Web Stuff

Amnesty International and Web2.0

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One of the project we selected for LIFT is carried out by Amnesty International and is called "web2.0 mashups and human rights".

Internet strategists from Amnesty International will present project proposals based on web2.0 principles.

The basic idea is innovation in assembly, using RSS to mashup existing web2.0 services (such as mapping) with Amnesty data (for example, information on people disappeared during the 'War on Terror'). Making this part of an architecture of participation should allow activists and volunteers to add value to the result and also to generate project communities.

Working from a swift overview of web2.0 examples, this presentation aims at stimulating discussion of concrete projects that apply the potential of new wave internet developments for direct human rights and social impact.

Why do I blog this? I think it's interesting to see what NGOs like Amnesty can do with Web2.0 concepts and how it can help them to meet their needs.

Yahoo Answers

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Rather than being impressed by the Yahoo take-over of del.icio.us, I am more interested in the launch of Yahoo Answers (of course the del.icio.us thing is great and the synergies with flickr are interesting but some other things are going on). This service lets you ask a question and have a real person provides an answer. This new kind of webservice (“new social networking/online community/search/question answering service”) is very close to a new trend in the field of libraries and information science: asking specialists specific questions. Since libraries have to rethink their missions, this kind of service emerges (like Lyon's municipal library with their guichet des savoirs project last year). Now it's not only a matter of asking specialist through or in an institution. This is enriched with social software features plus a lazy web spin. I find this model very interesting. Let's wait a bit to see to harsh criticisms as for Wikipedia... Update: a commented list of 'ask and expert' websites is available on netsurf.ch thanks to Emily

A Web2.0 checklist

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mmh this is so true: a Web2.0 checklist

Give us your email address, we'll let you know when it's ready! Public beta alpha Tags Feeds for everything Built with Rails Sprinkled with Ajax Yellow fade Blue gradients Big icons Big fonts Big input boxes REST API Google Maps mashup Share with a friend TypePad blog for a peek inside the team Feature screencasts (thanks, Waxy!) Hackathons for new features Development wiki Business model optimized for the long tail It's Free!/AdSense revenue stream

Now let's discriminate do's and dont'ts!

Bidirectional RSS: Simple Sharing Extensions

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Ray Osszie (Lotus Notes creator and Groove founder) introduces a new standard called SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML) meant to support sharing and 'cross-subscribed' feeds. It's actually a RSS extension. What's interesting is that the SSE specification is released under a Creative Commons license, which is a gooD thing for MS. The SSE FAQ is available (as well as the SSE specifications):

Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) is a specification that extends RSS from unidirectional to bidirectional information flows. SSE defines the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely cooperating applications to use RSS as the basis for item sharing—that is, the bidirectional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items among two or more cross-subscribed feeds. For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse's calendar, and vice versa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and add new appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or a doctor's appointment.

Why do I blog this? RSS was already a huge achievement in terms of information management, then I'm curious about this SSE thing.

Thinglink: connection information and artifacts

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An intriguing post by Ulla Maaria-Mutanen about thinglink, a concept I was not aware of:

A thinglink is a free unique identifier that anybody can use for making the finding and recommendation of particular things easier in the Internet.

A thinglink identifier is based on the idea that many of the things we use in our daily life are quite particular. Perhaps we know their origin (who has made them, when and how) and something about their history or previous use (like with furniture and cars). Some things have more meaning to us than others. (...) Thinglinks are unique, 8-digit identifiers that anybody can use for connecting physical or virtual objects to any online information about them. A thinglink on an object is an indication that there is some information about the object online—perhaps a blog post, some flickr photos, a manufacturer’s website, a wikipedia article, or just some quick comments on a discussion site.

The purpose of the thinglink.org is to offer an easy way to learn about products and artifacts in their various contexts of production and use. Small-scale producers such as artists, designers, and crafters can use thinglinks to bring their products to the emerging recommendation-based market in the Internet

Why do I blog this? well this is very close to ID specifications of Bruce Sterling's concept of spimes! There is a website coming out about this: Thinglink Besides, it's closely related to our discussion about blogjects with Julian. This 'thinglink' idea could be seen a way of implementing the blogject concept since it's able to connect information (on the web) and artifacts. So Julian what do you think? Let's all meet and talk about it. Isn't there a workshop scheduled about this in 2006 conference? Well, let's have a workshop about blogject at LIFT then! (something like the day before).

