web 2.0

David E. Williams, from the Health Business Blog recorded an interesting podcast with Dr. Jason Bhan, co-founder of Ozmosis.

Ozmosis is a social network for practicing physicians to share knowledge and communicate. Revolutionary in its nature, Ozmosis uses the rich experience of existing social networks, plus a proprietary "trust" technology, to create a breakthrough environment where physicians can quickly get answers and improve their knowledge.

Ozmosis was made possible by Drupal. Examples of Drupal usage that benefit public are numerous, but if I am not mistaken, this is the first major case of Drupal being used in Healthcare. It's great to see Drupal helping revolutionize the way things are done, especially in such an important area.

Listen to the podcast: [ http://www.healthbusinessblog.com/?p=1804 ]

Web 1.0: Global reach to content publishing.
Web 2.0: Web becomes a two-way publishing avenue: readers contribute content and play central role.
Web 3.0: Let's try make sense of the enormous content published. Smart aggregation becomes key.

It looks like the reality in which content aggregation plays equally important role, compared to publishing, is arriving quietly but steadily:

Image courtesy of Amazon Web Services Blog

P.S. Thanks to Doug for pointing to the blog post.

Nice and funny "analysis" of the Internet community on CreateDebate

Ok, finally Google is starting to make a move against Wikipedia, with the private launch of Google Knol. The specifics of the system are not yet known, but from what we can read between the lines, the interesting difference betwen Knol and Wikipedia is that in Knol content will be authored by a "group of experts" (that will later be able to share ad-revenue with Google for their efforts?).

If this is true, then clearly Google is responding to the long-standing joke (started in the TV show Office) that Wikipedia is reliable "because anybody can edit it". Google must be proud to "have gotten the message"... of all conservatives who refuse to accept Wikipedia.

Good job, Google! Nice swing from a progressive thinking away and into aligning with stagnating conservativism. So, Google does not believe in the Wisdom of Crowds, anymore? And here we thought the whole point James Surowiecki was making was that crowds are always smarter than a bunch of "experts". Ironic, how we are going back to "experts", is not it?

You, my friends, can make "Knols" (What the heck is this with Google people trying to come up with an alternative English, anyway?) as your "the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.", but I am sticking with Wikipedia. Wiki has been the first entry into a new subject, for me, for a long time now and I am not complaining.

I think Google is just desperately reacting to the unfortunate reality that people now prefer to start research in Wikipedia rather than Google. Desperation is never a good adviros, though and Google seems to be missing the point.

I assess the chances of Knol's success somewhere near that of Google Video and Orkut.

*sigh*

Last week, the major news on the Web was the launch of OpenSocial. Google did an excellent job documenting APIs and publishing quick-start tutorials and videos, as well as signing-up an impressive group of early adopters. All that is left to us, the blogger by-standers, is to review, envy and criticize. That is exactly what we are going to do.

Since it's too early, I, personally have only a few, quick comments. These comments may be totally off, so I insist on the right to change my statement at-will. Nevertheless, the first impression of OpenSocial is highly positive. The API is clear, concise and pragmatic. Pragmatism and (at least an attempt of) parsimony are a necessary feature for such API. It seems like Google is on the right track on that front.

Some of our readership, coming from the Java/J2EE world, may draw parallels between OpenSocial and Java Portlets API (JSR-168). Java Portlets API was created about four years ago, intended to be a plugin infrastructure for Java-based web sites (a plan much less ambitious than that of OpenSocial) and - failed miserably. The main reason why it failed was that it was too restrictive in the areas that do not matter, and too general in the areas they should have described in detail. Areas like user profile management, user actions, user interactions. Basically, JSR-168 was page-centric, rather than user-centric and the demand is for a user-centric integration. Rendering is a job of a container.

OpenSocial has clearly avoided the trap that JSR-168 fell into. They concentrate on the right features: people, activities, persistence. The choice of the platform - Javascript, REST (bye-bye SOAP), Atom, RSS, HTML and CSS makes complete sense. The API is quite modular, reasonably high-level and what seems like flexible-enough to allow for all kinds of applications. We were shown some very different applications in the demos, created by different vendors.

