Hey if you are subscribed to this blog and wondering why you haven’t heard from me lately…well I have been posting on the Waggleverse, our group blog!
Be sure to check it out:
http://wagglelabs.com/waggleverse
You’ll hear the combined voices of myself, my partner Peter Brown, and Jordan Schwartz our guest blogger—circling around each other on the topics of social technologies and web 2.0.
Unless I have something especially academic to say, I’ll be posting to the WaggleVerse.
I was spending some time today in Yahoo Answers . I had heard it was popular, the leader of the Q&A genre, so wanted to explore why that would be.
I was suprised to realize that there is a lot of discussion going on in Yahoo Answers. People pose fairly broad questions, ranging from topics about civic participation How can we engage more people in the democratic process to personal topics such as how do I get my husband to introduce me in social situations?
In other words, it behaves very much like a discussion board! What is the difference? People build reputations for being good participants: posting good questions, and posting good answers. Over time, around any topic, a community of known contributors emerges. it is very much a community site. People have profiles that include a personal statement, their history of questions and answers, and their knowledge network: example
I looked at the answers in just one topical area (home and garden) and found that in 24 hours 760 questions were posted! Within half an hour they had about 2.5 answers each, and within 24 hours had about 5.2 answers each.
Most of my experiences with YouTube involved being sent a link, clicking on it, and viewing the movie. Otherwise, I’d played around just a bit looking at most viewed videos in different categories.
I was surprised the other day to realize there is a whole other level of experience in YouTube which is not really exposed to you until you browse around the community groups and profiles in depth: through the profiles, through the comments on videos, through the videos themselves, people are engaged in conversation! Rich communities are emerging around particular topics, often through asynchronous video clips that refer and build on each other. Here’s an example, a YouTube group about: mental health . This woman is responding to another video post, and she has a lot of comments responding to her.
Communities built around asynchronous video based communication! Yah.
Well, all I have to say is something tells me there is going to a whole flurry of research papers on this topic next year at CHI. Any graduate students looking for a new and exciting topic in social computing?
When I was arranging for my Social Web 2.0 class at the UW I asked for a computer lab. I was met with surprise and was advised against letting students go online during my class. I have been attending conferences with laptop enabled sessions for a couple of years now so I was a little surprised myself. My goal, since it was a social technology class, was to ensure my students used them all.
It’s been going very well, so far. I told my students to bring their laptops to class. and I had them create a chat room for inclass backchanneling discussion. I created a class mailing list, and I reguraly email them updates to assignments. They post their reading commentaries as blogs in Vox. They send me presentations to review in email. Just yesterday, we were sending files back and forth in class via email that were then integretated into the class discussion using the projector.
I had “Brady Forrest”http://radar.oreilly.com/brady/ of O’Reilly come to give a guest presentation to the class. I sat behind one of the students to surreptitiously observe her behavior during the discussion. She wasn’t surfing around aimlessly. Rather, each web site Brady mentioned she immediately looked up. Her surfing behavior was a continuous supplement to what she was hearing during the conversation.
Yesterday, I asked the class what did they think. On the whole, they found the experience positive, indicating that the chat room enabled them to ask each other for explication of terms I was using during lectures, and to look up web sites as I mentioned them. They did report however that they did feel that their attention was split: transferring back and forth between the topic of the lecture and their laptop screen. This split attention reduced their inclination towards jumping into discussions.
My expectation is that we all need to learn both the etiquette and the self-regulation required to handle the multiple channels of a wi-fi enabled class room. However, my observation is that overall it increases student engagement in the topic. Although I am receiving less direct attention during lectures, on average more of the students’ brain cells are firing over the course of the class.
The advantage of teaching is it really forces you to sit down and learn. My class is called Social Web 2.0 so I figured OK I better actually figure out what Web 2.0 means. I read the O’Reilly overview, and then for my class revised it to emphasize the more social aspect. Here are my bullet points from the slides about Social Web 2.0:
What is Web 2.0?
