LifeHack

[TheWorld] Has the internet become indispensable?

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Has the internet become indispensable? by D. Hoffman, T. Novak and A. Venkatesh (ACM registration required) is a paper about how the Internet modified our living habits.

We seem to be in the midst of an Internet revolution and entering an era of enhanced digital connectivity. The pace of social change resulting from the diffusion of this technology, both in the U.S. and globally is, by many accounts, dramatic. In less than ten years, the Internet has become indispensable to many people in their daily lives. What are the consequences and implications of this perception? In this article, we consider the idea that the Internet is becoming increasingly essential to families and to society at large, present data supporting our contentions, and develop a conceptual model that allows for the testing of key hypotheses related to Internet indispensability.

[Cognition] Can a concept exist without words to describe it?

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Can a concept exist without words to describe it? as stated by The Economist. It is indeed a nice topic.

The Pirahã, a group of hunter-gatherers who live along the banks of the Maici River in Brazil, use a system of counting called “one-two-many”. In this, the word for “one” translates to “roughly one” (similar to “one or two” in English), the word for “two” means “a slightly larger amount than one” (similar to “a few” in English), and the word for “many” means “a much larger amount”. In a paper just published in Science, Peter Gordon of Columbia University uses his study of the Pirahã and their counting system to try to answer a tricky linguistic question.

This question was posed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. Whorf studied Hopi, an Amerindian language very different from the Eurasian languages that had hitherto been the subject of academic linguistics. His work led him to suggest that language not only influences thought but, more strongly, that it determines thought.

[LifeHack] Ideas all day long

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What to do when you have ideas all along the day... Idea Recording by Charles Cave.

get ideas at all hours of the day. What can I do? How can I keep a journal to record my ideas? Tell me about Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks? How can index cards be used to organise my thoughts?

[LifeHack] ifeedyou/rss4you meeting

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Today, roby and I met jerome. This was a fruitful discussion about our respective motivation to develop web-based news aggregators (jerome developed i feed you and we developed rss4you). Of course, one could say that our projects are competitors but I don't really think it is, since they should be seen as showcase to show what we can do and to foster discussion about content aggregation. The funny thing is that all those tools (i feed you, rss4you, and weblogues) are all developed in the french-speaking part of Switzerland (aka Suisse Romande). I am not Swiss, so this is not a patriotic concern but it's funny to have this cluster round here :)

[Tech] Applying Social Network Analysis to weblogs

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Finally I got something about this topic! At BlogTalk2.0, Michael Schuster described stuff about SNA and weblogs. Some excerpts:

Scale-free networks: people do not link randomly Link density and network-buiding as a "natural" process: some people simply have fewer links - not a problem. Power Law Distributions & Hubs: "A-List Bloggers"/ "Dead" Weblogs/Those with cat-pictures

Governing Principles of networks: • rich get richer • Achilles heel: if a hub is removed, the community might collapse • Diffusion: Hubs play a crucial role in influencing the community (Hubs, like Schockwellenreiter or Dave Winer) • Growing difference: The more nodes, the bigger the difference between "rich" and "poor" nodes

Methodology - how are the networks/[personal] connections measured: - Incoming / Outgoing Links - Connections between persons determinded by Comments 40%, Blogroll 40%, Stories 20%

Incoming links • Average: 6 Links • Median: 2 Links • Power Law • 20% have no links • 60% have less than 3 links

On twoday.net, users have a different linking philosophy - many weblogs do not consider links to be important.

Community of approx. 600 blogs is held together by just 10-12 blogs - very close "clique" with personal contacts at the heart of the community - hard to become part of this core community. This holds the network together, but it's also a cause of churn if users try too hard to get "accepted" by these "A-list" bloggers, but don't.

Power law seems impervious to "typical" portal strategies for diffusion. How much of this is related to personality, and how much to content? What makes an A-List blogger?

