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Articles --
Yaga, Yaga do! -- P2P meets micropayments
Business opportunities for peer-to-peer (P2P) networks
Baseball -- the killer app for audio over the Internet
Beyond McLuhan -- many parallel media, and discussion
-- no message
Message from Mongolia
PalTalk -- a free voice chat alternative for distance
education and business
Evaluating synchronous/real-time platforms for
distance education
Text chat choices
In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan said "the medium is the message." Well, in the world according to John Hibbs, the medium is not the message, should not be the message; in fact, there should not be a message (in the sense of prepackaged content to be delivered to passive consumers). Rather, you focus on the preliminary content and the audience, and the medium is just a means to the end, which is the global discussion that results from allowing large numbers of people around the world to receive preliminary content, react to it, and react to one another.
In other words, rather than picking a single medium (such as, Web, text chat, voice over IP, telephone, radio, etc.) and designing for it, you plan to use as many media as possible, to make it easy for the maximum number of people to connect and participate. Some of these media may be integrated to some extent, but the objective is not to build some massive well-engineered mega-medium, but rather to use whatever is available in parallel -- taking advantage of low-cost and free mechanisms for connecting thousands, even millions of people -- many of whom would be shut out if you limited yourself to just one, or even to just several of these media.
The project at hand is Global Learn Day V, scheduled for Oct. 7, 2001. People around the world involved in distance education will share their progress and the challenges they face -- with the virtual podium starting in New Zealand and moving ahead one time zone per hour for 24 hours. The whole event will be available for hearing/viewing by multiple means (including telephone, streaming audio, Paltalk voice chat, text chat, and broadcast radio). Archives will be available on the Web to check out and react to later. And simultaneous with the "main event", many side conversations will take place on related topics through those same multiple media.
I'm fascinated not so much by the event itself (which is certainly amazing), as by the potential of this approach for promoting global discussion on a regular basis -- setting up a sort of ad hoc multi-media network -- in the true sense of multi-media: not meaning just voice and video, but rather meaning many different means of communication. Such a network could be used to hold regular, scheduled educational and social/entertainment events. This is a way to build global communities, rube goldberg style -- taking advantage of free and low-cost media to facilitate discussion and move us beyond the corporate-dominated world that McLuhan took for granted.
For details on Global Learn Day, check the Benjamin Franklin Institute, www.bfranklin.edu, or contact John Hibbs, hibbs@bfranklin.edu
Then, experimenting, my 11-year-old son Tim discovered a whole new world
out there:
1) The search results seem to differ according to who happens to be
online. So while the song you want may not be available right now, try
again in half an hour and it might be there.
2) Don't limit your search to audio files. Select "all types." That
greatly increases your chances of finding a match -- perhaps in a format
you hadn't expected: for instance, a music video that has the song you
want synched with images. Many of these music video files seem to have
been hacked together by very clever and creative individuals, just for
the heck of it. They combine images captured from television (still and
motion, from regular programming and ads) with music, dialogue -- anything.
(E.g., in the middle of a serious scene, a character starts singing a commercial,
with hilarious effect).
Who can play? To enjoy this new playground to its fullest, you'll want a fast Internet connection and lots of gigabytes. The average 4-5 minute music video runs about 30 megs. Yaga's technology speeds downloads. If your connection is faster than the PCs that are serving up the files, Yaga will connect you to several at the same time, taking different pieces of identical files from different sources and automatically patching them all together. But 30 megs a shot does eat up disk space.
FYI -- in the past "firewalls" were a nuisance that you typically encountered at work -- getting in the way of your experimenting with new and interesting capabilities. Nowadays, many people have cable and DSL connections and have installed personal firewalls to protect their machines from intrusion. So it would seem likely that the very folks who are well equipped for the P2P experience would be blocked out. Fortunately, Yaga makes it easy for those with personal firewalls to share files with one another.
So what is a P2P (peer-to-peer) experience? Yes, you use the Internet, but not the Web. On the Web, you post your content on a server, and your audience connects to that server to view it. If you interact live with other users, it is by way of all of you connecting to the same server at the same time. With P2P, the computers of individual users are connected together directly. This connection could be wide open to the public, mediated by a service like Yaga, which allows you to search through available content offered up by hundreds of thousands, even millions, of individuals.
