November 2009 Archives

For a while I have been playing around with different configurations of how to share my stuff. I have this blog. I also have a bunch of other places. With blogs@psu, I have talked a lot about the idea of the one blog to rule them all - all your content should really flow into one blog. This works when you are writing a bunch of reflections based on classes you are taking and other experiences in your life. But what about when you are not creating a portfolio or repository of your work, but instead are working towards some sort of multi-authored document (Like Long's Digital Dialogue (see my post here))? I guess what I am getting at is that I am starting to think that it is more useful to have multiple blogs for multiple purposes than I originally thought. I am not saying that a student should create a new blog for each course they take, eventually graduating with 40 separate small blogs that no longer get updates. I don't think that would be useful.

Here is my short personal manifesto on managing my digital identity:

a blog should be the default format for a website.

One person may have many websites, as long as doing so is useful.

Each blog is a living document.

Each blog may have different collaborators.

My own personal blogs: edushizzle for topics related to education and tech, flickr for experiments with photographic techniques and processes, posterous for small random fragments that may tell an autobiographical story as they are assembled, twitter for notifications of all of this and direct communications with my social network, stuff for sharing in collaboration with my colleagues stuff related to edu.

I am joyously over-thinking something that most people just do naturally.

PS - I wrote this on my iphone.

TK (via a wave) pointed me to this slashdot story on using Google Wave to play Dungeons and Dragons.

The commenters point out, rightly, that the same thing could happen with a combination of IRC and wiki, and that there are already "play by post" systems where people do this - basically a message board with built in character sheets and dice rollers.

Let's get this out there: Most (all?) things you can do with wave, one could right a web app to do the same thing. Here is why if I was to write a play by post style role playing system, I would use wave instead of implementing it on the web:

1) User management, authentication, authorization. My web-based system would require I implement user registration, and that all users register (create an account) with my system. Wave is a federated protocol. All existing wave users could easily be joined to a game. It doesn't matter if they are eduwave users or googlewave users, and eduwave users can interact freely with googlewave users.

2) Real Time interactions. Yes, a web app can handle realtime interactions (google's wave client is even implemented as a web app), but as a web developer I would have to design and implement a system for real-time interactions. Wave gives me a platform that handles this. I don't have to implement it over again. As a developer, I get it all for free.

3) Deploying the app. I do not even need to deploy any kind of persistent storage (in other words, a db). The wave server handles storing this data for me. The code all runs within the wave (it is a javascript). I just need a place to store the gadget (a static file). If I was doing something like having a robot listen to the wave and automatically decrement a user's hit points as they get attacked in combat, then I would need to deploy that somewhere.

I am happy to even further alienate all non-geeks by not only talking more about wave protocol, but also by using DnD as an example case.

Based on the recent Wave conversations I've seen at Cole's Blog and at CogDog (here and here), I revisited my google wave post from a few weeks ago. Man, it is a rambling wreck. So, I am going to rewrite my central idea from that post a little more succinctly:

Google wave is not a web-based application. Google wave is a basis for building and deploying applications that facilitate interactions among participants that are simultaneously synchronous and asynchronous as well as linear and non-linear.

Just as the web shook up old models of organization (hyperlinked instead of hierarchical, bottom-up instead of top-down), the wave aims to shake up models of interaction.

The jury is still out on if the human mind is capable of grokking this kind of interaction, or what the benefits and downsides are. I think it is an issue worth exploring.