From ZDNet comes a post reporting of Google’s CEO pleading to crawl Facebook.  Quoted as saying “If it’s not searchable by Google, it’s not open, and open is best for the consumer,”.  Hmmm, best for the consumer or marketer?  Eric Schmidt is quoted as then going on to say that people should be able to move from place to place on the Web with their data.  I fully support the notion of me being able to do that and am pleased to see the OpenSocial initiative however that is quite different to a site being ‘crawlable’.

Its kind of strange seeing Facebook being portrayed as some sort of champion for protection of people’s data given the way that many Facebook apps work and their past experiences.  Anyway, it would be nice as a user to be able to make that choice myself.  Do I want Google to crawl through my Facebook data or not?  Why should it be the choice of Facebook and/or Google?

technorati tags: Facebook, Google,OpenSocial

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

From the Learning Futures Eiffel team blog here’s a nice introduction on standards to consider for ePortfolios. It gives a nice summary of the major ePortfolio specific standards to consider and importantly, mentions related specifications such as OpenSocial which I believe those interested in ePortfolios should start to at a minimum, become familiar with. From the article:

Today, even if few ePortfolio suppliers are engaged in the implementation of existing specifications, those doing it generally do so within the context of a specific community, using what is called application profiles, i.e. an adaptation of a base specification to the particular requirements of this community. This adaptation adds a level of complexity to the issue of interoperability, as different application profiles of the same base specification do not necessarily interoperate…

Our own experience in this area certainly backs this up. Some time ago, we developed an Employability Skills ePortfolio and used the IMS ePortfolio specification to build it. The IMS specification itself is (well) quite comprehensive to say the least which added some complexity to our work but in developing a profile specifically for employability skills, we in effect lost interoperability with other IMS ePortfolio conformant applications unless they used the same profile as us (highly unlikely).

In the past I have discussed the need for simple to implement standards and concentrated on specifications such as RSS, Atom and microformats. The Learning Futures article references hResume, an interesting format used by LinkedIn. Compare the definition for that with a heavy duty specification and see which one you would rather implement.

technorati tags: ePortfolio, standards,interoperability

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

In an earlier post I asked whether Google could be my ePortfolio. While I can find out quite a bit about me and other people who share my name using a Google search, its not really an ePortfolio application (then again, what is?).

As a participant in a number of social networking services, I have content about me in potentially many of them that would be useful for inclusion into some form of ePortfolio. One of the frustrations that I have is how to combine content from a number of places that I would find useful into some sort of personal portfolio platform. Many services have their own interfaces that are inconsistent with others. Each service that I want to interact with is accessed in a different manner.

Now along comes OpenSocial from Google. OpenSocial specifies a common set of interfaces for accessing social networking applications. The number of services that are listed as committed to it is impressive. Services such as LinkedIn, Hi5, Plaxo, imeem, slide, MySpace to name a few are all in there. Each of these services could provide an interesting component of my ePortfolio. Having a common set of interfaces should simplify the task of developing an aggregate platform for ePortfolios. Combining this with institutional or systemic ePortfolio implementations would be really useful.

technorati tags: Google, ePortfolio,OpenSocial

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back