta trial of another web2.0 service at getclicky.com.

It is a free service to analyse your web traffed. It has been designed for blogs, but should work on any site according to the makers. I heard about it via the Museum of Modern Beta's and decided to give it a try. Last week I got a mail that signup was opened again and created a free account. You need to provide the URL to your site/blog, and include a small script in your blog template or on every HTML page of your site.
That was 3 days ago.
So, how is the service? Actually, pretty good. It would seem I had 6 vistors to this page today, 4 from Belgium, 1 from India and 1 from Australia (hi!). Three use firefox, three use IE. You can even see what links are clicked most, and what websites your visitors were coming from (that linked to your site). Clicky is a nice service that gives you some interesting statistics on your site usage. Recommended.

This weekend, I played with Ajax on my "toy" project 6C Quotes. More specifically, I added a star rating control to the site. You can see the differences for yourself:
- http://www.about2findout.com/6CQuotes/default.aspx is the 'normal' page
- http://www.about2findout.com/6CQuotes/defaultajax.aspx is the 'ajax' page

The quote (pink area) is now an autonomeous update panel. That means if you refresh the quote, only the pink square is refresed, and the rest of the page is not reloaded by a server round trip. That also means when you click the 'New Quote' button, you stay where you were on the page. The star rating control itself is part of the upcoming Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit.

So what did I find out that I wanted to share?
- The start place for AJAX on an ASP.NET platform is the site http://ajax.asp.net . There are two parts you need do download and install. First of all the Ajax framework extention itself. This is the core functionality (codename ATLAS) made and supported by Microsoft. It is currently in release candidate 1 and will ship soon. Secondly the Ajax Control Toolkit. This is a set of ready-to-use controls that are built upon the framework and created by an open source community (so not Microsoft itself). It's a combination that seems to work.
- For the rating control and basic information on ajax on asp.net, have a look at the free video tutorials on asp.net (free) or on aspalliance.com (free registration). Highly recommended! I think they are made with Camtasia Studio, but I'm not sure.
- If you want to AJAX-enable existing asp.net applications, you need to add these lines in the web.config file (see attachment webconfigcode.txt)


- You also need to add the AjaxControlToolkit.dll in the \bin folder of your application. If your hosting provider hasn't installed the Ajax extentions on the server yet, you also need the core framework DLLs (System.Web.Extentions.dll) in that \bin folder.
- .PNG image files don't work in a transparant way in most browsers, so I chose some .GIF star images
- I couldn't figure out how to have a message 'Thank you for rating' without adding an extra button and adding a server round-trip. I don't want to add another button, users already need to click a lot.
- The System.Math.Round() function doesn't round properly, or at least not how I would like it to. (Which is how I learned it in school.) For example, it rounds 4.66 to 4. So I made my own rounding formula.

I want to use the Ajax controls on about2findout.com, so I need to play around with them. It's a slow start to implement one feature like star rating on an entire sunday, but I need to get the basics first. So far, Ajax seems a nice technology.

Labels: ajax, asp.net

LinkedIn.com is one of the leading profesional networking sites. You make a free profile, and link with collegues, classmates and basically everybody you are not afraid to show your CV to. With LinkedIn.com you can expand your professional network and get in touch with new contacts through your network, write endorsements, get alerts when somebody changes positions or jobs, search for a new job, etc. LinkedIn is free, but charges for additional services such as job postings.

This is a link to my profile.


On this blog from Guy Kawasaki you will find ten tips to use linkedin.

They recently added a new section to their site for exchanging knowledge: LinkedIn Answers. Users ask questions, you browse the questions in your areas of expertise and answer them, and if you provide the best answers, you become an official expert in those areas.

What I personally admire on LinkedIn is the way they do the follow-up. When I signed up for my free account some year ago, there was a good chance LinkedIn would become yet another site where I once made a free profile and hardly ever went back to. But they send you a mail every so many months with relevant information such as new contacts, a reminder to search for classmates or colleagues from your company, etc.

Labels: linked-in

Over 90% of e-mail these days is spam. More than half of blog entries are also spam. Many forums or sites that allow commenting become victim of spam or inappropriate comments. Very often the spam is inserted automatically by bots. One way to fight bots is to check via CAPTCHA.

You have seen it before: the picture with a few characters that you need to type, for example when you sign up for an account or if you want to comment to this post on blogger. (Try it!) The idea is that software agents cannot recognise the characters within the picture.

I just added a CAPTCHA component to my experimental site about2findout.com/6CQuotes. From now on you can no longer suggest a new quote (which sends me a mail) without typing in the CAPTCHA 5-character code.
I've found this excellent CaptchaControl component on The Code Project. It's free to use.

What I learned in my little experiment:
- You can add a control to the Visual Studio toolbox by right-clicking the toolbox, selecting 'choose items...' from the drop down menu, clicking the Browse button and pointing to the DLL file of the provided component.
- You need to add the httphandler section in the web.config file of your application for the CaptchaControl to work. (as described in the CodeProject article or in provided example)

DECISION: I'm going to use CAPCHA on the about2findout.com site for login, setting up an account and posting comments.

Labels: 6C Quotes, asp.net, CAPTCHA

Flickr is one of the most popular web2.0 sites around. Flickr enables you to upload your photo's, share them with others, comment on (parts of) pictures, interact with your contacts and communities, tag pictures, etc. It is now part of Yahoo. It made many web2.0 features popular : tagging, clean interface, ajax elements, user rating etc. There are even sites now that just like flickr drop the 'e' in the 'er' ending (for example blogmailr.com).

As a business model Flickr uses advertisement income from its free account, and a yearly subscription fee (around 25$) for the PRO members, who get additional upload rights and features.

