Hans de Zwart: Technology as a Solution…

Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. This time we decided to write about what makes Goodreads a great website. First we sat together for an hour and used Gobby to collaboratively write a rough draft of the text. Each of us then edited the draft and published the post separately. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.

Goodreads.com

What is Goodreads?
Goodreads is Facebook and Wikipedia for readers: a social network of people that love to read books, full of features that readers might like. It allows you to keep many “shelves” with books that can be shared with other people on the site.

Great Features
Here are some of the features (in no particular order) that make Goodreads work so well:

• The site is not only useful when you are a member. Even if you are not logged in it still is a pleasant site to read and browse for book lovers.
• It allows you to keep track of your own, yout friends and “the crowds” books. If you see an interesting book you can put it on your to-read shelf, if a friend reads an interesting book than he or she can recommend it to you.
• Statistics can suggest recommendations based on my shelves, reviews and friends.
• There is a distinction between friends (a symmetric relationship) and followers (an assymetric relationship).
• There is a book comparison feature: it finds the books you have both read and compares the scores you have given to those books.
• It is very easy to invite your friends into the site. You can put in their email address, or you can give Goodreads access to your webmail contacts (sometimes this is a questionable thing, but Goodreads isn’t to pushy (it doesn’t send out Tweets without you knowing it for example)).
• They have a great “universal” search box where you can search books on author, title or isbn from the same field.
• It makes use of Ajax in the right locations, allowing you to update small things (“liking” a review, noting what page you’ve reached, handing out stars to a book) without having to reload the page.
• The user profile page is related to the contents of the webservice: for example, it allows you to say who your favourite authors are.
• The site supports many different ways of viewing and sorting your shelves. You can look at covers or at titles and sort by author, by score, by last update and more.
• Before building a great iPhone app, Goodreads made sure their website had a great mobile version of their website. When you access the website with a mobile browser it automatically redirects to a mobile version of the website, so even if you are accessing the site with your Windows Mobile device you have a great experience.
• Not only is it very easy to put data into the Goodreads ecosystem, it is also very easy to get your data out again. You can download a CSV file with all your books (including the data you added like reviews, date read, your rating and the metadata about the book that Goodreads has added like the ISBN or the average rating). The smart import feature looks at an HTML page (e.g. an Amazon wishlist page) and imports all the ISBNs it can find in the source code of the page. Like any good webservice it imports files that are exported from their competition (Shelfari, Librarything and Delicious library).
• There seems to be an evolving business model. Initially there were only (onubtrusive) adds, but now they are starting to sell e-books, integrating this into the social network.
• Often when you read a book there are sentences or passages which really impress or inspire. Most of the times you then forgot these. Goodreads allows you to favourite and rank (and thus collect) quotes easily by author or by book. You can add and export quotes as well.
• Sharing your Goodreads activity to other important webservices is built in. There are integrations with Facebook, Twitter, WordPress Blogs and MySpace. Goodreads also provides embeddable widgets that you can put on another website (e.g. a box with the most recent books you have read). A simple integration allows you to instantly find a book that you are looking at in Goodreads in your favourite online bookstore. And of course there is the ubiquitous RSS.
• A site like Goodreads get is value from the data that its users put in. Goodreads allows this at many levels. There are trivial ways of adding information (i.e. saying you like a review by clicking a single link, allowing Goodreads to display useful reviews first), but there are also ways of adding information that take slightly more effort. For example, it is fairly easy to get “librarian” status which shows the site trusts their users. As a librarian you can edit existing book entries. A low entrance level is key to crowd sourcing. Another way to involve people is to allow them to add their own trivia that other users can try and answer in trivia games.
• It allows users to flag objectionable content.
• Goodreads has its own blog, keeping you up to date about the latest features and their direction.
• It has an element of competition, you can see how many books are on your shelf and how many books are on other people’s shelf, but there are more metrics: you can see who has written the most popular reviews, your rank among this week’s reviewers, or who has the most followers
• It has a great and open API. This allows other people to build services on top of Goodreads. The potential for this is huge (the very first Goodreads iPhone app was not made by Goodreads itself, but was made by a Goodreads enthousiast) and I don’t think we have seen what will be possible with this yet. A lot of the data that Goodreads collects is accesible through the API in a structured and aggregated form. It should be very easy for other book related sites to incorporate average ratings from Goodreads on their own pages for example.
• It is in continual beta and their design process seems to be iterative: it keeps evolving and adding new features at a high frequency like the recently added stats feature.

