Online Business Primer

It’s been nearly a year in the making but I’m finally pleased to announce the release of Real-World Ajax, a massive new compendium of the Ajax spectrum that I’ve compiled and edited with Kate Allen in conjunction with leading Ajax authors from across the country.  While not generally available until later this month, with full availability on March 19th at the AjaxWorld Conference and Expo which I co-chair with SYS-CON Media’s Jeremy Geelan, this book marks a significant milestone in the brief history of Ajax, rich user experiences in general, and the growing challenges and opportunities in this space as we continue to witness a tectonic shift in the way Web apps are designed and built.

The inevitable conclusion: The Web page metaphor is just no longer a compelling model for the majority of online Web applications.  We are now rapidly leaving the era where static HTML is acceptable to the users and customers of our software.  Combined with the rise of badges and widgets, the growing prevalence of the Global SOA to give us vast landscapes of incredibly high value Web services and Web parts, it’s important to note that the use of Ajax is essential to even start exploiting these important trends.  Skirting the corners of this phenomenon are also the non-trivial challenges offered up by largely abandoning the traditional model of the browser.  Specifically, what happens to search engine optimiziation (SEO), disabled accessibility, link propogation (along with network effects), Web analytics, traditional Web user interface conventions, and more, which are all dramatically affected — often broken outright — by the Ajax Web application model?

Some of these questions are answered directly in Real-World Ajax, but many are as yet relatively unanswered in an industry struggling to deal with a major mid-industry change.  The tools, processes, and technologies we’ve brought to bear to build Web applications are going to change a lot, as well as the skill sets.  As I wrote in my Seven Things Every Software Project Needs to Know About Ajax , these types of rich Web applications require serious software development skills, particularly as the browser is a relatively constrained environment compared to traditional software development runtime environments like Java and .NET.

Of course, despite this issues — even because of them — it is a very exciting time to be in the Ajax business right now.  One big reason is that there are few Ajax products with clear market dominance yet and the dozens and dozens of Ajax libraries and frameworks currently available often a very diverse and compelling set of options for use as the foundation of the next great Ajax application.  While the Dojo Toolkit is probably the Ajax toolkit with the largest mindshare and lots of industry interest, the big vendors such as Microsoft and their Microsoft’s ASP.NET Ajax (aka Atlas) show that the story is just as the first major products from big vendors make their way to market.  There’s little doubt that we’ll continue to see the Ajax market maturing and I’m looking forward to a variety of upcoming improvement to Ajax such as Project Tamarin, the high-speed Javascript engine donated by Adobe to the Mozilla project, the ongoing evolution of OpenAjax, and the 1.0 release of Dojo sometime this year, to name just a few of the exciting things that have the potential to ensure Ajax continues to grow and evolve.

While we expect that Real-World Ajax will give you a front row seat to the thinking and techniques of some of the industry’s best and brightest, here’s a short list of things that are still not generally well known about Ajax:

• Ajax is based completely on the open standards of the Web.  Based entirely on XHTML, CSS, ECMAScript (the name of the standard for Javascript), and even XMLHTTPRequest, Ajax itself is nothing more than a technique that blends together open Internet standards that no vendor currently controls.  When used carefully, Ajax results in applications that are built on the Web as a true software platform, and as such means that there’s no vendor lock-in, no licensing fees, and nobody to control the direction and destiny of your application but you.  That doesn’t mean that many of the most popular Ajax frameworks don’t break these standards in some minor ways, but with initiatives like OpenAjax, this too will be addressed soon enough.
• Currently, Ajax cannot be a complete rich user experience solution. Even with pretty darn cool things that can be done with Canvas 3D and SVG support (the Dojo clock), there is just something Ajax cannot do: true rich media.  That means that Web apps that want to offer features that include video and audio must use another method of doing so, usually the Flash plug-in.  With some of the most effective new Web apps such as YouTube being rich media driven, this poses a significant challenge to the Ajax approach.  For now, a rich Internet application strategy simply must include a blend of Ajax and Flash and the attendant complexity in testing, skill sets, and integration.  Unfortunately, this has implications for the previous point since one particular vendor does control Flash at this time: Adobe.
• Almost all of the initial disadvantages of Ajax can now be countered. Everything from search index addressability to accessibility to offline access and local storage has been addressed in one form or another.  The techniques for resolving issues with bookmarking, the browser’s back button, page view analytics and others all currently have well documented work arounds or even entire frameworks that address them head on.  While memory leaks in the browser and the limited abilities of Javascript timers pose challenges still, they are no longer enough alone to hold back the majority of Web application development projects.  While freeform drawing and accelerated 3D graphics are also on the short list of Ajax capabilities not supported by more than a few browsers, these too are being addressed rapidly either by recent browser upgrades or interesting new plug-ins like WPF/E which will soon be common.

