TPR7: High in the Clouds: Purposing WebApps for Education

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield, Missouri.

Jonathan Steffens:� It makes it a little bit better so you guys can all hear me.� I�m going to be blunt and honest with you.� It has been a long night recreating these slides and I�m going to go through them as quick as I can possible and then we�re going to get some questions because I�m sure that with the broad base of technologies that we�re going to go over this morning, you guys are going to have specific usage questions and I�m pretty sure you�re going to drill me down with some coding questions but I want to make sure I cover the basis and showcase the examples of different technologies that are available out to you, many of them you already know but you didn�t know that you could leverage them for higher education.� It really helps because all of our budgets are shrinking if they�re not already at the big zero.

I�m here to try and help you get the best out of that with all these technologies.� Who all knows what this little app is right here right now that�s running up?� This is something called Whirl which is great.� It�s bringing in our feed from the back channel going on that we have right now.� Paul, they love you apparently, dang.� I don�t know why.

Anyway, what we�re going to cover here are pretty much the big boys in the industry.� We�re going to go over Google App Engine, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and the big behemoth in the room that�s getting all the grace, Amazon S3 and EC2.� This, we�re talking about the cloud, and the cloud is what�s out there.� It�s not in your little server room in your basement.� It�s out on the World Wide Web and there are plenty of companies out there that are willing to sell you the space on pennies on the dollar from Amazon to so many others.

The first thing I wanted to go over here is the benefits of the cloud.� You have your existing infrastructure, your bandwidth and overhead, and that costs a lot of money.� You�re going to see.� So just bear with me.

Anyway, moving on to easy setup, easy shutoff.� That�s the point of the cloud and of many different things that you can get setup because you�re not investing time in many of these processes.� You are getting them for instant activation just like you�ll find anywhere else and you also have the ability because they are a service-based model that you can shut them off at any time.� It�s just your normal monthly subscription fee on most of these services that can run you anywhere from a couple hundred dollars a month to a couple of thousand and if you are getting that kind of bill, that means you are doing something right.

It gives you the opportunity to integrate your current technologies.� I�m sure everyone here has some kind of humble solution and kind of get over that by leveraging these APIs from all these services to drive your innovation at your university.

The first one I want to go over is Flickr.� It�s a very simple service.� Everyone probably here has used it or is using it right now.� Out of curiosity, how many people here in the room already have a pro account on Flickr?� Now, how many of you are using that professionally for your institution?� Okay.� Now, I�m going to be very curious to see how you guys are doing that as well in addition to I might be mentioning a couple of you here in this presentation today, but the first thing is many people use Flickr but they don�t realize that Flickr actually has a full-fledged API that you can develop applications for.� It�s a very simple and sell-documented method.

Yahoo has always been on the forefront of putting out these services, documentations, tutorials and kits available for free and very easy to drag and drop into your existing applications.� All you need to get started, and it�s even free, you don�t even need the program, you sign up, you go to their API section.� You get to your key and they�ll let you start off right of the bat building 10 applications.� If you need more than that, just keep enrolling an account.� It�s like Gmail, you just keep going.� You know you have two or three of them already.

Then, they have a very diverse method-based protocol database where you can grab anything and everything from posting photos to deleting photos to grabbing their specific geotags to filtering down all the nitty-gritties that�s in the existing data so you can pull out and manipulate whatever you need.� You can even run your own image library on them to rotate photos, crop them, change lightning and that kind of thing.� So you can actually modify the photos that are on Flickr in the display without actually affecting what�s actually out there.� So if you want to those images on it on your display but not on the actual Flickr display, you can do that kind of thing.

For those of you who are the more technical savvy, the supported formats are listed up here, and that�s what you can interact with.� In addition, there are many kits available, thanks to the industrious engineers all over the world that can already show you how to use those methods and find API wrappers for your language of choice.

