Technology As Innovator

On the occasion of Yahoo! 360 being closed in April 2009, I have some personal recommendations for alternative blogging solutions.

Where to migrate automatically copy legacy Yahoo! 360 contents to

Yahoo! 360plus Vietnam

This product is the official product for Vietnam market with Vietnamese interface.

Click here to see instructions of the utility.

Pros

• Compatibility between Yahoo!’s products
• Local events

Cons

• Community outspread: 360plus Vietnam is for Vietnamese users only

Publish to FeedBurner

FeedBurner is a Google’s property to manage contents via RSS.

This method requires certain technical experience.

Publishing using FeedBurner does not migrate your data to another SNS, but to HTML format where you can backup your contents manually.

How to do that

1. Set your 360 blog to public mode
2. Register an account at FeedBurner or login using your Google account
3. Burn your feed
   
4. Go to Publicize, select BuzzBoost
5. Fill in the form activate the BuzzBoost function
   

Considerations

1. You go where your friends are. Is Facebook where most of your friends reside now?
2. You may want to choose the platform that will be easy to backup your contents. WordPress is best to fulfill this desire

Recommendations

Before you go on with further introduction on the blogging alternatives, here are a few immediate recommendations:

1. Professional blogging: Blogger, WordPress
2. Personal blogging: Facebook
3. Blog to update family and friends: Facebook
4. Don’t really care about receiving comments (but still can receive response): Tumblr
5. Mostly copy & paste: Tumblr

Best choices today

Facebook

Facebook is world’s #1 Social Networking Site. It has a powerful Notes function with very good privacy settings

Click here to see its Notes.

Pros

• Contained within world’s #1 SNS, which means all your social graph and contents are in the same place
• Your friends are updated of your blog post
• Person tagging, which notifies the tagged persons
• Privacy option to item level

Cons

• The ’sense of blogging’ is drowned within a complex SNS
• Ads

Blogger

Blogger is a well-known blogging platform from Google.

What people usually hesitate about Blogger is that it seems to be stand-alone, i.e. no feeds.

However, few know that it has a very useful Follow function where you can get updates from other bloggers using Blogger.

Update from Official Google Blog

KhanhLNQ, Tính năng Following mới nhất của Blogger

Pros

• Professional platform with many built-in widgets
• Good SEO optimization
• You can choose your own domain
• No ads

Cons

• N/A

Windows Live Spaces

Windows Live Spaces is in Live network with more than 40 millions users.

Pros

• Professional platform with many built-in widgets
• Very trendy themes
• Potential to integrate into the new Microsoft’s Live product package
• Privacy option to item level

Cons

• No permalinks
• Ads

WordPress

WordPress is a highly regarded blogging platform. WordPress is offered in two ways: a blog on WordPress.com or software package to run a self-hosted blog.

This blog is WordPress itself.

While WordPress has limited social networking features, one can use plugins or external service to achieve this goal.

For example, MyBlogLog connects readers with the author(s).

Pros

• Professional platform
• Free plugins developed by many supporters
• Free theme designed by many supporters
• Good SEO optimization
• Full control over the contents on self-hosted blog
• One’s own domain
• Privacy option to item level
• No ads

Cons

• Limited built-in social networking features

Tumblr

Tumblr is not a blogging platform, but instead a tumblelog, which is much more of a free-form log.

There are interesting features of Tumblr:

1. You can Follow other tumblrs. All posts of yours and people you follow are displayed in the Dashboard
2. You can reblog other tumblrs, which means copy exactly the content into yours
3. Privacy option to item level
4. No ads

It is much different from a regular blog in ways that:

• There is no comment function
• There is no category or tag

Then why would people want to use it?

• Just log it, no need for meticulous and time-consuming editing

Tumblelog creates a much different experience so it is incomparable to a full-pledged blogging platform. Try it and see it.

Other global sites

The services that I mention here are perfectly social network sites with blogging, photos sharing and communication channels. Explore them as you please

1. Multiply
2. Xanga
3. MySpace
4. Friendster
5. opera

Sites targeting Vietnamese market

YuMe

YuMe’s features and design remind me of Vietnam 360plus Vietnam. However, I find the themes more attractive.

The team behind YuMe is also high active and helpful.

A data migration tool from Yahoo! 360 is provided.

faceViet

faceViet is a Facebook clone built by a team based in San Francisco.

faceViet also provides the data migration tool from Yahoo! 360.

TheGioiBan

Among Facebook clones for Vietnamese, TheGioiBan is the most advanced in terms of design and features.

Until this entry is written, certain features of TheGioiBan is under construction, however.

Trivia

Technically speaking, Blogger and WordPress are purely blogging platforms with certain connecting features. Others are social network sites that provide blogging feature.

You might be interested to read my ponders over Content-centric Social Networking one year ago. One year has past and I’ve witnessed Follow feature standardized by Twitter it has spread to Blogger.

Tai Tran’s presence

While the majority of my blog content is right here on this blog, I am present on all the sites that I have mentioned.

Kindly comment if you want to connect to me via any site listed above.

What is your choice?

