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Sneak Peek: Mozilla’s Theme Revamp for Firefox 3.7

Jeremy Muncy — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:23:20 +0000

Firefox 3.5 has only been around for about a month now, but Mozilla is currently working on version 3.7

What do you think about the new design changes? Tell us.

Over on Mozilla’s Wiki, some Firefox 3.7 Windows Theme Mockups were recently posted. Mozilla is quick to note that:

"These are NOT FINAL! THEY ARE ONLY FOR BRAINSTORMING / EXPLORATION!"

Mozilla has even explained some of the new additions coming for version 3.7, which go along with the first screenshot below. (You’ll probably notice that Mozilla has numbers 2 and 3 mixed up, just wanted to clear that up before anyone got confused.)

Embracing Glass: Toolbar and Tabs using Glass. Buttons translucent and slightly glossy to meld with the toolbar. Raised 3D lookachieve tactile "feel".
Tools/Bookmark Bar: Connecting the Tools button to the side of the Window to emphasize the fact that it is used for customizing and changing the UI. Adding a button next to that to toggle the Bookmarks Bar which is turned off by default.
Page Button: Connect the Page button to the left side of the tab area. Directly connected to the Page.

Below you can see the screenshot without the glass look (Vista’s Aero).

One last screenshot of Firefox 3.7… this one shows what the browser would look like on Windows XP with the various colors (Luna, Silver, Olive and Royale).

What are your thoughts of these very early screenshots of Firefox 3.7? Tell us.

RecentChangesCamp: Barcamp For The Wiki Way

Ross Mayfield — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:21:05 +0000

RecentChangesCamp, the Barcamp for the wiki way, is May 9-11th in Palo Alto:

RecentChangesCamp was born from the intersection of wiki and OpenSpace – a very wiki-like way of organizing gatherings. A lot of cool people into wiki, community and collaboration will be there – what do you want to talk with them about? Every participant is invited to lead their own sessions; the guideline is to take responsibility for what you love. In addition to general and technical conversations about – and actual coding on – wikis and other software, session topics from past RCCs have covered subjects from art to social organizing to philanthropy, playing a creative conversation game, and individual & group coding practices. See the past conference wikis for more complete lists and session notes.

Anyone and everyone is invited to attend. You will especially enjoy Recent Changes Camp, if you happen to be any of the the following:

*    Member of any open wiki community or someone who uses wikis at work, school or in any other context
* Interested in community, action, collaboration, creativity or any other activity in which the self-organizing power of wiki might be helpful
*    Interested in the OpenCulture and/or OpenTechnology movements
*    Interested in knowledge creation and sharing knowledge
*    A generally curious and inquisitive person

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Social Media Buzz Words List: Part I

Jim Tobin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:44:58 +0000

In December, as part of a tongue-in-cheek print ad, we listed 25 social media buzzwords that make you feel cool if you say them. Surprisingly, that post still gets a fair amount of traffic, and with so many people new to social media, we still get questions about, “What do these all mean?” The most recent request for definitions was just last night. So, without further adieu, here are my brief definitions in layman’s terms.

We’ll make this like a quiz in reverse. How did I do? Think I missed the point on any of them? Let me know in the comments.

1. Social graph: The social graph is a diagram of the interconnections between people, with the people serving as nodes, and the lines between them showing the connections. But hey, it sounds much cooler if you now refer to it like this. Thus, it’s a buzzword. Well respected blogger (actually, some say inventor of blogging), Dave Winer says that social graph and social network are the same thing, and you sound like a monkey if you use the term social graph.

2. Twitter: This one is easy. Twitter is either a “presence app” or a “microblogging tool” depending on whom you ask. In English that means, it’s a place where you send short updates to say what you’re up to (thus the word “presence”) and/or it’s a place where you can do very short (140 characters or less, like a text message) posts that might share good articles, etc. It’s a great tool for keeping in touch with a group, believe it or not. You can see my “Tweets”, as they’re called, here.

3. LinkedIn: Often called Facebook for grown-ups, but I think that’s wrong. Linked-In, in my view, is your resume online plus the ability to connect with a wide array of folks. Good place to find jobs, connect with people for new business, ask a question and get a good answer, etc. Maybe it’s Facebook for work. I could live with that explanation. If you’re reading this, and you’re not on LinkedIn, join right now. I don’t know why you wouldn’t.

4. Semantic Web: Ok, you’re really cool if you casually work this one into conversation. Picture that all the data on the web was sort of tagged and defined so that computers themselves could know what those pieces were. If so, then the Internet itself (or actually the computers connected to it) could analyze that data and do some of the “thinking” for us. Cool, huh?