As for Real-World Ajax itself, I’d like to give thanks to the large team of expert authors we assembled to give you what we believe is the most complete picture yet on the Ajax user experience, one of the key planks of Web 2.0.  Not only does the material in Real-World carefully go over the basic Ajax technologies such as DHTML, XHTML, and CSS but there is also in-depth coverage of mobile Ajax, enterprise Ajax, and even a complete chapter that often fails to get enough coverage in the Ajax world: security.   Finally, the book includes several complete working Ajax applications as well as the video sessions from most of our previous AjaxWorld events.  A big thanks to Nancy Valentine, Yakov Fain, Richard Walter, Kate Allen, Jeremy Geelan, and Fuat Kircaali for making the book possible and to our great complement of Ajax authors: Jim Benson, Jason Blum, Kurt Cagle, John Crupi, Luis Derechin, Jay Fienberg, Corey Gilmore, Rob Gonda, Kevin Hakman, Ajit Jaokar, Dietrich Kappe, David S. Linthicum, Phil McCarthy, Dan Malks, Scott Preston, Anil Sharma, Coach Wei, and Greg Winton.

See you in New York City at AjaxWorld Conference and Expo later this month.  Also, there will be a book signing event where you can meet many of the authors as well.

By Dion Hinchcliffe

Technorati Tags: web 2.0

Use these lessons in your classroom. Post your thoughts, ideas, and ways in which you use them. We want to hear from you.

By infinitethinking@gmail.com (Infinite Thinking Machine)

Technorati Tags: teaching tools

While it’s no longer quite so fashionable to label your Internet startup a “Web 2.0″ company these days, the popularity of the term remains extraordinarily high and is presently used today both far and wide in traditional media and social media.  The Google Trends graph in the figure to the right tells the overall story; global search interest in Web 2.0 is more popular than “social media” and “social networking” combined and by a significant margin.  About the only other strategic technology concept that has anywhere near the same volume of world-wide interest is service-oriented architecture (SOA), which as it turns out is also surprisingly closely related to Web 2.0.  Granted, Google Trends is not a scientific, “bet-the-business” kind of source, but it’s a pretty darn good barometer.

Even for someone who spends much time with Web 2.0 concepts, I was surprised at this and I carried out a little cross checking from other sources and they all show the same disparity: Web 2.0 is still far and away one of the most popular terms to describe the intrinsic nature of many new online applications and businesses.  This apparently highlights large scale demand for a broad enough term that rightly captures the innovations, new trends, and technologies that have emerged in the online space in the last few years.  Web 2.0 has fit this bill better than any other single meme including the read/write Web, Social Computing, the Social Web, and the New Internet, to name just a few alternatives (and conceptually incomplete) terms that have been suggested.

The only real problem with this is that term itself has sometimes devolved into a vague buzzword that is often substituted as a simple synonym for social software or rich user experience techniques such as Ajax.  Part of this is that the early investigation into Web 2.0 trends attempted to use it as a placeholder until the real underlying patterns were actually identified.  This work resulted in the famous Web 2.0 meme-map that began to put meat on the bones and ultimately resulted in the excellent Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices by my good friend John Musser.  However, the lack of early specifics, though a brilliant move that allowed the right concepts to emerge from research into what was happening online, rather prescribing it blindly, also left a lasting impression of a vague, somewhat shapeless term for “newness” in the online world to the extent that even Tim Berners-Lee himself was left doubting.

However, it does appear that we are now left with both a very popular term that also has an increasingly large body of serious work that puts tremendous substance behind it.  Academics such as Amy Shuen and her excellent Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide have produced enormous formal texts based on intensive research.  A quick search of Google Scholar shows that over 14,000 references can be found. So too does the popular Web 2.0 Expo conference series continue and it has been expanding in recent years to the East Coast, Europe, and Asia.  While the hype itself has largely dissipated and Gartner’s 2008 Hype Cycle report says it’s entering the trough of disillusionment, it also notes that “it will emerge within two years to have transformational impact, as companies steadily gain more experience and success with both the technologies and the cultural implications.“  I could not agree more.