Consider that when the Web went public in the fall of 1993, the average PC probably had a hard drive with a capacity of 50 megs or less. Today, middle-of-the-line PCs are selling with hard drives in the range of 50 to 100 gigs. When PC hard drives were small, it made sense that files should be stored on servers. Now PC hard drives are so large that anybody can store and serve up many large files. And the processing power of today's PCs is so great (1 GHz is becoming common), that with the speed of a cable or DSL Internet connection, your PC can serve up files to people around the world, working in the background, while you go about your normal computer-related/Internet-related tasks without even noticing the difference.
Also, the files that you access via a P2P connection are unlimited -- not just text, graphics, audio, and video: anything that can be stored on a computer. And the P2P service can be set up to be open to the public or only to authorized members -- allowing the construction of custom communication/collaboration communities -- a la intranet/extranet, or on a paid subscription basis. The content can be available for free transfer, or for transfer only on payment -- allowing the creation of a smooth, fast, hassle-free marketplace for digital content of all kinds. Content can also be provided to subscribers in a push/channel mode (Yaga calls their offering of that kind "YagaNet Gold").
To enable the creation of that marketplace, Yaga just purchased MagnaCash, a micropayments startup. MagnaCash processes small payments for a fraction of the fees assessed by credit cards. It can also track who earns what from every slice of every transaction -- artist, author, publisher, distributor, etc. -- and can distribute the proceeds accordingly. Money can enter the MagnaCash System from credit cards, bank acocunts and rebates/incentive. Inside the system, money can move from consumers to merchants, consumers to consumers and merchants to merchants. Then money can exit to bank accounts and credit cards. There is no need to establish your own merchant credit card account to participate.
So Yaga is not only opening up the capabilities of P2P to new business models, it is also capitalizing on micropayments -- the capability to very efficiently handle small sums of money, so consumers can pay minimum/token sums and content providers can get paid for their work, benefitting from access to a new set of customers. Micropayments technology has been available in one form or another for about five years. (I remember the Millicent effort at Digital well). But it never took off on the Web. Now maybe the time is right and P2P, rather than the Web, is the right platform.
If you'd like to learn more about Yaga, please participate in our chat session on Thursday, Oct. 18, from noon to 1 PM Eastern Time. Go to www.samizdat.com/chat.html for details.
Peer-to-peer or P2P networking opens a whole new range of business opportunities. On the Web, you post your content on a server, and your audience connects to that server to view it. If you interact live with other users, it is by way of all of you connecting to the same server at the same time. With P2P, the computers of individual users are connected together directly. The best-known instance of this today is Napster.
If you haven't already, you should go to www.napster.com, signup, and download and install their software. Then begin to use their service to fetch songs that you'd like to hear.
Regardless of the outcome of the legal battles regarding rights to and payments for music, the rapid, phenomenal success of Napster changes the Internet business environment. Yes, anybody could set up a Web server to make it easy for people to download music or any other kind of digital file. But what Napster did was to make it easy for Internet users anywhere to connect directly to one another and share files. The music doesn't reside at the Napster site. It sits on your PC and the PCs of millions of other Napster members. That's what makes such a service so impossible to police.
Napster uses a central site to manage the users, but has no control over what they put on their PCs and what they decide to share with one another. Napster just makes it easy for someone in Peking to find out that you have a particular file that he or she wants and to make a copy of it on his or her own PC. Individuals can name their files however they want. So you can foil automated efforts to block the sharing of particular copyrighted material by just changing the spelling of names or adding a letter or number here and there.
What works so well for music could work just as well for any other kinds of digital files -- text or graphics or video or animation. And while Napster is set up as a global system connecting tens of millions of people, the same technology can be used to link together much smaller, more focused communities of users.
Another approach to P2P sharing known as Gnutella does the same thing without any central management of users. Gnutella client software is basically a mini search engine and a file serving system in one. You search a Gnutella Network and get the files that you want -- any files at all: music, pictures, video, text, software -- anonymously. To learn more and to download the software, go to http://gnutella.wego.com That's pioneer-style sharing, like the early days of the Internet, with free and open software. It's easy to sense that there's great potential in that direction, but hard to come up with a viable, profit-making business model.
Up until today, if you wanted to use P2P for business -- setting up a community of employees, partners, and customers for file sharing and search, you had to build it all from scratch, using Gnutella-style tools. Now you have an interesting new alternative -- Yaga.com
Go to their site, download their software, and give their P2P network
a try. Click on Advanced Search near the top of the home page and you can
search not just by title, but also by file type -- image, music, sound,
video, text, html, Word, Excel, pdf, zip, or exe. You can make files of
your own available to the community as well as download files made public
by others like you. If you have software you wrote that you'd like to make
available to the world and you don't have your own ftp site, you could
make it available here. Whatever kind of file you want to share, you can
share it here, today, for free.
