My first impression is that survey respondents don’t understand what the cloud is, but that shouldn’t have been a shock to me, most people don’t know what it is.  Admittedly this lack of understanding could be due to the way the survey was structured; but even after a couple of tweaks to the order of sections (I moved Software to the front of the survey and Platforms and Infrastructure to the end), respondents were still having a hard time understanding what was what.  I’ll most likely need to do some clean up on the survey, but I think for now I have a great understanding of what is going on in Higher Education in terms of the cloud.

In the survey I tried to define the three main components of the cloud: Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service.  After the survey was completed, I realized that I’ll need to do a better job of defining things for the audience members in my NERCOMP presentation.  Something that I though I could spend 10 minutes on will probably need a solid 20 minutes so that everyone can be on the same page.  I think diagrams and other visual aids might really help people understand what these different components are, and how they correspond to computing they are already using.

My second impression is that institutions are very comfortable with using Software-as-a-Service.  Below is a graph showing SaaS usage among respondents.  Facebook is of course the leader in the SaaS cloud race, with Twitter and Google Docs coming in right behind them.  What I think is the most interesting though is that overall, Google has the highest share of the marketplace.

As far as PaaS and IaaS, most institutions are not using these services.  I’m hesitant to show results from these sections of the survey since so many respondents confused software for platforms or infrastructure.  Once I clean things up, I’ll provide more information.  Suffice to say though, few if any institutions are using Infrastructures or Platforms in the cloud.  Those that are are using Amazon Web Services (for infrastructure) and Google Code (for platform).

More to come later.  And thank you to everyone that took the time to take my survey.  It has been eye opening and hopefully will make me a more informed speaker.

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When I saw the post I printed it out (i know…the trees) and started marking it up.  This morning when I came back into the office I took a look at the paper and realized that most of the ideas that I liked were basically screaming “I’m a project!”  Some of the highlights from the post were:

• create a user-base for your data
• market to that user-base
• think about publishing your data at the beginning of the project
• consider the sustainability of publishing your data
• think about what you’re hoping to accomplish with your open data
• who are you targeting by opening up your data
• build your project based on what you want to accomplish and who you’re targeting

None of these points are really that new to me (or to anyone that works in systems).  You need to plan before starting on a project, and if you plan right you can have an awesome project.  I think planning is what makes data.gov.uk so much better than data.gov.  It was well thought out.  They considered user-bases in advance.  They incorporated RDF into the data catalogue (yes that’s the british spelling…we are talking about a british site afterall).  These little subtleties are what people are the most excited about.

At the same time I recognize that a lot of times we’re working with retrospective data, data that we thought no one would ever want to take a look at.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t make it useful now, and data.gov.uk proves that. Through great planning they created a very useful tool.

So my point is PLAN PLAN PLAN.  A well thought out plan can make a project succeed or fall flat.

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As a companion to this presentation. I’m doing a survey, to see what kind of things institutions are using in the cloud. Its definitely not a comprehensive list of what’s in the cloud or even what’s possible in the cloud, but my presentation is only 40 minutes.

At any rate, if you work in academia and you’re interested in/using cloud computing, please please please take my survey.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/cloud-academia

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

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1) What exactly is cloud computing
(because we should all be on the same page before talking about something)

• defining the overall concept
• discussing SaaS, Iaas, Paas (and providing examples)
• public v. private cloud
• current “trends” in cloud computing
  • the demise of the operating systems
  • creation of cloud standards

2) How can IT use it beyond outsourcing email

• testing out new software
• storage
• improving upgrade processes
• development

additionally how will this impact IT departments

• less focus on technology
• more focus on user experience
• more focus on process and project management
• increase to production timelines
• a faster pace of “academic business”

3) What are the benefits to creating an Educational Cloud

• lowering the cost of the cloud services that are currently offered
• collaboration on projects
• sharing ownership of computing resources
  • software
  • platforms
  • infrastructure

I don’t know if I can fill 50 minutes all by my lonesome.  I’d like to have a session that is more meeting and less presentation.  Maybe getting users to participate via polls.  I wonder if I could make the session a mini unconference of sorts.  Maybe start off with a definition and then ask the audience to raise their hand if they have done any of the points outlined in #2 part 1  above.  Have them come up and talk about what it is that they did and how it impacted them (using ideas in #2 part 2 as a jumping off point)  in 5 minutes or less.  I could come up with a back up plan just in case no one raises their hand.

