Some Interest Facts From The Video

• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year have met via social media
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
• YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world

Specifically there are some interesting educational stats that are included.

• 2009 U.S. Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction
• 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
• 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
• In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen

With all of these online students, what kind of problems does that pose for a traditional school and dorms? It was a while back that Michael Fienen wrote about how online education is changing.  If the data above is fully accurate then colleges and universities have a lot to worry about unless they are willing to adapt.  With LinkedIn beginning to hold such an important function in the hiring process this puts a lot of pressure on Career Services to fully take advantage of this platform or risk becoming irrelevant.

The video states it best:

Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

Besides all these interesting facts, the video is a perfect example of how to promote an online book through an interesting and engaging video.  Great content and now it has me interested in checking out the Socialnomics book.

So what are your thoughts on the data?  Any other great videos on this topic?

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Everything is coming together. Slowly, steadily, it’s all about to come crashing together in an energy producing, gamma ray blasting, supernova explosion. Twenty years ago when the first colleges and universities started getting in to the web (and ten to fifteen years ago when it became more commonplace) the web was a very decentralized and amorphous thing. Rarely was there central control because there was no central to do the controlling to begin with yet. Part of our issue with centralized control now is that frequently colleges and departments started sites entirely on their own to begin with, and now don’t want to give up that freedom (whether or not they are doing good things with that freedom). That’s a problem many of us are dealing with, generally with varied success. Usually the move to an increasingly centralized control can be made or broken on the backs of high level buy in. That is crucial, especially with what I’m talking about, something that can span departments, colleges, and the university on the whole.

The issue I’m seeing is way bigger than that. It goes beyond who should be allowed to put content on the Art department’s web site. Look at your web presence – the whole thing. You likely have a web site that is all front facing and public, right? What about an intranet? Student portal? E-commerce platform? Student information system? Alumni portal? Athletics, fundraising, help desk, housing, event ticketing, blog system… The web isn’t just about a stack of HTML files anymore. This is the problem. Of all of these systems present on campus, how many different people are involved in running them, and how many of those are working together (better question: how many are working against each other)? How many are even under the same authority? I’ll happily throw down a stack of money that says you can’t even name everyone responsible for the whole of your web site. Peter Nissen of JBoye.com talks about some of the reasons decentralized control doesn’t work.

Despite all of this, we still have a core client to address. They might be in different audiences, but they are all web users, and they have common expectations. Is there someone responsible for looking at a housing management system that can say “Hey guys, this system has some serious usability and integration problems, and I don’t think it’s going to be a good fit in the overall web presence.”? I can answer that for you: you don’t. You should. I’m sure there are a couple exceptions out there that have gotten over this hump (and PLEASE share your experience in the comments, I’d love to see what you have to say). We see similar issues with content. Kristina Halvorson, in her book Content Strategy for the Web, looks at the web like a news show, newspaper, or magazine. All have to have multiple content types and sources, all reach an end user, and all need to have a central point of oversight to make sure it’s right. Where’s our editor-in-chief?

The Singularity in this case is user expectation with respect to our systems. Your web visitors don’t care that you have a dozen different systems and applications running to make their web experience happen. All they know is that if it sucks, then you must be failing. They get angry, they get frustrated. They want a simple, seamless experience. If you’re familiar with the MVC style of programming, users want a single, standard view, not dozens. And to put it simply, the systems are starting to get good enough that our excuses for not working towards that goal are getting very thin. It might be hard, it might take time, but that’s our job. We aren’t here to just set something up, slap the school colors on it, and walk away. If you aren’t striving to do better than that, then you are probably falling prey to the very issues I’m talking about.

Imagine if you will a cruise ship. Cruise ships have tons of components that make your vacation happen. Some you have direct contact with, some not. Engineers, cooks, stewards, bridge crew, medical, security, performers, and so on. Imagine if all of these people tried to make your cruise happen without any central management. It’d be a mess, a complete disaster. Every cruise ship has a captain. The captain might not know the fine nuance of the water reclamation system, but he can at least make sure their team coordinates with the right people when there’s trouble or when a common goal must be achieved. He can’t do the job of all 2,000 employees on the ship, but he is a successful planner. He dictates, directs, and designates well. He’s a 3D sort of guy (get it? 3D? Because he dictates, des… oh nevermind).

That’s what we need. Our web sites need a captain. That captain doesn’t have to be a Python guru, or a master of Flash, or a jQuery ninja. But, he should know the heading and be able to make sure efforts are properly and efficiently coordinated. Their knowledge should be broad, but not always deep. That’s why you hire the experts in the respective fields for your specific tasks. Our problems aren’t going to get simpler moving ahead. It used to be a web site was a handful of GIF animations and a dozen HTML pages. Now we have CMSs, tens of thousands of pages, multiple servers, and all that just to maintain our front facing presence. In the coming years, these systems will have more crosstalk, not less. Expectations will increase, not decline. And the complexity of our sites will balloon.

