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The goal of this blog is to help to create an online learning environment and my specific purpose is to use such a system to help people learn English. In the summer, I proposed a model for the environment that used Ning’s social network sitting on top of Facebook with content to be developed by teachers and learners and a user-interface that used Adobe’s cool new AIR technology. Facebook was my choice for the base of the system because people know it and use it. Simple. But, as many people have pointed out, Facebook is a more or less closed system. To open-source believers, this is poison. Period. But to content developers, like myself, as long as a system is powerful and easy to use and popular, I don’t really care that it is closed.

However, as I suffer using the bloated and dumb Vista operating system on my laptop, I’m often reminded that being tied into a big system is not such a good idea when the big system has gone dumb. (Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau used to joke about how it was difficult being a Canadian next to the USA because it was like being a mouse, sleeping next to an elephant.)

Anil Dash’s words made a lot of sense, when, on October 9th, he warned that the proprietary nature of Facebook was running counter to web logic:

Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch asked the obvious question:

So how long does Facebook have before it melts into the Web?

Now we know the answer to Schonfeld’s question: less than one month because, on November 1st, Google announced OpenSocial. The announcment is causing a storm among web commentators and experts but what does it mean to content developers?

First, what is OpenSocial? Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb describes it this way:

OpenSocial is a hugely ambitious project that would tie together Google, MySpace and numerous other social networking platforms in a common environment that application publishers could publish widgets to with one set of code.

So for content developers, it becomes a ‘write once’ situation, after which they gain access to a huge variety of interesting additional functionality. Nice. Facebook has the same possible extension of capability, of course, but it is always within a Facebook-world. OpenSocial is different because there is a standard and accessible application programming interface. Kirkpatrick wonders about the devil in the details and asks , ‘How open?’, but Marc Andreessen, who was a huge fan of Facebook, likes OpenSocial and his company, Ning, has already joined the initiative; he describes the development in this way:

In a nutshell, OpenSocial is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:

“Containers” — social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and…

“Apps” — applications that want to be embedded within containers — for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.

This is the exact same concept as the Facebook platform, with two huge differences:

With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a “container” — “apps” can only run within Facebook itself. In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it.

With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) — those languages and APIs don’t work anywhere other than Facebook — and then the apps can only run within Facebook. In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.

If you recall how I previously described the Facebook platform as “a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry”, you’ll understand why I think OpenSocial is the next big leap forward! OpenSocial takes the Facebook platform concept and provides an open standard approach that can be used by the entire web. OpenSocial is an open way for everyone to do what Facebook has done…

If you have a web site today, and you want to turn your web site into an OpenSocial app, that’s perhaps even easier than “porting” a Facebook app. Just take your current HTML and Javascript front-end pages and create a version of those pages that use the Open Social API. QED.

Andreesenn says it’s even a good thing for Facebook because the key at this stage is market development and “Open Social will definitely help fuel market expansion, which is in everyone’s interest, including Facebook’s.”

The thing that will make the market grow is content, of course. Most users want some kind of service from the web and the capability to connect with other people in order to use that service and content. It’s content and connection that makes a social network compelling. The ‘winner’ will be the social network or collection of networks that makes it easier for content to be developed.

Schonfeld of TechCrunch - who, you remember, was watching the Facebook ice melting in the warm web-sea - is aware that all the talk of underlying system software isn’t what users respond to:

No actual consumers have changed their social networking habits because of OpenSocial. Facebook still has all the momentum with consumers (and, thus, with the developers who want to reach them). It can afford to wait and see how this whole OpenSocial thing plays out.

It just cannot wait too long before deciding its next move.

He’s right on both counts but the time factor with the web can be scarily fast. The guys at Hitwise, a site that counts how many people are using the various social networks, were not so thrilled by OpenSocial on Day One because, according to their count, FB’s user-base was 5 times bigger than all the networks that had signed up to OpenSocial. Their post the following day was titled, ‘What a difference a day makes’: the OpenSocial grouping had grown to be 5 times larger than Facebook!

