IWMW 2008

Supporting The IWMW 2008 Event

Kwansuree and I welcome you to the group for our session on embedding external services. The real information environment is made up of all the external services (in broadest sense, not just "web services") that can add features to your site, or on which you can have a web presence. For example, YouTube enables my site to embed Flash video, to have videos discussed (and disparaged!) and also enables my project to offer its brand to a new audience.

On the one hand, we all want to provide new functions to our users and external services provide ways to do this. On the other, there are well documented risks on many fronts; usability, legality, sustainability, brand control and so on. As an example, I'm pleased to have this forum to get in touch with other attendees, but I'm bombarded with ads telling me to work from home and lose weight fast. Not a huge or insoluble problem, but as with any use of external services, there's a trade-off.

In this session, I hope we'll be able to freely discuss benefits and risks, both experienced and anticipated. We won't be trying to derive some universal conclusion, because each of us has a different audience and each service has its own merits. However, we hope that each of us will come away better informed both about general strategy and about specific services.

We're keen to hear your own experiences. Are you providing a service which is dependent on an external commercial company? If so, what's your back-up plan? This post is short of examples of external services: which sites and services did you think of? Do you feel a pressure to move to "Web2.0" and what do you think that would involve? Are there services that you are thinking of using in the future? Are there services which are trendy but that you wouldn't touch with a bargepole? Please bring some suggestions to the session.

If you'd like to demo your site in the session, please message myself or Kwansuree.

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