I�m going to go over a couple of great examples for some Flash-based API wrappers and viewers that can very well supplement any kind of communications platform you want to use imagery for.� The three I�m going to through are FlickrViewer, Polaroid and dfGallery.� I�ll just briefly mark over these things.� I will have all these links available because you�ll see them at the bottom of every slide.� These are very useful things that you can take with you today and modify and use for your own because all of them are either Creative Commons or open source that you can work with.

The first one is FlickrViewer which gives you a quick little example.� It�s a nice little just photo gallery setup that gives you captioning and will allow you to filter through the Flickr sets or specific pages of what you�re doing by user ID.� Beyond that, like through the API that I mentioned earlier, it�s fully customizable through the methods that you want to use and does require an API key.� Some of these do not because they just go straight through the RSS feeds.� Some of them do specific API commands so you will need to be versed in them a little bit but beyond that, many of them come with a standard configuration file that you would use to configure WordPress or whatever and that�s all you need to worry about.� From there, you can brand it to your U and just insert it into your pages.

The next one up is Polaroid which is a nice little app and it�s very much using the touch sensitive thing.� If you�ve seen some things such as Microsoft Surface or whatever where you literally have a photo viewer on a Flash-based photo viewer that you can manipulate these Polaroid photos on the ground and pick them up and do a slide show and do whatever you want.� It�s really good for viewbooks, campus tours and that kind of stuff and just showing what your college life is like and very good to put right in there, and it�s customizable in its liquid display.� They give you the full FLA so you can get into the code yourself, change any of the graphics that you want, any of the ActionScript commands and see the nitty-gritty of how they�re putting these kinds of things together.

The last one is the dfGallery which probably has the most features of anyone, and Matt is not even in here today, isn�t he?� You watch him.� He�s going to be riding a mechanical bull later tonight.� Anyway, the dfGallery is put out there by the Dezinerfolio which is if you�re not subscribing to the blog, I highly recommend it.� They put together many great designer icon sets in addition to a couple of applications; very similar to Iconfactory who does Twitterrific.

This particular item allows you to do a myriad of features, including background music which is very good for when you�re mixing audio slideshows to invoke a little bit more motion in what you�re presenting.� Also, because you can turn off a lot of these features in this particular program so it just looks like an image that keeps going. �You don�t need to have the sidebar.� You don�t need to have anything.

Another comparable one that we use at Mizzou is audio slides.� However at the moment, audio slides does not support a Flickr feed but it will take an RSS feed which you can get out of Flickr but not to the exact same depth of commands that you can get by utilizing the API.

Some uses around campus: As I mentioned before, you can use it as an online viewbook or a campus photo tour through Flickr.� You can make interactive galleries and slideshows for news portals.� Faculty or personnel directory, through many usability studies, we found that some people want to search a faculty person by name; some people just want to see a whole bunch of mug shots and go, �That�s the person I was interested in,� or, �That�s who I saw no the hallway I want to learn about.�

And institution image libraries for PR and marketing; first example is California State University who uses this just built straight into Flickr and they have it on their website where it�s just there.� A specific photo group with the photo map API in there so people can look around campus, click certain hotspots and see and literally kind of walk around campus.� I�ve also seen building tours using this exact same thing. �If you want to read more about it, there was a very detailed article from Coreen Jolie. a college web editor about a couple of implementations.

Our own Mizzou Wire which gives you a good highlight of what you really want to do with news portals, getting information across, because you really want to engage your audience with rich multimedia content.� This allows you to do that.� By having Flickr on the backend, you can be saving yourself the bandwidth with all the photos and make it very easy for your writers and content producers to put it up on Flickr and then just have them insert the right variable in your CMS system that you want to use because once you write a proper algorithm and then just puts it in automatically and you�re not putting up storage space on your server and it�s fully searchable because those same photos will end up being leads to this article as long as you set it up correctly.

Then the last option which we found out: Things that Tony Dunn and Eric from Oregon State University.� How many of you have a gatekeeper of your public images that your university shoots?� Or do you just take them all yourself?� Now, Eric had a very unique situation where he wanted to not be able to go to the one computer in the deep dark basement or flip through a CD library of all the stock photographies of his institution and said, what if?� Well, you can put it on Flickr.