But, remember the experienced voice of Andreessen who is telling us all that most web users are signed on to NO social networks, presumably because they can’t find the content there that makes the effort worth their while. Another veteran analyst, Marc Eisenberg, urged everyone to calm down but called the release of OpenSocial, ‘a nice transitional moment.’

Of course FB is busy adding lots of good stuff to their service: an ad network that will generate income for content developers and ways for content creators to very easily build Facebook applications. All good stuff.

But, it’s not a battle, it’s a war and Google is active on many fronts that Facebook can only dream of: there’s rumoured to be a Google Operating System in the works and a GooglePhone, or at least some GoogleThing that will bring all things Google – including the OpenSocial stuff – to mobile devices. And Google has the money to keep going. Another potential plus: Google’s potential social networking partners are more powerful than FB in their respective turfs. Mashable recently quoted a study:

… there are actually more social networking users (as measured by unique visitors) in Asia-Pacific (where Friendster leads) and Europe (where Bebo leads) than in North America.

Of course, Microsoft has invested in Facebook, and MS has the money and the world-reach that’s required. However a crucial point was made by Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet

The software business model is being replaced by the online advertising model.

Microsoft was built on the former and remains so; Google lives and breathes the latter.

Meanwhile…there are 5,000 content developers who will make all this software engineering stuff of interest to real people. So the decisive question may be: Who understands content developers better: Microsoft/Facebook or Google/OpenSocial?

“But answer came there none…” as Lewis Carroll said. The full poem is worth reading because it brilliantly describes the devouring of little ones.

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Two Mondays of Books! This week: why the near future for books is all online and all-Google. Next week: a bunch of great sites from Google Scholar to BookMooch to Madame Bovary in your Inbox, courtesy of DailyLit.

My TESOL instructors were fond of saying – for reasons only they understand – that there are no books on the web! There are, of course, thousands of books available for free download and scores of publishers opening up their books to Google’s BookSearch and a mountain or two of useful and cool information about books. All of the above can be useful to teachers. And teachers better get used to more and more books starting and staying online and never seeing paper because the bookscape is inexorably changing.

Books may be the single most valuable artefact of civilization – next to non-fat plain yogurt and a Bialetti coffee machine. Something so important doesn’t deserve our nostalgia. Somewhere at sometime in every situation…somebody is reading a book, or, at least, a part of a book. Books make the world go round but, like fruit, they’re a gamble (to quote from Seinfeld.) Even a paperback costs $20; so only the financially-relaxed folks of the middle-class are going to be regular bookbuyers, sadly. It’s even more regrettable when you think what an incredible bargain a book is as entertainment. If movies were as good, they’d cost about two bucks!

The dream to make such an important cultural tool more accessible and more affordable is worthwhile. So a flood of gadgets, both hardware and software, pours forth on a regular basis. The specialized hardware seems unnecessary to me. The New York Times recently hyped a bunch of new gadgets but it all ended up sounding like flabby ad copy or wishful thinking. The best line belonged to a New Jersey lawyer who

“…takes his cellphone to bed with him. ‘If I’m reading in bed and I don’t want to wake up my wife, I can use my phone and read in total darkness,’ he said.”

This seems to be the tone of the tech side of bookworld; if you can’t simply eliminate the painfully slow reading aspect of books, you can at least turn it into a kind of low-energy extreme sport to be performed in total darkness. This is what infuriates the real book people, of course, and correctly so. Alan Wall, writing a guest column in Mark Thwaite’s wonderful book site, ReadySteadyBook, told the story of encountering one of the deadly new book geeks:

This particular enthusiast for all things speedy, simultaneous and multi-tasking, anything that flashed and bleeped and interfaced, appeared to have no interest whatsoever in what I in my quaintness still call knowledge and learning. He was a representative of that new and potent ideology which claims that it is not the internalisation of knowledge that should be the aim of education, simply the acquisition of techniques for effectively accessing it. In other words, the skills do not have to be ‘learnt’, simply located, downloaded, then stored for future use. As long as a student can find where the knowledge lies, and process it for the task presently in hand, then that, it would appear, is acceptable. This is cant, and dangerous cant too. I would like to explain why.

