thesis

I have been taking a bit of a break after the successful completion of the Reasonate testing within the BBSc303 course. There's been a couple of interesting articles appear in my newsreader recently. The first has a good construction analogy for 'Web 2.0'.

"An analogy from the world of building construction perhaps clarifies the distinction. Web 1.0 was like building houses from cement, sand, crushed bricks and aluminium. You had to mix cement, bricks and sand together to make concrete, then use concrete to make the house. With newer Web 2.0 technologies you effectively have concrete, prefabricated walls, corrugated iron sheets, etc to build houses. So you can make more interesting and elaborate houses than before.

Many Web 2.0 building blocks are available as open-source software products. These products are, for the most part, free to use. Further, the source code (ie, the engineering blueprint) is usually available for developers to modify as needed. Since there is a huge variety of open source software (for example, SourceForge, a repository of open source software, has over 115000 projects), the programmer can mix and match the right tools and build a program very quickly (and cheaply.)

So, continuing our construction analogy, Web 2.0 programmers not only have ready-made concrete, but it is free ready-made concrete!"

Unfortunately there has been a lot of debate recently over the term 'Web 2.0', mainly caused by O'Reilly making moves to copyright the term because apparently it was Tim O'Reilly who originally coined it. This move certainly peeved a lot of people off who had considered the term more a definition of a genre/ideology rather than some new trademark to be monetised. Anyway in the future I'll be steering clear of using the term Web 2.0 just to avoid any controversy that will continue to plauge the term over the next six-twelve months.

I was reading David Weinberger's blog today and saw two interesting things, the first was a dilemma he was facing with tag namespaces and the second was his idea of an 'ideal tag results page'. The first discussion centered around which website should be referenced when blog tagging (i.e using the rel="tag" microformat). A general theme in the subsequent comments was that his tags should first link back to his own blog site to show his tagged blogs and then from there provide links to other tag services (like Technorati, del.icio.us or Flickr).

A Mash-up in the Web sense is when you grab a bunch of disparate API’s, say Google Maps and live crime statistics and come out with something whose sum is greater than that of its parts (in this example chicagocrime.org). A Wrap-up is my term for the grouping of hyperlinks and tags with a supporting wiki-based summary of the ideas, issues and decisions reached within the identified dataset. In both cases the outcome is of more inherit value than its component pieces. Yet without the individual value of the compontents the end result lacks credibility or interactivity, making the concept as a whole less appealing or conclusive.

As I said in my last post a major issue we were facing in the Reasonate testing was quickly gaining an global overview of a project or individual’s progress without having to read and understand numerous scrapbook-like blog postings. Just to complicate matters these posts are often related to, but not explicit in their overall meaning or relationship to the design’s end goals. Or how I put it more pragmatically last time round:

For the last few months I have been very busy developing and testing Reasonate within the BBSc303 ‘Digital Craft’ class at the VUW School of Architecture. The main purpose of the testing was to evaluate the adoption rate and usage trends of blogging and tagging within a simulated team design process. In concert with this goal the testing was also used to establish what sort of toolset design-orientated bloggers require, especially when operating within a structured environment of project groups, tutors (fellow students) and course coordinators (the lecturer, Mike Donn and myself).

At the end of the BBSc303 tutorial on Tuesday I held a feedback session with the students present regarding Reasonate, their experiences with it and areas that could be addressed. This feedback session was prompted following the observation that the tagging functionality was not being utilised by students as much as hoped.

My opinion of this was that the current usage pattern suggested a scrap-booking mentality by most students and tagging (if it occurred) would probably follow once the bulk of the modelling work was completed and the emphasis shifted to explaining the overall process cohesively.
The students present provided the following feedback:

I am over vendor presentations after the CAADRIA conference but it was interesting to read that Salesoft are touring around NZ on a big bus (which looks a lot like the XBox360 bus repainted) to promote AutoDesk's new products (Revit, ADT). They were in Wellington today and are off south for the rest of the week. It is good to see AutoDesk staff member and blogger Shaan Hurley (of Between the Lines) tour down here as an indication AutoDesk takes this market seriously. Its kind of funny, after years of almost no active promotion all of a sudden AutoDesk and Bentley seem to be interested in this part of the world again.

Architosh and CADwire have feature reviews of Acrobat 3D and I must say it sounds really, really good. I am big fan of the PDF standard but not of recent Adobe Acrobat releases (the term 'bloatware' springs to mind). When I first heard that Adobe where planning on including 3D support in Acrobat I assumed it would be a token gesture in order to differentiate it from its 2D PDF competitors like Foxit (my favourite Windows pdf reader). I began to change my mind and think it was something a little more serious when AutoDesk suddenly seemed to get very anti-PDF when it came to exchanging building information. 

Reading the reviews of Acrobat 3D I can see why the people at AutoDesk seemed so worried, it has one major killer feature that really sets it apart from all the competition, a 'print screen' equivalent for 3D models. This 3D importing feature does not work at the software application level like most data importers, it skips all the difficulties associated with data format translation and plucks the 3D information directly out of the OpenGL buffer. This is a really intelligent move from Adobe, it gives their product a degree of model importing support perhaps only rivaled by Right Hemisphere.

There has been a few interesting articles about products that hope to assist in the process of communicating and collaborating (C&C). Tangler sets out to do this by providing a mechanism for grouping various discussion sources (blogs, instant messaging, mailing lists) into a single 'group' that can be easily searched, scanned and in turn discussed. It sounds like they aim to get around the problem of information dispersion, ie. an interesting blog here, a somewhat handy mailing list here. This could be really useful in certain arenas like open source where often I find myself going to several similar but different discussion venues (mailing lists, forums, blogs) in order to find the answer to a certain question. Unfortunately it would also seem like the potential for making money out of such a system is pretty low, not only because similar systems already exist but also because the 'value-add' is relatively small when put in the context of the web, search engines and the flexibility of RSS.

It has been a while since I last posted, mainly because for the last month and a bit I've been busy preparing and implementing Reasonate within BBSc303. Consequently its been a pretty interesting time. It seems to be working out really well, I've got to grips with Rails (to the point that I cringe at the thought of having to do Java stuff) and almost all of the functionality has been implemented in an easy to use manner. Tagging and RSS have been implemented and introduced to the students whilst the project blogging aspect will come into play once the students form their project teams. Overall the students have picked up the ideas very quickly and some are really getting into the swing of things.