Web 2.0: The Concepts Spread to Other Fields

I’ve previously covered what Web 2.0 means exactly and the virtual ink spilled on this often surprisingly complex subject is itself vast.  The Wikipedia definition of “Web 2.0″ remains one of the most popular entries on the site and the number of offshoots of the term has been a saga in itself, from the early days of Advertising 2.0, Law 2.0, Library 2.0 to the newer, (generally) widely accepted terms Enterprise 2.0 and Government 2.0.

For simplicity’s sake, however, this is what we normally use to provide the most straightforward definitions of all things Web 2.0:

• Web 2.0 - The continuously changing, participatory Web with a focus on building collective intelligence on myriad devices and primarily servicing The Long Tail.
• Web 2.0 in the Enterprise - Web 2.0 as applied to business and not consumer activities.
• Enterprise 2.0 - The social, collaborative network with emergent behavior and structure.

At this point there are some that like to invoke Buzzword Bingo at such seemingly gratuitously coining of new terms, but I personally find this a crucially important point: The global network of the Web itself, which is shaped continually by the endless participation of hundreds of millions of users around the clock, is no more than a reflection of those that shape it (which are then shaped themselves by it.)  That the principles of Web 2.0 cross all disciplines, types of business, types of government, languages, as well as types of people and culture has fostered an interesting phenomenon.  Namely, each of these topical areas are in the various stages of translating how Web 2.0 transforms and improves what they do, from architectures of participation and harnessing collective intelligence to radical decentralization (with cloud computing being the most interesting new example) and open service ecosystems.

This “localization” of Web 2.0 into specific verticals appears to be a natural competitive response by those trying to incorporate the latest best practices and proven technique into their work.  In fact, I find that non-technologists and those whose professions are not spent in the world of software or in Internet businesses have a hard time incorporating, indeed translating, the Web 2.0 body of knowledge to their line of work.  So one by one, we can thank a largely self-appointed group of experts have taken the trouble to map the 2.0 works into the many aspects of the world that are steadily being remade by the increasingly pervasive presence of the Web.

And Web 2.0 isn’t standing still, we certainly haven’t figured out all the ways that we can leverage the network yet.  As we start thinking beyond Web 2.0 we begin considering where sensor-gathered information of every description, location-awareness (the iPhone will drive this like few other devices today), and the glimmerings of semantic capability, we can see that eventually Web 2.0 will — like Web 1.0 — evolve into something else in its own right.

It took us almost 10 years to figure out how to begin to use the Web properly and it may take another 10 years from now before most of us are incorporating the lessons of web 2.0 deeply into how we run their businesses.  The result will be a transformed business and competitive landscape with products and services created and delivered in ways very unlike today (see my Web 2.0 predictions for 2008 for some details on this).  It’s also clear that the long-term implications will go well beyond that, similar to the way that the telephone, television, and especially the printing press changed how information was created, who could access it, and how it was owned and distributed.  The parallels stop there since the deepest implications of 2.0 is a tremendous shift of control from the center of our networks to the edge.

What other 2.0 memes are you tracking? Please put in comments below.

By Dion Hinchcliffe

Technorati Tags: web 2.0

The economy is slowly beginning to improve. People are thinking about starting to invest their money again. Nobody wants to lose their cash, though. So what are the best things to invest in right now?

• Real Estate with a Long Term Plan. The real estate market is still shaky. However, housing prices are at an all-time low in many areas so it’s a good time to buy if you can. The trick is to make sure that this is a long-term investment plan for you. Make plans to rent out the property for at least a few years until home values rise and you can make a profit off of the investment.
• Gold. The great thing about gold is that its value stays much steadier than the value of the dollar. You can easily sell gold for cash whenever you have to but you don’t have to sell gold for it to be worth something to you since it’s a form of money itself.
• Social Lending Clubs. Peer-to-peer lending clubs allow you to make a small personal loan to someone in need of money. These clubs screen participants carefully so you aren’t taking a big risk. You don’t make a lot of money but it’s a nice safe investment.
• Your Education and Career. You can never go wrong with investing in improving yourself!

Technorati Tags: sell gold, sell gold for cash

While many educators use Web 2.0 tools to make global connections, some educators are actually making these connections by traveling directly to countries where resources are scarce equipped with XO laptops, digital cameras, Flip Cameras, and incredible commitment to bridging the digital divide. I’ve invited Sharon Peters to be a guest blogger for Infinite Thinking this month to share with you how she and fellow educators are making global connections through Teachers Without Borders, and how you and your students can participate in their efforts to bridge the digital divide.