The other great thing about Flickr is it doesn�t have to be public; it can be private.� And you can give certain user accounts access to certain photos and you can organize them any way you want and you can put them at any resolution you want in there so that you can easily and quickly with cheap instant labor deploy your binders of CDs or that one portfolio machine and put it all online.� So you always have the quick access and your constituents to your most recent PR photos and that really helps get the same branding, the same quality of service and the same visuals across your university.

If you want to write these down, these are some quick little websites that will help you get started with using Flickr API.� Also, one quick little thing I want to let you know is that they do have one idiosyncrasy where they ask for your Flickr ID.� Your Flickr ID is not your username.� Your Flickr ID is actually a small little hash key that they give you, and there�s a tool on both the Flickr side or this one where you can enter your username.� It will give you that 12-character hash key of what your actual photo; it�s almost like a second API key to a degree but that will go ahead and get you started.

Moving on, we�re looking at Google App Engine.� The Google App Engine launched about eight months ago; actually, I think a little longer than that.� It is a new service that does virtual computing in the cloud.� Think of it as the virtual server that you�ll get through your IT community, except you�re now getting it through Google and they�re letting you hop on their bandwagons of CPU cycles and run your code on their server and take their bandwidth.

A couple of institutions have already started playing with this, and this is still very much in the beta, and I know everything from Google is in beta but trust me when I tell you this.� This one really is in beta.� It�s going to get there but this is the learning one, but like anything, Google is putting everything into it so I imagine it is really going to take off in the next couple of years and try to really compete with Amazon.

The one important I also wanted to note here is this bottom bullet point.� It�s that it will do authentication through the Google API and through your Google account, so that�s the one thing that they are leveraging hard that you�re not going to get with the other services.� It�s that you can authenticate with your Google ID and that you can get access to those same Google apps such as Mail, Calendar, Images, Picasso, that kind of stuff.� Those same methods and technologies, this is kind of giving you a gateway to.

Why App Engine?� Well, it�s quite simple.� Like anything else that I�m talking about today, it�s very low cost to use.� You can get signed up and set up for free and they will set you up with like I mentioned all their APIs that they have working for you from images to mail and data store.

Data store is quite simply their table-based system.� It�s kind of like MySQL but a little bit differently.� There�s a difference in the way it handles certain injection commands for creating tables and some other things but it�s all very well documented in how they do that specifically with their syntax.

Like everything else, like Google Analytics especially, they have a very robust administration system and dashboard so you can quickly see and quickly debug your applications as you�re making them and quickly get statistics on what kind of traffic you�re getting, where it�s coming from and all that kind of important stuff and especially how the query response times are going.

The other important thing is because it is Google and because it is on the backbone of their system, your application is spread across their entire network of servers, so you might have a load balancer at your own university between two or four servers or whatever, well, they�re load balancing all over the world for you in case you hit that hard.

Getting started, the one biggest drawback to App Engine right now is that it only supports one language, and it�s Python.� How many people here already know Python?� Well, lucky for you, like I said, it is in beta and they are going to try and move on to Rails.NET and a couple of others but that�s still a little ways off.� Right now, it is completely in Python.� I do encourage you to look it up.� Python is a very good language, very easy to write for and it�s pretty much predominant on any of these platforms I�m going to talk about today and it�s well supported in all these APIs with kits.

To get you set up with it, they provide you with an SDK that you can download for free and get started in addition to a local runtime library so you can run your code on your hardware before you upload it to their engine.

Here�s an example.� You many not know that but a lot of sites you go to right now are already up using Google App Engine.� DownOrNot is a popular one, and Twitter is actually up.� But really, it has been pretty good these last few months, so I can�t really slam it that much.

Another one, a new one in the field called Edurank from our good friend Kyle James here that will run your ranking algorithm through to see where your university and your domain stands as compared to your competitors or the overall.� It�s very simple because the script lives on Google App.� The code can live wherever you want; on your Media Temple server, on your Amazon server or your own box, but it�s running all the reports through here.� It�s very similar to what FaceBook is doing with their FBML format.

Moving on to Amazon S3, simple storage space.� Amazon is the big dog in the room and I do highly recommend them for getting your remote data storage going and for just setting it up because Amazon themselves while you use their webspace portal, they have portals for all over the world and they are literally leveraging their own infrastructure and just selling you bits of what they�re already doing.� They�re like leasing it to you, and it�s pennies on the dollar because it doesn�t cost them anything to do.� It�s like when in our case, when Wal-Mart buys your town and just literally starts leasing out the other buildings around the Wal-Mart but it�s still raking in the money just because it�s getting your lease fees and people come into it; same thing as what Amazon is doing.� They�re opening up the doors but they�re still getting a piece of the pie.

These costs are always changing.� What I found is they�ll drop about every four months by a couple of cents.� That�s just unheard of.� Normally in this kind of economy, you expect the prices to go up as demand increases.� No, this is going down because just like Google, they�re just getting more and more terabytes of data to be able to provide it for you and just solidify their infrastructure.� So what I�m posting here today, very well not be the same price when you get back home, but it is very, very cheap to get started because if you don�t use it, you don�t pay for it.� If you do use, well done.� I�m pretty sure when you compare it to the annual contract of buying a server, buying a sysadmin to admin that server and then just getting it set up, you�re talking about two months prep, hiring, getting it configured correctly.� No.� This one, go up, sign up today, you�re activated.� You can go ahead and use many different tools to just go ahead and SSH into it, Samba into it, whatever you want, drag and drop your files onto there and it�s running.

Never use GoDaddy.� Always use these guys.� I just have to put that out there.

S3 data access.� The way they�re setup is you get buckets, kind of like separate accounts that many of you guys have in your own university when you go, okay, I�m going to set up a new student account till they get whatever on this one.� You get buckets.� They�re just essentially folders but they also use that for separate processes because one bucket could go through one server and another bucket could go through another server but they�re still all integrated to each other so you can talk between buckets.

Uses.� There are tons of them.� Those are just like sample, right there, just remote backup and archiving.� I highly recommend full development. �There are so many sites out there currently and startups that just exists using Amazon services, and it has been a great way especially for student on starter projects just to get them going because it doesn�t cost you anything to get them going except maybe a little grant money or something.

Some examples are SmugMug which is a Flickr competitor for like high-end photos and high-def photos, kind of like what Vimeo is to YouTube, and they�re completely on Amazon S3.

SlideShare, where I�m going to putting this presentation later today, is completely on Amazon S3.� It�s just amazing how well it�s able to scale.� If only Twitter was on it.

EC2 is their competitor to Google App Engine in the respect that it gives you virtual machine spaces that you can work with processes.� Now, one potential way to use EC2 that I�ve not used but I would love to see some research if people want to try it is what some institutions will have some super computer to run the numbers for some faculty members or for some research initiative.� In theory, if you don�t have that super computer, you could use EC2 to run it because it is just running virtual machines and you can have it run whatever datasets or processes that you want.� Same goes for App Engine too to a lesser degree.

Looking at the numbers, here are some costs of EC2 at the moment as far as what kind of hardware and what kind of machines you�re going to get and how many CPU cycles that you�ll receive for that cost.� Is it a little hard for you guys to read?� But it kind of gets increased but again, it�s a moving target because you get better and newer hardware everyday and it just keeps getting cheaper.

Some more on it as far as data transfer limits, here is one that I wanted to highlight today.� It was something called Panda streaming.� Now, this is a new open source project that basically gives you the ability to run your own YouTube through Amazon S3.� This is giving you the ability to actually have your own startup right here out of the box.� You can use your own branding with it and it basically has a plug-in module that works for S3 where you have the keys talk to each other, you set up some configurations and it lets you do everything that YouTube does in respect to you can set up an authenticated user upload page.� You can set up captioning.� You can set up watermarking your brand on it, so you can quickly make your own YouTube channel just in the cloud.� It supports both FLV and h264 which is what YouTube also uses to transfer so you can view that same video on the iPhone or comparable mobile devices.