5. Wiki: Wikis are collaboration tools. They allow multiple people to work in the same document, and that document lives online. Plus, it saves all the old versions, keeps a history of who changed what, etc. So it’s way better than Word in that respect, particular for groups that aren’t on a shared server. But, besides Wikipedia, these haven’t taken off like people thought they would, in part because you need to know a few wiki codes to make things bold, etc.

6. Widget: I define widgets as mini-applications that can live away from their parents. Probably not the definition that you’ll see in a dictionary, but it works for me. These might be desktop widgets that update the weather for you automatically, for example. (Vista and Mac OS both have widget capability.) Or they live in Facebook, Open Social, or many other places. A lot of folks are using widgets to drive traffic to their sites, which is sort of counter-intuitive.

7. KickApps: This one is just fun to say, because everyone thought you cursed there for a second. But KickApps is a very cool tool for building your own social networks. And they’ll give it to you free if you let them run ads on your network. (Or you can buy out the ads. If you do, you can have no ads or you can sell your own ads and make money.)

8. Tumblr: I’ve only played a little with Tumblr, but it’s a way to post really short blog posts. Some people call it the blogging platform for busy people. You can also pull in feeds from your other posts, share pictures, etc. Think of it as in-between super-short Twitter and super robust WordPress (which this site uses).

9. del.icio.us: Ah, it’s fun to say delicious seemingly out of context, too. Del.icio.us is (a) very hard to remember when you type it the first few times and (b) a better way to save your bookmarks. Say you like a page and want to hang on to it. You can CTRL-D and save it as a bookmark on your computer (and only that computer) or you can save it to del.icio.us. If you do the latter, you can get it on any computer. More than that, there’s a social component to del.icio.us. For example, if you are the one who always bookmarks stuff I like, I can follow your tagged entries. Poof, look at all the time you saved me!

10. Enterprise 2.0: In my mind Enterprise 2.0 is simply this: Using all this social media stuff to change the way we work within an organization. How we collaborate. How we use the wisdom of crowds. That sort of thing. And again, think of how cool you sound when you say this. w00t!

11. Social Media Optimization: Ok, you’ve got content. You put it out in press releases, white papers, yada yada. Social Media Optimization is about making that data portable. Can it be subscribed to through RSS? Can someone submit it to Digg? Can someone take your video and embed it on their site? That sort of thing. A social media newsroom is a great example of SMO for press content.

12. Meme: First of all, how do you say this? It rhymes with dream. To me, memes are ideas that catch on, and a variety of people run with them, build on them, expand on them. The definitions for this one are somewhat varied, but I just sort of think of them in the simplest terms as an idea that spreads.

13. Mash-ups: Mash-ups are great. Take two pieces of content and mash them together to make something new. One very, very common one is a custom Google map, for example. Here’s one that Gene in our office did a while back. But mash-ups are limited only by your imagination and computer skills, so don’t just think they are Google maps.

That’s it for today. I’ve got some work to do, and this is taking a bit longer than I expected. Look for Part II tomorrow or Friday. I’ll link to it here when it’s up.

How am I doing so far? Any that you think I missed the boat on? Let me know in the comments.

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Google Sites: JotSpot Returns, Joins Apps

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:03:33 +0000

Google wiki acquisition, JotSpot, returned to public view as part of Google Apps, with a new name and 10GB storage for free accounts.

News of Google’s JotSpot purchase haunted the Internet on Halloween in 2006. Then, like the best candies in the trick-or-treat bag, it vanished from public view aside from JotSpot’s existing userbase.

Today, a trip to Google Apps reveals the return of JotSpot. The clever name had to be erased, a sacrifice to the gods of uniform corporate branding. JotSpot goes forward as Google Sites.

The functionality of Google Sites fits in with the other Apps services. Sites has a minimal learning curve, without having to muck about with icky HTML code to create a page. Several templates will get the Sites user up and running.

Through permission controls, access to viewing and editing Sites may be given to a few people or an organization. Any Sites pages may be opened to the world, in true wiki fashion.

With any change to Apps comes the perquisite Microsoft-killer commentary. The NYT Bits Blog called it “a rival to Microsoft’s SharePoint.”

Shooting the messenger is a favorite pasttime for people who don’t really understand the impact of their actions. Mayfield proved pretty quick on the draw today after Schwartz demonstrated something that Wired should have thought of in the first place.

Schwartz said on Search Engine Land he created a page on the Wired How To Wiki to show how easily one could get link love from Wired:

(1) Register at How To Wired
(2) Add a new page or edit an old page on the site (don’t be too evil)
(3) Then add your link to that page

His sample page, a proof of concept, linked externally. Schwartz noted the links appeared to pass weight, an unusual occurrence and one that would draw plenty of grifters seeking the same link benefit. Where was the nofollow Schwartz expected to find?