My current stats for 2010

• It is easy to delete your account, deleting all your data in the process. This makes for complete transparancy about data ownership, an issue that other sites (Facebook!) have been struggling with lately.
• It has a kind of update stream which let’s you easily keep up to date with your friends, groups and favourite authors status.
• The service has ambitious and lofty goals: “Goodreads’ mission is to get people excited about reading. Along the way, we plan to improve the process of reading and learning throughout the world.” (see here). I do believe that this clear mission has led to many features that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. For example, there is a book swap economy built into the site allowing people to say that they own the book and are willing to swap it for other books. Another book lovers feature are the lists. Anybody can start a list and people can then vote to get books on the list. Examples of list are The Movie was better than the Book or Science books you loved. Another feature are the book events. You can find author appearance, book club meetings, book swaps and other events based on how many miles away you want these to be from a certain city or in a certain country. Of course you can add events yourself, next to the ones that Goodreads imports from other sites, and you can say which events you will attend, plus invite friends to these events.

How Goodreads could improve
As said, Goodreads is continuously changing, there are still some things that require some change in the right direction:

• Ocassionally the site feels a bit buggy. I have had a lot of grief updating the shelves of books using the mobile site with it not doing the things I wanted it do.
• It is not always clear what kind of updates are triggered by an user action. I am not sure what my friends see. Sometimes you find your Facebook Wall flooded with Goodreads updates because your friend found a box of long lost books in the attic which he entered in an update frenzy.
• Usability: Some features are hard to find. Like the new stats feature discussed above, you can only find it hidden away on the bottom left of a page in some obscure menu. Other features are hard to use, requiring many more clicks than are actually necessary.
• They could improve on localisation and on the translations of books. In your profile settings you can select your country, but you cannot select in which languages you are able to read books.
• The graphic design of the site isn’t top notch. When people initially see Shelfari, it might have more appeal just because it looks a tad better.
• In-app mailing or messaging systems are always beyond me. Goodreads also has an “inbox” where you can send mail to and receive mail from your Goodreads friends. I would much rather use my regular mail and use Goodreads as a broker so email addresses can be private.

Some thoughts on the process of writing this post
Gobby is a multi-platform text editor that allows multiple people to work on the same text file in realtime. It uses colours to denote who has written what.

A Gobby Window

This was an experiment to see how it would feel to work like this and whether it would be an efficient and effective way of working together. I thought it was quite successful as we produced a lot of material and helped eachother think: building on the point of the other person. It was helpful to do an initial draft, but it does require some significant editing afterwards. I thought it was interesting to see that you feel no compunction to change the other person’s spelling mistake, but that you feel less free to change the contents of what they are writing.

This time we were sitting opposite each other while writing. In the future it would be interesting (firewalls permitting) to try and do this over a longer distance. Then the unused chat-window might become more useful and important.

You can download the original Gobby file here (it requires Gobby to make sense).

Hopefully this post about Goodreads is an inspiration to anybody who tries to build a social network around a certain theme and remember: if I know you I would love nothing more than to be your Goodreads “friend”.

Internet Movie Database

I really like the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). It is the largest freely available database of movie related data. I use it mainly for two things:

1. Whenever I see an actor or actress in a movie and cannot remember in which movie I have seen that person before. IMDB list all the actors/actresses in the movie and allows you to click on the name of each person. On the page of the person it will then show you all the movies in which they played a role.
2. Whenever I am in video store and need to know whether the movie  that I am about to rent is any good. IMDB has a ratings systems that can give you a good general idea of the quality of the movie.