More important from a business standpoint, Yaga will help you
set up your own private branded P2P network that you can use to publish
audio, video, images, software, or any other kinds of files -- for free
or for a price, depending on your business model. Their technology makes
it easy to reliably transfer files as large as a gigabyte -- which is becoming
increasingly important for distributing demos and software and videos.
On the one hand, this is an alternative to distributing files by email
or ftp or by browser-based download. On the other hand, it's a new infrastructure
that supports collaboration and community -- with all members able to quickly
and easily share files of all kinds with one another.
Basically, Yaga seems to have found a way to harness the power of P2P,
while curbing the anarchic tendencies. They have built in security, and
support for digital rights management. Everything is managed centrally,
with files given unique signatures based on their size. Files are scanned
for viruses before being made available. As soon as a file is made available,
it is included in the search index, supporting full-text search (every
word, not just the title and description). All the basic elements are here
to let content producers use this as a mechanism for selling content. Yaga
is in a good position to be an ally of the movie, music, publishing, and
software industries, rather than an antagonist. Please give it a try and
let me know how you think you could use it in your business.
August and September, I'm a baseball addict. The Red Sox almost always make it interesting right up to the end. And this year, they're going all the way, so I don't want to miss anything -- the lows as well as the highs. And this year the Internet brings it all home.
In past years, I depended on boston.com I'd can go to their sports/redsox directory www.boston.com/sport/redsox and check the scores and the standings, even take a look at scores and box scores of previous games and see how the schedule looks for the rest of the year. Unfortunately, the site isn't updated very often -- they still operate like a newspaper. I don't like having to wait four or five hours after the game or even until the next morning to see the results and all the details. If I could wait that long, I could wait for the next print edition of the Boston Globe or Herald.
Last year, I switched to espn, www.espn.com. Their coverage of major league baseball is excellent -- not just the availability of detailed stats and records of every team, but especially for their live pitch-by-pitch gamecasts. I can select any game at all and see in text what is happening as it happens. If I have a lot of work to do online, I keep one or more gamecast windows going in the background and check them every once in a while. Sometimes I watch the Red Sox on TV and keep the gamecast of the Yankees and/or Oakland going on my PC.
Now Major League Baseball has caught on. Their site -- www.mlb.com -- has grown to the point that it beats ESPN. There is a separate area with enormous detail about each team. When you go to www.redsox.com, you are really going to a sub domain of www.mlb.com They don't have live gamecasts, like ESPN, but they do have audio -- all the audio coverage you would ever want, and for a reasonable price.
This year, audio came of age. Radio broadcasts of every single major league game -- both live and archived. Yes, you can get the same audio by way of ESPN, but ESPN will charge you $9.95 a month for a subscription by way of real.com, which includes lots of non-baseball stuff as well, that you probably aren't interested in. But if you go by way of mlb.com, you can subscribe for the entire season for just $9.95. Now I can listen to the Red Sox or any other team in the background while writing an article like this. I can also run espn gamecasts of some games, while listening to the radio broadcast of another.
Baseball is one sport that works very well over the radio. It's easy to visualize what is happening, because usually one thing happens at a time. In football, basketball, and ice hockey, there are people doing things all over the game area at the same time. In baseball, the action usually centers on where the ball is. The pitcher pitches. Then the batter bats. Then the fielder fields. Yes, there's some supplementary action, with fielders positioning themselves in anticipation, and with runners taking leads and trying to steal. But a good announcer has plenty of opportunity to fill you in on all that. Based on a voice commentary, you can easily imagine what is happening. Much of the action, in fact is routine. When a line drive hits the ground in front of an outfielder, you know it's going to be a single. When the ball is popped up in the infield, you know it is going to be an out. The physical details of the situation are often of no importance. Your imagination can easily fill in the blanks. In other words, baseball is great for radio. And hence baseball makes a killer app for streaming audio over the Internet.
And the large numbers of people who are now getting used to enjoying sports entertainment by way of Internet radio broadasts and archives, will be primed for other creative uses of audio over the Internet. The technology has been ready for five or six years, now finally there's an audience -- a very large and enthusiastic audience that other businesses should be able to serve and build on.
Last night I got an email from my son, Bob. No big deal you might think. But, yes, it was a big deal. You see, he's in the middle of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. And that message got me thinking about the paradox of today's Internet business environment.