Visualisation using touch graph

Community pressure by A-List blogger heavily influences churn -- the visuals look like those from physicists related to gravity around large bodies in space. How does this impact extraordinarily active, but tiny communities of bloggers? Would you see the same effects in communities of bloggers who are all friends and blog exclusively with one another?

Conclusions • every node can be reached through 6 connections

DISCUSSION

Q: roland: Password protected blogs - has any analysis been done on these? (e.g. his sister got interested when Roland posted baby pics).

A: 20-6 no data 19% have password protected blogs A: ??? no data - only 10% of community is password protected

Q: blogs & media coverage? A: ??? -> had good media coverage in Austria when they set up the service. This likely leads to new bloggers and resulting churn. A: 20-6: article in times, gained more than 1000 bloggers, only 10 survive (UK)

Q: MB: in 1996 - was worried about the collapse of the web to 1 or 2 sites; similar concern with A List bloggers. This never happened. why?

A:20-6 : it did happen in online auctions and google. (power laws and 80:2o rule are out there) ◦ Will this happen not with A-List bloggers, but by those who offer blogging

services?

Suw: welsh (30 blogs, half dead) -- how do you encourage a reluctant community to start using blogs (could be a perfect medium for minority languages/ minority groups) -- so how do we encourage them to (a) start them (b) continue using them?

A: MS: no real recipe for success, best thing is if those who are enthusiastic about it tell others about it (use "contagion") - but it boils down to whether people feel they have something to say or not.

NL: word of mouth among bloggers and their friends ◦ What about usability? Or the ability to "blog" from a spontaneous impulse? Do minority groups have different needs that traditional blogging doesn't satisfy?

LE: most important: not functionalities, but what it enables for the community

MS: Blog survey: several types of bloggers

neighbourhood is important - few, if any outward links strength in seclusion?

NL: communities should not be based on using the same tools

SG: This seems to be a German phenomenon, in the UK this is not the case

- there are cross-tool coimmunities.

MS: tries to be part of the community where he currently is - maybe that's representative - isn't wanting to know the whole blogosphere like wanting to know every person in the world?

[LifeHack] Social Spreadsheet Concept

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According to Marc Lauritsen and David Johnson:

Notes (Lotus Development Corporation) integrates document and database management, forms, e-mail, and related files and applications into a single environment. It has been called a "social spreadsheet."

The concept re-emerged at Supernova in a panel called "The Network is People." with Esther Dyson, Ray Ozzie, Mena Trott, and Christopher Allen as panelists.

How do we make these tools better? If you look at the financial tools, the calculator and the corporate financial system, the spreadsheet was a middle ground where the individual found tremendous power to change the models. In social networks, you've got email on one extreme of the spectrum and complex enterprise workflow, there is a middle ground that is a kind of corporate wiki or something. "It's what I am looking for. If you have it, let me know."

[LifeHack] Backchannel tools modifying conferences activity

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The topic of "backchannel" is more and more tackled these days. I appreciate this because since it is impossible to go to all the conference that could interest me, I still could access to some valuable information. Apart from IRC chat channel and AIM/MSN/ICQ/Yahoochat, backchannel tools more and more used in conference: a wiki, a webfolder full of transcripts, a weblog, an audio/video feed. Of course WiFi is one of the obvious reason that enabled backchannel. I am wondering about how conferences will be transformed by these new tool. It is clearly a way to have a feedback loop for speakers (even real-time panelists). But, apart from that, I am convinced that backchannel could modifiy the way conferences are organized. Maybe it could be helpful to put forward specific questions or request from the audience, or as a way to involved more the audience. I don't know, this is an intersting topic.

Liz, in many to many, proposes a three-modes backchannels typology:

- good content + great speaker(s) = near silence in the backchannel, as people focus their attention entirely on the stage - good content - great speaker(s) = lively relevant chatter in the backchannel, with questions, annotations, challenges, and links - poor content = lively (and often snarky) backchannel that drifts entirely away from the topic. - The fourth mode comes into play when someone (typically Joi Ito) projects the conference IRC channel on the screen during a presentation. This creates a significant shift in the environment.