3rd generation of social-networking software

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Ok, there's a new buzzword around here (Web2.0 spin): "third generation of social-networking systems" as attested by this TR article by Wade Roush. Instead than focusing on this '3rd' thing, the interesting point of this article is that it highlights the new important feature of social software: the ability to manipulate user-generated content:

"We've listened to our user base very closely, and we're also paying attention to what the competition is doing, and we've formulated a new strategy that is really about personal media," says Jeff Roberto, a marketing manager at Friendster. For example, users can now create blogs, control the appearance of their profiles, upload up to 50 photos, watch slide shows of the photos most recently uploaded by their friends, post classified ads that link back to their profiles, and share audio and video files stored on their PCs using peer-to-peer technology provided by Grouper.

"The uptake we've seen has been incredible," Friendster CEO Taek Kwon said in October, about a month after the new features were introduced. "We've seen substantial increases in media being uploaded, profiles being customized, and people posting classifieds."

It also talks about a new player: iMeem who puts this idea into practice, using an interesting model:

iMeem hopes to attract members to by building all their activities not around a virtual representation of their social network, but around instant messaging technology.

That's exactly how iMeem works. A downloadable application similar to Yahoo Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger, iMeem is built around a buddy-list window that shows a user which of her friends are online. From that window, she can send and receive instant messages, join group chats, keep a blog, and share photos, videos, podcasts, playlists, and the like with other users using a peer-to-peer system related to the technology behind the original Napster.

Aggregating all of these functions into one program sounds like a recipe for information overload. But Caldwell believes that iMeem users will act as each others' media critics, perhaps bringing real effectiveness to the much-heralded idea of "collaborative filtering." "There's too much stuff out there," Caldwell says. "Too much data, too much content, too many blogs. Collaborative filtering is one of the most important things that's happened on the Web over the past couple of years. It's holding back the tide of overstimulation."

Why do I blog this? This 'iMeem' makes me think of a 1st generation social software called Huminity I tested long time ago mixed with this user-generated content trend. I like the 'collaborative filtering' feature but I am wondering how it would work.

IBM new analysis tool: blog analysis

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ZDNET reports this interesting fact: IBM said it is developing an application to analyse how discussions on blogs and other Web sites are affecting a given corporation's image. It's called "Public Image Monitoring Solution" and it's based on IBM's text analytics and search software, WebSphere Information Integration OmniFind Edition. This would certainly be of interest for some e-marketing companies down there (among others).

The Web-based program could cull results on the topic of fuel efficiency from various sources and generate reports by categorizing the information. If many consumers or news stories are making negative comments about a product, for example, a marketing person would know and could react,

Why do I blog this? this seems to be a tool that would be of interest for other purposes than just marketing. I don't know whether this service will be affordable...

Teen Content Creators

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The latest report from the Pew Internet, which deals with 'teen content creators', is very insightful. It reports that more than half of online teens have created content for the internet; and most teen downloaders think that getting free music files is easy to do

Some 57% of online teens create content for the internet. (...) These Content Creators report having done one or more of the following activities: create a blog; create or work on a personal webpage; create or work on a webpage for school, a friend, or an organization; share original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos online; or remix content found online into a new creation. The most popular Content Creating activities are sharing self-authored content and working on webpages for others. (...) Bloggers and to a lesser extent teens who read blogs are a particularly tech-savvy group of internet users. They have more technological tools such as cell phones and PDAs and are more likely to use them to go online. Not only do they live in technologically rich households, but they are more likely to have their own computer at home and to be able to use it in a private space. They help adults do things online. Most strikingly, they have more experience with almost all online activities that we asked about. Bloggers are more likely than non-bloggers to engage in everyday online activities such as getting news, using IM or making online purchases, but content creating and sharing activities are the areas where bloggers are far ahead of non-bloggers.

The report is of great interest. In addition, people interested in sort of content creation might been interest in check this "I want to" webpage which summarizes the large number of web applications to manipulate content on the web (sharing pictures, do podcasts, share bookmarks...)