A year and a half ago, my son Bob co-founded a company called Trenza which raised $3.3 million and set out to revolutionize the Internet. At its peak, he had two dozen employees, and they developed software that made Web browsing a 3D experience. Ordinary Web site and Web pages appeared in a 3D landscape, making it far easier to recognize the context and navigate to what you want. And designers using their authoring tools would be designing in 3D rather than 2D -- in other words, instead of giving your creative artists a blackboard to work with, you give them the Sistine Chapel.
While their technology moved forward at a rapid clip, the Internet business environment around them collapsed and transformed. When they started, investors were looking for the next great new thing that would change the world. They weren't interested in cautious, slow-growth companies. They weren't looking for penny-ante current profits. They were looking for a huge upside. They were willing to gamble, hoping that one of their investments would win big -- very, very big. Trenza was positioned great for investors of that kind. They were narrowly focused on developing the technology as well and as quickly as possible. They had no marketing. Once they completed their second round of funding, and once the product was complete, then they could line up customers. For now, they needed to focus their small team on the product itself.
As the investment environment turned bad, Trenza continued to attract interest. For about eight months, they were on the brink of getting one set or another of second round investors lined up. But the investors' criteria were in the process of changing. Increasingly, investors shied away from risks, and looked for sure wins. They no longer expected huge IPOs. Rather they were afraid of losing money. With the huge drop in stock prices, the assets they had to work with were greatly diminished. And the stock of well-established technology companies, with billions in annual revenue, billions in fixed assets, and hundreds of thousands of employees was selling for a small fraction of what it used to sell for. If you had money to spend, you would put it into one of these established and far undervalued companies rather than gambling on a startup with no customers and zero current revenue.
Toward the end, AOL expressed interest in a takeover. Dozens of phone calls and meetings seemed to bring that possibility ever closer to reality. With firm faith in the potential of their technology, nearly all of Trenza's employees hung on tenaciously, working the final month and a half for no pay, in hopes that the AOL deal would come through.
Then, at time when prospects looked brighter than they had in many a month, with everyone at AOL expressing enthusiasm, and only a couple more corporate hurdles to clear, someone near the top said no, and it was all over.
They closed the company down with a few dollars still in the bank, rather than go into bankruptcy. And two dozen brilliant hardworking Internet experts found themselves in a job market with very few opportunities.
Bob decided it was time for a break. He and his girlfriend set out on a three month trip to the Far East, with the hope that when they returned in September the market would have turned around and they'd have a clearer idea of what they wanted to do next. They started in Hong Kong and China. They are now in Mongolia. Next they'll go to Bali, Borneo, Singapore, Viet Nam, and Thailand. At various times, they'll be riding camels and yaks and elephants.
So yesterday, I got an email from Bob, sent from a town with a few hundred inhabitants in a remote area of Mongolia. Previously, I'd gotten half a dozen emails from him from small towns in China. Apparently, there are public Internet cafes everywhere. And the irony struck me -- here Internet business is still on very shaky ground, with more good companies folding, day after day, because they simply can't raise the next round of financing. And meanwhile the underlying strength of the Internet -- the people connected -- continues to grow; and online interactions among people everywhere continue to transform the world.
Two of the major voice chat players favored for use in distance education and business -- Firetalk and Lipstream -- recently went out of business. And HearMe was acquired and is changing. So it's important to determine what service still remain and how appropriate they are for business.
We tested PalTalk in three consecutive chat sessions and found very useful. (See www.samizdat.com/chat.html for details about our weekly chat sessions).
www.paltalk.com has both voice and text chat. Their text chat is barebones, but savable. Their voice chat is excellent, and easy to manage, but cannot handle Macintosh.
Paltalk is a bit complicated to get setup. You have to download and install software. It runs as a separate app, not through a browser. And your chat room does not have a URL for quick connection: rather you have to go through a lengthy process to get to the right room. Despite all the barriers we had 32 people participate in one session, and the great majority were very favorably impressed.
The free version is powerful, and the paid service is incredibly inexpensive.
A few quick observations about the capabilities of this application:
The speed of Internet connectivity did not seem to be a significant
factor in voice quality. People with 28.8 modems sounded about the same
as others with cable connections. But a headset-style microphone helps,
by keeping the distance from the microphone to your mouth constant. Also,
some people found that lowering the settings on their Norton Antivirus
software improved voice quality.
Increasingly, people who could benefit from online courses have ever more powerful PCs and ever faster connections to the Internet. At the same time, suppliers of software and services for distance education are providing platforms better suited for education, and easier for both instructors and students to use.
