Impressions Scholarcast

As luck would have it I happened to open my Twitter home page on the web, something I do rarely, and noticed I had exactly 1000 tweets. Although paltry by the standard of some of my Twitter friends I thought I would mark this small milestone.

My tweet number 1000 turned out to be a ‘personal’ one, something relating to my own day-to-day life rather than the ‘professional’ tweets I favour. By that I mean tweeting about a topic or link that I reckon might be of interest to other tweeps. So in its full glory my 1000th tweet is:

For the record the Australian date is Friday 30 January 2009. Ironically Twitter was down at the time and the tweet didn’t get delivered by the 7 am deadline for go/no go on the ride! It’s taken me a while to reach this milestone from my first tweet almost 23 months ago:

If you do the sums you will see I was dormant for several months at the start. This also got me thinking about my personal/professional tweet mix. I look through my last hundred tweets or so and decided between 20-25% of my tweets are personal. [Google Reader comes to the rescue here showing my Facebook status change RSS feed which is a reflection of my Twitter updates.]

Then I moved on to look at tweet frequency. I wrote six months ago about acculturated twitter users and chose the number of 8 tweets a day as a comfortable number to receive from my Twitter friends. [Sadly Stephen Fry had to bite the dust after exceeding this greatly during his childish rant about failing to use the simplest Vista features.] So it was on to TweetStats to see how I was doing. Over the last year I have been averaging 3.1 tweets per day, enough I think, although with great variation especially when live tweeting conferences and meetings. I used TweetStats on some of my Twitter friends to see how they were doing. I shortened their Twitter names to the first and last letter so they might be able to recognise themselves:

As can be seen there are a number who exceed the 8 tweets a day ideal.

[Just noticed one of the guys I follow most avidly on Twitter, @mweller, has just crossed the 1000 tweet threshold as well.]

I was not the only one who knew Evernote was going to be the only sensible replacement for Google Notebook now that it will be no more. Evernote themselves obviously set to work immediately to provide an easy import path from Google Notebook. For others planning the move:

Many others are picking up aspects of the 2009 Horizon Report one of the continual outputs from ‘a long-running qualitative research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations’. These reports are immensely valuable and should be required reading for all management concerned with the effects of information technologies on their operations in educational institutions.

I take the opportunity, for my personal notes, to quote from the executive summary where the key technologies are described:

Key within 1 year

• Mobiles. Already considered as another component of the network on many campuses, mobiles continue to evolve rapidly. New interfaces, the ability to run third-party applications, and location-awareness have all come to the mobile device in the past year, making it an ever more versatile tool that can be easily adapted to a host of tasks for learning, productivity, and social networking. For many users, broadband mobile devices like the iPhone have already begun to assume many tasks that were once the exclusive province of portable computers.
• Cloud Computing. The emergence of large scale “data farms” — large clusters of networked servers — is bringing huge quantities of processing power and storage capacity within easy reach. Inexpensive, simple solutions to offsite storage, multi-user application scaling, hosting, and multi-processor computing are opening the door to wholly different ways of thinking about computers, software, and files.

Key within 2-3 years

• Geo-everything. Geocoded data has many applications, but until very recently, it was time consuming and difficult for non-specialists to determine the physical coordinates of a place or object, and options for using that data were limited. Now, many common devices can automatically determine and record their own precise location and can save that data along with captured media (like photographs) or can transmit it to web-based applications for a host of uses. The full implications of geo-tagging are still unfolding, but the impact in research has already been profound.
• The Personal web. Springing from the desire to reorganize online content rather than simply viewing it, the personal web is part of a trend that has been fueled by tools to aggregate the flow of content in customizable ways and expanded by an increasing collection of widgets that manage online content. The term personal web was coined to represent a collection of technologies that are used to configure and manage the ways in which one views and uses the Internet. Using a growing set of free and simple tools and applications, it is easy to create a customized, personal web-based environment — a personal web — that explicitly supports one’s social, professional, learning, and other activities.

Key within 4-5 years

• Semantic-aware applications. New applications are emerging that are bringing the promise of the semantic web into practice without the need to add additional layers of tags, identifiers, or other top-down methods of defining context. Tools that can simply gather the context in which information is couched, and that use that context to extract embedded meaning are providing rich new ways of finding and aggregating content. At the same time, other tools are allowing context to be easily modified, shaped, and redefined as information flows are combined.
• Smart objects. Sometimes described as the “Internet of things,” smart objects describe a set of technologies that is imbuing ordinary objects with the ability to recognize their physical location and respond appropriately, or to connect with other objects or information. A smart object “knows” something about itself — where and how it was made, what it is for, where it should be, or who owns it, for example — and something about its environment. While the underlying technologies that make this possible — RFID, QR codes, smartcards, touch and motion sensors, and the like — are not new, we are now seeing new forms of sensors, identifiers, and applications with a much more generalizable set of functionalities.

