Comments (4)

By Tai, August 22, 2008 9:43 am

Friend: “Hey Tai, what is wiki? Is it a software or a website?”

TaiTran: “Neither. Wiki is a concept. It refers to a content which everyone and anyone can edit.”

Friend: “What? You’re confusing me!”

***

OK, so let me go into details on Wiki.

“Wiki” is a concept

“A wiki” might be explained as a computer software or a website. “Wiki” is a concept.

What’s the difference?

You may want to notice this difference: “A Wiki is a software/website” and “Wiki (without ‘a’) is a concept”. “A wiki” refers to a specific instance of the concept “Wiki”.

To make it easier to understand. It’s like we talk about “a person” and “person”. “Person” is general, has body organs, has character and personalities - but doesn’t have specific character and personalities. “A person named X” is specific, has X’ body organs, has X” character and X”’ personality.

Back to Wiki. So I say “Wiki is a concept. It refers to contents which everyone and anyone can edit.”

Basing on this concept, people may build Wiki software that put this concept into practice. Wiki software allows users to create different wiki websites.

Wiki is powerful

1. Collaboration

The major power of Wiki lies in its open nature to collaboration.

Anyone can edit Wikis, and it’s quick to do so. We have the power of the mass where every contribution is counted. That’s how within a short amount of time, the community has grown Wikipedia to be the world’s largest encyclopedia.

Does this work?

To some, the idea of “anyone can edit” is crazy. But it works!

You want to know that the edition doesn’t go away easily. All modifications are tracked and they are discussed by the whole community. If person A puts in an inaccurate or biased information, person B will point it out and the discussion will determine how to deal with that information.

While I agree that we can never have perfectly unbiased information, this open nature allows the whole community to reach a consensus that would benefit all.

“I’m a genius. They don’t understand what I wrote in the wiki so they removed it!” - Well if this is the case, I’d suggest you revert to your blog or your Knol whether you have full authority

2. High Linkage

Wiki pages within a wiki website link to one another through keywords. Therefore, when you read a wiki page, you are presented with information to other worth-knowing concepts.

Wiki management models

Power of the Mass

“No editor”, or “everyone is an editor”.

This is the original concept of Wiki. However, you may want to know that this is an idealism and no wiki is perfectly wiki.

People participation varies, people commitment varies, and people behavior varies. There may exist certain bias in many wiki pages.

Because of this “open” nature, many question the validity and authority of information on wiki. Researchers may need to cite from other sources accepted as “more authorized”.

Power of Authority… plus the Mass

To deal with the issue of validity and authority of wiki, Larry Sanger, former Wikipedia co-founder, has initiated a new model for Citizendium.

“Authorized editors are selected to be editors of Citizendium. The site is still open for everyone to edit.”

This model harmonizes the credentials from editors while still utilize the power of the mass.

Wiki in enterprise

Wiki is useful to teams within an enterprise to centralize their knowledge. Of course, people can write separate documents, but it will be hard to avoid duplication, hard to maintain and hard to search. Wiki solves all these 3 issues.

In Sum

Wiki is a powerful concept on which people in the last decade have built centralized massive amount of information.

Bibliography

5 ways to build effective Wikis

Wiki Software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

List of Wikis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis

Comments (7)

By Tai,

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.

Addendum: academic requirements. Some institutions forbid the use of wiki-like sites and dot-com sites.

1. Use Google Books
2. Use Google Scholar
3. Use syntax for Google search: site:edu & site:gov & siterg
4. Get the reference at the end of a Wikipedia page, then search in school / local libraries

Watch a slide show on Google services:

Tai Tran's Lab: Technology As Innovator

Dear Subscriber, if you can't see this presentation in your feed reader, kindly go to the original article to view the content.

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

Moreover, Twitter can be used to observe trends with Twitter Search

Watch a video explaining Twitter Search

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.

Watch a video explaining Social Network

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

Comments (3)

By Tai, July 22, 2008 3:57 pm

VCCorp is aggressively penetrating the “expert” content composition in Vietnam with their new products: CafeF, bnok, gocnhin and thenao

1. CafeF

A group-blog service on Finance and Stock developed basing on WordPress

2. bnok.vn

A group-blog service that hosts multiple professional and interest groups.

Currently, bnok is limited:

• Registration done manually
• Each blog is associated with only one group
• Maximum 3 blogs are associated with 1 account

bnok supports import from these platforms

1. Blogger
2. Blogware
3. DotClear
4. RSS
5. GreyMatter
6. WordPress
7. LiveJournal
8. Movable Type / Typepad

From this list, it is observable that their development team utilize plugins for WordPress. To penetrate the Vietnamese market, they should have started building a tool to import Yahoo! 360 blog now.