I could then wrap things up using with a push for creating an educational cloud based on the ideas outlined in #3 above.

hmmm…thoughts…flowing…through…head…

Please provide comments or opinions on these ideas.  If you think its an AWFUL idea and that NERCOMP might explode, let me know.  Or if you think it’ll explode in a good way, let me know that too.

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I’ve been to conferences before.  At ALA though there are TONS of women.  At Code4Lib I had friends there (both male and female), so that eased the lack of females (but only slightly…I still had the nerves).  But at CloudCamp Boston, I’ll know no one and I’m not going to lie, I thought about not going.  In fact this idea isn’t something new to me.  Being a female in technology has stopped me from going to other things too. That’s right, I’ve chickened out and not gone to things I really wanted to attend because I’m too nervous.

Seems strange right?  But it makes sense when you think about it, I mean how comfortable would you be at a bridal shower, or a baby shower, or in the lingerie department if you were a male.  Not so comfortable.  Well that’s what its like for me going to a technology conference.  And I could throw numbers at you on the lack of women in technology, but most likely you’ll think about it for two seconds and know that its the truth.

So what are my issues about going to these conference? Well I’m sure some are the same that men have.  Do I know enough to hold my own at this thing?  Who am I going to sit with?  Blah blah blah.  But here is the difference; in the back of my head I always hear one of my old coworkers who tried to explain to me why a guy in an IT department was so rude to me:

None of us were particularly popular.  And I’m sure when he looks at you he sees that girl that rejected him in high school

I know he was trying to tell me to brush him off…afterall, the guy he spoke of was a jerk that ended up in a server farm in order to stop his interactions with the public.  But that comment has resonated with me throughout most of my jobs.  It has made me feel like I HAVE to know enough to hold my own because if I don’t, they will just dismiss me as nothing but a girl.

So there it is, my fear laid bare for all of you to read.  But now that I’ve written it I feel a bit better about going tonight.  I’m sure I’ll know just as much as everyone else there.  And I’m sure I’ll find some really nice people to sit with.  And I’m sure no one will be mean to me (assuming the jerk from the server farm isn’t there….).

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When Amazon first came out, it wasn’t cost effective for me to host my website there (in truth it still isn’t cause I have a friend that gives me a deal).  But now it is; Reuven Cohen over at Cloud Interoperability Magazine writes:

In doing the math, @ $0.03 a hour, a small reserved EC2 instance will cost you about $262 a year for the uptime, and $325 for the reservation or about $48 dollars a month. Compared to about $876 a year or $73 a month using an on demand instance (not including storage and bandwidth).

Like I said, its still not cheaper for me, but the thought of being able to do whatever crazy scheme I want on a server sure is enticing.

So if you hate your hosting provider (I hear lots of people whining about Dreamhost), perhaps you should consider switching.

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The datasets are available via Elastic Block Storage:

Amazon EC2 customers can access this data by creating their own personal Amazon EBS volumes, using the public data set snapshots as a starting point. They can then access, modify and perform computation on these volumes directly using their Amazon EC2 instances and just pay for the compute and storage resources that they use.

All of this can be done through the AWS Web Console > Elastic Block Store > Volumes.  When you click “Create Volume” a new window will up and there is a dropdown box that allows you to choose from available datasets or you can use the snapshot id numbers that are shown on the public datasets page (because not all datasets are listed in the dropdown box).

What’s even better is that you too can share your data with the world by filling out a form (also found on the public datasets page) and talking to Amazon.

a view of EBS from the AWS Web Console

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So while that was great, what was even better for me was that she used Jing, a free screencasting tool from TechSmith.  It allows you to create screencasts (in .swf format).  You can save the screencasts to your computer (and make an endless supply) or upload them to http://www.screencast.com.  You get 2GB of space with a free screencast.com account but if you upgrade to the pro account you get 25GB.

I’m hoping to rework the library website and would love to have tutorials that use screencasting.  And since it’s so simple to use I think our librarians might actually like to utilize the tool.  I also think that some of the faculty technology liaisons will get some use out of it while working with faculty members.