I am well up on the technologies in the 3-year horizon, although my application of geo-coding is somewhat embryonic at this stage. My podcast listening and some hands-on trials have brought me into contact with various semantic-aware applications although these are rough at the edges to say the least. Several of my colleagues are well into the research area of smart objects but I have not heard them using this term. Nevertheless it seems I must start listening to them more carefully from now on.

In my book the eventual disappearance of Google Notebook is evil. Can we users put pressure on Google to correct his evil and save Notebook? Check out the Mashable post for ‘an online petition, a Facebook group, and a “Save Notebook” blog’. Help save Google Notebook.

I have written before about the benefits of PostRank (previous known as AideRSS) in several posts (post 1, post 2 and post 3). With its help and some feed cleaning in honour of the New Year I am down to just over 30 blog posts read per day (from 50). This is despite adding close to 10 new feeds in the last couple of months. As before I still feel in touch with developments in my areas of interest.

Trying to determine the reasons for the drop off apart from PostRank I suppose that the holiday season has some effect and of course my student class stopped blogging for marks at the beginning for December (but that’s less than 2 posts per day over the last semester with small student classes). May be that blogging frequency is dropping as tweeting takes over?

Today I read the sad announcement on the Official Google Notebook Blog that development and support of Google Notebook has ended. I have to say that Google Notebook must be in my top three favourite Web 2.0 applications of all time, and so this is devastating news. Over the last couple of years I have used Notebook extensively and have given a number of presentations extolling its virtues and flexibility. I use it to share evolving notes with colleagues and fellow researchers. The associated Firefox Notebook extension and its simple layout that works on the small screens of netbooks makes Notebook highly useful. It is even included in the list of services on the iPhone Google Mobile app. The autosave feature is invaluable meaning all typing/pasting is saved automatically up to the last few seconds of use. The only downsides are the lack of keyboard shortcuts and the limited size of each note.

The Google post quote is:

Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we’ll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don’t fret, we’ll continue to maintain service for those of you who’ve already signed up. As part of this plan, however, we will no longer support the Notebook Extension, but as always users who have already signed up will continue to have access to their data via the web interface at http://www.google.com/notebook.

Existing users can continue to use Notebook but for how long? So my next steps must be:

1. Save all my Notebook notes to Google Docs via the built-in export features – no problem
2. Configure sharing of the appropriate Google documents to continue shared access with my colleagues – fiddly but not a big job
3. Look around for an alternative online note taker app

I have to admit I don’t have to look far for a Notebook replacement. About 8 months ago I signed up for the free version of Evernote. Very recently Evernote won the Crunchie for Best Mobile Startup of 2008. A couple of months later I paid for the premium Evernote because of its larger online storage capacity but mainly for the encrypted transfer between Evernote client and server that permits me to store confidential personal data online. So for some months I have been torn between Notebook and Evernote, mainly using the latter for personal data.

Although less nimble than Notebook there is no doubting the Evernote feature set is impressive:

• web client plus bookmarklets and a Firefox extension,
• extensive keyboard shortcuts
• note submission by email,
• full-featured desktop clients for Windows and Mac, and
• mobile apps for iPhone and Windows Mobile.

We now have files as notes with full file synchronisation in the Premium version. All images and digital ink in Evernote are scanned for text to improve searching. Evernote notebooks can be made publically accessible on the web with human-memorable URLs and include an RSS feed. However the pages of notes are read-only so collaborators can’t change the notes – back to Google Docs for shared updates for now. Other Evernote missing features are notebook sections and autosave online. The benefits of Evernote far outweigh the disadvantages so it’s definitely Evernote for me from now on.

Google points out several of their other services that disappointed Notebook users might consider: SearchWiki, Google Docs (already noted), tasks in Gmail and Google Bookmarks. All are good services but spell the end of the central note taking repository concept.

It shows that even with a giant of cloud computing such as Google it is necessary to diversify use of online tools in order to spread the risk of such tools ceasing to exist. Maybe if there had been a paid version of Google Notebook its decease might have been avoided.

Note that other Google services are going as well: Google Video, Catalog Search, Jaiku, and Dodgeball. [Via Read/Write Web]