Roll your own

ROLLYO (“Roll your own”) is both a very handy software tool and a symbol of where web 2.0 is heading.

Go ahead, try the new ROLLYO search box in the left column on this page. Search for something on internettime.com. Very fast search of nearly 2 GB of content stretching back more than ten years.

I put the code for that searchbox together in about two minutes by simply following the instructions on a web page.

Search any site: I went to this page and dragged an icon to my Firefox toolbar. It put a bookmarklet in my toolbar. Whenever I push the button, I can search just the website I’m on. Wow. Often, this will be a lot more useful than Google.I perceive a major cultural trend toward Do It Yourself, hands-on, and user empowerment.

• Self-service usually translates into better service and lower costs.
• The power of choice is shifting from institutions that make things to people who buy them.
• Mass customization in practice can be each of us doing our own final finishing.

For decades, one of the biggest monkeywrench in the gears of business and government has been the isolation of IT from the rest of the organization. The fastest machines in the organization seem to take the longest to feed. When you want IT to do something for you, it’s like working with an interpreter who takes months to get a sentence out. By the time you get your request in, the situation has changed. Probably your message lost something in translation, too.

Ever since hearing IBM’s Irving Wladawsky-Berger describe a future computing environment where users could create applications without resorting to programming, I’ve been salivating for the day I could craft my own solutions. (I am a lousy, lousy programmer, so coding is out.) I want to manipulate databases and rules and filters and what-not as easily as making a new pinball game used to be.

I wrote the previous paragraph in April. I used ROLLYO just now to find it for me. Grabbing back control of my own information with ROLLYO opens the door for me to remix my earlier writing.

Since I crave real-time gratification. I enter the URL of Stephen Downes’ OL Daily on the ROLLYO form and paste the code into my blog. Here’s the result. Enter a topic and select OL Daily. Press Go.

Now it’s up to you to roll your own.

Related posts: