Ubiquitous Microblogging
As I wrote in the posting Microblogging – What’s next?, I strongly believe that there could be huge value in including non-human information sources to (enterprise) microblogging. The original idea for such a scenario including processes, machines and sensors (see the image for examples from Twitter) reaches back to my master thesis one year ago. It took that time that I finally came up with a term which could name this idea: ubiquitous microblogging.
Obvious, ubiquitous microblogging leans on the well-known research field of ubiquitous computing. While the latter understands ubiquity in a way that artificial computing devices are everywhere in the real world, the meaning of ubiquitous microblogging is that of real world objects being integrated and represented in an artificial computing space. In our definition, ubiquitous microblogging means a microblogging system including everyone and everything in an organisation. Therefore we borrow the conceptual meaning of ‘ubiquitous’ in the sense of its Latin origin ‘everywhere’.
Weiser (1991) in his vision about ubiquitous computing stated that ‘the most profound technologies are those that disappear’. Figuratively speaking, this is also true for ubiquitous microblogging as the goal behind our approach is to hide real world’s information access complexity with providing a flat information space accessible by the easy following-mechanism.
The approach of ubiquitous microblogging has much to do with the search for enterprise use cases of microblogging and a rising number of researchers is thinking about this topic. Michael Rosemann from Queensland University of Technology described how microblogging could be used for business process management. Alexander Dreiling from SAP shows a prototype for collaborative modelling with Google Wave (is Wave microblogging? I am going to discuss this question in a future posting). But the other way round is also possible, as the guys from Akibot show with their microblogging bot using NLP (Natural Language Processing). And finally, our research group is currently involved in several microblogging projects including ‘microblogging for logistics’ (think of tweeting RFID chips).
To implement a full ubiquitous microblogging scenario, still lots of work has to be done. Today’s examples from Twitter are individual programmed prototypes. In terms of enterprise-wide ubiquitous microblogging we need much more sophisticated architectural approaches. Currently, we are thinking about how such a ‘microblogging middleware’ could look like.
References:
Weiser, M. (1991). The Computer for the 21st Century. Scientific American, 265(3), 94-104.
September 3rd, 2009 at 14:01
I agree with you that ubiquitous microblogging could have interesting application areas. I suggested it already for a kind of status information within a learning object lifecycle management. But I did not came to the point why using microblogging would be better than traditional log files. What do you think?
Maybe it could be a next step to identify if there are really advantages and new possibilities of ubiquitous microblogging in comparison to log files.
September 3rd, 2009 at 14:33
Well, the question “why is it different as log files” is absolutely correct. Maybe microblogging is nothing else than a logging system - but one with collaboration functionality. This makes the difference.
I wrote about microblogging adoption reasons in one of the former postings (http://thingthatthinks.com/2009/08/a-full-range-of-reasons-why-to-adopt-microblogging-for-the-enterprise/). There are a lot of reasons. For me, the main point is: with ubimic you could have all use cases on ONE platform. And: in a ubimic scenario where would be standard agents (looking for key words, monitoring the tweets) which you could use for monitoring your “logs”.
However, if a log-file-like tracking of e-learning content is the only use case, arguments in fact are rare. You need some more use cases (communication between the e-learning participants, communication between lectures, monitoring of other information sources…)!
April 7th, 2010 at 07:20
[...] The story “Yet Another New Version” pointed to an article about Akibot by Martin Bohringer, “Ubiquitous Microblogging”. He wrote: The approach of ubiquitous microblogging has much to do with the search for [...]
Oktober 4th, 2010 at 17:37
microblogging is funstuff just like regular blogging”::
Oktober 19th, 2010 at 10:39
microblogging is nice but it also limits how much you can say about your daily activities:`:
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