Centralized control might not be a popular idea to a lot of people, but it will become a necessity for success, regardless of how big your university is. That’s my prediction. The alternative risks a mess of code, duplicated efforts, and upset development teams. Without someone at the helm, to use a phrase from Twitter this morning, running your site will be like pushing a wheelbarrow of squirrels. That’s my rant for today. Our needs are going to come together, as users and providers, and we’re all going to be looking for something central to tell us what to do. We’re already near the event horizon of this problem. It will be up to us how we’ll handle crossing the threshold.

Illustration by NASA/Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital Inc.

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[UPDATE: 09.09.24 11:28AM] Thanks to Andrew in the comments for pointing out something I missed: If you would like to read this book, Lessig has made it available, for free, under a Creative Commons license for anyone to download at the book’s web site.

Lessig is, to put it lightly, a talented academic and lawyer.  If you’ve never heard of him, I can’t recommend enough that you go listen his TED lecture on user generated content.  Oh, he’s also on the board of directors for a little system called Creative Commons, you might have heard of it.  He picks up his legal understanding of copyright law and swings it around deftly like Babe Ruth and his famous hickory.  He even shows substantial humility by writing of his own big failure on the topic before the Supreme Court.  The best part is that he’s not writing from the perspective of a politico pushing an agenda, he’s writing as a lawyer and academic evaluating the law and the damage it has on a society.

As educational professionals, we tend to ride very close to the edge when it comes to the development of web and creative content, especially in terms of fair use, and the issue is increasingly confused by professors who come to us asking us to do things with content or post things they have done with content that is in a substantially gray area of the law.  Education leans heavily on the idea of fair use, but increasingly the freedom of that idea is being challenged and eroded at every opportunity by those with the power and money to do so.  Thus, the problem isn’t that there is a gray area, it’s that the gray area itself is increasingly a realm of lawyers, where you either have to hire one to assure your rights, or one to defend them.  In either case you end up with costs and work that often times outweigh the value of the content being created.

But, I don’t want to spiral into my personal opinion on the matter.  Obviously, I agree with Lessig at pretty much every turn.  But, the man is smart and precise.  The book dives into the history of copyright law and it’s evolution into the monster that is now fighting a messy battle with internet technologies on our doorsteps.  All of this is done with the lay person in mind, and even without an understanding of the law, anyone could pick this book up and understand the threat being posed to our creative culture.  Indeed, by the end, you’re likely to find yourself sitting in your chair thinking, “How can Congress be so dumb?”  Well, as it turns out, it’s quite easy, and he explains why.  By the end, you don’t feel even remotely like you were just lectured ad nauseam by a lawyer.  He lays out scenarios, explains how common and primary law has handled it in the past, and why the drastic change in honoring that past is costing us a great deal in the long run.

This is not a book about education or law, this is a book designed to educate.  Because of our proximity to such issues, I think it is critical that we all educate ourselves on the changes that are taking place, and the impact it is going to have on us as we move forward and try to support schools, professors, and students in their pursuit of an open learning environment.  I’m not sure that there is any place better to start that education than with Free Culture.  Despite being five years old now (a long time when dealing with anything related to technology), the book is still extremely pertinent to our world today, and indeed, there are a number of times that I caught myself thinking about some of the newer instances of intellectual property challenges taking place today in the context Lessig provides.

An absolute must read for everyone, period.

Have you read Free Culture?  Share your thoughts with everyone below.

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I credit the Washington Monthly for the first article I’ve seen on the company (institute? school?  BTW, that article is long, but I recommend reading the whole thing.).  The idea of online schools and degrees is, of course, nothing new.  After all, Kaplan and the University of Phoenix have been parlaying the online degree game for years with success.  Others are entering the game every year, some more legitimate than others.  The goal is first, make money, and two, provide an alternative form of education that better fits the technology and tools we have available to us today (then three, make more money).  They focus on their goal from the ground up, as opposed to us, who play catch up from our brick and mortar offices.  Often times, in web offices we’re asked to help slap together a system a school buys, or provide support or integration.  Naturally, we have MOUNTAINS of resources to do this with (or not), so the ultimate effectiveness of online programs at traditional institutions can vary quite widely.  From the article:

“…[Burck] Smith envisions a world where [students] can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price.”

I’ve been rather vocal in some circles that the traditional brick and mortar education system is in danger, not just from online schools, but trade schools, and industries where specialized certifications mean more than any degree we can offer (classic example is a BS in Computer Sciences vs. a CCIE for someone interested in networking).  Imagine being able to assemble your core classes (and someday beyond) from the institutes that can best serve you, right from your home and for the best cost available.  This new model is one of the bigger changes I’ve seen, and it’s the kind that really stopped me in my tracks and forced me to start doing more research on them.  It’s the exact kind of groundwork that is laying the path for others, and spells a major paradigm shift in what it means to have “higher education.”  The article aptly describes the fact that colleges are in as much financial trouble as many other industries, and it’s coupled with the problem that change within institutions occurs much more slowly than the technology that we need to use and teach about.  To make matters worse, a company like StraighterLine.com is stepping in offering cheap, cost effective classes, while the online course universities offer are typically the same cost as normal classes, and sometimes cost more with the added fees that may be associated.  Then add in annual tuition hikes that have no end in sight.  Simply put, higher ed is thinking backwards and not addressing the true problem – an antiquated business model.  They continue with a rather poignant line:

“Like Craigslist, StraighterLine threatens the most profitable piece of a conglomerate business: freshman lectures, higher education’s equivalent of the classified section. If enough students defect to companies like StraighterLine, the higher education industry faces the unbundling of the business model on which the current system is built. The consequences will be profound.”

The idea is that large lecture classes taught by a graduate assistant or adjunct professor are highly profitable for a school, and help to fund all the other less cost effective programs.  Newspapers made tons of money from advertising and classifieds, until it became easier, cheaper, and more broadly reaching to do it online.  Now, they’re feeling the impact in harsh ways.  Higher ed could be in the crosshairs for a similar reason.  Antiquated business models are pinching industries across the board, some are adapting, some aren’t.  Another good example is the service that Hulu.com is offering (for free no less) vs. the traditional cable subscription model.  Or not to mention the mess that is digital music distribution, or the open textbook movement, or e-book standards.  The business lesson of the day is “evolve or die.”

Now, there’s one big obstacle here – you can’t get a degree from them.  In reality, StraighterLine.com isn’t accredited at all.  But, that’s the genius of it.  They are working on the side with REAL colleges and universities to accept credits from them, making them into an actual commodity for the students that they can take elsewhere.  I personally thought this was genius, and was sitting here wondering what their market penetration was until I read their first case listing.  Fort Hays State University.  In Kansas.  It just so happens I work for Pittsburg State University.  In Kansas.  This drove the point home like a stake through the heart of a vampire.  This is a school in our state, right on our level that has got the jump on us at something that could be paving the way to a totally changed landscape, and it REALLY gets you thinking.  And what if, WHAT IF, someone like the University of Phoenix stepped up and offered a similar service?  The ARE accredited.  What if they decided to attack that base demographic aggressively offering a similar model.  Not only would they pick up students from your school, they set themselves up for keeping them in the long run and offering them the same commodity at a cheaper price.

Interestingly, social media exposes the risks involved in such an endeavor.  Fort Hays is actually considering ending their agreement with them just because of the pushback they’ve seen around campus.  People who attend the brick and mortar institutes see it as a risk on the road to cheapening the quality of their education and the way they are viewed after they’ve graduated.  Ultimately, I see that as just a growing pain of such a system.  The Provost at Fort Hays ultimately had sound logic, that by accepting the transfer credits, it’s basically lead generation for out of state students that are worth substantially more to the school than in state students.  When you’re running the risk of losing money from both the state and to people like StraighterLine, and you’re beginning to have trouble funding teachers to teach some of your basic classes, why not team up in a way that can benefit everyone.  For Fort Hays, their anti-SL Facebook group only had 150 members, not all students.  And the pushback from the teachers is almost moot, because the teachers aren’t the commodity, the students are.  If only 150 out of 10,000 students complain about something, I might actually call that a big win.  Remember, you’re more likely to hear from the people against it than the people for it.

That’s the rub.  It’s about change.  The landscape is changing, and it’s happening more quickly, and with effects that are slowly becoming more obvious in their long term.  Schools need to be ready to address this, and need to understand that the demand for online courses is going up, not down.  What happens if someone develops a model that builds on something like the open coursework movements at MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley?  Eventually that wall holding back a company like StraighterLine is going to crumble.  They won’t be seen as cheapening education, they’ll be seen as valuing it exactly right in an environment where traditional schools just keep charging more for the same (inconvenient) service.  And then there’s the REAL worry: eventually, some day, a company that may be StraighterLine, or it may be someone else is going to GET accreditation.  That cannon volley is going to break the wall.  When that wall yields, the landscape is going to begin changing in ways that we aren’t even predicting yet.  It’s going to happen.  I’m not sure that this particular company will be the one to get it done, but they definitely exposed a chink in the enemy’s armor.