The earliest distance education programs over the Internet depended largely on email and asynchronous communication tools -- like forums or bulletin-boards, which allowed people to connect to read or post whenever was convenient for them. This capability is important for serving people with busy schedules, who are located in many different time zones.
Synchronous/real-time chat was mainly used for informal communication, and, in particular, for "office hours", as a way to encourage and enhance interaction among students and with the professor.
Now, platforms using voice -- either over the Internet or in parallel by ordinary telephone -- can make it possible to provide rich, interactive synchronous, real-time experiences, where everyone connects simultaneously and interacts immediately. that feel "natural" to non-technical participants. And the contents of these sessions (including text, audio, and graphics/slides) can be saved and posted on the Web for later review, for the benefit of students who couldn't show up live, and also for possible packaging on CD/DVD.
When both voice and text are available, voice dominates -- that's where all the action is. People won't use text -- even though text is better for searching, saving, and editing.
Hence, you should use voice-powered real-time platforms for high-energy, high-impact, for experiences that benefit greatly from interactivity between teacher and students and among students, not for tasks that could be performed at other times and in other ways. And maintain asynchronous discussion platforms as a place to post documents to be read by the entire class, and for students to post their work and comment on one another's work as well as class topics and activities. Course designers and deliverers face the challenge of balancing these very different capabilities to optimize the learning experience of a diverse and widely dispersed student audience.
At the high end, auditorium-style platforms allow hundreds, even thousands of students to attend simultaneously, mimicking a lecture hall experience, but with everyone having a clear view of what is being shown, and with clear sound, and with opportunities to "raise you hand" and ask questions, either directly to the professor or to assistants who are also available online. Some also offer virtual break-out rooms, where smaller groups of students can meet to work together on projects that they then report out to the larger group in the auditorium. Other platforms, with similar capabilities, are designed for more intimate classes with a dozen or two students.
When shopping for such a platform, don't presume that it needs to include every feature on your wishlist. Simple alternatives may fill in the gaps very well.
For example, if the platform you prefer is weak in terms of storing audio archives, good inexpensive software (like Total Recorder from High Criteria, www.highcriteria.com) can record any audio from any platform using a PC, and you then can post the audio file on the Web for anyone to hear later.
Also, don't give too much weight to software features that enable you
to forcibly control the discussion. For groups as large as two to three
dozen people, protocol (rules of procedure that you establish) works fine
for managing the discussion. In running chat sessions at PalTalk, a free
voice chat platform, we did not need to use the handy force-style admin
tools (whereby the administrator can shut off and turn on microphones).
Rather, everyone who wanted to speak clicked on the Request Speak button,
which generates a raised hand icon, and waited politely until called upon.
For instance:
For example:
This platform seems very well suited both for office hours and for auditorium-style (for the opening and closing sessions). Using the same application for both purposes would make it easier for students and instructors to get acclimated -- helping them focus on content, rather than technical matters.
To learn about the capabilities of their hosted service and their server product (packaged hardware and software for you to run yourself), click on Products, then Features and/or Pricing. If you just look at their home page, you might get the false impression that all they have to offer is OfficeHoursLive, which has a limitation of 25 participants for two-way audio, and 50 for one-way audio. The ASP (hosted) service and server product have the same very attractive capabilities, but can handle over 300 people.
Their online "wizard" helps students quickly determine if their equipment is compatible and to let them know if they should adjust any of their settings: http://live.horizonlive.com/wizard/launcher.cgi
Capabilities --
The WebEx Onstage service can handle 1000 people. It works with Macintosh as well as PCs. It allows:
At this point, they have no voice over IP. Everyone has to connect by
phone. (Their voice over IP provider, Lipstream, went under). They claim
that they will have voice over IP in a couple months. But even then, they
will not be able to mix and match -- you would have to go either all voice
over IP or all phone.
Their support people recommend that you use the phone exclusively --
"voice over IP doesn't really work well." Also, their voice over
IP application will be proprietary software of their own, for which you
will need their plug-in.
There is no simple way to archive an entire session. They save the polls and the chat text and the slides (but in a proprietary format of theirs which resembles pdf, they say.) But audio would have to be recorded by the customer. While it is possible to put together complete synchronized archives, it's complex to do so (in contrast to HorizonLive, which makes that easy.)
They have very limited polling functionality, and the polling data, using a proprietary format, cannot be exported for use in another polling app. Also, they have no breakout rooms and only very limited Macintosh functionality.
This platform appears to be designed and priced for business, not really for distance ed. (So far, they have no college-level customers to point to as examples.) Their very expensive pricing is based on per user, per minute (now either 35 cents/minute/user or $200/concurrent user/month).
