Search your own information web

September 16, 2007

I just stumbled over deliGoo, a great new search mashup. It combines del.icio.us and Google’s custom search. That means, it can search for a keyword through all the websites of the 2829 bookmarks in my del.icio.us account. This gives me amazingly relevant results because my del.icio.us bookmarks represent my own web of topics–those I am interested on.

information_web.jpg

You have to install deliGoo in your Firefox browser. When you run it the first time, it takes some time to include all your bookmarked websites into Google’s custom search. But then, once it is done, you can search through all these websites by typing any keyword. Now I am even happier of having invested so much time bookmarking so many websites that are part of my personal knowledge management. Here is my deliGoo search (Sorry works only with the firefox plugin.)

One can also search single tags in del.icio.us too. For example the NPK4DEV (nonprofit knowledge management for development) tag, which is collaboratively used by various people, offers great websites. That way you can search in websites chosen by people for being interesting and valuable. Not surprising, the results are far better. To me, it is another step proving that web2.0, with such tools, makes the web more useful and handy to anyone.

Challenges of web2.0 in Africa

June 18, 2007

Recently I met Toni Eliasz from Ungana-Afrika in Pretoria. We discussed over web2.0 in the context of development. His thoughts were interesting on that of the potential and challenges of the collaborative web, given his experiences in South Africa and the region. Ungana is a NGO which devotes its work to find solutions for the capacity crisis.

A ‘capacity crisis’ is a mild expression to describe the skill levels and understanding of information and communications technologies (ICTs) within non-profits and small-to-medium enterprises in Africa. It will take a decade before the young, technologically literate generation can address these challenges.”

No surprise Toni highlighted first, challenges regarding web2.0 for rural development:

  • The general problems of connectivity, such as the lack or high price for access. For example, a 3 GB ADSL connection costs up to a hundred dollars in South Africa, which is 15 times the price compared to Germany.
  • Web2.0 requires often bandwidth or instant access for videos, podcasts or tools such as google docs.
  • Before investing time and resources into web2.0, there is a question to be answered, ‘How do these tools benefit local communities and how can they contribute to development?’
  • The computer and its appliances are complex and often need to be demystified for beginners, and like everywhere else, training is needed and that can also take quite some time.
  • To use web2.0 tools such as wiki, blogs etc., requires well written documentation and training.
  • The lack of technical expertise, which is often required, is currently very expensive and very limited outside of urban areas.
  • Like many other ICT4D projects, the question for sustainability is important and yet not proven for concepts based on these new tools.

For Toni many challenges have to be overcome first before web2.0 can be adapted in rural communities or small organizations. I stated that there are examples such as the the Nata Village Blog, which shows how communities communicate their messages and interact with a worldwide audience. However, we both agreed, that it is the know-how, which at this stage it is mostly limited to intermediate organizations, who nevertheless have already a real benefit from the opportunities to interact and collaborate over the web. Ungana is on the APC network and will be sharing documented work experiences and toolkits, especially from their eRider project, to local technology service providers and networks to make quality support and capacity-building programs a reality.

We both agreed, in terms of connectivity, that the mobile phone is very promising. Whereas widely distributed and affordable Internet access will still take many years to arrive in Africa, first, interesting applications to link the mobile phone and web have to be offered. In South Africa for example Mixit is a big web driven mobile chatting portal. It got so far over 4 million subscribers. Toni concluded that ideas and its implementation have to be localized. As an example, two weeks ago a workshop in Kenya launched the development of a mobile advocacy toolkit, which is focusing on the needs of the organizations from the developing world. Homegrown approaches, which emphasizes the
sustainable need, are decisive.

Crossposted: blog.web2fordev.net

NPK4DEV – a collaborative tagging experience

June 14, 2007

I remember when I came across those weird looking different size word aggregations on websites and wondered what were they? When I read about tagging and tag clouds I was first skeptical about it and asked myself what is the benefit of them?

Nowadays I am fascinated, how tags can solve or at least improve how we sort information and make relevance between different tags. Through the wisdom of crowd one can extract very precisely the connections of themes and show the pattern of a community. To me classical hierarchical folder structure is only two dimensional, whereas tags are three dimensional, as long as the semantic web has not been implemented.

With social bookmarking through de.icio.us a single tag can be used to share links collaboratively. Peter Ballantyne had the idea of using collaborative tagging for the knowledge management for development network back in 2005. Next week another KM4DEV workshop will take place in Holland where I will prepare some visualization of the efforts throughout the last two years for the nonprofit knowledge management for development (NPK4DEV) tag.

NPK4DEV Tag Cloud (popular tags)
Tag Cloud

Joitske, a contributor of NPK4DEV wonders whether this tag experiment can form a community?

Tagging seems so superficial in terms of knowledge creation, it is more a flow of information. Can we say there is learning going on or is it just sharing information more rapidly? If people start tagging can we all that a community of practice?

In my opinion this tag cloud shows quite impressively what people associate with knowledge management for development in methods, countries, organizations and themes. It is a great way to share certain kind of information. In this regard it might be a passive community of practice keeping each other updated about new and interesting documents or new approaches such as vlogging. Furthermore it connects you to the people behind it.

However to deepen the effect of sharing and to have a broader learning effect, further steps would be necessary. For example Beth Kanter summarizes in her posts all links for the nptech tag, which is very useful. The communication between each other over delicious is close to zero, and one does not know whether the information behind the link is useful or valuable to his or her background. Commenting is rarely used and rating is not possible, and only bloggers involved reflect transparently the shared information.

Lastly, it is interesting to see how you can analyze tags, in this timeline. In the picture you can see the recent tags. Thanks to the blogger from www.unthinkingly.com, who did this timeline very nice with the nptech tag.

tagliner


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