Throughout the semester we were tasked with blogging about our progress on our semester projects. I have found this to be a very beneficial way to journal all of my progress and findings. I have enjoyed this so much that I think I’m going to continue to use my blog in this manner for future courses and projects. In fact, I have a Senior Project that I am going to be working on over the Summer and this will be an excellent way to keep track of my progress on this project. It will also give me a point of reference for my thought process and the methodologies that I used when creating my project. This will come in handy when giving my presentation because I’ll be able to remember exactly what I did and why.
James gave his presentation in class. I was unable to attend the actual presentation but I did listen to the podcast that was created. I thought it was pretty neat that IUPUI is interested in using Web 2.0 technologies outside of our CIT499 class. I think this will only be a good thing and as a university we need to break into this realm of technology because it’s the wave of the future.
Using facebook to keep CIT students updated on various things is a very good idea. Student’s are already on facebook very often so it makes sense to update them on educational events etc. in a place that they frequent.
I’ll be interested to see how this pans out and evolves over time.
I actually gave my semester project presentation during class today. I received a lot of good constructive critisism on how to make my mashup even better and more useful. Overall, I am please with the way the project went and especially what I learned about Web 2.0 by working on the project all semester.
I’m going to make modifications to my mashup to make it even more useful for my co-workers. I will also be asking my boss if I can use some time at work to update the mashup and make changes that will benefit our team.
Today we started class by discussing chapter 14 from the book “The World is Flat” by Tom Friedman. This chapter discusses how technology has made communication very accessible however it’s made interaction with others in a face-to-face manner a thing of the past. He uses the analogy that we have dog’s hearing. This lead into a new venture called “Attention Economy”. This is a marketplace where consumers agree to receive services in exchange for their attention. The Attention Economy is about the consumer having choice. They get to choose where their attention is spent.
Dr. Ho also discussed an event called Alliance of Youth Movements. This event was about young people coming together using social media to advance their particular cause. These sessions can be found at youthmovements.howcast.com.
Dr. Ho shared with us a story about an IUPUI student named Keith John Sampson. A couple of years ago during a work break Keith was reading a book. One of his coworkers took exception to him reading the book because she thought it was a racist book. She turned him in to human resources. Keith was told not to read the book and took a hit on his employment record for racial harassment. Keith went to the ACLU and a group called FIRE for help. These groups appealed to IUPUI administration to take a second look at the situation. Keith ended up getting a letter of apology from the chancellor of IUPUI. However, if you Google his name you immediately think that he may be guilty of racial harassment because of the headings that show up on the subject. This is very much a burden for Keith because now when he starts to search for a job after graduation future employees may Google his name and not like what they see at first glance. This story just goes to show you that your online identity can be jeopardized even at no fault of your own.
It’s important to realize how sacred your online identity can be. We need to teach our young people how to manage and protect that online identities because their reputations will be cast in cement at a much earlier age than ever before. They need to think of their online identity as a lifelong resume that needs to stay clean.
I completed my CIT499 semester project. I put the finishing touches on the project by doing a summary write up on the project. I also put together a PowerPoint presentation to help me outline what I did all semester. The actual presentation will actually be given in class this coming Wednesday. I am please with all that I learned this semester about Web 2.0 and mashups. There are many very useful online tools available that I would not have known about had it not been for this class and this project. I will be sharing the project with my co-workers to get their feedback and to help them understand how Web 2.0 technologies can help us at work.
We started class by discussing the video podcast that we watched during the last class by Tim Berrners-Lee. I didn’t realize that the new version of the Web is coined “The Semantic Web”. The Semantic Web is a web of data. It’s about the common formats for integration and the combination of data drawn from diverse sources. With the use of XML instead of HTML we can start to create a web of data that is relational. This can create a new Web that is much more useful for searches etc.
We spoke about the idea of an online application that could be used to track traffic issues for instance pot holes, traffic signal problems etc. This could be a good way to use link data to accomplish something like this. It could be used like other social networking sites where people could post an issue and then others could comment or vote on that issue to make sure it’s valid. You could also favorite a route or section of the map to personalize it. This portion of the map would be of most interest to you because it would contain the areas of the city that you travel most. I could see this as a very beneficial online service to provide to the city.
We learned from James that there is a Facebook app for Twitter. The application allows you to send tweets to your facebook status by using the hash tag #FB. This authenticates to your facebook account and posts your twitter tweet. This sounds like it could be a useful app to kill two birds with one stone.
Only a few more classes left.
Dr. Ho spoke about different blog technologies in class today. He showed us the Lijit search wijit report that he received over the weekend. This report contained information about stats taken from his blog that were recorded via the serch wijit. This report provides information about the number of searches that were performed on the blog and what critera these searches contained. We also discussed another blogging site called technorati. You can present your blog to this site and allow other users to “fan” your blog if they are interested in it. Almost like friending someone in facebook. It’s pretty amazing how much blogging has taken off in the past five years. It demonstrates how hungry people are to get their thoughts and ideas out to be shared by other people.
We also watched a video by Tim Berners-Lee on the Next Web. This was especially interesting to me because he spoke about data on the web. He referred to it as “Linked Data”. Link Data is basically relational data on the web that people can link to. Being a database administrator I immediately thought of the web being used a huge relational database management system like SQL Server that people could have access to, or link to. He asks about obtaining raw data that hasn’t been massaged or manipulated yet as the type of data that will be uploaded to the web. I really liked the analogy he used about social networking sites being relational data stores. I never thought of it in those terms but it makes sense. The main point he is trying to make is that if every person does their little bit to provide linked data it would be extremely beneficial for everyone going forward with the “Next Web”.
Pretty interesting stuff…
I started writing my summary paper for my CIT499 project the other day. What I thought was going to be a brief summary ended up being a three page paper. I was a little bit surprised when I looked back over my blog postings discover all of the things I learned about Web 2.0 that I incorporated into my Yahoo Pipes mashup project. This course taught me quite a bit about Web 2.0 and social networking. I’m also quite pleased with the outcome of my project.
I’ve added a Lijit search wijit to my blog on Monday which was over 48 hours ago. When I search on it I still don’t get any results returned. I sent a tweet to the Lijit support using Twitter to ask them for some help. I can see how this tool can be very useful if I can actually get it to work correctly.
Hopefully I will get a response soon and be able to figure out how to fix the wijit.
I updated my Yahoo Pipes mashup again. This time I added another YQL module and connected it to a feed from sqlblog.com. This is a site for SQL Server database administrators to blog about anything and everything SQL related. I setup my YQL module to filter the feed for blog postings about SQL Server 2008 SP1. We are currently upgrading to SQL Server 2008 and Service Pack 1 was just released for this version. What’s nice about the YQL module is you can simply update it with any string that you would like to search the feed on and it will return only feeds containing this string in the heading. This will be a handy resource to use when we want to see what other SQL DBA’s out in the field are blogging about.