Weblogs, data collection and tools I use

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Yesterday I attended a presentation about dangers and opportunities fostered by weblogs (of course 'danger' is where the emphasis where). One of the most interesting presenter was certainly David Sadigh from IC Agency (internet marketing firm in Geneva) in the sense that his presentation achieved to show how weblog and their corollary tools (e.g. search engine a la technorati/blogpulse) could be used for marketing/data collection/competitive intelligence issues. His pragmatic view of how using such tool was very refreshing among those talks who more focused on conservative topics. This made me think about my own practices about intelligence gathering; which are certainly close to what to do, except that the focus is less business-oriented but rather purposely aimed at being part of a research community, finding new information about specific topics and in the end discussing about innovation. But the approach is the same.

Then I made a quick list of the tools I used on a daily basis for various purposes connected to my research activities (be it for my phd funded by public fundings or for my R&D projects for private copmanies):

I should make the same list for statistical sources.

IM names and personal messages displays

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The other day, after reading (and writing about) Stowe Boyd's post about IM rules, I made a quick scanning of the HCI recent literature about IM and found this article: Broadcasting Information via Display Names in Instant Messaging by Stephanie Smale and Saul Greenberg (ACM Group 2005 Conference) It's a good study about why and how people display and change their names + other things in IM. Here are their research questions:

This study investigates how people use the display name feature in IM clients to broadcast information other than one’s name. We do this by capturing changes in each person’s display field as they appear in contact lists over time and over everyday use, by asking people to explain what these changes meant, and by counting, categorizing and analyzing these changes.

1. At what frequency do users change the information in their display field when using an IM client such as MSN Messenger? 2. What are the main communication categories that represent the information held by these display field changes? 3. What is the frequency distribution of these categories? 4. Are changes to the display name related to the demographics of age or sex?

Here are the main results:

1. results show that 58% of our 444 contacts (258 people) never changed the contents of the display field during the three week period. For the remaining 42% of contacts (186 people), we counted a total of 1968 display name changes, or an average of 11 display name changes per person over the three week period, or up to 4 times a week. (...) 2. the new information fell into seventeen different categories of communication supplied to others. Three themes encompass these categories: Identification (“who am I”?), Information About Self (“this is what is going on with me”) and Broadcast Message (“I am directing information to the community”). (...) 3. Younger users may change their display names more frequently than older users; sex does not make a difference.

The figure below shows the different categories they gathered (extracted from the paper):

Another relevant point is that this phenomenon lead to an interface change on MSN:

Some of these capabilities are only now being supplied by a few major IM vendors. For example, the new version of MSN Messenger (v. 7.0), released shortly after our study was performed), includes a dedicated space for adding and editing a personal message.

Why do I blog this? this phenomenon always amazed me (because I tended to do it few years ago and also from an tech observer), so I was pleased to see a study about it. Moreover, it's connected to research projects we conducted in the past at the university of geneva about awareness and communication (The authors also expands their discussion to a 'a community bar' that could display personal messages with presence items, a very greenbergesque topic).

Fives rules of IM

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Stowe Boyd sketched an interesting set of cardinal rules about IM uses:

The social aspects of real time life will swamp any specific technology's impacts. I believe in tools, but effective application requires changes in behavior. For example, effective use of IM in groups means people must adopt the five cardinal rules of IM which I tend to agree with:

  • Turn on your IM client, and leave it on. (The Turn It On rule).
  • Change your IM state as your state changes. (The Coffee Break rule.)
  • It is not impolite to ping people. (The Knock-Knock rule.)
  • It is not impolite to ignore people. (The I'm Busy rule.)
  • Try IM first. (The IM First rule.)

Moreover, a good paper about it is The Character, Functions, and Styles of Instant Messaging in the Workplace By Ellen Isaacs, Alan Walendowski, Steve Whittaker, Diane J. Schiano & Candace Kamm:

Current perceptions of Instant Messaging (IM) use are based primarily on self-report studies. We logged thousands of (mostly) workplace IM conversations and evaluated their conversational characteristics and functions. Contrary to prior research, we found that the primary use of workplace IM was for complex work discussions. Only 28% of conversations were simple, single-purpose interactions and only 31% were about scheduling or coordination. Moreover, people rarely switched from IM to another medium when the conversation got complex. We found evidence of two distinct styles of use. Heavy IM users and frequent IM partners mainly used it to work together: to discuss a broad range of topics via many fast-paced interactions per day, each with many short turns and much threading and multitasking. Light users and infrequent pairs mainly used IM to coordinate: for scheduling, via fewer conversations per day that were shorter, slower-paced with less threading and multitasking.