I want to end by sharing a SlideShare from one David Wiley Ph.D. of Brigham Young University talking about the evolution of higher ed, why we are in danger, and the future of opening ourselves up to new systems and ideas:

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“The gradebook does not operate in real time.  I have to check those later when I don’t have classes,” I’d tell them. “This isn’t Burger King. You don’t get it your way.”  I’d use that line for everything: haggling over late work, grades, the amount of homework, whatever they wanted to negotiate.  They seemed to think everything was up for grabs.  I didn’t. But maybe they were onto something…

We’ve grown up for decades knowing we can have hamburgers any way we want them.  We can get are electronics in any color we want.  Why then do we rely on old models for our content?

Why can’t I get a DRM-free movie with no regional encoding when I have been able to get a flipping burger (bad pun intended) my way since I was born? Why can’t ABC let me watch the entire season of Lost over the summer via Hulu when the ABC commercials have been telling me as a consumer I can have anything I want when I want it?

Why can’t students take the programs of study that they want to take? Why can’t the courses be offered at times that working students are able to take them?  Why can’t the content be offered in multiple formats to address different learning styles?

Is content king or is the consumer king?  And who do we work for anyway? If we don’t sort it out now, we may find ourselves out of work, or—at the very least—flipping burgers.

Photo of burger & fries by jwalsh.

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Google = Advertising Company

First and foremost Google is an advertising company.  Of course you knew this though… right?  Google does so many things for us and does it for free, but at the end of the day Google is an advertising company so much to the extend that 98% of their revenue comes from selling ads.

Now that’s a sobering thought isn’t it?  I’m just as bad as anyone else, maybe more so, because when Google comes out with a new service or product I always want to sign up and test it.  Gmail, Feedburner, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Analytics, etc. I don’t know how I lived before these services!?  So when the concern comes up with people that when I sign up for additional service Google will have more information about me and doesn’t that concern me, my answer has gotten to the point where I simply reply “well they already know everything about me anyway” and that is the end of it.

The reason that Google offers all these services for free is to learn more about users and ultimately provide more targeted ads to users.  It’s that simple. When I use Gmail, Google searches and indexes all my emails and has a better picture of the type of email I get and enjoy.  When I watch videos on YouTube, Google knows what sort of videos that I like to watch.  Google Analytics gives me data about traffic to my site and it gives them a more complete picture about my traffic.  Same for Google Webmaster Tools, as the more sites that they know that I control the better picture they have about who runs what on the web.  You see where I’m going with this?

As awesome and helpful as all these services are in the near future it starts to get a little scarier or blissful depending on your outlook on things.  When is too much information a bad thing?  Is there such a thing as too much information?

The Google TriForce

Three recent creations by Google when put together create a triforce so powerful and so completely consuming that it’s quite startling that more people haven’t taken a step back to see exactly what Google is amassing over the next few years.  This triforce that I refer to is Google’s mobile OS Android, Google’s offline capabilities in Gears, and Google’s web browser Chrome.  When you put the power of these three offerings together you have the ground work of the operating system of tomorrow.

Already in Asia and other parts of the world cell phones are the main way that people surf the web.  A little over a year ago I predicted 2008 would be the year of the mobile phone and it absolutely was.  The iPhone because a status symbol and staple for the tech geek crowd to stay connected.  RIM launched their Bold and Storm to mixed reviews but it was obvious we had a whole new type of phone here.  Google created their own mobile operating system, Android, and the G1 was born.  Although it’s hard to declare a long term winner, with Steve Jobs days running Apple most likely numbered despite his expectations, Google being in and doing everything online it’s hard to not like Google’s chances at coming out on top.  Also their operating system being open source and providing much more flexibility and customizable options you almost want to be pulling for them.  Even Microsoft’s new Windows 7 is going more the route of being lightweight and more open.

So we combine a mobile experience with Chrome being absolutely lightning fast running Google applications (for the sake of full disclosure I’m still quite happy with Firefox) and the ability of web applications being continually more immersing and sufficient you have to wonder if the browser isn’t the OS of the future?  Remember when thin clients were all the rage and the idea of having data managed in a central location with people being able to access what they needed from “dumb” terminals?  Well with the web and the power of cloud computing it’s not that far away until we go round circle.