Real learning modifies the human being who undergoes it. We change; we grow; we see reality differently. If we don’t, then we have not, in fact, learnt: we have merely skimmed the surface of a learning subject. Learning is participatory…

All of which sounds right to me. But, like the over-enthusiastic geek, the over-protective Professor Wall wants to turn the book-lined library into the Alamo (or whatever the Brit version is); he claims the book empowers students because a book enables students to turn the pages themselves as opposed to those nasty computers that keep locking us into PowerPoint presentations. An idea that doesn’t click with the Prof is that electronic information is easier to store and search and reference. If he would come clean, I think he’d admit that he simply likes the smell of books better than the silicone scent of his laptop! In this, I agree wholeheartedly.

While Old Book fights with New Book, sales keep dropping. The reasons are: the TV is easier to succumb to; the wider public has less disposable cash; and our high schools are turning out half their ‘graduates’ who are unable to really read.

Into the twitch & bitch of books, rides Google. It’s not surprising they’re interested in books; I’m not sure when the back-of-book index was first invented but we are clearly ready for an upgrade. And Google has not been shy. Book Search assumes the entire history of written communication is just a part of the web that’s slightly more difficult to access. By copying all the books that exist, the Library Project is designed to make the access much easier. Google Scholar is trying to do the same thing with all the scholary literature hidden away in journals.

Publishers are like ostriches except they are noisier - and they own copyrights. From the beginning, they have hidden from technical change while complaining loudly in response to Google’s argument that making all the material more available would help to promote it. I’m sure the publishers would feel better if they could somehow see a familiar cash register midst all the advanced optimism. The astonishing thing is this: Google is slowly convincing people. As recently as 2005, RandomHouse was suing, now they are signing up to Book Search. And they are not alone: the program now has 10,000 publishers and 27 academic reference libraries.

In spite of some bookpeople making tentative steps toward the future, I think the hassles are going to continue for Google; book people would rather bitch than twitch (see today’s NYT, for instance). However, we all can see where we are headed and, just for fun, let’s imagine how it might play out:

1. Books on paper keep not selling so well.
2. The big media conglomerates that own the publishers take a moment out from their problems with their recording companies where music is not selling so well and realize they don’t want to hear anymore bitching about books!
3. Google’s stock, currently at $600, rises modestly to $1,200…then $1,800…
4. Google buys the book industry. Aside from the convincing argument of giving the media companies a chance to own some Google stock, Google shows the oligopolistic publishing sector that if they were to buy one of the group, they could effectively set prices for the whole industry. So why not get everyone at the table and make them an offer they can’t refuse?
5. Anti-trust? Google announces that if they are allowed to own the entire collected written works of mankind, they will make these things we once called ‘books’ available on-line for free! And, did we say that everything will be searchable?
6. But what about the authors!!! Free books yield zero royalties. And when it comes to bitch, authors are heavyweights. But do you think it might be possible to interest authors in being included in the Google Stock Option Plan? Maybe.

Next week, some more-near-term fun: along with personal Google Book Searches and Google Scholar, I’ll take a look at things a teacher might do with Project Gutenberg, BookMooch, Goodreads, Rosetta: Books for Kids, DailyLit, Maud Newton and ReadySteadyBook.

 

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(Read googlegamble 1 / googlegamble 2.)

Let me recap my thinking about Google and the gamble we share with them:

First, the obvious: the long odds in gambling mean you’re gonna lose.

Second: if you have some way to handle the big number, you can turn the tables. Evolution was my example; nature’s fecundity extends over eons and, as a result of almost infinite opportunity, yields mutations that succeed and survive – mutations like us (at least until we invented the combustion engine – but that’s another story.)