Why do I blog this? this is not my research but since I am an active IM users, it's sometimes interesting to see how people reflect on IM practices.

A "social" browser called 'Flock'

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Flock is a new browser that seems promising. This Palo-Alto-based company developed a browser based on Firefox with powerful social features:

Flock is a new browser, built on top of firefox. It is a functional browser with excellent features (including firefox features like tabbed browsing, etc.). What really makes is stand out are two additional features they’ve added to build social networking directly into the browsing experience: social bookmarking and a wysiwyg blog writing tool.

Flock has integrated del.icio.us-type features right into the browser. When you are on a page you would like to bookmark, simply press a “+” button on the top left of the toolbar and the page is automatically included in your bookmark area (called your “breadcrumbs”). You can also tag bookmarks, of course. Additional features include your “watchlist” (people who’s bookmarks you would like to monitor), and “groups” (basically, defined groups of flockers linking to this category). Breadcrumbs, Watchlists and Groups all have RSS feeds (of course).

Why do I blog this? I am looking forward to see more about this; I am very interested in augmenting browsing, especially with social features as we did with Roberto for our rss4you project (french aggregator). What is interesting in Flock is the interoperability with other applications like doing drag and drop Flickr photos into a post as described in social browser. However, calling this a 'social browser' is a bit like an overemphasis on the social thing, since social activities are richer than just tagging. It's a good step anyway. I was also wondering about why developing a new browser instead of providing a plugin/add-on for Firefox; time will tell.

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A discovery engine for RSS feeds

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The personal bee seems to be a new interesting tool:

The Personal Bee is a "discovery engine" that helps you discover information from a collection of RSS feeds. In contrast, client-based RSS readers and web-based RSS aggregators merely catalog your RSS feeds. These tools are adequate if you subscribe to fewer than 5-10 news sources per topic of interest. Compared to RSS search engines, the Bee captures the latest "buzz words" in a topic area without requiring you to pre-specify search terms.

They seem to have a blog.

Diagrams of FOAF network

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Just ran across these interesting diagrams of O'Reilly Connection Network using FOAF and Graphviz here. For instance: It depicts:

2nd degree of O'Reilly Connection contacts. This is a close up of the populated section of this graph. This graph was created by crawling the FOAF documents from my [the author Timothy M. O'Brien] O'Reilly Connection profile and then obtaining the FOAF documents of people associated with me. The results were then stored in a neato format and visualized using graphviz neato.

The guy's complaining about the fact that he lacks computational power to visualize six degrees, what a pity that would be great; however, judging from the previous graph it might be quite messy!

Why do I blog this? I still find FOAF relevant and I have always wondered about can we use this sort of network data in a useful, efficient and reasonable way. Apart from viewing the network, how this could be of interest in a peculiar kind of application? There are already good examples like what people do at the Sociable Media Group (MIT) but apart from that?

OPML editor

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Quick too for nerds: OPML editor (Mac, Win), developed by Dave Winer:

The core purpose of this program is to create outlines and share them with other people, in various forms. 
1. Choose the New command from the File menu. This creates a new outline window. 
2. Type: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. Save. Navigate to My Documents, then OPML, then www, and save the file as test.opml. 
3. Now switch over to your web browser, and enter the url of the file, and see if it opens.

Why do I blog this? because it's a tool I will use to play with my OPML files.

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Corporate use of RSS

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I thought the Red Herring blogs were dead but it's not the case. They have a pretty good piece about how RSS goes corporate. It's mostly about hy information overload and spam leads enterprises to use RSS. Some excerpts here:

Until the last year, RSS was nearly impenetrable for all but the earliest of adopters, due to the complexity of reader setup, the narrow assortment of available feeds, and disputes over standards. (...) However, MSN, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Google, Amazon, and AOL are integrating RSS into their portals, and all major browsers will have an aggregator embedded when Microsoft comes out with the new version of Internet Explorer. Various estimates put the number of active feeds at slightly over 5 million. (...) ING Chairman Michel Tilmant wanted to send a message to 115,000 employees without getting blocked by spam filters. The treasury department wanted instantaneous updates to worldwide company phone directories. The corporate leadership wanted to get outside information into its portal, but wanted to control the available channels and feeds. KnowNow CEO Michael Terner says RSS is the solution.