Now that we have praised OpenSocial enough, and probably nobody had any doubt in its huge potential, anyway, let's mention some oddities, we've noticed:

Web these days is full of spam-bots, malicious crawlers and other "e-pests" that post junk-advertising all over the Net. These parasites give the most headache to blogs and social sites, where moderators want to free-up comments to general audience ("Two-Way Communication", eh?), but have no desire to promote illegal Viagra sales.

Captcha, or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, is one of the most effective tools to fight evil machines with. Unfortunately, not all Captcha is equal. Many Captcha systems are vulnerable and have been hacked, rendered useless against all but the most primitive spamming.

reCAPTCHA is a service from Carnegie Mellon University. This service is a prime example of blending pleasant with useful in a very Web 2.0-ish way. reCAPTCHA provides a free, high-quality protection and at the same time helps digitize old books. Every time you use reCaptcha, you help digitize one word of a book that was written before the digital age. How much cooler can it get? Well, reCaptcha also provides enhanced accessibility through audio-Captchas. That one is not easy to "code" yourself, and I don't know of any other free service that offers it.

Great job, guys!

... or his campaign team does. Either way, when I logged into my Linkedin account yesterday and saw a banner spotlighting Barack Obama's participation in one of my interest groups, I could not help a "wow" reaction.

We have already blogged that 2008 Presidential campaign is being run in an unprecedentedly Web-savvy manner. Pretty much all candidates, in both parties, have a MySpace page and a bunch of YouTube videos, at the least. This may sound trivial now, but if you look back 4 years ago - the picture was quite different, was it not? The candidates have come a long way, but Barack's team is taking it a notch further. Whilst most candidates do suffice with the minimal - MySpace, YouTube, maybe FaceBook, the featured participation of Obama in a specific interest group on Linkedin is a great example of entering the conversation on the Web at the right spot.

Anybody who has ever applied to a US university has at least heard the name of the US News & World Report. Their website of the US educational institutions' rankings is the most comprehensive and authoritative one. To give you a flavor, the US News ranking for business schools is equally, or maybe even more recognized than the one from the Financial Times.

It was a pleasant news to find-out that the authoritative publication has expanded its ranking outreach into other areas as well. The recently launched US News Rankings and Reviews website [rankingsandreviews.com] is in public beta, right now, featuring only car reviews. One can assume, however, that this is just a first step and we should expect more from the reliable source.

Stay tuned.

When Google first launched GMail, it fundamentally changed the free, web-based email service arena. The "big" players back then, Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail were only allowing up to 5MB of storage, forcing users to spend more time on cleaning up their inboxes than actually using the e-mail service. Then there came Google with unimaginable mailbox sizes of 1GB for free and aggressively PRed mantra of "so you'll never need to delete another message.".

That was all nice and dandy, but apparently did not quite live up to the promise, since I just got this message today:

Bummer.

I was part of the early cohort of GMail users that got the service through private invitations, so I have been using it for about three years, now. That, granted, is quite a number of emails. However, I do not use my GMail as a hard disk or anything of the kind. I simply follow the mantra of GMail, by almost never bothering to delete any of my e-mails (except spam or things that get in my way). And in return I get this ungrateful message saying that I exceeded blah blah?

Grrrr... Google, shame on you! :)

Kijiji US is eBay's attempt to bury Craigslist. It has been buzzed about for a while now, but I received an e-mail announcement, from eBay, only this morning. I guess, it is official starting today.

Kijiji is wrong on many levels, as in - it should have never existed in the first place wrong. An industry leader with wallet as fat as eBay's simply has to absorb iconic successes like Craigslist that rub shoulders against its primary business. Instead, eBay purchased minority share (25%) of Craigslist, in 2004 and a year later launched Kijiji overseas. Now it is bringing Kijiji to the US market, to directly compete with the company that it owns a large part of.

I have no idea what kind of world does the sequence of eBay's moves makes sense in, but who am I to judge? No doubt, eBay's executives are plotting something that our simple minds can not reach. After all, that is why they are eBay executives and us - just a bunch of lousy bloggers with too much time on our hands, right?

With a modest attitude like that, I give up analyzing the business strategy behind Kijiji and its future prospects. Instead, let me offer you a screenshot snippet that I found quite amusing:

Now, District of Columbia has indeed been "blessed" to have a special status, taxation without representation and alternatives for spelling, but I swear I have never seen it spelled as "D. Columbia". eBay did really go down the innovative path on this one.

Laughing out loud.