[LifeHacks] Misuse desktop applications in one's personal life

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I miss this interesting post from Nigritude Ultramarine .

Almost every one of my friends has, at one point or another, made at least one Excel spreadsheet to document some arcane aspect of their lives. The number of consecutive sunny days, the types and prices of the cups of coffee they drink, or just straightforward charts about their boss's mood.(...)Have you ever made a spreadsheet for your personal life? Talked to your kids using PowerPoint? Share your geekiness, and maybe it'll justify the creation of an exciting new community of dorks.

I did that at the end of the dot-com bubble, carefully noting the CAC40 numbers... I also have one for my CD list (not updated) and a txt file for my book/movie list.

[LifeHacks] More life hacks

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Other people describe their life hacks here:

- when I find a new piece of info online ask myself "do I need to read this, bookmark this, research this, add it to my aggregator, contact this author, pass it on, or something else?" and then DO that - jam all news into the rss aggregator - I keep a piece of paper in my pocket of words/ideas/concepts I want to research more later [possibly google, possibly popdex, possibly library of congress, possibly my library] - I keep post-its on pages in the books I am reading for the same purpose - I keep a piece of paper in my pocket as a calendar for this same purpose when I am really busy - calendar contacts on iPod = one less gadget to carry - I group my bookmarks onto my toolbar by purpose. So I have separate toolbar folders for "links to add" "stuff to read" "blogs I read" [subfolder for ones in the aggregator] "social networks" "scripts and bookmarklets" "to do" The more of my life that is wired, the more that I want things fewer clicks from wherever I'm sitting - I allot specific time to data cleaning during the week [adding addresses to address book, messing with MP3 filenames and sorting, clearing stuff off the laptop desktop, getting rid of old buddies from the buddy list, making sure my email filtering is working like it should, archiving old bookmarks, organizing uploaded photos] so I don't have to do it all at once when I need to find something - two words: tabbed browsing. it's gotten to the point where even then small wait in point-wait-click is too much waiting. load pages simultaneously, check email in the shell while you wait.

[Blog] Blogposts Title Ergonomics

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Sometimes I am pissed by the titles put by people for their blogposts. It is difficult to get what I can get if I click on it. This is an interesting side-effect of using an aggregator: you have to be careful with your title: it should be meaningful and appealing from various point of view... That is why I put [categories]...

Mapping the Landscape of Science

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Katy Borner is Assistant Professor of Information Science at Indiana University School of Library and Information Science. She works on:

data mining and information visualization techniques to map the structure and dynamics of scientific disciplines. Large amounts of, e.g., publication, patent, and grant data are analyzed, correlated, and visualized to communicate the semantic space of researchers, publications, funding, etc.. The resulting visualizations can be utilized to objectively identify major research areas, experts, institutions, grants, publications, journals, etc. in a research area of interest. In addition, they can assist identify interconnections, the import and export of research between fields, the dynamics (speed of growth, diversification) of scientific fields, scientific and social networks, and the impact of strategic and applied research funding programs among others. This knowledge is not only interesting for funding agencies but also for companies, researchers, and society.

An example: A map of the top 50 "hot" words in the most highly cited PNAS articles from 1982-2001. Words appearing more often have larger circles, while the circle color and ring color identify when the word first appeared and when its popularity peaked, respectively. Credit: Ketan Mane and Katy Borner, Indiana University.

[LifeHack] My virtual desktop

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Here is my desktop (on my PC not on my MAC) with:- an instant messenger: IM - a moo client: tkmoo - the current task I am carrying out (writing a document, reading something, drawing...) - a browser: Mozilla - a music player: winamp or iTunes - a mailer

[LifeHacks] How to write textfiles

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A much more up-to-date resource about how to write textfiles can be found here. Reasons to write textfiles:

- text files are virtually universal, almost ANY computer in the world can view the document at anytime. - text files are easy to print, this makes them very easy for you to read when you aren't at the computer. - text files are small in size, this means that they are easy to transfer - text files appear HOW YOU want it to appear - many operating systems have a text editor built right in, windows has notepad/wordpad, while dos has edit.