Why do i blog this? following the evolution of RSS is interesting, and I am pleased to see that this good technology is more and more present.

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Why Technorati is so slow

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Why Technorati feels slow is a relevant piece by Stephen Baker In Business Week. Very interesting if you've ever wondered why it is so slow:

In the last year, with the blogosphere doubling twice in size, Technorati has had to re-engineer its system. Originally, says Hertz, it dealt with all the data in one big (and ever-expanding) pool. In the last nine months, engineers have rearranged the data in different segments. At the same time, they're enabling it to comb through the data more intelligently, sorting each piece so that it can be cross-referenced. For example, this post can be associated with me as a blogger, with Blogspotting, with BW, with Technorati, with the search industry, and with any of you who link to it. Each one of those relations has meaning and value. But offering all these dimensions adds layer upon layer of complexity to blog search. "In general, our traffic isn’t the big gating factor," he says. "It’s the amount of new data that we’re managing." (...) New services will continue to add to the complexity. In the future, says Hertz, Technorati will organize bloggers by their specialties, and perhaps even rank the authority they have on certain subject matters. (...) For many, the first impulse when faced with a crush of blog data would be to add servers. That's the easiest part, says Hertz. "The trick here is when we have to break things into pieces, or invent brand new systems to do the data management."

What's more, blog search engines, unlike Google, have to update this data continuously. They're providing a look at time as it passes. Yesterday, with the London bombing, traffic exploded, taxing the Technorati system. Instead of the usual 800,000 new posts, Technorati was on track yesterday to process 1.2 million of them.

There are more stuff about it there, in a .doc file written by the author. Why do I blog this? Technorati is a powerful and interesting tool, however it's sometimes slow, just wanted to know why. What is also cool in this blogpost is that the CTO of PubSub (technorati's concurrent) expands the discussion.

Social versus Antisocial Software

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I appreciate Paul Dourish's take about social software. A the SCS 2005 conference about social software, he came with this statement:

It is time for the notion of “social software” to go away. It’s a cute coinage, but conceptually it’s at best vacuous and at worst downright dangerous. I have two particular beefs with “social software.” The first is that, despite an avowed acknowledgement of the social, most software developed and marketed under this rubric has a very impoverished or partial notion of the social. It draws on a highly positivist interpretation of social phenomena—a sort of social science, perhaps, uniquely attractive to engineers. Phenomenological and interpretivist approaches to social science (the sort that, curiously, underwrite ethnographic methods and related analytic positions) emphasize that social phenomena are interactionally constituted, being products, rather than shapers, of concerted action. Social software advocates often seem to miss the fact that many social scientists would question whether social networks exist or have any sort of analytic validity.

The second is that the notion of “social software” perpetuates an artificial separation between “social” and “non-social” software. In many ways, the development of CSCW as an intellectual area distinct from HCI was an unfortunate move, since it erected a wall between notionally collaborative and individual software systems. This wall is problematic, because it inherently relegates social software to a niche position. It blinds us to the ways in which individual activities (e.g. with ‘single-user’ software) are socially organized and socially oriented. For instance, in writing this position, I am (1) oriented towards an audience, (2) working within established genres, (3) drawing on the work of others, and (4) embedding my narrative within a particular disciplinary position. All while using Word. If that’s not social software, then what is? The social—by which I mean not simply some set of representations of others, but the ways in which actions and objects take on meaning through their use within systems of collective practice—is an inherent aspect of human activity. We can no more separate ourselves from the social than we can separate ourselves from the passage of time; we are irremediably enmeshed in social and cultural settings. As a community, then, we need to stop thinking of “social software” as something new, different, and separate. Our goal should be to understand all software as social, and to dissolve the category of social software entirely.

Why do I blog this? well I have to admit that I fully agree with this positions. The 'social' aspect in social software very poor. Is it because you can know who knows who and who likes what that it's 'social'? Hum...perhaps SoSo need another term, besides one of the best social software (according to me) is Flickr and it does not refer to itself as a 'social software'.