{"id":423,"date":"2010-04-15T21:29:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T21:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/ning-is-our-wake-up-call\/"},"modified":"2010-04-15T21:29:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-15T21:29:00","slug":"ning-is-our-wake-up-call","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/ning-is-our-wake-up-call\/","title":{"rendered":"Ning is Our Wake-Up Call"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ning just recently announced that <a href=\"http:\/\/creators.ning.com\/forum\/topics\/ning-update\">they will no longer support free sites<\/a>. I belong to a lot of Ning sites. Ironically, the Open Textbook Advocate Trainers website is a Ning site. That site is (was?) dedicated to open source textbooks. It really makes you rethink exactly what tools you use and why. I have a lot of materials in Google Docs that I think I am going to be backing up at home more often. I used to use Flickr a lot until I one day they emailed me to say that I was over the limit and they down-graded my account so I could not upload anymore or see pictures in full resolution until I sent them some money. This &#8220;premiumware&#8221; happens when something is free to drum up a customer base and then they &#8220;offer&#8221; you an &#8220;upgrade.&#8221; Very effective when the company is holding your files and network hostage. Google does say they have a commitment to education but we will see what the economy dictates here. George Siemens warned about this too. <\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I use a lot of &#8220;free&#8221; online tools but I have some redundancy in there in case one fails &#8211; for instance, I use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slideshare.com\/\">Slideshare<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slideboom.com\/\">Slideboom<\/a> for my online presentations. I use Google Docs and I use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scribd.com\/\">Scribd<\/a>. I decided this early on in case someone&#8217;s server was on the fritz and I was travelling. Now this redundancy is especially important when companies are looking to &#8220;monetize their assets.&#8221; It is amazing how short-sited business people can be. How do you monetize a network? What do you charge for the learning and connections that happen? All of the great work that people did in these networks is swept away to &#8220;capture a big opportunity.&#8221;  Why not partner with education institutions, UNESCO, and other governments to harness those networks for everyone&#8217;s benefit? That would be a far greater opportunity (and maybe even more lucrative) than any current business model could conceive.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In the meantime, we should be pushing more for open source tools, platforms, and public hosting of those open source tools.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ning just recently announced that they will no longer support free sites. I belong to a lot of Ning sites. Ironically, the Open Textbook Advocate Trainers website is a Ning site. That site is (was?) dedicated to open source textbooks. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/ning-is-our-wake-up-call\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,39],"tags":[924,598],"class_list":["post-423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-networks","category-oer","tag-ning","tag-opensource"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}