This post will be about the second use case. In the video store I use the Internet connection of my mobile phone. This is a tedious and often infuriating process, especially when you want to look up multiple titles. IMDB’s pages are huge (they have many images and ads), and this makes them load very slowly. In case of an ambiguous title two pages need to load before you can see the rating. Let’s look at an example. If I search for “pulp fiction” I get the following page:

IMDB results page (click to enlarge)

I then have to click on the  “Pulp Fiction” link to see the IMDB page which has the rating:

Pulp Fiction at IMDB (click to enlarge)

After another angry session at the video store, I decided to do something about it. First I looked for a mobile version of the IMDB website. There are some available options (see here and here), but they are geared towards iPhones and don’t really work well.

Next I decided to write my own small web application and tried to find the IMDB API. It doesn’t exist! Unfortunately there is no way to easily use and re-purpose IMDB’s data. I don’t understand why some web companies (in this case Amazon) still don’t realise that this actually inhibits the building of their brands.

Luckily there is always one last option: screen scraping. I was actually willing to try and write my own parser for this (would be great practise), but found Izzysoft‘s IMDBPHP class which makes this easy work. This class allows you to get a lot of data about each movie.

After about two hours of programming I now have the following result. I call it Rent it?:

Rent it? The results for "Pulp Fiction"

I tried to design it to be as fast as possible and made it fit for purpose using the following design considerations:

• I used a big input field at the top of the screen, with a big button underneath. This input field is also shown on the results pages, so that it is always easy to start a new query. The field gets automatic focus as soon as the page finishes loading.
• Only relevant information about each movie is shown: rating, title, year, director, run time in minutes and a user generated plot outline. The title links to the original IMDB page which will open in a new window.
• The standard IMDB score is converted to a percentage and gets a background colour on the basis of the height of the rating. Red has a rating of less than 60% (not worth watching), whereas movies with green ratings are above 70% and could be interesting.
• The pages are very light: no ads or images. All the processing is done on the server. If a search has many results, then this processing can still take a while. That is why the number of results are capped at five and results are cached for a week (also on the server to benefit everybody).

I hope you are willing to try it out and look forward to any of your feedback!

Try “Rent it?“

Rent it? is also accessible through my mobile start page.

Just over a year ago I wrote a Dutch newsletter post about the State of Moodle in the Netherlands, Belgium and Surinam. I said that I would repeat the exercise in a year’s time. So here we go.

First a table showing the growth of Moodle and the Dutch Moodle user association (Ned-Moove) in these three countries:

It is easy to see that Moodle has grown significantly in the last year. I am a bit disappointed that the growth in Ned-Moove memberships has not kept up with the growth in registered websites. This is something that I will try and change for next year.

I have created two montage images of the Belgian and Dutch registered Moodle sites. They give you a general idea of which colours and themes are currently the most popular (click on the images to enlarge them, note that the first one is 3.8 MB and the second one is 12.6 MB). Just like last year, I noticed that many of the sites use a standard Moodle theme (e.g. formal white, custom corners) with some very minor customisations. To me this means that Moodle HQ should make sure that all packaged standard themes are of a very high quality (currently they are not) and that some of them should allow for easy switching of the header image.

Belgian Sites

Dutch Sites

We all know that many schools in secondary education use Moodle. What some people might not know is how many other organisations use Moodle for their learning, training or teaching needs. I have gone through most of the registered sites and want to highlight some of the more interesting ones for you to peruse at your leisure:

There are a couple of medical related sites: Mediclass, Sint Maartenskliniek, MedSchool, Proveto (for vets) en Huisartsopleiding Utrecht.

Some of the sites are focussed on teaching languages: Taallo,  Chinese School Nederland en Learn 2 Speak.

MijnLes.nl

There is a site focusing on deaf people: Effatha Guyot Group. They have a great logo for their Moodle site.

