May 12, 2007
Supporting Enterprise Current Awareness with Web2.0ps
Earlier today - err, that is, yesterday - Marc posted about a YourMinis page he put together on an eGov theme in a live demo to some eGov visitors to KMi last year.
Quite by chance, I'd been doodling with a Pageflakes page for the OUseful homepage that pulls in live search info relating to the Open University, partly in response to a quick skim through a draft document reviewing environmental/horizon scanning across the OU by the OU Futures Office.
Although the Pageflakes page only took 20 mins or so to put together, I was intrigued as to how much time Marc put into preparing for his 5 minute 'create an eGov page in 5 mins' demo. I asked, and it turns out it took a couple of hours the day before, apparently, and then set up/browser priming time on the day...
If you've been thinking about doing a live demo to show off how quickly you can pull a page together from feeds and widgets, his post about the real story behind the time it takes to do a 5 minute demo is well worth reading: 5 minute YourMinis demo? No way!
It includes tricks such as bookmarking the resources you're likely to call on well in advance, having a run through on the environment you want to build, and priming your browser by preloading tabs with pages you're going to feed from. Good stuff.... Go read it now...
[Related to that is this post from a while back by Matt McAlister: How to give a 90 second demo.]
Returning to the OU scanning review for a moment, one of the comments I made was difficult it seems to be to get hold of search referral and site search data that may provide useful info to curriculum planners at faculty and departmental level. (It might also be fun to play with ;-).)
Reading Battelle just now, we could also make use of incoming referrals from Google to provide "Maybe you're also interested in this?" search results: Cool New Search Referral Widget Live on Searchblog.
This maybe does imply that out internal search engine is at least as good as Google... which I think is arguable. An email last week from a regular reader of this site - and member of the OU community - suggested that he used Google to search the OU domain rather than the OU search engine itself....
...and you know what, so do I: using the site:open.ac.uk search limit...
(ooh.... this is interesting just doing a blank search on that: Rocks From Space, an informal, Moodled learning environment. Good stuff... not as friendly as it might be, of course, but a good initiative...)
Posted by ajh59 at May 12, 2007 12:30 AM