Finally let’s spend a few minutes on Google Gears.  Microsoft Office is great, but let’s be honest we don’t use 90% of the functionality in the software and everyone is tired of emailing copies of files around and not being able to keep up with which one is the “most recent” or up to date version.  Gears combined with Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Gmail is more than good enough and always available (online and off).  It’s a freaking blessing when we can do anything on any computer as long as it has a web browser, a low common denominator of any machine out there.  The portable option is already here today in limited functionality and will only become more of the norm than the exception.  Who needs to spend more and more money on more powerful machines?  Simply store your files in the clouds and use a large data center to run your computations.  It’s also better backedup!

So Why Should I Care?

So step back for a second and ask yourself a question.  How important is your privacy and what is considered private anymore? In this Brave New World are you ready to share the actives of who you are for free tools that hope to make your life easier and also help to offer you more targeted ads that promise to be much more relevant than the local car salesmen that we grew up watching in between our Saturday morning cartoons?  Personally I don’t think anything I do is important enough to be classified or secret, but that’s just me.  I do know that this gigantic advertising company that promises to “not be evil” has much larger ambitions than simply providing the best search results on the web.

In closing I’ll just leave you with a list of some of the free tools that Google offers and you decide if they are the kind of things that you have come to depend on daily.

Can you live without Google?

• Google Search
• GMail
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs
• Google Maps
• Google Checkout
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Google Analytics
• Feedburner
• YouTube
• G1 Phone and Android
• Google Connect
• Blogger
• AdSense
• AdWords
• Froogle
• Google News
• Picasa
• Google Reader
• Google Trends
• Google Earth
• Google Alerts
• GOOG-411
• Chrome
• Google Talk
• Orkut

*Google Camera Picture taken from Radar Online article

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First, I can’t count the number of times I heard “Oh great, another browser I have to bug check layouts in,” today.  Luckily, Chrome is using WebKit as its rendering engine.  WebKit, if you aren’t familiar with it, is becoming hugely popular for mobile browsers due to its footprint, efficiency, and accuracy.  It’s also the backbone for Safari and Konquerer, and currently passes Acid2 and aces Acid3 in the latest builds.  So, this is good news for designers, as we shouldn’t be pulling our hair out with display quirks.  “Shouldn’t,” always the operative word.  Secondly, Google (so far) has no intention of unseating Firefox, let alone IE.  Google just extended their sponsorship deal with Firefox until 2011, which will provide the Mozilla folks with better than 80% of their operating dollars.  And IE simply has market penetration on their side.  Since Chrome is open source, I do expect to see a lot of cross pollination of features in upcoming FF releases.  If they don’t, there’s a serious chance it could spell trouble for the future of our favorite flaming dog-cousin.  After playing with Chrome though, you can quickly tell it is not the web browser to end all web browsers.  It’s more of a rebirth, and new beginning, for a web where the web application rules supreme, rather than the web page.

Instead, Google is simply trying to produce an environment that is more conducive to using the web as a sort of ambiguous operating system, rather than a place where we read stuff and watch videos of people hitting each other in the crotch.  The idea is to treat browsing sessions as discrete processes just like how an operating system addressing different programs, so if a poorly crafted Javascript crashes one page you’re viewing, it won’t kill the document you’re writing in Google Apps on another tab.  My big question is, why not throw this effort into Firefox wholesale?  I know they have an interest in WebKit since they are using it for Android, but when I think of multipurpose environments, Firefox kicks all, and a Firefox/Google partnership could easily be as powerful as Google flying solo, if not moreso.  I know people will complain until the end of time about Firefox’s memory management, and I won’t defend it.  But, Google could have taken their multithreaded approach to them to fix that.  To me, Firefox is an IRC client, FTP client, layout debugger, social networking engine, and more.  And all the plugins that make that happen, in all fairness, are what cause a lot of that memory bloat in Firefox 3.  However, the browser itself is good.  Chrome does feel a tad snappier, but not by any degree that would make or break user experience.

What Google is banking on here is a tool that addresses the potential of the Internet as an operating system-like interface.  They want you to use Chrome to interface with all your most important web applications (especially if those start with the name “Google”) where stability and security are important considerations.  But in lacking any kind of plugin interface, they really have made a tool that best serves people hell bent on living in Google Apps.  In that sense, it is very self serving.  Not that that’s bad.  To the contrary, it knows very well what it is and what it’s for, and they did a pretty kick ass job of executing that goal.  Their little comic explains fairly clearly what they were going for with garbage collection and multithreading around pages 6-7.  Those of you familiar with Java will catch on pretty quickly to what they are explaining.