3. gocnhin

A techmeme clone

4. thenao

A Vietnamese wiki platform. I believe that with their financial base, VCCorp will introduce incentives for contributors in the competition with Wikipedia Vietnamese.

The name “thế nào” gives me the impression of “how stuffs work”.

Comments

VCCorp seems like the only player on this field. Will expert content have any potentials for monetization?

Apart from traditional monetization by advertising on web, selling analysis and contents to consumers is also a good idea.

What do you think about these products?

Comments (0)

By Tai, July 3, 2008 12:54 am

I hereby model a message delivery as an article. If a conversation/talk/speech were an article, how differently would people communicate?

The sample article

Let’s take a random article as an example.

The Heading-only style

The communication from this style only conveys the headings of the article. The communicator possibly either doesn’t want to spend more time explaining in details or expects the audience to understand upon hearing the titles.

Advantages

• Time-saving

Disadvantages

• Huh? What next?

The Wiki style

Lambrusco

Some of you may have heard me preach of lambrusco, the foaming, almost purple sparkling wine from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.

No, not the semi-sweet fizzy stuff that was so popular in the 1970s, but the real, dry, earthy lambrusco, from producers like Medici Ermete, Vini, Vittorio Graziano and Villa di Carlo. Served icy cold, it’s wonderful with just about any simple dish, be it fried chicken or pizza or burgers.

But you say you want a real wine (as if lambrusco weren’t real enough)? You say you want an American wine because it is, after all, practically the Fourth of July?

Description

This style is exactly like a wiki page. The communicator mentions keywords of the article, with or without priority order. Each of the keyword then links to a whole concept from other sources.

For example, when the speaker mentions “organizational behavior”, s/he could point to a book on the topic and recommend her/his audience to read the book.

Advantages

• Inter-connections of information
• From the spoken conversation, the receivers can then search for the more details with the keywords from the message

Disadvantages

• Some audience who have not known the concepts might lose track of the information mid-way

The Ad-hoc style

The communicator randomly picks paragraphs from the article and give full details of the paragraphs without or with limited conclusion.

Next time: full details of another random paragraph.

Advantages

• The audience might extract the right information in details if asking the right question.

Disadvantages

• Very hard to assemble the comprehensive but scattered information into a complete article.

The Bottom-up style

Throw the conclusion on first, then explain if questioned.

Advantages

• Just straight to the point. Exceeding time doesn’t impact much as the audience has already caught (if so) what they need.

Disadvantages

• Surprise for unprepared audience

The Full-article style

Section by section, paragraph by paragraph, word by word till the end.

Advantages

• Every full details

Disadvantages

• Time consumption

Conclusion

What is your style?

What other styles do you add to this list?

What style do you choose for which situation?

Reference

The sample article is taken from The New York Times’ Reds on Ice? It’s Not Heresy

Comments (0)

By Tai, December 6, 2007 12:15 am

Simply Wiki

Wiki is a platform that allow anyone to quickly edit web pages. Repeat after me: anyone & quick.

I doubt that you don’t know Wikipedia. Yes, it is the most successful Wiki instance today.

To know more of Wiki, please see the following video:

Potential problems with Wikis

Disorder

The fact that information can be quickly edited by anyone is the primary reason why wikis grow like weeds instead of carefully tended gardens.

Large scale wikis become chaotic and disorganized

Multiple collaboration means no one owns anything — organization comes from someone having a vested interest to organize and maintain.

Information is hard to navigate consistently because there is no unifying vision to the structure.

Large scale wikis turn into a flat hierarchy of documents with no hierarchy.

Information transfer

It is hard to import information into a wiki from other sources.

It is hard to export information out of wikis (eg: RSS feeds).

5 ways to build effective Wikis

1. Make it Search-intelligent

Make URLs human-readable permalinks

Navigation clues

2. Manage Version Control

Version control for every change

Rollbacks of edits

Notifications, watch lists and logs

Discussions of changes

3. Enable Information Management

Refactor and maintain information

Document management: attachments (documents, images, media…) should be treated the same as pages when it comes to search and version control.

Provide import/export functionalities to standard-compliant format (XML).

4. Build an Organization that best supports

Wikis are not built to be used in top-down organizational hierarchy. However, all-are-equal model lurks serious problems. Click here to read more of the story…

We shall see if Larry Sanger’s experiment of Citizendium will make it more effective.

5. Develop a Process

Building Wikis is one activity of knowledge management. Knowledge management process should be developed, especially in tightly-organized groups, to support this.

Conclusion

Wikis are effective if built and managed the right way, and let’s.