Posted by Ric
Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:02:00 GMT
One of the benefits of Swirrl is that it provides a secure and centralised repository for all of your data, and tools to edit and analyse it. However, sometimes we realise you want to work with your data in another software package, or just keep an extra copy of it.
So we’ve recently added the ability to export your data (both data sets and normal wiki pages).
You can export data sets as a csv file, so they can be opened in a spreadsheet application, or imported into another system. You can also export your wiki pages as html, so that they can be viewed off-line (if you know you won’t have internet connectivity for some reason). Exporting data sets as RDF is coming soon.
Obviously we hope you’ll find Swirrl useful and stick with it. But you can always export your data again if it doesn’t work out.
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Posted by Bill
Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:05:00 GMT
Richard McManus of ReadWriteWeb was kind enough to give Swirrl a try and write up his first impressions. His article gives a good overview of Swirrl and what we are trying to achieve.
He has a few criticisms to make: “In our tests, it was difficult to use Swirrl.” Obviously, we’re doing our best to make the system as intuitive to use as possible, but this is very valuable feedback for us. The data sets features of Swirrl are something new – and so it may be difficult for new users to know where to start. We hope that a bit of perseverance will pay off and that once people get used to it, they’ll find it a useful way to work.
But we realise that helping users get over that “OK, I’ve signed up, what do I do now?” moment is crucial. We’‘ll keep tweaking our design to try to make it easier and more natural for people to work with.
We’re hoping that our rapidly growing user base will give us some feedback on what works for them and what doesn’t. So if you have been giving Swirrl a try, please do drop us a line at hello@swirrl.com, leave a comment on the blog, or post your thoughts on our new forum.
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Posted by Ric
Thu, 02 Oct 2008 13:57:00 GMT
So, the public site has been up and running for a week. What have we got to report?
Well, today we passed the 100-wikis mark, and apart from a couple of minor teething problems (which we’ve now sorted out) everything is running smoothly.
Follow Swirrl on Twitter:
We’ve also opened up a couple of new channels for communication:
Forums, where you can discuss Swirrl, ask questions, and give feedback. They are open to anyone who is interested in Swirrl: our users, people deciding if Swirrl is for them, or just people who want to know what it is all about. We look forward to hearing from you.
And a Twitter account. We will tweet with any status announcements or news regarding Swirrl.
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Posted by Bill
Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:09:00 GMT
We are pleased to announce that Swirrl is now live!
Sign up (free) and give it a try – we’d love to hear your comments and suggestions. We’ve also updated the tour pages if you want an overview of how it works.
We have a long list of new features planned, so look out for updates over the coming weeks and months.
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Posted by Ric
Tue, 09 Sep 2008 09:31:00 GMT
Next month, Swirrl will be at the Future of Web Apps Conference in London, with a stand on the Expo floor.
If you’re coming to FOWA too, please drop by and say hello. Even If you’re not attending the full conference, entrance to the expo floor only is affordable (under £5 I think).
I attended this conference last year, and I certainly recommend it – the speakers were excellent and there was a good atmosphere. It was also great to chat to the companies on the expo floor and see what everyone else was up to.
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Posted by Bill
Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:48:00 GMT
In the UK news today: a contractor working for the UK government has lost a USB memory stick holding unencrypted confidential data on thousands of UK criminals. As we were saying the other day, carrying sensitive data around on a USB stick is one of the least secure things you can do. Keep it in a well managed secure central location instead.
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Posted by Ric
Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:43:00 GMT
One of the questions we’re asked about Swirrl is “Why should organizations trust you with their data?”. Our answer? Because it’s probably more secure than what they are doing at the moment. This blog post hopes to address some of the security concerns people may have with online services like Swirrl.
Any system needs to make a balance between security and usefulness. If you keep all your documents locked in a safe, then it’s secure, but not very useful if your colleagues need them to do their work. On the other hand you don’t want to leave them in the lobby of the building either. You have to optimize the security, while still providing the access you need. We think that Swirrl and services like it provide a better balance of secure and useful than the traditional alternatives.
One of the benefits of Swirrl is that it removes the need for emailing of documents or spreadsheets, a practice which is commonplace at many companies. Normal email over the internet is inherently insecure as it is not encrypted and the data can be intercepted en-route. (By the way, be especially careful if you are using public wi-fi, for example at the airport or in a hotel or coffee shop). Unlike your e-mail, Swirrl offers SSL encryption for all data sent over the internet (the same level of security used by online banks).
Also, to make sure they have access to the data they need while travelling, people keep sensitive information on laptops and USB sticks and those often get lost or stolen. Swirrl removes the need to carry copies of your data around with you, because you can access it securely wherever you go.
Many companies think that by storing their data themselves on their own servers, they are taking the safest, most secure option. However that relies on the systems being properly secured and properly maintained – inexperienced or overworked administrators may not always follow all the right procedures. Done properly, securing and backing up a system can be time consuming. If you let specialists look after that, you have more time and resources to concentrate on the core tasks of running your business.
With Swirrl, we take care of security and backups. Your data is stored in a secure data centre, with security staff onsite 24/7 and CCTV. Offsite backups are always encrypted. Swirrl has a small and trusted team, and since your data is our livelihood, we are highly motivated to take excellent care of it.
With fine-grained control of access permissions in Swirrl, it’s easy to determine who can see what. And because we keep each version of documents and data as they evolve, you can’t lose your data by mistake either.
(Padlock image by Declan Jewell)
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Posted by Ric
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:00 GMT
I recently came across a couple of blog posts by Richard Sine about startups, and I felt that some of what he said rings true for us at Swirrl.
For example, Swirrl currently has no external investors – it’s entirely owned by Bill and me, funded from personal savings. I’ve sold my sporty gas guzzling car (though not a Saab like Tony in the article), and I’m living partially off the proceeds …and the fuel savings.
When discussing Swirrl, it’s astonishing how often we’re asked for detailed financial projections. So far our answer has more or less been “I have no idea”, which doesn’t always go down well. We know a lot about our costs, but the revenue side of the equation is still a guess, or a target – but you couldn’t really call it a forecast. So I guess it’s a good job we’re not looking for any external investment at the moment.
The truth is, at such an early stage in proceedings, we can’t see how it’s possible to know exactly how much income Swirrl will generate. We’re pretty sure we’ve got something useful and interesting that people will pay for, but the only way to really find out is to get people using it and work from there.
(dolllar image by TW Collins)
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Posted by Bill
Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:44:00 GMT
One of our mantras at Swirrl is “data in context” and a key part of creating that context is the ability to link bits of data together, or link descriptive text and discussions to data: essentially using the same principles that work to make the web so powerful.
And to be able to link to something in a web context, it needs to have a URL. Not only does this allow you to find information on an object (by getting your browser to follow the link and show you what’s there) it allows you to identify it clearly, so you can then refer to it in other places.
So good URLs make linking easy – and linking is important in lots of fairly obvious ways:
- You can refer to something so that you can make a statement about it. When you are talking about data, you want to be able to do this in a fine-grained way.
- You can organize your information with links and you can do this in lots of different ways: for example a book can have both a table of contents and an index, as two separate sets of pointers into the content.
- By making pointers to parts of the information, you make it easy for others to find particular things.
When we were scoping out our initial plans for Swirrl, we were influenced by Tom Coates’ excellent presentation at FOWA2006, “Native to a web of data”. (Slides here). One of Tom’s key points is “identify your first order objects and make them addressable”.
What are our first order objects? Swirrl works with data sets. A data set is a table of data, where each cell in the table is essentially an RDF statement, containing the value of a property of something. So we needed to have URLs for data sets, and for individual statements within a data set. We found it’s also handy to be able to individually address things and properties.
OK, so now we know what should have its own URL – but how do we choose what that URL should be? Tom tells us (with a couple of my comments in brackets):
Good URLs should:
- be permanent references to resources
(don’t change them!)
- have a 1-to-1 correlation with concepts
- use directories to represent hierarchy
- not reflect the underlying technology
(users don’t want to see .aspx or .jsp or whatever in their URLs)
- reflect the structure of the data
- be predictable / guessable / hackable
- be as human readable as possible
- be – or expose – identifiers
We’ve tried to follow these guidelines, so for example, if you have a data set called “my_data” in a wiki called “my_wiki”, then the URL for this is http://www.swirrl.com/my_wiki/data_sets/my_data, which we think is about as simple and clear as you can get.
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Posted by Ric
Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:23:00 GMT
As we discussed in last month’s blog article, semantics help give meaning to your data, and they make everything more interoperable.
So why has the semantic web not taken over the world? Well, one reason could be that people have the impression that there’s nothing really in it for them: that you have to put a lot in to get just a little back. This stems from the fact that when people think “semantics” they often imagine sprawling xml marked-up ontologies and a maintenance nightmare.
But the semantic web doesn’t need to be hard. It doesn’t even need to use RDF (although at Swirrl, we think that the RDF-triple is a nice way of thinking). Taken literally, semantics is just is the study of meaning in communication. Anything that adds additional meaning to your data is a step in the right direction. The ability to add tags to items is the extent of most sites’ semantic features, but this is better than nothing.
Swirrl takes away the pain of semantics by adding them for you. Imagine you’re typing simple data into a spreadsheet. Normally, the rows represent different items, and the columns represent different properties or attributes of those items. The cells of the spreadsheet store the values of the properties of the items. So, simply by appropriately naming the colums and rows, you’ve just added semantics.
To use Bill’s ice-cream example again, January’s sales (the item) of vanilla ice cream (the property) are $3200 (the value).
Things can obviously get more complicated than this, but this simple example helps to give you an idea of one of the key concepts underpinning Swirrl’s data processing. Just by entering data into an appropriately labelled grid, you can build up data sets with full semantics. The statements produced by this process can be reused in other data sets, searched, and analyzed. There’s no up-front design to do: just create the data as it becomes available, and if you want to change things, rename the columns or rows (thus changing what items or properties you’re referring to).
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