What is Social Web 2.0?
This is way too much fun, from a group called Troika in the UK:
http://www.troika.uk.com/sms-guerrilla-projector.htm
Looks like they do a lot of interesting projects.
I had reason recently to immerse myself in the social tagging literature. Aside from the “classic” clay shirky article on ontologies there have been some recent studies exploring social tagging.
Brooks, C., Montanez, N., (2006). Improved annotation of the blogosphere via autotagging and hierarchical clustering. WWW 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Analysis of technorati tagging data to assess effectiveness of tagging systems relative to autotagging (through classic IR keyword extraction techniques). The winner? Autotagging. Of course, you don’t get that extra benefit of social networking with autotagging…
Marlow, C., Naarman, M., boyd, D., Davis, M. (2006). HT06, tagging paper, taxonomy, flickr, academic article, to read. HT 2006.
This is a good overview, if you want a fairly thorough intro to the space. Also an analysis of flickr tagging, providing some basic usage statistics.
Golder, S. A., Huberman, B. A. (2006?) The structure of collaborative tagging systems. http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0508/0508082.pdf
Analysis of tagging in del.icio.us, some basic usage info.
Kim, J., Candan, K. (2006). CP/CV Concept Similarity Mining without frequency information from domain describing taxonomies. CIKM 2006. Lee, Kathy. (2006). What goes around comes around: an analysis of del.icio.us as social space. CSCW 2006.
Interesting. Finds that the social presence indicators significantly increase tagging behavior in del.icio.us.
Wu, X., Zhang, L., Yu, Y. (2006). Exploring social annotations for the semantic web. WWW 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Great paper, exploring deriving emergent semantics from social annotations using de.licio.us data.
I need to look up Merholz metadata for the masses, and Mika Ontologies are us. A few of the articles I liked the most came from the WWW 2006 conference…I have to admit I had thought this more of a 2nd tier conference but the quality of these papers is making me rethink going to the next one.
I gave a talk at Ignite (See below post) on Dorkbot, trying to inspire folks to innovate on the intersection between art and technology. Pic from bre.
My favorite talks were Scott Berkin’s, talking about the real nature of innovation as being more collaborative that folks like to admit, Jonah Burke talking about the darful wall, and Peter Brown, talking about Reality Allstarz, which was just made public as a beta last week. Of course, I’m biased toward Peter’s talk because not only is he my significant other but i’ve been helping him out on the project. How could i not ? He’s completely obsessed with it and it’s a very cool site, right up my alley as a social technology buff. It’s a game where you send your friends challenges and then document completing them with pictures, video, and stories. Be sure to check out the Reality Allstarz blog. Now that it’s public I’m excited to be able to talk about our experiences with it.
The past month has been full of great events in Seattle for the entrepreneurially minded technology industry. First there was Seattle Mind Camp a few weeks ago. It felt much “tighter” than previous Mind Camps, they really encouraged folks to put more thought into hosting topics for the open sessions.
We had a Games night at Dorkbot, which was very well attended (about 120 folks?). It started with a particularly great talk by Jordan Weisman and Elan Lee from 42 Entertainment, those guys are really breaking into new territority using the entire globe of media as a platform for their mega-collaboration game space.
Then we had Ignite organized by Brady Forrest of O’Reilly and Bre Pettis with Make. I liked the format of this meeting (5 minute talks), it kept the energy going pretty high all night.
There’s a real sense of the community “gelling” which is great. There seem to be some common emerging themes in conversations about the nature of innovation, collaboration on a large scale, fostering more interaction in the Pacific Northwest, integration of real world goals and online social networking, etc. I’m really looking forward to seeing where this all goes.
I gave a talk, plugging Dorkbot. It’s an important part of my agenda as Dork Overlord to encourage people to consider all these new technologies as mediums for creativity. There’s an amazing sense of new emerging innovation at the intersection of art and technology.
