Ideas….

So I tired to make my blog appear in Google Buzz.  I tried the <link> tag that was described in the Google Buzz API Documentation.  No dice though.  I finally found instructions though.

Adding wordpress.com blog as connected site in Google Buzz

Works like a charm.  If you’re not a wordpress.com site you can add the <meta> tag by going to the theme editor and inserting the tag in the header.php file (assuming that the theme is created properly).

Yay!

A number of places asked me to provide my initial first impressions of the survey I did on Cloud Computing in Higher Education.

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.

Yesterday I read a great post by Nat Torkington over at Radar O’Reilly.  It really got my juices flowing.  I’ve been thinking a lot about Data, especially data in the cloud/open data in advance of my presentation with Michael Klein at Code4Lib at the end of the month (holy crap its coming fast).

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.