Now I’m wondering if there is a Moodle block or plugin that plays .swf files…..

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So anyway, on to the real meat of the post.  What is ORE?  Well that’s a great question; let’s see if I can sum up what I’ve learned.

First, Herbert did a quick crash course on what RDF was.  It consisted of this:

• resources exist at a particular URI
• RDF is about explaining resources
• there are things called RDF triples, they consist of a subject, predicate, and object
• if you don’t have a URI for a resource you can have something called a literal

Below is an image of RDF triples:

Kind of an abstract idea, but if you’re really interested in learning more check out W3C’s page on RDF, perhaps reading the RDF primer first (of course I recommend this, but I have yet to do that myself).

Ok so now that we have a basic understanding of RDF we can move on and gain a basic understanding of ORE (supposedly).

The ORE Primer states that:

Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources.

Brilliant, so now instead of just describing one resource we can aggregate resources together, but then what?  OAI-ORE uses the same http 303 redirect guidelines that linked data does to redirect users to something called a resource map.  This map describes how the different resources in the aggregation are related to one another.

What’s great about the resource map is that it lives in what Herbert calls the two web worlds (web 2.0 and the semantic web).  The resource map can be written in Atom XML, RDF, and RDFa (RDFa is like RDF except in XHTML rather than XML).

So now we can have aggregations of resources in a machine readable map rather than sitting out there as seperate resources seemingly unrelated to one another.

Herbet went on to say that Dr. Robert Sanderson at the University of Liverpool actually went through and created resource maps for everything in JSTOR.  You can find out a little more about this project via this Code4Lib listserv posting.

So that’s OAI-ORE in a nutshell.  A very small, simple minded nutshell.

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So now you’re wondering what this has to do with anything…well hold on I’m getting there.  So the other day I was in the grocery store buying chicken and garlic.  I personally like to do all my checking out at the self checkout out because there are usually fewer people there and I can move pretty quick.  So I scan my chicken and enter in my garlic.  Then I swipe my Shaw’s card to get the garlic for cheaper and finally I pay.  So the little machine tells me to take my items and not to forget my coupons and receipt.  So I grab my coupons and I pause…

The coupon says: “buy personalize M&Ms for your wedding at a discount”.  And I wonder:  How the heck does the grocery store know I’m getting married!

Well simple really.  Crate and Barrel, Macy’s, and Bed Bath and Beyond sell my registry and other information to marketers.  The marketers sell my information to Shaw’s.  Shaw’s matches it up to their rewards card database thingy.  The rewards card tells the coupon machine what targeted coupons to spit out at me.  This is why I get coupons certain times of the month for certain items, its like the coupon/reward card knows I’m out cause it can see my shopping behavior, and presumably I’m somewhat predictable.

Scary right?  So I actually think this is cool (once I got over the weirdness).

Well my targeted information advertising experience didn’t stop there.  The other day I was at a faculty workshop on social networking and one of the professors here, Josh Stenger showed the workshop that you can go into Facebook and buy an advertisement.  Of course the cool thing isn’t the buying of the ad (and you don’t even need to make a purchase to get to the cool stuff), its the information Facebook supplies you when you get to step three of buying the ad.  Below is a picture of the coolness:

Step 3 when buying a Facebook Advertisement

Essentially Facebook allows marketers to find the exact number of people on Facebook that fit my criteria.  And of course, if I were buying an ad, I could sell it to my targeted audience.  That’s how I (personally) got the ad for Lost (the TV show) on my Facebook page, and how I then became a fan of the show and why that’s the only add that comes up (which is annoying).  At anyrate, its kind of cool to play around with.

Another really cool tool Josh showed us was the Facebook Lexicon.  This allows you to see what words people are interested in.  So below you can see the buzz around Obama which of course spiked on election day.

the buzz around obama as seen from the facebook universe

So my question is this.  Why aren’t libraries using this stuff?  Why aren’t we looking at the buzzwords our users are typing in to search interfaces and then trending them on graphs?  Why aren’t we using profiles to keep track of their research interests and then pushing them targeted articles.  Or even easier than all that, why aren’t we putting ads on Facebook for research assistant appointments or the like?

How cool would all that be?

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