Last week I spend a decent chunk of time doing meta-reviews for CHI 2007 short papers. It was striking to me out of the nine papers I meta-reviewed, the number for which the reviewers’ collective feedback was “interesting, well-written, but you have no analysis to support your claims.” Ah, yes! I am reminded of the difference between a blog post and a research paper (ahem).
A couple of week ago I gave a guest lecture to students in the digital media masters program in the communications department at UW. I talked about the role of research in a technology company, and gave a couple of examples of research projects from when I was at MSR. Seemed like a good overview talk to put online:
Following the guest lecture I arranged to teach a class next quarter “Social Web 2.0”, exploring the role of emerging social technologies in sharing and filtering digital media. Should be fun, it’s been a while since I taught a class! It’s a really good way to keep up with the latest research and technologies.
After a hiatus of “unemployment”, “sabbatical”, or “being in transition” since I left Microsoft (interspersed with the occasional conference) I have been working again as an independent consultant. It feels great to be using my brain again, and I really enjoy being able to spread myself over different projects, meeting new people. I am developing a real sense of the social landscape of start ups here in Seattle. I just updated my home page to better outline the kinds of services I have to offer as a consultant, and now I figure I should pick up blogging again.
I was trolling through some project folders today and found a couple of papers that were never published. I am sure any research scientist would understand the grief of coming across an old paper representing months or years of work that somehow never made it past the review process into a respectable journal or conference. It’s a grief that, well, i don’t think bloggers would identify with at all. Why wait six months to get your words into a conference, or a year to get a paper into a journal, constrained by the biases of the review process, when you could just get your message out online Today?
In any event, I thought I would put a couple of my favorite unpublished papers online. They’re a little old now, in blogger time, but still full of meaningful lessons…. Here are titles and abstracts, with links to full papers:
Research in Social Computing (written Feb of 2005, an overview of the topic of social computing) Abstract: People have begun to accept technology as a matter of course in the day-to-day areas of their lives. As a result, the development and proliferation of social software has enjoyed exponential growth in the past several years. In this paper we argue that as researchers and practitioners who create social technologies, we must take a “social engineering” approach, actively designing social applications to help users achieve their social goals. We then review current trends in innovation in social technologies, and discuss some of the hard problems that need to be addressed by the field in the next several years. We expect that as social technologies continue to innovate in areas such as social networks, social navigation, lightweight authoring, and mobile and ubiquitous computing, we must increasingly envision an integrated social computing experience: that is, a social computing platform.
Approximating Social Networks from Public Mailing Lists (originally written in 2003, describing a particular research project) ABSTRACT: Online social networking tools may facilitate knowledge exchange by allowing users to share information and develop relationships with others near them in their social network. However maintaining complete, u p -to-date social network information is challenging, requiring users to provide continuous, explicit access to their personal relationship data. We explore the viability of using public mailing lists in a corporate environment to automatically approximate social relationships. We found that co-memberships in mailing lists provided a reasonably accurate indication of who works with whom. We then explored whether people would find such social networking information valuable in seeking out or providing information to others. We found that organizational distance, social status, and informal social connections had a meaningful impact on whom users would chose to meet for sharing knowledge.
In the past several weeks I have had the joy of attending several conferences: Seattle Mind Camp, a meeting of local technophiles, the Social Computing Sympsium, which brings together leading academics, practitioners, and pundits to discuss social technologies, and ISCRAM, an academic conference for researchers focusing on information systems for crisis management.
These conferences adopted very distinct formats. Both Seattle Mind Camp and the Symposium adopted an Open Space style, which is very discussion-oriented, enabling participants to generate their own discussion topics, in hopes of leading to the emergence of cutting edge themes. ISCRAM, on the other hand, has a very traditional academic style, with paper proceedings and presentations.