Don’t get me wrong.  I used it, and I rather liked it.  The interface is clean, and collapsing the tabs into the title bar when maximized really tops out the viewable browsing area (why not just do that full time?). The built in Java debugger and task manager are handy for tackling misbehaving tabs/processes.  Javascript runs faster thanks to the multithreaded JVM compiler, V8, which allows Javascript to be ran as compiled code instead of interpreted code (this has been a long time coming).  Incognito mode readily answers IE8’s InPrivacy for you privacy minded folks.  Likewise, it’s also fast to clearly announce when it encounters a mismatched or self-signed SSL certificate.  FF3 does this, but the page can be easily mistaken for a standard error page.  No risk of that in Chrome.

On the other hand, I think they could have built in a nice print preview mode, and using the text-zooming method instead of the cleaner and, in my opinion, far superior page-zooming method was a big whiff on their part.  Also, on the topic of V8, running compiled Javascript code is fast and awesome… when you’re working in applications that constantly run Javascript.  Odds are most pages you visit don’t.  And with respect to garbage collection, consider times when you have 25+ tabs open.  Instead of a pool of memory and resources, each tab is now a defined, idle process, holding on to all its own resources and threads.  Seems a little wasteful and reinforces the “this isn’t really a web browser, per se” argument.

Here’s the bottom line: I don’t plan on looking at Chrome as a web browser.  It is, but it isn’t.  The way it has been developed, the purpose, target, and reason for its being is to serve as an interface portal for increasingly complex and robust web applications.  Chrome, as I mentioned, is a very selfish and self serving application (not that that’s a bad thing!).  It’s made to run Google Apps, Google Video, Google Calendar, GMail, your web apps, and whatever else you want to throw at it where stability, security, and reliability are musts.  They’ll run faster and be more trustworthy than in “traditional” browsers.  If GMail crashes, oh well, everything else is safe, just like in a real operating system environment.

Keep an eye on Google Chrome.  There’s a lot of opportunity here, and a certain gamble taking place in just which direction the web will evolve.  Reserve judgment, because if you’re like me, there’s not quite enough here to beat out Firefox.  Yet.  And even if Google’s gamble pays off, I suspect you’ll see Firefox quickly moving to integrate a lot of Chrome’s smarter features, the main one being multithreaded processing and garbage collection.  There’s no need to start sweating bullets over whether or not web pages will work perfectly in it (though I would test web apps pretty heavily in it).  Plus there’s huge opportunities here if there’s ever Java integration and a plugin architecture added.

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A few days ago on August 20th, Microsoft officially took the technology out of the “look but don’t touch” phase, and began enabling users to log in and create their own “synths.”  This amounts to going out, taking a ton of pictures of something, and uploading them.  There’s no other user intervention needed aside from naming the synth and tagging it.  The system calculates groups, intersections, perspective, placement, etc.  Great on the time saving, not so great if you want to adjust something.  I noticed in my tests that a couple times it didn’t connect groups that clearly went together, and there’s no way to tell it otherwise yet.

My first instinct is that even though this is a little heavyweight on computing power needs, it’s an awesome idea for virtual tours of campus.  I was recently considering doing a bunch of videos around the university – walking around, looking at things, and other tasks.  The idea is to give potential students a better feel of “being there.”  Instead, I’m considering throwing in some time to build out some of the key areas of campus in PhotoSynth (along with the videos as well).  Some colleges are already playing with this.  The reason I see this as a huge opportunity is that it moves out of the passive nature that video has, and creates an active environment they can explore with about as much detail as you make possible.

Furthermore, the ways they are working on improving this technology are simply awesome.  It really gets me thinking about how interesting it is that 2D still images could really beat out video as an interactive tool on the internet.  In reality, almost everything is more interactive than video, but video is viewed as being more dynamic since it has moving pictures.  Just about the time Photosynth went live, this video came out detailing some of the advances they are already making for the photo tourism software.

Examples

I worked up four quick examples just to test run things, which I have linked just below.  I found that with anything of any size you should really try to hit with at least fifty shots.  I maxed my synths about 120 or so, but could see using way more on other things in the future.  I also found that it works much better if the camera is not necessarily the center of the synth.  Instead, try to make the camera be outside looking in.  In the first example of the Russ Hall stairway, clicking the “Switch to the next 3D Group” button will show you how many different groups it put together, because it seemed to have some problems organizing things in an indoor 3D space.  It also probably didn’t help that I was moving all over trying to cover things with different angles.  Note that in that video I mentioned in the previous paragraph, it looks like they are working on this very issue though.  Outside works much nicer though.  Taking a target and moving around it seems to produce nicer results.

• Russ Hall Stairway
• The Oval
• Night Song Statue
• JungleTron Construction

You can also see how things work from a single vantage point (JungleTron), and how the orbits come together (statue).