I found a couple of sports related Moodle sites: Dive-Rescue, Koninklijke Nederlandse Gymnastiek Unie, Watersportvereniging Almere, European Academy en Sailing Expertise.

One college has done a great job of creating a single theme for all of its separate schools: Esdal College.

A couple of Dutch tertiary educational institutions have now chosen to use Moodle. E.g. Theologische Universiteit Kampen, Internationale Hogeschool Breda Assessment and Learning Network for Learning Design. The last one is a site from the Dutch Open University exploring the IMS Learning Design specification.

Some organisations use Moodle like an alternative CMS: Isaga en Cyberdam.

Many small and bigger businesses have their own sites through which they sell or give away free courses: Camera College, Cursusnetwerk, Eduactiever, Even Leren, Cavell Group, Landelijk Expertisecentrum Sociale Interventie, Radio Nederland Training Centre, Mijn Breincoach, Online Cursussen, Opatel, Open of Course, Permanente Educatie, Zebrakey, Human Rights Education Associates, Mathelo, and the European Wine Academy.

The one site that I probably like the most is In de Groep. Jaap Marsman has done an excellent job creating a site geared for primary school students. He is pushing what he can do with the platform and that is great.

In de Groep

On to the State of Dutch Speaking Moodle 2009-2010!

Kiva

Today is Blog Action Day:

I would like to use that as a chance to talk about Kiva, a website that facilitates micro-lending: allowing people to give small personal loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.

It is a great example of how the Internet can make things possible that weren’t possible before. It builds bridges and connections that just wouldn’t happen earlier. Kiva allows us to see which entrepreneurs need small loans (often only a couple of hundred dollars). We can then decide who we will lend our money to and can use Paypal to do the transaction. Kiva’s field partners are responsible for making sure that the money reaches the right person and will also make sure that the entrepreneurs pay back their loans. The field partner also gives updates to the lenders about the repayment (through email and RSS).

You are encouraged to give many small loans instead of a few big loans. This way you spread the risk , which isn’t high anyway with a 1.3% default rate on more than 15 million dollars in loans.

A couple of months ago I lend out $ 25.00 to Vuth Ang who used that money (and the money from others) to buy a new grinding mill:

Vuth Ang, a Kiva lender

She has been pleased with the results of her investment. So far, the grinding mill can earn up to $5 each day. In the future, this couple plan to purchase a truck to transfer wood, rice and etc… There are no problems paying back the loan. Again, she states that the loan is very useful as it is provide a chance to all poor entrepreneurs to start and sustain their businesses. Finally, she would like to say thanks to all lenders for interest helping Cambodian entrepreneurs like her family.

I have decided to make out another loan today. Why don’t you do the same?

(Kiva Brochure)

I am a strong believer in theories that see a large role for the environment in shaping in our behaviour and our well-being. I think that the easiest way to change somebody’s behaviour is to change their environment. Let me give you a simple example: if you want people to drive slower, then you should make the road narrower.

So I was delighted to find these Reversible Destiny Lofts through Boing Boing:

These houses keep you young and healthy by providing you with perpetual challenges:

Designed to stimulate the senses and force inhabitants to use balance, physical strength and imagination, the lofts feature uneven floors, oddly positioned power switches and outlets, walls and surfaces painted a dizzying array of colors, a tiny exit to the balcony, a transparent shower room, irregularly shaped curtainless windows, and more.

Since I have changed jobs about one and a half years ago, I have gained 10 kgs just from living in a different environment (walking to my car, instead of to the metro and sitting behind my laptop instead of standing in a classroom). I believe that living in a reversible destiny loft could really keep you physically in great shape. I don’t think I would be able to manage it mentally though: climb a wall every time you want to turn on the light?

Learning is could be (narrowly) defined as overcoming challenges. It would be interesting to try and create a learning environment that keeps challenging as many senses as possible, keeps changing/adapting and keeps your brain working at all times.

Does anybody know any?