My friend is heavily into Flickr (he celebrated 10000 views last month) and you can find his pictures here. I also have opened a Flickr account just to play around, and to store the pictures that will be used on the Bed&Breakfast site of my mother-in-law. You can find my sets here.

What I especially like about the Flickr interface and I want to have in about2findout.com as well, is the greeting in a random language (Aloha Bert) and the menu box that lists your main options on any page.

I also want about2findout.com to be able to use Flickr pictures. There is a special section to search for royalty-free pictures under Creative Commons. Flickr also has an upload tool that will automatically size your pictures for web delivery, which is handy.

Labels: flickr

On the site http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.php you can find a free tool to check the gender of the writer. Based on some research of very important people who's name I don't know, you can now copy/paste the text of fiction, non-fiction or a blog entry and the tool will tell you if it thinks the writer is male or female. It's based on the frequency of typical male or female key words.

So next time you are unsure if that person in MSN messenger is of the right gender, try it out!

In case you were wondering: I'm male. (Yep, that's right. If you don't believe me, check it out for yourself.)

Every year in Flanders the competition 'BizIdee' is organised. It's a free competition for innovative ideas and business plans, and to promote enterpreneurship. But it is not only a competition in 3 rounds, because participants get plenty of tools, tips, events, feedback and coaching to get them started.

One of those tools is the Creativity Index test from Creax. I scored 76,88 in case you are wondering. So how creative are you?

I just entered about2findout.com to BizIdee, and I hope to get some valuable feedback and contacts out of it.

Even web2.0 sites need money. Money to host, to develop and above all a lot of money to maintain a good quality service level day to day. The difference between community based applications and enterprise applications is in the amount of money needed. If a lot of people will put in their hours for free, well that saves a lot! And if you don't need money for profits, shareholders or taxes, that saves even more. But there are always costs, and it is a dream to maintain a popular site with no income whatsoever. Every organisation needs a sound business model, even if your products are for free. Those who denie basic economics may find themselves out of business quite soon. In retrospect they will probably say it was another bubble. No, it was just stupid.

Many web2.0 sites rely on advertisement income to cover their costs. Of course, you need the necessary eyeballs for that. Today I want to talk about another valid business model for the internet: serving the long tail.

In his book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson suggests that the Web and low-cost technologies have made it possible to finally address the underserved demand that results from scarce resources (for instance, shelf space, capital, bandwidth) and superficial barriers (such as geography, regulations, culture). Anderson’s research has determined that this underserved demand could double the size of an addressable market while actually decreasing the costs of addressing it.

The term 'long tail' comes from statistics. Remember your statistics course and the bell shaped 'normal distribution'? Well, that thing tells you that about 70% of a population is within 1 standard deviation from the mean. Remember? :-) Anyway, it is the kind of logic to store 20% of the most popular cd-roms in your store because 80% of buyers will want those. Since you can't physically store all records ever made in your store, you can't offer them. So you try to optimise your scarce shop floor by offering the most sold or most profit generating items. Makes sense. Traditional business will focus on the bulk of the bell shape. And now enters the internet. Via the internet is it perfectly possible to offer all music ever made at the same cost of serving. There is no scarcity in storing digital bytes on the internet. So you can serve the other part of the bell curve that others typically leave out. You can become the place where people find songs they can never find in stores. You serve 'the long end' of the bell curve.

Everyone is making lists these days, so I couldn't resist. This is the list of topics I would like the learning professionals and the learning industry take to heart in 2007:

1- Architecture

Architecture is not just about IT systems. It's a combination of people, processes and systems. I would like to see more focus on the design of the learning function.

Architecture comes to mind when you think of buildings. Buildings need architecture because they are complex systems with many components (foundations, walls, electricity, heating,...), because you want to be able to redo it later on, and because you want to be able to change it later on. Without a blueprint that would be close to impossible. We need more architecture in learning for the same reasons: it is complex, we want to be able to redo it and we want to be able to change/maintain it. So we need a blueprint of how the people, processes and systems in the learning function deliver their goals.

2- Reuse of content

It has been a promise of the learning industry for years: reuse of content. It is one of the main reasons that make organisations standardize on SCORM or AICC. It is one of the main reasons why we design our learning products as a combination of small 'reusable' learning objects.

But it doesn't happen. Why?

There are dozens of LMS vendors out there, but end of this quarter we will have one single dominant worldwide player for content: SkillSoft. (And a bunch of small, local players.) There is just no competitive and efficient market place for content. I would like so see more focus on sharing/selling content. What stops us from doing it?

3- Localisation

Another wet dream of the learning industry is to one day be able to assemble a course 'just in time', adapted to the unique needs, delivery capabilities and style of the learner. It will not happen in 2007, but we can already progress halfway between this dream and the one-size-fits-all approach we still take too often. We can start localising our learning products better. With localising I mean not just translating (which is important on its own), but also making the examples and exercises relevant to the learner, the learner's organisation and the learner's work context.
So what does it take to be better at localising content?


So that's my proposal for the learning agenda this year. I'm even too realistic in my dreams: I did not dare include measuring the impact of learning, but some day we need to get our act together on that one too. Hypes last for years, but when they are over you need to be able to prove your value. Maybe in 2008...

I stumbled upon Quotiki, a web site to share and rate quotes. I'm a big fan of quotes myself. In fact, I'm collecting quotes and statements on learning.

You can find back quotes by keyword or author, and the popular 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' buttons allow you to rate the quotes. It is yet another example of a web2.0 site that lets its users create, filter and rate the content.

DECISION: about2findout.com will also use the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons to filter comments.