They have many features, but most appear to be unnecessary for distance education, just adding to complexity and cost.
Centra, www.centra.com (Symposium product)
Centra sounds much better in the marketing descriptions than it looks and feels in demos.
It doesn't work with Netscape (at least not my Communicator 4.75). In demos, the voice cuts in and out. The text chat is not immediately evident -- you have to click on Tools in the tool bar to get into it, and then it opens a separate window that obscures the regular presentation until you resize your windows. And the text chat is barebones, with no threading.
The marketing material indicates that the maximum audience size is 250. But there are probably ways to work around that (e.g., two rooms simultaneously delivering the same presentation).
They offer voice over IP only. You'd have to set up with another provider for telephone.
Strengths:
· breakout rooms
· polling (but with delays -- the results don't appear until
the presenter gives the okay)
· whiteboard
· handraising
· professor can selectively allow particular students to speak
(with microphone, voice over IP)
· Web pages sharing/co-browsing
· purportedly firewall friendly
You can run it on their hosted service or buy their server and run it yourself.
Evoke, www.raindance.com (they just changed their name and URL to Raindance)
Evoke is very telephone-oriented. Normally, you meet in a teleconferencing room. The telephone voice is normally two-way, but the administrator can mute all others and unmute individuals. Individuals can also unmute themselves if they know the command. They also offer streaming (one-way) audio.
Strengths:
· works with Macs as well as PCs
· purportedly firewall friendly
· works with both Netscape and IE
· 24X7 support by toll-free number
· presentations stored, with voice synchronized with other content,
but they charge for every time a student accesses the presentation (you
don't "own" it to put it to other uses, as is possible with HorizonLive)
· text chat
Limitations:
· normal limits are 96 people over the phone and up to 2000
over the Internet, but with advance notice they can hook bridges together
· polling, but only in their "collaboration" product, which
requires everyone to be on the telephone (no streaming audio)
· very expensive pricing (per user, per minute)
· students can submit questions by text chat, but only the moderator
sees them, unless the moderator elects to "publish" them
Placeware, www.placeware.com
Placeware seems better suited for corporate events than for distance
education.
The system requirements are on the high end: 166 Mhz Pentium-based
Windows or Sun SPARCstation. No Macintosh. The audience needs 64 MB RAM,
and the presenter needs 128 MB. The audience also needs a 56K modem, or
faster. And presenters need PowerPoint 97 (2000 recommended).
Strengths:
· works with both IE and Netscape
· auditorium can hold up to 2500 attendees
· on-the-fly polling
· archival of presentations with visual and audio content synchronized
· lots of features
· both phone and Internet for audio
· no plug-ins or new software required
· powerpoint presentations
· purportedly firewall friendly
· the color-coded audience feedback
· the text submission of questions (separate from chat)
· wide range of annotation options for the presenter
· wide range of additional services available a la carte
Limitations:
· Many people in your target audience probably don't have the
latest and greatest equipment.
· They do not "formally" support Macintosh
· High per-seat, corporate-style pricing (probably negotiable)
· the archive is custom-made (typically with a week delay)
· no voice over IP (just streaming audio and phone)
· none of the chat content (even that done "publicly" to an
entire row) is saved
NB -- several vendors (Hewlett-Packard, Knowledgenet, and Click2Learn) are developing distance education platforms based on Placeware.
HP Virtual Classroom http://e-learning.hp.com/store/classroom.asp
This hosted solution is "built on PlaceWare's PlaceServer engine." The specs are very different than Placeware's. Users need just 28.8 modem (instead of 56K), and it is only "scalable" up to 500 users (instead of 2500).
Strengths:
· handraising
· online polling
· private chats
· question management
· whiteboard
· web page sharing/co-browsing
This might be a viable option, but there are no demos of archived presentations, and there is no simple way to get a live demo. (The pricing is steep -- per user per hour).
Epiclearning www.epiclearning.com
offers:
· polling
· white board with annotation
· PowerPoint presentations
· two-way voice over IP and telephone conference call
· text chat
Their classroom size is limited to 200, there might be some way to
work around that).
Educata from Catatech.com www.catatech.com offers many useful features, but no polling. They have voice over IP, but not phone. They require a high-end PC (Pentium 166 MHz is the minimum; 200 MHz recommended), and do not support Macintosh. Students need to install a 250K plugin. Their Web site does not indicate the limit on the number of students, but their support people indicate that there is no upper limit -- that they can accommodate "hundreds". They do archive the sessions, but not the audio portion -- and since the professor's presentation will be largely audio, you would need to find another way to record the audio and then put the pieces together so they are synchronized for later playback.
