Shareables

Flattr - future of micro donations

A recent upgrade of Flattr suddenly made the service extremely more useful and powerful than before. Flattr is a peer 2 peer microdonation service that allows content creators to receive micro-donations with each Love (or Like) they receive if they (or their content host) installed a Flattr button. As a giver, you specify an amount that can be flattered each month, and that will be equally distributed to all those “flattered” by you.

Now, however, they upgraded the service so you can easily connect popular services like 500px, Instagram and others, and people can just use the particular service’s Like/Love/Fav or other token of appreciation as an input for a microdonation.

The Google generation: myth or reality?

Digital natives

Very comprehensive list that critically analyzes many of the claims made about the Net Gen, Homo Zappiens, Digital Natives, Millenials, or whatever the kids born in the 90s are called. What should be noted is that only in some cases, opposite claims are made, but in most cases, it is just explained that there is no clear evidence supporting the original claim. The research is published in 2008 and the sources they have used to do their analysis even older, so more recent insights will probably add additional proof. However, the list gives a good overview of the different claims used and shows that one should be careful in interpreting what is said.

Paper: Rowlands, I., Nicholas, D., Williams, P., Huntington, P., Fieldhouse, M., Gunter, B., Withey, R., et al. (2008). The Google generation: the information behaviour of the researcher of the future. Aslib Proceedings, 60(4), 290–310. doi:10.1108/00012530810887953

Many of the claims made on behalf of the Google generation in the popular media fail to stack up fully against the evidence (Williams and Rowlands, 2007, pp. 11-18). Over the following pages, we try to assess these claims on the basis of the very scant available evidence.

Confidence level: low [a], medium [b] or high [c].

They are more competent with technology[b] (see confidence level above). Our verdict: generally true, we think, but older users are catching up fast. However, the majority of young people tend to use much simpler applications and fewer facilities than many imagine.

Continuations: One Graph (Search) To Rule Them All?

continuations:

Yesterday Facebook announced its long awaited search offering which they are calling graph search. It is the logical way to make the graph data that Facebook has been accumulating on its own and through its open graph accessible to users. Graph search is launching in beta with the obvious…

Good questions regarding Facebook Graph Search and future of the Web.

Downes Future of Learning - A summary

Last week, in the train, I digested the 40 page report by Stephen Downes on the “Future of Online Learning” (original blog post, download PDF or Word here). He wrote similar report 10 years ago, which you can find here.

You can read the index and scroll through the embedded document below. Below it I have pointed out the stuff I find interesting…

Downes - Future of Online Learning 2008

Attention profiling…. nice discussion about privacy and identity

Attention profiling is making profiles based on someone’s online activities (comments, blogs, music, bookmarks, etc.). Nowadays, this information is usually not available for the user hem/herself, but stored and analyzed by a private organization who can do whatever it wants to do (like adverstisements: Google). APML is a standard that these websites can implement, making the profiles available for the user to be used according to the user’s wishes.

Great idea, and I believe in it, but this interesting post, and very interesting discussion, is more than a year old, and since then not much is heard of the mentioned initiatives and companies working with APML. Any ideas or suggestions why this is so?

clipped from mashable.com

APML: The Next Big Thing or the Next FOAF?

The concept of APML is that it allows you to share your “attention profile” data with other users, organisations or programs in the same way you might share your OPML file with someone. The most compelling reason I can gather why the internet world as a whole needs to line up behind the concept of APML because companies are already gathering so much data that used to be considered private and sacred, so we all need to get out in front of it now and define the process of gathering that information, and attempt - as users - to control a bit of that.