What’s Good

• Embeddable: You can embed the synths in existing web pages, and it has a nice splash prompt asking users to download the plugin if they haven’t (the splash even shows that specific synth’s thumbnail).  U of W’s web site also shows an example using a Java applet, though that doesn’t appear to be a publicly available feature yet.
• Engaging: Rather than just asking a user to sit and watch something, or flip through a handful of disconnected images, you are encouraging someone to interact with your site and campus.  Consider the potential for Easter Eggs.
• Easy (what’s with all these E words?): While the ease of use forces you to sacrifice control (see the other E word below), it makes it stupidly easy to deploy and use, which is a great time saver and makes the barrier to entry low.
• Single Image View: Users don’t have to remain trapped in the interactive world if they don’t want to, and can switch to a simple thumbnail gallery.
• Storage: Microsoft was generous in giving users 20GB of storage space for synths.  That’s a lot.  For comparison, my four synths are built from 364 1600×1200 images that took up .3GB (that’s point three, or a little over 300MB).

What it Needs

• A preview mode: This is especially true if you are shooting in hi-res of any kind.  Prior to taking all the time to upload a couple hundred megs of photos, it’d be nice if you could make sure it looks right.
• Better indoor modeling: Right now Photosynth seems to have some trouble modeling from inside a structure looking out. Recent demonstrations indicate this will be improved soon.
• Manual stitching: If Photosynth defines a set of photos as a separate 3D group, it’d be nice if you could manually match it to another 3D group that it goes with if it made a mistake.
• More OS support: Few tears will be spilled over those of us crazy enough to use Linux, but the Mac crowd is big enough that Microsoft needs to get on the ball at the risk of Apple, et al doing it better to please their customers.
• Clean permalinks: Hopefully they will hurry up and do something about the links to individual collections.  At the moment, they contain long, and impossible to verbally telegraph synth IDs.  It would be nice to see something more like http://photosynth.net/username/synthname.
• Editing: Currently, you can’t add or remove photos from a completed synth, and you can’t edit existing photos in place. You also can’t download all the images used as a batch (that I know of).

Is it Ready?

Unfortunately, not just yet, at least not as a primary campus marketing tool.  But, if you have the time and resources to start playing with it, I think there’s plenty of value in it, even at this early stage.  Since the whole process (besides taking the photos) is automated, it doesn’t actually take much to slap a synth together and post it.  Imagine groups like your art department and what they could show off with this kind of functionality.

I think the keys to success with this are all in the “What it Needs” section.  If Microsoft can bull ahead through those issues, particularly making it OS and browser agnostic, I could see this quickly becoming the tour software de jour.  I’ll also be interested in what sites like Flickr will do in response, be it license the softwre, or produce their own.  There is always the “Microsoft” variable that can and will keep plenty of people from commiting to it.  I don’t entirely blame them, as I am frequently against putting all your eggs in one third party basket.  The only reason I differ on that opinion in this case is because, well, there is no alternative yet, and given what I’ve seen in that latest video, I’m not sure there’s much improvement even necessary.

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•  Tech’s all-time top 25 flops – These pivotal moments are the history you don’t want to repeat. To plan for the future you have to understand the past.
• AT&T iPhone Google Deal Pits Apple Against Blackberry – Google teaming up with AT&T and Apple against Blackberry… NO, I love my blackberry
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• Microsoft Commits $234 Million To Put PCs In Schools – The company said it aims to reach 270 million people with the second stage of its Partners in Learning program.
• How to Track RSS Subscribers using Meta Refresh in Google Analytics – Setting up RSS tracking in Google Analytics. I know that Feedburner is awesome, but this looks promising.
• Benchmarking Your Blog Post Quality… So You Can Improve – Very admirable idea that’s worth some more thought.
• Blu-ray players grab 93 percent of market after Warner went Blu – Wow. Check the article this happened in one week time going from 60% to 93%… I think I posted something about this the other week… so can I say “I told you so” at this point or still too early!?
• The Ultimate Student Resource List – Excellent list of student resources. Ok the list might be a little overkill, but sometimes having too much to choose from is a good thing. I think this is one of those times.
• TED Talks: The story of a passionate life – Dr. Dunlap – Dr. Dunlap’s, president of Wofford College, speech from TED 2007. A wonderful presentation and I’m happy to say that’s our president. If you can set aside twenty minutes for a weave of storytelling an inspiration I highly recommend this one!
• Color Schemes, Color Palettes, Color Theory – Large list of links to online Color Resources for Designers
• 100 Best Companies to Work For 2008: Full list – Google tops the list of best employers for the second year in a row
• Great Student Videos – College Web Guy put this nice little collection of College Student videos. If you haven’t seen them I recommend checking them out.
• Google Health Coming Soon? – Google attempting to tackle the digitization of the US health care system  a future possibility… wow.
• Open Source Poised for Surge in Education – Open source software will nearly double in the education space over the next four years.
• How the Wireless Spectrum Auction Could Change Your Life – The auction of the 700MHz spectrum could significantly change the mobile and wireless landscape in the United States. Another one of my predictions made some follow-up worth news this past week.