—- from Guest blogger Sharon Peters —-

Teachers Without Borders is off to Africa

At 59 million, teachers represent the largest group of educated professionals in the world. If you are able to read this blog post, very likely you are NOT one of the millions of those teachers who lack access to professional development and enrichment resources. Teachers Without Borders (Canada affiliation) is an organization of teachers helping teachers in order to foster and promote adequate teacher training in areas of the world that desperately need it.

In my experience, teachers are also those with the biggest hearts. During the last 12 months, I have had the incredible privilege of working shoulder-to-shoulder with inspiring teachers from Canada, the U.S., South Africa and Kenya as we rolled up our sleeves together and shared resources, methodologies and practices. I have learned so much more from my new colleagues than I contributed and I can see a substantial difference in my own teaching approaches. Last July and August, I served with a team of Canadian teachers facilitating workshops for science, math, English and ICT (Information, Communications and Technology) educators in South Africa and Kenya over a period of six weeks. We were the first teams of TWB Canada to be deployed. My experiences profoundly changed my world view, my priorities and my attitudes about learning - and ultimately affected how I ask my students to consider becoming global citizens.

Frankly, I cannot imagine more effective professional development than to work cross-culturally with other dedicated teachers from around the world. We return to our own educational communities greatly enriched and empowered. To develop relationships with teachers in politically and economically challenging situations permits us to give voice to teachers we may otherwise ignore due to lack of media attention or awareness.

Over a period of nearly seven weeks in July and August, I will be returning to South Africa and Kenya as a team leader of ICT teachers who will facilitate workshops for educators ranging from newly appointed elearning specialists to teachers who have never touched a computer before . Our team faces enormous challenges and will be stretched to the limit in ways we cannot yet imagine. Our team of Americans and Canadians will be joined by in-country facilitators this year. Many of these educators have not yet had the opportunity to facilitate professional growth for their colleagues. Our model is to ask increased participation of in-country educator facilitators every year so that by the fourth year of our presence in a community, we can hand over the PD to the in-country educators.

As an educational technologist, I see the incredible potential that online tools and environments offer to educators to connect, collaborate and share on a global level. Many teachers may not yet have access to the technology or they may lack adequate instruction on how to harness and exploit the tools available to them. Meeting teachers face-to-face in their contexts and creating relationships with them greatly facilitates the possibility of sharing resources and approaches. I witnessed many educators who eagerly desired to learn more technology and computer skills when I was in Africa. There was a profound sense of a need to “catch up” to the developed world, in terms of skills and access to the Internet. My experiences have also forced me to recognize and question how culture and ideology is implicitly embedded in technology tools and approaches. These are very important issues that must be considered as we facilitate content for our workshops. We are in new territory here where there are few guidelines or “how-to” manuals. Fundamentally, though, I think we are on the right track through the model of partnering with in-country educators who provide cultural and historical interpretation.

We need your help!

Teachers Without Borders is a relatively young organization. We are working on a model to build capacity and sustainability. Not all teachers are able at this time in their careers to consider going abroad and working on an overseas team. There are certainly other ways in which you can help.

• Consider making a tax-deductible donation. TWB raises money through grants and donations to cover our on the ground expenses while we teachers are asked to raise money toward our travel costs to the host country. As you know, most teachers are not able to pay for this out of pocket. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to help us cover our travel expenses. If you are in Canada, you can give donations here. If you are in the U.S., please go to this link and be sure to specify that the donation is directed toward the TWB-Canada team members.
• Consider making donations of used digital cameras, laptops or flash drives. I will be at NECC in Washington D.C. (probably hanging out at the Bloggers Cafe) in late June and will be happy to connect with anyone who would like to pass resources along to me. John Schinker, another team member, and I will be leaving from NECC to travel to Africa.
• Consider making a donation of a Flip camera (or similar camera) to kick off a classroom exchange between your students and students in South Africa. We are partnering with Edunova in the townships of Cape Town to establish classroom-to-classroom partnerships. If you pass along a camera, perhaps with some embedded content on it from your own students, we will give it to a committed teacher in South Africa who will establish and maintain contact with your class.
• Consider joining our TWB community to communicate with other global educators and to develop resources for teachers in other parts of the world.

For more information or for an American or Canadian address to which you can send equipment, you can contact me at speters at twbcanada.org and you can follow our blogs throughout July and August:

Jody Meacher:

Zac Chase:

John Schinker - http://www.tasteoftech.net

Lois McGill-Horn

Sharon Peters: http://wearejustlearning.ca

Noble Kelly: http://twbcanada.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?user=noblek

By infinitethinking@gmail.com (Infinite Thinking Machine)

Technorati Tags: teaching tools