Some tips:

- DO NOT use word wrap, why? Simply because some programs are not designed to handle it by default and if the file is viewed in a web browser it will most likely scroll off the side of the screen and will be unviewable. Always use enter when you are done with the end of the line.

- DO NOT exceed 79 characters per line, this is for compatibility for users with 640x480 resolution, if it exceeds 79 characters once again some of the characters could potentially go off the screen.

- DO NOT USE CAPS, using all caps isn't exactly eye pleasing..this is just a personal preference use caps all you want, but not many people will like it and it will lead to getting less viewers of you document should you put it online.

- USE A SPELLCHECKER, it is annoying if you can't read the document because the word is so off on spelling. Using a spellchecker ensures that most blarring errors are corrected.

- FORMAT YOUR TEXT, again there are no laws to writing text, but if the layout is nice people will want to read it more than if the words were all put together in one paragraph with 300 lines. Try to make headings stand out from the rest of the text.

- UNLESS IT IS CREATIVE ORIGNAL WORK DONT PUT LEGAL DISCLAIMERS, there is absolutely no point for a disclaimer if it is just stating facts. Which most text files are. Don't waste your time writing a while paragraph on copyright information. If you need to put copyright on your work then a simple "copyright " this should be sufficient. Even if it is creative work, don't bother making a big legal disclaimer unless the document really matters to you. Even with legal disclaimers you will notice that people will still try to steal your work.

- REFRAIN FROM USING ALT+ FOR SPECIAL SYMBOLS, this is not ASCII that is ASCII-2 which is NOT universally accepted. On top of that the character will not appear the same on other systems.

- PUT DATES AND YOUR ALIAS ON TOP OF THE PAGE, that way the viewer can identify who wrote the document as well as when it was created. This shows if it has been updated lately or not, it also good to laugh at your own documents when years pass by. Without dates you don't know if it needs updating or not or when it was created.

- TRY TO REFRAIN FROM WORD PROCESSORS, its really not that they don't create text files right, its the fact that most of them are bulky and if you are multi-tasking they are most likely to crash than a little notepad program would. Plus they have more features than you are ever going to need when making a text document. The only real function of a word processor is for spell checking your text.

- REMEMBER THERE ARE NO LIMITATIONS, you can type whatever you wish about whatever you wish. The limitation on content will probably depend on the host it goes to. If you don't plan on putting it online then the host doesn't matter either. Hosts are fairly accepting on the context of txt files.

- MAKE THE TITLE STAND OUT, making the title stand out grabs focus to the viewer and makes them understand what it is all about. If it doesn't the user may not understand what the particular text file is all about.

- EMAIL ADDRESS SHOULD BE INCLUDED, this is optional..however it is recommended that you get a free web email address for your text documents that way you can get a better understanding of your viewers and they can email you with comments (both negative and positive). Yes it will probably bring in spam, but you will get legit email if many people view your document.

[LifeHack] Writing (old) text files

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How to write a good textfile. It is old but some stuff are funny.

- YOU NEED TO THE ABILITY TO MIX DIFFERENT CHARACTERS IN AN APPEALLING WAY TO MAKE A BORDER FOR THE TITLE. - YOU HAVE TO HAVE A LOT OF PATIENCE YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO TYPE FOR HOURS AT A TIME. IF YOU TYPE FAST ENOUGH, YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THIS STEP. - CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF, YOU DON'T HAVE TO SPEEL STUPH RITE. SPEELINK ERRURS AR VARY COMON. - OU DON'T NEED TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE WRITING YOUR TEXTFILE ABOUT IF YOU CAN MAKE IT UP AS YOU GO ALONG.

[LifeHacks] Structured Procrastination

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Via starhill, notes by John Perry about procrastination: the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. (...)The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.