My third point was that Google’s famous algorithm proves you can face big numbers and win. Because Google’s algorithm puts the odds in our favour, we search and we find.

Point four: for their mathematical legerdemain, Google makes about $1 per month from each and every internet user. Seems fair. The other big web searchers collectively make an equal amount: roughly a buck a month.

My fifth point was based on my experience watching someone play the googlegamble and win her share of the pie. It worked like this:

• » She spent $6,000 on Google Ads.
• » She sold $90,000 worth of University courses.

Results may vary, as they say, but, with that kind of payday, who wouldn’t support Google and the other searchers to the tune of a couple bucks per month?

Unlike the other tech giants stumbling across the changing landscape of the Internet, Google has shown an understanding of the bigger picture (Gmail, the YouTube purchase, their recent play for a piece of the airwaves.) It is my hope they also understand that we are at the end of the first stage of internet exploration; it’s time to recall those Westerns in which the settlers made the big bad ranchers understand that fences and trains and grocery stores were needed to settle the West (apologies to our First Nations people for this Euro-centric view of settlement). In our case, the fences and stores and trains of the web will be built by Content Developers.

But why should the big bad ranchers/Internet giants help us settlers/content developers? And, even if they decide to accept the argument that future web growth depends on the production of content, the question remains: ‘How can they help us?’

Why is easy. It will help build business; it’s market development.

Here’s how:

1. The bright boys and girls at Google create an algorithm that, each quarter or year, selects qualified developers who are delivering or planning to deliver content in certain viable categories.
2. These developers will be given GoogleBoost, which is a premium on any Google Ad clicks that are logged from any site or social net that they are associated with.
3. If the developer wishes, it may trade the value of its GoogleBoost to other entities for cash now. How the future clicks are valued is, of course, a matter between seller and buyer.

The result of such a market development program is threefold:

1. The huge rush of substantive material would hit the web, bringing new users and new countries into the game without the encumbrance of government.
2. A subsequent surge of learning and information would hit the world. No small feat. And a significant increase in search requests would also come about: an even bigger haystack from which and in which Google makes it’s living.
3. Google would truly stand out as a powerful force for good, something the other guys don’t seem to even understand.

Oh yeah, and I’d get to help someone build a learning environment for teaching English, which I happen to think is the single most important thing in the creation of world peace and prosperity. That’s the real gamble.

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Last year I went to the University of Toronto and I also worked on contract for another University in the city doing website design. My webwork paid for my courses in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and covered the cost of my lovely little laptop! Both in class and on the job, I learned a few things but nothing was more of an eye-opener than the day my client for web design showed me how she was using Google Ads.

Like many people, I was barely aware of the bland little ads on the left of the screen; the idea they actually did something useful seemed unlikely. As many of you will already know, they generate billions of dollars in ad revenue but a more interesting question is, “How can educators get some of that money?”

Ten years ago I worked on contract at Macromedia; I was in charge of the redesign of their website and there was much discussion of banner ads: to have them or not. I wanted the site to generate some revenue because my experience in business suggested to me that it’s always good to have a bit of a revenue stream. But the banners were as irritating as TV commercials and they didn’t generate much in the way of money. So, this year, when the marketing manager in charge of promoting the University’s courses told me she was going to use Google Ads, I wasn’t overly impressed.

As you can tell, I’m a beginner at this but this is my understanding of what happened when the Google Ads and the new site hit the web:

1. The marketing manager chose a number of words and, when anyone used one of those words in a Google search, a little ad for the University courses showed up on the left of the screen. Over 2 months, 1.5 million of those impressions appeared. No charge.
2. It’s no surprise that a very small percentage of people actually clicked the ad - in fact only one-tenth of one percent, or 1,500 people. Each time anyone clicked, it cost the University two bucks. Cost: $6,000.
3. Of the 1,500 ad-clickers who reached the University website, an amazing 10%, or 150 people, actually signed up for a course after each plunking down $600. That’s $90,000!
4. Of course it’s not all Google and good design. The University in question has a great ‘brand’, there’s still a calendar being sent out and word-of-mouth is also a factor. But the same courses had enrolment of 120 in the previous term so there was a direct 25% improvement, worth approximately $20K.