Mayfield seemed to recognize this as well. Schwartz’s original page soon received an edit, replacing the content with this message:

deleting this page, 'its spam

on the comment about nofollow -- nofollow works for blogs, but not for wikis where everyone is an editor

Obviously, Mayfield missed the whole Wikipedia and nofollow discussion from earlier in 2007. Wikipedia slaps nofollow on outbound links to foil the kind of mischief Schwartz demonstrated.

Calling the Search Engine Land entry spam soon drew a response from Sullivan, rebuking Mayfield for his spam comment:

Now we come to find that you

Wiki Investment Site Receives $2.5 Million

Doug Caverly — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:29:01 +0000

When it comes to financial matters, I like to play it safe. Bubble Boy-safe. So the concept of a wiki for investors makes me a little nervous. But Wikinvest apparently inspired enough confidence in some onlookers to win $2.5 million in funding.

And aspects of Wikinvest seem quite sensible. Want understandable, English-language explanations instead of decimal points and ratios? Or how about a site that understands company’s names, and not just esoteric ticker symbols? Wikinvest has got you covered.

I was particularly impressed by the site’s stock charts. “Typical stock charts plot a line that moves up and down – but most people want to know why the stock price is moving,” notes an “About Us” section. “So we built WikiCharts that allow people to annotate and explain what’s happening. Investors have already created over a thousand annotations explaining the stock price movements of hundreds of companies . . .”

These features tend to favor inexperienced investors, however, and in a wiki, that may not be ideal. If more knowledgeable people have no reason to visit, Wikinvest could have trouble gaining information and creating a following. And then there’s the whole slew of issues that any wiki must face (imagine the financial equivalent of Wikipedia’s elephant issues).

Still, with a fresh $2.5 million, Wikinvest has probably gained quite a lot of time to sort these things out. Hat tip to TechCrunch’s Nick Gonzalez.

When Wikis Won’t Work

Luis Suarez — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 15:20:06 +0000

In the past you would remember how I have been talking about wikis over here to reflect how they are some of the most interesting and refreshing social software tools out there to help boost knowledge sharing and collaboration amongst different teams, communities and whatever other groups.

I am a big advocate of them more than anything else because of the strong capabilities they offer to help democratise the way knowledge workers get to share their knowledge with others and collaborate with one another.

However, one has got to realise that wikis may not be the ultimate solution for each and every single scenario while trying to address a specific problem. And that is exactly what Lucas McDonnell has tried to put together over at When Wikis Won’t Work: 5 Questions to Ask. Lucas references a previous blog post put together by Doug Cornelius under the title "Getting Wikis to Work" after commenting on CNN Money’s "Why Commercial Wikis Don’t Work" and which I will be talking about at some point in time. Not to worry.

The interesting thing from Lucas is that he ventures to put together five different questions that knowledge workers should ask in order to establish whether they would need to use a wiki or not. So in a way, he is already helping out folks identify whether wikis would meet their needs or not by answering those questions. To help speed things into what those questions may well be, here you have got them:

"1. Is a wiki the best technology for what I am seeking to accomplish?
2. Is my community cohesive and focused enough to be able to work together?
3. Am I asking my community to create a universal truth based on tangible facts?
4. Is my community going to be able to agree on these facts?
5. Is my community both knowledgeable and interested about the subject of the wiki?"

I must say that while I was going through the blog post, and the different questions mentioned above, there were a number of other questions that popped into my mind and which I always ask different knowledge workers, and their communities, before they would start making use of their own wiki. So I thought about creating a follow up weblog post where I could mention those additional 5 questions and make a list of 10 questions to find out whether your team or your community needs a wiki or not to help improve the already existing collaborative efforts.

Yes, that is right. This is a weblog post to indicate how despite all of the buzz and hype around wikis they may not well be your best tool after all. At least, for that particular task. Thus without much further ado, here you have got the additional five questions I would ask as well on whether people would need to have a wiki or not:

1. Does my team / community have got the necessary resources to support and facilitate the participation on the wiki?
2. Is the team / community capable of maintaining the wiki with a robust enough infrastructure?
3. Do team / community members trust each other good enough to be able to update content on top of each other’s content without risking the quality of the knowledge shared?
4. Will the team / community provide the necessary education and training materials on how to effectively make use of the wiki for that specific purpose?
5. And, finally, the killer question: can the team / community perform that task at hand with the same quality and participation using other tools than a wiki? If so, why don’t you would use whichever of those tools?