Beyond that, I highly encourage you guys to check this one out because I think it�s really something.� Until Google actually makes, adds YouTube or Google Video to their formal offering for universities, this is one of the better options you can take right now and you can just take it and run with it.

In addition to that, it has an extensive dashboard where you can set up your users.� In theory, I have yet to test it, you can even set it up for LDAP authentication and make multiple admins to work through your departments.

Then finally, Twitter, which almost everyone here is familiar today, thanks to the back channel giving us some stuff.

So I will quickly go through some different interesting things that you can do already.� How many of you already have it integrated into your blog?� All right.� That�s one way, and I highly encourage you to use it to integrate it into your corporate blogs, into any other kind of communication that you�re doing right now, from having a research institution blog or CMS because if you were here earlier or yesterday for the WordPress intro, you can literally make WordPress be your website and then quickly integrate Twitter to get those quick announcements out there.� That�s going in.

As many of us have already seen, you have an opt-in SMS notification network which is great; events and announcements.� It�s just another communication medium.� The thing is the API itself plugs into so many other things so when you send that Twitter, you can send that to a bunch of other services that you may not have thought of.

For the technically savvy so you know, it utilizes RES technology as I forgot to mention as does Flickr.� It supports XML, JSON, RSS and Atom.� They have recently re-launched their API wiki which was once on Google code base into a full-blown wiki with tutorials, examples and dev kits, so you can quickly get it working in the language that you want to work with.

The other thing is when you actually look under the hood, you actually see what Twitter is supposed to be but it�s not quite there yet as far as anything from editing your own twits in the timeline to quickly switching out background colors to doing like find and replace algorithms.� I can�t say that they�re all along considering how often Twitter turns things on and off but it�s quite interesting to kind of see that little roadmap in the API that you wouldn�t know about otherwise.

Like everything else, they also have a very good Python-based kit that I highly recommend you to check out.

For examples of integration into your university, this is Butler Bloggers from our permanently MIA Brad J. Ward integrating these little twits from his bloggers.� In addition to going to their blogs, you can see what they�re doing right here right now.� I know at Missouri SNT, they use it for emergency communications and besides, I�m pretty sure most of you already have it on your blog to some degree or right here.

Then, finally, YouTube.� If you do want to try YouTube, there are a couple of things that you can work with.� In addition to their API, you can also get what�s called a Nonprofit Channel Page.� Many people thought it was very elusive to actually procure this but it�s actually not.� It�s just that you are still at the mercy of them to approve you, but here�s an example of Duke�s page.� How many people here already actually have one, has it seated in this task?� How hard was it for you to actually get this accomplished?

Male: Has anyone done something similar in the past?

Jonathan Steffens:� Has that been similar for anyone else here?� Okay.� I mean I�ve heard many stories just like yours but I think if you�re just persistent, you�ll work it.

One other option is by utilizing the API in some of their natural integration tools.� This isn�t even using the branding.� This is just taking their tool for our Mizzou engineering site and putting a YouTube-based browser just straight into your own department or your institution and it�s very easy to use.

To get setup for the nonprofit one, there are no contracts.� There�s just their term of service.� You are at their mercy.� Unfortunately right now it�s only available in the United States and the UK.� Hopefully, it will get further out from there.� If you don�t already know it, this is the elusive URL where you can go ahead and apply it right now.� You will need to be subject to some requirements and that first one is the big one, so talk to your fiscal officers or whoever has that information because they won�t even look at your application unless you can show proof of your 501 status.� Then most of these other things pretty much just fall in line.

Anyway, I�m going to open up the floor to questions.� Feel free to hit me with any specific examples.� I can go back and backtrack for you guys.� I apologize for the rapid nature but I�m willing to work with you guys so if you give me some questions, anyone?

At that point from what I�ve discussed with folks is you�re at the liability of just your own public perception to a degree because it�s like any post, they will notify you if your service with them is being compromised in some way, and that is disclosed individually on each of them through their terms of service, specifically through the hosting ones.� Through the actual APIs, that�s themselves, that�s just whether or not the APIs and the methods that they�re using are secure enough.