At the risk of saying what every 10-year old and every marketing manager already knows: These little ads work and organizations are going to use them more and more. If you’re going to buy something, the first thing you do is to get online and check it out. Whether you’re formally searching or visiting a related site or mentioning it in your mail, the little ads will be there. And if the University’s use of them can stand as a test case, it benefits both customer and supplier.

Google does very well by all this, of course. If one small marketing program in one University can benefit, then start multiplying $6K by all the other programs in all the other companies and all the other organizations…

We’re happy for them, no doubt. But the life blood of the web is content. The key question, in my opinion, is this: Can the content suppliers of the new webworld get the costs of content development covered by some of this flow of cash? Next week.

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Gambling lacks the honest appeal to the body of the other vices. If the little devil perched on my shoulder ever wins over the angel on my other, the three of us will go for gluttony or sloth or good old lust. No one in his or her right mind would want to spend eternity in Heavenly Vegas, would they? The point of winning is you can then go out and truly celebrate.

My problem with gambling is not the possible moral corruption, it’s the stupidity. It’s worth remembering that even the venal are purchased. For the innocent among us, that means you get some money for being corrupt. If your pure mind still can’t quite get that idea, just think Dick Cheney. But gambling even taints corruption! At the roulette wheel or at the Lottery kiosk, you pay someone else in order to be corrupt. Isn’t that perfectly dumb?

The essence of the stupidity is simple: the odds are bad, very bad. A Vegas veteran interviewed in Frontline’s excellent attack on gambling couldn’t resist this corny but accurate old saw: “The odds are slim and none…and Slim just left town.”

The mathematics of gambling do have a place, however, if you’ve got some way of handling enormous numbers. Evolution, for instance, depends on the endless and vast spinning of the wheel of DNA. As in Vegas, the mutants almost always lose. But when the chance-driven change happens to fit with the environment, the bug or flower or fish or human can actually win and their likelihood of reproduction increases. (Please note that the real pay-off is in sex.)

What makes the winning possible is the incomprehensible fecundity of nature and the inconceivable extension of time. In other words, the numbers need to be VERY BIG for the mathematics of gambling to work. Which only begs the question:

How can we make big numbers work in our favour?

Googlegambling is a good example because web searchers face similarly large numbers. Each day over a billion people go online looking for stuff - and the number will jump dramatically when the $100 laptop hits the dusty streets of the planet. Every day each one of us makes half-a-dozen searches and two out of three of the requests go through Google. Managing this quantum query-fest is, of course, quite a task but generally - and amazingly - it seems to work! Meanwhile, like martini-powered punters on a short-lived winning streak, we don’t even contemplate what’s really going on. Numbers that are as big and bad as those thrown at us by the roulette wheel start to work in our favour! The Googlegamble pays off.

And what about our winnings?

Even when gambling is good, the house wins: Google takes home the gold.

The actual cash comes from two sources: Google’s sale of its search expertise to other companies and all those not-quite-invisible ads. Whatever the source of revenue, the reason people choose Google is that they believe they’re going to win, that is, find out what they need to know. And a number of experts have calculated what that’s worth to Google; we even know what each question yields in the way of cold, hard cash. Don Dodge of Microsoft has figured out that each search query produces $0.12 ad revenue. Emre Sokullu worked the numbers and came to the conclusion that it comes to about $1 per month for Google from each and every internet user.

Two questions come to mind:

• Where does the money come from?
• What does this mean to educators who want to create personal learning environments?

Next week, I’ll try to answer the first question by relating a real-world example from my own experience doing website design for a Canadian university. (It will probably send you out to buy Google stock.) The second question I’ll tackle the following week in the same Thursday slot.

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