Open Social Network Roundup

There seems to be more and more dis­cus­sion regard­ing the open­ness of social net­works of late. In try­ing to fol­low the dis­cus­sion, it seems that there are a num­ber of dif­fer­ent types of ‘open­ness’ being dis­cussed. Dare Obasanjo has pro­vided a good overview of the dif­fer­ent con­sid­er­a­tions of what it means to be an open social net­work.

Regard­less of what def­i­n­i­tion of open­ness you are using, Fred Wil­son, reminds that:

…most of Facebook’s tra­di­tional users (like my two daugh­ters) don’t care that their data is locked up in Face­book. I’ll show them my Face­book run­ning in Netvibes when they wake up this morn­ing and they’ll say “that’s nice dad but why would you want to do that?

For­tu­nately, there are a num­ber of peo­ple inter­ested in portable, open social net­works includ­ing Marc Can­ter who pro­vides us with an overview of some of the peo­ple and pol­i­tics involved in the open social net­work dis­cus­sions that are hap­pen­ing. Marc is work­ing on the Peo­ple Aggre­ga­tor to be a stand along sys­tem and is dream­ing of dreams of aggre­gat­ing aggre­ga­tors, aggre­gat­ing con­ver­sa­tions and aggre­gat­ing groups”

Stephen Downes has also done some think­ing in this area and defines three areas of need for social net­work porta­bil­ity and names some of the tech­nolo­gies that may get us there.

Wired recently made head­lines with their cri­tique of the walled gar­den approach that many ven­dors are using to con­trol cus­tomer data. The arti­cle came along with a nice how to page from their wiki on how to Replace Face­book using Open Social Toos that gave some good ideas on aggre­gat­ing con­tent from your net­work of friends, but read­ily admit­ted the dif­fi­culty of pro­vid­ing the key com­po­nent of social net­work­ing– rela­tion­ship man­age­ment tools.

For­ward into the future we go– with mis­matched def­i­n­i­tions of what it means to be “open”, busi­nesses who build mar­ket share by walling their cus­tomers in and many cus­tomers who don’t feel any need for things to change.
Hope­less?
Hardly. As com­mon def­i­n­i­tions emerge, busi­nesses mod­els are adapted and the need for social net­work porta­bil­ity is rec­og­nized then solu­tions will come for­ward, it just may be a lit­tle bit of a wait.

Other resources:

• Social Net­work Porta­bil­ity Google Group

Accessibility, Availability and Affordability

Of these three, which is the largest obsta­cle to the free and open flow of online information?

Con­sider the following:

1. A 12-year old boy in West­ern Africa has learned how to read Braille. He has also recently received an inex­pen­sive lap­top as part of a cor­po­rate ini­tia­tive to save the world with cheap com­put­ers. Unfor­tu­nately, he is unable to access the infor­ma­tion on his own because he was born blind and the com­puter did not come with any soft­ware that can read the con­tent of web pages.
2. In rural Idaho a high school stu­dent has an inex­plic­a­ble desire to “make web­sites”. There are no tech­nol­ogy classes at her school, but a teacher allows her to use a school com­puter dur­ing the last part of lunch to prac­tice her craft. She has found a cou­ple of online com­mu­ni­ties that the school fil­ter allows where she is able to find answers to many of her ques­tions. After school she has a 50 minute bus ride to a small home at the bot­tom of a hill bor­der­ing a National For­est in Cen­tral Idaho. Her fam­ily does have an older com­puter, but they haven’t been able to find local Inter­net ser­vice provider.
3. A young woman in Alba­nia con­stantly hears her friends talk about peo­ple that they have met online. She found a job at a local byrek stand where she earns enough money to accom­pany her friends to a local Inter­net Cafe to par­tic­i­pate in their online activ­i­ties. How­ever, her father recently lost his job because of ill­ness and her fam­ily expects her to con­tribute all of her earn­ings to the fam­ily pot. She occa­sion­ally gets a few min­utes to check her email by tag­ging along with her friends, but by and large she no longer able to use the Internet.

Each of the above prob­lems might be over­come with some com­bi­na­tion of tech­nol­ogy, aware­ness or money. How­ever, each sit­u­a­tion does present a prob­lem of acces­si­bil­ity, avail­abil­ity or afford­abil­ity that might be gen­er­al­ized to include a larger num­ber of people.

Which of these is the most sig­nif­i­cant obsta­cle to ubiq­ui­tous, afford­able tech­nol­ogy to allow every­one to con­nect to this vast col­lec­tion of tubes that we call the Internet?

What other obsta­cles keep peo­ple from access­ing the Internet?

Quick Catch Up on Links

A few links that I would like to unload off of my docket:

• Learn­ing with a Dis­abil­ity PhD Pro­gram
  ”…a doc­toral pro­gram designed to pro­vide a broad and com­pre­hen­sive edu­ca­tion, real­is­tic work expe­ri­ences, and oppor­tu­ni­ties for prob­lem cen­tered research in the area of learn­ing with disability.”
• IBM Strives For Super­hu­man Speech Tech
  ” ‘At IBM, we have this super­hu­man speech recog­ni­tion [ini­tia­tive in which] the goal is to get per­for­mance com­pa­ra­ble to humans in the next five years…’ ”
• Acces­si­bil­ity Roundups
  • The Great Acces­si­bil­ity Blog Roundup
    A great list of acces­si­bil­ity blogs from Jared Smith at WebAIM
  • CETIS acces­si­bil­ity roundup
    A list of links from Shan­non Perry from the CETIS–TechDis list­serv
  • Wel­come back and another acces­si­bil­ity roundup
    A few inter­est­ing links from Ron Graham

Curb Cut, Take 3

The past few years I have been work­ing in the area of reli­gious spe­cial edu­ca­tion and have recently jumped back into a job where Curb Cut is rel­e­vant to my work again. A cou­ple of fee­ble attempts to start post­ing again in the past quite awhile have led to a blis­ter­ing pace of one to two posts a year. Remark­ably, some peo­ple haven’t cleaned out their feed read­ers for awhile, so hope­fully the remain­ing sub­scribers will stick around as we get things going again.

In my new gig I am work­ing as a web developer/architect in the edu­ca­tional divi­sion of a large Inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tion and I’m anx­ious find a place for stan­dards, acces­si­bil­ity and open­ness in the work that I am doing. To that end, Curb Cut lives.

We started out as Curb Cut Edu­ca­tion and evolved into Curb Cut Design. Nei­ther of those titles seemed quite right for the direc­tion I’m head­ing, so this blog shall hereto­fore be known as sim­ply ‘Curb Cut’, enjoy.