As far as liabilities, you do find some of that with just your own procurement of using these services because I found that fiscal officers are sometimes a little bit leery of a subscription-based service for a hardware need when they�re not actually hosting it.� I know that�s a problem with some institutions.� The best way around it is actually working through and with your personnel to make sure that is acceptable within your terms of using that software and getting it approved.

Any other questions?

No.� I remember they had a privacy issue come out about that about a year ago.� You were not transferring ownership, and that actually got quickly dismissed in the idea of when copyright issues came down.� So if you are the original copyright holder, you have the ability to get that denial service.� That�s why you see Viacom constantly turning down everything that comes out of CBS on their website, because they are the content holders.� It�s kind of just like mailing it to yourself to a degree.� It�s a copy but by no mean do they own it, and they�ve been very careful not to phrase it that way anymore.

Yes, put in the student data up there.� I�d actually have to research that for you, Paul.� I don�t know what Amazon�s specific policy is on that one.� That again goes back specifically to your institution, and yes, you are trusting them on their service to be secure and to securing your data.� But that�s specifically with Amazon if you�re with S3.� If you�re using EC2 or App Engine, they�re just hosting your scripts and running the protocols.� They�re not actually hosting the data in any way other than those scripts and programs that you�re writing for them or the processes that you�re writing for.� But like any third party host, it�s going to be up to you, but I�m interested to see what they say on that one and I�ll give them a call.

Any other questions?� Yes?

Are you pushing the data from your box to them or you want the other way around?

For Amazon S3, you can write the scripts and like anything else, you can tunnel in if the ports are correctly opened on your end and authenticated and you can establish a secure connection, I�ve not tried this, I�m not sure how that exactly works for Google App Engine.� Do you know, Kyle?

Yes, but they do recommend that you do stay within the buckets and just transfer your data within the buckets in S3 just to keep it secure because as soon as you�re going across domains on the open web, it just doesn�t work sometimes.� You�re really at their mercy.

Any other questions?

I�ve been thinking about that too because yes, there is that concern that any day, Yahoo is going to start liquidating its assets and start selling off one service here or there but for the most part, what makes Yahoo specifically work is if they sell any one of their staple tools from del.icio.us to Flickr to really anything, they�re going to be cannibalizing their own account markets because those are all binded back to your main accounts.

As far as the terms of service, yes, that�s a possibility with anything because startups live or die and even giants live or die, but usually what you can find if you look in the nitty-gritty of the terms of service, before anything actually happens for instance when they finally actually shut down Yahoo Photos to switch over to Flickr, Yahoo is very good at announcing this giving you the timeline.� More importantly, when you did switch over and moved your photos over, they give you the option to download it all and take it with you because that is in their terms of service.

And when the terms of service do change, do take note of that.� Every time you see that on anything, you just got to make sure to go, yes, they�re trying to cover their ass but you never know what they might sneak in there, and that was what Brett I think brought up earlier.� It�s the fact that you don�t know what�s in there and whether or not they are violating policy, your privacy.

I think we have time for one last question.� Anyone else?

That�s true.

Yes.� It�s definitely hard or you could do what I know USC does and just hire all actors in your photography because damn if I didn�t take a campus tour and they�re just sitting there just going, we�re taking shots like you�re all models, aren�t you?� Yes, they were.� You never know what you�re going to get with some of those institutions, but I think that just about covers it.

I know I went through a lot of this real quick so I will be putting all these up probably by tomorrow night on my website, vagabond by nature, and I do encourage you, if your guys have some more specific questions to just shoot me an email because I�m always trying to build on this and learn.� I�m always looking for examples but I�m also looking to help you guys out here.� So if you have any questions, I�ll be right here, but else, stick around, we have some great presentations coming up I�m sure.

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Announcer: For more presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference visit HighEdWeb.org/2008 or sign up for our podcast and feed at HighEdWeb.org/podcast.xml

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