According to the marketing descriptions, Interwise www.interwise.com has many useful features. But it's simply too complex for students to get set up to use it. You have to download and install a 3.6 Meg program. And you even need Acrobat to view the installation instructions. I gave up after half an hour of trying to connect to their live demo.
The Web site for LearnLinc www.learnlinc.com is overloaded with marketing hype and facts are hard to find. The canned demo has no sound, though the service includes voice over IP and streaming audio. You would need to schedule a live demo to properly evaluate this platform.
Also, it is important to minimize the number of different tools/applications students need to become familiar with. Hence it would be best if you could use the same application for both real-time office hours chat and asynchronous forum-style discussion; or use the same application for office hours chat and for auditorium-style sessions. Less is more.
When selecting a chat platform for office hours, keep in mind:
If you must have threaded text chat, then I believe that SiteScape Forum, in the hosted version www.webworkzone.com, is the best choice. That's what I use for my own weekly chat sessions and what we used for previous KSG and Sloan/Merrill Lynch distance education pilots. It includes threading, the sessions are automatically saved, the saved files can be downloaded or reposted on another server, and AltaVista search is built into the product. This is HTML-based chat, which works fine without considerations like firewalls. You might also consider using the related asynchronous/forum discussion capabilities of the same product.
Delphi www.delphi.com offers free forums and chat rooms. But their java-based chat is not savable and is not archived.
There are many free public chat services (at Yahoo, Excite, etc.), but they either use java or IRC for chat, which means it is difficult if not impossible to save the transcript.
You also could use Paltalk www.paltalk.com for both voice and text chat. Their text chat is barebones, but savable. Their voice chat is excellent, and easy to manage, but cannot handle Macintosh. The voice could be saved with a separate application (e.g., Total Recorder from High Criteria) and posted at a Web site for future reference. Paltalk is far more complicated to get setup than HorizonLive. You have to download and install software. It runs as a separate app, not through a browser. And your chat room does not have a URL for quick connection, rather you have to go through a lengthy process to get to the right room. This is, however, quite viable -- even in its free version; and the paid service is incredibly inexpensive. I've tested this platform in my weekly chat sessions. Despite all the barriers we had as many as 32 people participate in a single session, and the great majority were very favorably impressed. For detailed advice on how to take advantage. PalTalk, check the related article in this issue of Internet-on-a-Disk.
On the Internet today, there's a variety of ways of "talking" to people live.
Instant messaging programs, like AOL Messenger, ICQ, and Yahoo Messenger
are primarily used for one-to-one communication. You build a buddy list
of other members, you get an alert signal to let you know when your buddies
come online, and you can quickly connect with one another and talk or type
away. With AOL Messenger, you can also create such a multi-person chat
room. To do so, you need to invite people by name, and all the participants
need to have the software installed on their systems, and need to be registered
AOL Messenger members. In other words, this platform is not designed for
holding open public chat sessions. It is, however, well-suited for meetings
among people who already know one another. It is very easy to save the
transcript, using a command in the application. And if you have a microphone,
you can also initiate private one-on-one voice conversations with other
participants in such a room.
The capabilities of the other major instant messaging platforms seem
to be very similar.
Customer-service oriented programs, like HumanClick, make it easy for a visitor to a particular Web page to initiate a live discussion with a representative of the Web site. In some cases, you have a choice of using text or voice to communicate.
"Chat" as we usually use the term refers to a room-style environment where many people can gather as a group and talk to one another. Today it comes in two flavors -- voice and text. The look and feel can be very like an instant messenger application -- typing and or talking.
While voice is compelling when everyone who needs to connect is properly equipped, text remains the lowest common denominator, reaching a much larger audience. Also, text is relatively easy to save as an archive and to search through.
When shopping for a text-chat platform, most people would agree that the top two goals are:
1) simple to understand/easy to use (that includes no firewall problems,
and no need to download software/plugins)
2) cross-platform and cross-browser (works well with Macs as well as
PC, and with Netscape as well as IE, and in all likely combinations thereof)
And if at all possible, you'd want a platform that is free, meaning that there's no need to beg/haggle/negotiate to get free access.
Depending on the anticipated size of your audience you might also need to be able to easily set up multiple chat rooms and handle many visitors in a single room.