As an event organizer (I organized the first two Social Computing Symposiums, workshops, group meetings) these distinct styles really raise the question: why do people go to conferences? Common themes are a) developing collaborative relationships with like-minded people, b) the exchange and development of ideas as a community, and c) learning from each other to accelerate advances in the field as people build on each other’s work. More implicit goals are a) social support from like-minded people, b) having fun conversations over wine with conference buddies who are willing to talk to you about something that would make your friends at home yawn in boredom, and c) exploring career opportunites.
At Seattle Mind Camp I really valued the increased prospect of potential collaborations (informal or formal) because people were co-located. At the Symposium, I felt like I was at a party with old pals, because I had a lot of history with my colleagues there. However, I was left feeling hungry for more of an awareness of their latest work. I had a vague feeling that I had already had many of the conversations, somehow they did not achieve a lot of depth. Now, here at ISCRAM, I find myself really enjoying the depth of knowledge I am developing for an area of research to which I have not had a lot of exposure. It reminds me that yes I do value the sheer new knowledge that one can acquire from an in depth presentation of a research project. I know this sentiment is not too popular in some crowds, but I say bring on extended paper presentations, powerpoint and all!
Obviously, the ideal conference has a mix. Throw in a keynote talk from a mucky muck everyone wants to meet, a few carefully selected presentations showing new innovative work, a few sessions where people discuss whatever they deem interesting, and many opportunities to drink wine and get sloppily philosophical.
Over the past several years I have become increasingly involved with the Seattle chapter of a group called Dorkbot. (There are over 30 chapters world wide.) It’s a monthly meeting of artists/geeks/scientists who use technology in their art (or…art in their technology). It’s extremely “geeky”, for the most part a crowd of established professionals in the tech industry interested in the creative uses of everything from RFID tags to microcontrollers. There’s also a yearly exhibit of art called “People Doing Strange Things with Electricity”. You can get a good sense of the kind of work presented at these meetings by reviewing bios of past speakers: http://www.dorkbot.org/dorkbotsea/archive.shtml.
Recently the founder of the Seattle contingent, Kate Seeking, decided to head off to art school so she recruited a few of us to take over running the meetings. We have an organizing committee, for which I have volunteered to be the Dork Overlord for the next several months. (Hee. I volunteered primarily for the privilege of the title, believe me.) I became involved with dorkbot because I have often observed at conferences, with friends, and with colleagues that some of the most innovative new technologies come from people using it for art.
swilson/book/infoartsbook.html”>Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology”, from the abstract: “Who said that scientific research and technological innovations belong to the technicians? Research has become a white hot center of cultural foment. It is affecting everything from the gizmos of everyday life to basic philosophical notions about the nature of reality and what it is to be human. Wilson explores the idea that the arts can assume their historical role at the edge of culture by becoming the independent zone of research, undertaking investigations ignored or discredited by commercial interests and academic science.” Yeah, what he said.
It’s rarely the case that people have the right combination of artistic vision and technological talent to implement their visions, so not only does dorkbot attract a rare breed of individual, it enables people with distinct skill sets to develop an awareness of each other and collaborate. Visual artist, meet microcontroller geek!
Dorkbot has been getting a lot of attention from the media lately. Here’s a video blog from on10 with Laura Joy about last months meeting, in which I make a brief appearance: http://on10.net/TheShow/2203/. The month before, a guy got an RFID chip embedded in his hand live which attracted a bit of press from the Seattle Times. Here’s some AP coverage of the original New York dorkbot: http://www.yahoo.com/s/292019
Peter T. Brown is co-founder of Waggle Labs, an expert user of ruby on rails, and a passionate innovator of online social technology. He has over 10 years experience as an active developer of Internet technologies.
Shelly D. Farnham, Ph.D., is a co-founder of Waggle Labs, and a social scientist who specializes in architecting online experiences. She designs social technologies, consults, and teaches a class on the Social Web 2.0 at the University of Washington.