As you would be able to see, those are some questions that I get to use myself on a daily basis to help guide different knowledge workers on whether they would be ready to adopt a wiki for their daily interactions or not. One of the interesting points from those questions that I try to make time and time again is that I try not to position wikis as the killer application for whatever the scenario or whatever the purpose. Adopting social software does not necessarily mean that you would have to leave whatever you have been doing before in the past, just because someone told you that you needed to be there. Social software needs to meet a set of requirements, of needs, that the group would need to be able to fix and if the current collaboration and knowledge sharing tools do not fit in the profile, then it would be when you can starting exploring those other possibilities.

In such a way that social software tools would become an enhancement of the already existing tools suite, because after all, why would you need to give up on what you have been using already with some good results, if you can improve even more that same experience by adopting different social computing tools, right?

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Wikipedia Stats Support Ron Paul

Doug Caverly — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 22:15:48 +0000

If Wikipedia’s users get to determine the next president, it seems like we’ll be seeing Ron Paul in the White House; according to an analysis of four different factors, the Republican candidate is popular in just about every way.

In regards to the first of the factors – the number of people who read a candidate’s article – Compete’s Matt Pace found that only Barack Obama ranked ahead of Paul. There’s a large gap between the two – Obama had 41,007 readers, while Paul had just 30,960 – but then again, the next closest candidate (who actually remains undeclared) is Fred Thompson (with 24,160 readers).

So, on to the next factor: minutes spent on an article. In this respect, Paul came in first place, with 10.22 minutes. Mike Gravel got second place with 8.83 minutes. In terms of a share of total time, Paul also won first place, but Obama displaced Gravel for second.

The percentage of Wikipedia users who also visited a candidate’s website became another Paul-Gravel mix-up, however. This time, Gravel grabbed the top spot, with 45 percent, while Paul trailed slightly with 42 percent.

That’s it for the factors. Pace then calculated an average rank for each candidate, and found that Paul’s 1.5 far outdistanced everyone else’s score. (Gravel, Obama, and Dennis Kucinich were the runners-up, if you’re curious.)

Is everyone who’s ever visited Wikipedia going to vote for Ron Paul, then? As we all know, that’s unlikely. Compete’s Pace points out one possible reason for these lopsided figures, writing, “Household names such as Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani trail rivals in this comparison. The modest interest seen in their Wikipedia articles could be a result of the public’s general familiarity with candidates whose lives of late have played out on the public stage.”

Google Wiki May Arrive Today

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 11:30:12 +0000

The start of the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco could be the fashionable choice for Google to unveil the product formerly known as Jotspot in its Google-icious form.

Google’s most ardent followers have been chattering online about the possible public opening of Jotspot, the wiki company Google picked up in October 2006. The latest rumors focus on a previously announced move to being a service on Google Apps.

Tony Ruscoe cited one of his commenters at Google Blogoscoped in noting the Jotspot service now appears in the list of Google Apps services codes:

anyone with a domain hosted with Google Apps who isn

Scanner Busts Dutchies Passing On The Wiki Side

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 22:19:30 +0000

I’m not up on Dutch royalty. I’m not up on any royalty cuz I’m an Uh-mer-kin and we don’t dig on that jazz, right? Well, some still do, or else the Today Show wouldn’t have anything to talk about on slow news days. Anyway, this about Wikipedia more than Dutch royalty, so let’s roll with it.

This Wiki Scanner tool has proven to be one powerful whistleblower, a nice KEEP OUT sign to the powers-that-be. It’s called citizen media for a reason.

After tracing edits back to the CIA, the FBI, and even a rather bizarre one about the IRA made from inside the Vatican (conspiracy theorists unite!), the latest to get busted are Prince Johan Friso of the Netherlands and his wife, Princess Mabel.

Mabel? Really? Not something hipper like Gertrude or Bessie?

Ahem.

According to Reuters Mabel had a thing for "drug barons" before she hooked up with the prince, who renounced the throne to marry her. Now, it is Amsterdam, so for all I know, "drug baron," could be the owner of a chain of "coffee shops" or the CEO of a pharmaceutical company.

Whatever he was, he was shot outside of an Amsterdam hotel.

It was a small edit, changing the claim that Mabel provided "incomplete and false information" about her relationship with the drug baron to "incomplete information."

After all, nobody likes being called a liar.

It also highlights an inherent problem with open, collaborative editing: where there is personal incentive to edit, there will be editing, just as sure as eating follows hunger.

Tools like Wiki Scanner are good, then, for keeping the larger establishment accountable, but do little for the smaller varmints – and we wouldn’t want it to operate on a smaller scale, would we? It wouldn’t be protecting the voice of the people anymore then, but a flagrant violation of privacy.

Um. Is it time to slow down yet?