Two additional characteristics are also important to me, but are often overlooked:
-- It should be easy to save complete transcripts, so people who weren't able to attend live can catch up on what transpired and also as interesting content that can draw traffic to a Web site by way of search engines. And
-- Visitors should see all the text, not just what was posted after they joined. Not every one will appear on the dot of the hour, and those who show up late should be able to read back and sort out the context, without you having to explain the same points and answer the same questions over and over again.
There are three main styles of text chat today:
1) IRC-based
2) Java-based
3) HTML
IRC or Internet Relay Chat was around long before there was a Web and continues to thrive. Software of this type typically runs into firewall problems. The folks in charge of a corporate firewall have to open up a channel to allow the traffic through. Even when those folks are willing to make the change, that is a hassle.
In addition, IRC chat typically presents problems in saving a complete transcript and only shows you what has happened since you joined.
Java-based chat also typically presents problems in saving a complete transcript and only shows what has happened since you joined.
HTML chat shows you all the text and makes it easy to save it all (just using the Save As function in your browser). That's my favorite type.
On July 19, we tested two text chat services: parachat and volcano (in the implementation at the Online Training Institute www.oltraining.com). Both are java-based, and hence both only show what has been entered since you joined and both make saving transcripts difficult.
With parachat, while it is possible to save what you can highlight with
your browser, after you have seen a couple of screens full of text the
application resets -- erasing the old text and starting fresh, which
means it's virtually impossible to save a complete transcript.
On July 26, we tested Bravenet, which offers far more capability than parachat and also is free. The chat window is very large, and you can easily adjust the type size and font to your taste. When entering, you can provide a "profile" of yourself (the best kind of profile appears to be your email address and URL) in addition to your name. Then anyone clicking on your name in the list of participants sees that profile information. Bravenet also make it very easy for any participant to "push" Web pages to everyone else. To receive such pages, a participant needs to have clicked on "Webtouring" to activate that feature. All it takes to push a page is entering a complete URL (beginning with http://) in the chat window. A new window opens up showing that page.
Thanks to the page pushing, you could use Bravenet to deliver a prepared presentation -- with Web pages that explain your main points and that have links to take your audience to other pages. In fact, you could, for free, conduct a very sophisticated meeting -- combining the text chat and page pushing of Bravenet and the voice capabilites of PalTalk (see www.samizdat.com/paltalk) by simply running both applications at the same time.
Limitations: While page pushing could be very valuable if properly used, it is subject to abuse, because any participant can push any page at any time. In many cases, simply setting a clear and understandable set of rules (e.g., the host needs to give permission before anyone else can push pages) could work fine. (FYI -- when you push a page, other people see it immediately, but the person doing the pushing does not. The "pusher" needs to open that page manually in a separate browser window.) But you need to balance the benefits of this capability with the risk that a prankster use it to make a mockery of your session. And even if the pushed pages are all relevant to the discussion, each pushed page opens a new browser window, which can quickly tax the capabilities of older PCs; so even well-intentioned participants could wreak havoc through over-enthusiatic pushing.
In addition, you can't paste text into the Bravenet chat form. Hence you have previously prepared text, you should put that text on a Web page and push the audience to that page. Also, there is no simple way to capture a complete transcript with Bravenet. The best I could do was to periodically highlight text in the chat window, do CONTROL C to copy it, then open a Word document and paste the text there with CONTROL V. The buffer on my PC held all the text up to about the 3/4 point of this discussion so I could see it all by scrolling up through the chat window. Then the system refreshed, erasing all the previous dialogue. Fortunately, I had just saved before the text was erased. (You can see the resulting transcript at www.samizdat.com/chat200.html) This is a common drawback with Java-based chat platforms. In addition, with this application (and other Java-based chat), you do not see any dialogue that took place before you joined.
Earlier, we had checked Multicity, which also is java-based. On the plus side, they offer free automatic translation that is amazingly fast and effective. On the negative side, we had several instances where people trying to go to the same chat room with the same URL ended up in different chat rooms, with no way to talk to one another and no way to know that they were all online at the same time. That's a serious glitch.
The chat at web-net.org, that I used to use for my weekly sessions was quite good. It was HTML-based, simple, and free. Unfortunately, web-net went out of business a couple months ago.
SiteScape too is HTML-based.
It automatically saves transcripts, and includes threading; and the chat
transcript can be part of an overall forum
environment, allowing participants and those who weren't able to show
up live to continue the discussion asynchronously. I'm prejudiced in its
favor,
from having known the developers for 5+ years. It isn't free. It comes
as part of their Forum product, for asynchronous web-board style discussion,
but it is probably the best text chat around. (Check my "Web
business bootcamp" discussion area at SiteScape).
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