1. 360plus started off in April 26, 2008.
2. Reaction was very weak. None, yes, none, of my 360 friends moved to 360plus. Even the non-tech users lost their confidence in Yahoo! products. When they saw the buggy 360plus, they even backed off farther.
3. Later on we learned that 360plus Vietnam was the product for Vietnam. What was meant to replace 360 is Yahoo! Universal Profile.
4. With no old friend on 360plus, I made friends with some a few new people though. However, it was neither an information goldmine nor a communication platform I was looking for. The community there was filled with spams, unthoughtful and inconsiderate bloats from younger users, despite some very nice efforts to guide the new users. I lost my patience after around 500 entries.
5. I tried to come up with around 20 suggestions for features for the 360plus team before quitting nevertheless.
6. Not until early September did they introduce a data migration tool from 360 to 360plus. What flabbergasted me was that the tool looks like it bases on public RSS feed from 360 to import to 360plus, which means the 360plus team has limited access to the 360 global database. Where is inter-department collaboration inside Yahoo!?
7. But I’m sorry it was too late I was not even trying the tool out. I have backed up entries I want to keep to my Window Live Spaces blog, manually.
8. Many of my friends on 360 have moved to Facebook.
9. Will 360plus Vietnam hit the 2 million cap that 360 did in Vietnam?

Addendum

Yahoo! shut down their “social network experiment” Mash just a few days before. Generally people agreed with this decision, Mash was too weak even for a marginal project to last.

The blog craze started in 2004, MySpace came out in 2002. From then till now, Web 2.0 has penetrated deeply into our lives.

You may have heard the buzz: it’s all about communications, exchange information and expressing the ego.

Have you thought of utilizing all those things for learning?

Recently I’ve been very aggressive on the net to see how we can use the applications for learning, and here I am with my key findings:

The requirements

Let’s imagine a very familiar study scenario: you’re assigned into a group to do a research on topic X.

Traditionally, the group would rely on emails, phone calls and IM to communicate and collaborate. Have you found these media difficult to classify your information?

This is how I would use Web 2.0 for learning

1. Search for information with Search EngineS

Obviously, information searching starts with search engines.

I have some hints for this:

1. Don’t just use Google. Try Yahoo! search, Live search, Ask search and other engines. They give different results and thus, relevant information might be found from ones other than Google
2. Try Google on different region settings. google.com/ncr (international version) yields different results from google.com.vn
3. Try different keywords and keyword combination. Also, exploit the operators
4. Also search for images. At least Google, Yahoo! and Live support this. Images are useful for illustrating your ideas and, in some cases, give you additional information.

Watch a slide show on Google services:

Tai Tran's Lab: Technology As Innovator

2. Ask your questions

Use Q&A service such as LinkedIn Answers to ask questions and receive information from professionals.

Watch a video explaining LinkedIn

3. Make information comes to you with RSS

Normally you go out for information. Think about making information come to you?

Use RSS for this.

Watch a video explaining RSS

For example, if I’m looking for “globalization”, I would take these steps

1. Go to wordpress.com/tags/globalization
2. Get the RSS of this tag
3. Subscribe the RSS into a feed reader like Google Reader

Then check with the feed reader everyday to see if relevant information comes in.

You can also use Yahoo! Pipes to aggregate the feeds. Click here to view videos on Yahoo! Pipes

Try exploring different sources of information you can use this trick.

4. Share links with bookmark-sharing sites

If I encounter useful webpages, I would want to share it with my group mates.

Using email would bury the link under heaps of other information. Sharing through IM stands the risk of losing the message when the program lags.

So I would bookmark the site using del.icio.us and use the function “links for friend” to share the link.

Watch a video explaining del.icio.us

5. Blog your group’s findings on group-blog powered platform

WordPress supports multiple-author. I would want our group members to blog our research everyday on our blog. This is not superficial. It helps us

1. Collect information, thoughts, findings, analysis and intermediate conclusions
2. Track each member’s progress
3. Present to the lecturer our growth

5b. Share micro details

This is optional though. Some information might be very detailed and we want quick sharing methods. I would connect my mobile phone to Twitter and quickly update my thoughts on the way.

Watch a video explaining Twitter

6. Schedule activities with Calendars

Schedule activities such as meetings, field trips with Google Calendar

7. Watch and learn

Go to Youtube, not to entertain, but to learn from podcasters on the topic.

For example, this video is useful to understand Web 2.0

8. Compose Collaboratively

Use Google Docs to compose the documents. This is very convenient in such that

1. No email chain flying around
2. Single repository of document
3. Better version control
4. Many collaborators do the job concurrently

Watch a video explaining Google Docs

9. Build wiki to store develop information knowledge

Wiki is great to understand new concepts and link the information to get the big picture.

Watch a video explaining Wiki

10. Relationship building

Facebook is good to build relationship with your work mates.

11. Publish your research

Publish your research as presentations on slideshare or documents on scribd to share your knowledge engage in discussion on the topic.

12. Consolidate them all into one page

There are just so much!

How’re you gonna navigate around them all?

Well, one solution is to use a homepage service like netvibes to put all these services together.

Why all these?

Too complicated? Well here are the reasons why I would do it this way

1. Better organization of information. No email confusion
2. Exhaustive analysis. You write on the way so no information is missed
3. Better collaboration
4. Man, isn’t it fun?

I know it would be much easier for you just to email. But how much time have you spent searching for information later on? I’d rather spend the time to get things organized first, then make it easier later to focus more on creating contents.

And I’m pretty sure of one thing: just next year, this entry will be outdated because many new services will come out. Semantic web, mobile apps are just a few to predict.

It’s not a fashionable fad or a time-killer, it’s a shift in the way we can be more effective. Do you want to miss the train trend?

Digital Divide

But you know, all these will never happen if digital divide hasn’t been closed.

Technology proficiency and more importantly, community habit is a big gap. I want my team to do so, but other teams may not, so some of my team members may argue “why do we have to!”

With the internet connection speed in Vietnam, using Google Docs et al is insane.

Today, a world that is flat is till a romantic dream for me.

Resources

I’ve already tried out these services. Kindly see mine as example of how things may end up evolve: taitran.com/blog/resources