That’s it for now.  Hopefully I’ll have my Facebook report by the end of the day so stay tuned.

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The first sign was about two weeks ago when Warner Brothers announced that they would go exclusively Blu-Ray and stop producing HD-DVD. With that I think it’s time to break down all the reasons that Blu-Ray will win:

• Warner Brothers to exclusively back Blu-Ray - I guess this news really hit the net almost two weeks ago so if you haven’t heard it then well go read it. I believe I read that this won’t full go into effect until May, but the announcement has been made.
• Porn industry finally embraces Blu-Ray - So your first response might be big deal it’s nasty porn, or maybe you really enjoy the stuff and this news excites you (I’m not here to make a judgment call on you). Let’s look at this for a second. Technologies have been driven by porn for years, especially on the web. Porn pushed digital images on the net, porn pushed the development of online credit card transactions, the digital cameras adoption was significantly helped so people could take pictures without having to get the film developed at the store, online streaming video is the same story, not to mention who knows what percentage of the internet today is porn! So what does all this mean, well the porn industry adopting Blu-Ray is definitely a huge piece of the puzzle. I went digging for something to back up my accusations and wasn’t able to find a lot quickly, but this article definitely supports some of my assessments.
• Microsoft’s Xbox could consider Blu-Ray support - Wait a minute here, back the truck up, isn’t Microsoft one of the creators and founders of HD-DVD? Why even bring this out unless they knew they were fitting a losing battle?
• Toshiba refuses to wave the white flag - Finally this article came out a few days ago and if after reading it you’re not convinced then I guess you can go down with the HD-DVD boat. Unfortunately I doubt Sony will buy your obsolete HD-DVD player from you like Toshiba is hoping to get paid to end the debate.

Ok so that’s four pretty compelling pieces right there and I haven’t found anything to back HD-DVD support. Well after reading this I guess it’s not really much of a prediction, but you can’t say you didn’t know now!

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1. The iPhone was a huge hit! Yes lots of people complain about no GPS and security issues, but let’s face it these things are selling quickly and it’s the most talked about gizmo out there. Yes businesses aren’t really excited about them as I’ve read numerous articles in both E-Week and InformationWeek about this, but the users seem to love them. What does the iPhone do that is so awesome? To me the biggest advantage is that it can render a website in its full glory as if your viewing it on a normal computer. That’s right no mobile CSS needed for this mobile device! I really can’t believe more people haven’t been talking about this point? This in itself really makes website programmers and developers have to think if all the time spent on designing sites that are mobile phone friendly will really even matter in another year or two?
2. You have probably heard about the February 2009 mandate of all television broadcast will be pure digital and no longer analog? So how is this related? Well this old UHF spectrum is going to be auctioned off later in this month and the expected bidders are mostly cell phone companies and technology companies like Google. It’s pretty safe to assume at this point that this spectrum will be consumed by cell phone and wireless transitions. I’m sure I’ll blog about the winners when the time comes. You can read more about this at BusinessWeek.
3. Verizon has announced plans to open up it’s network to third party devices. Although some are very skeptical this, to me is an admission by a large player that the field is about to drastically change. In Europe this is standard and with services like Skype using VOIP and free wireless access you really don’t even need a carrier. It has to be a concern that with wireless networks being added to more cities that this is a major concern. Another angle would speculate that Verizon is obviously showing support for Google’s Android, the Open Handset Alliance to create an Open Source Linux OS that would be Standard for cell phones.
4. Well as I just mentioned we have Android. I have very obvious speculations about why Google is interested in an open source OS platform, but I’ll save my assessment of Google and their predicted path for another post. Android, if universally adopted (and there is little reason to believe with Google’s recent track record that it won’t display some clout), has the possibility to really change the mobile environment. It is being supported by 33 other companies besides Google. We are talking about one OS with the dominance of Windows on personal computers, and it’s Open Source FREEWARE! Ok ok, so maybe it’s a little bold to say that Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile are done for, but there are 20+versions of mobile linux currently out there!

Ok so there you go! Four solid points that say we are in for some big changes in our cell phones as we know them today. Maybe some of my predictions are off, but if one of these comes out big then doesn’t that make my prediction correct? So I’m hedging my prediction with four possible positive outcomes, what’s wrong with that? I’ll definitely be sure to follow this as the year progresses.

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