Here Come the Big Boys

Seems Microsoft has been listening in on our discussions and is eager to simmer some buzzword soup. I am sure our two Google visitors got their ears burning. Their ecosystem model for enabling Web content, innovated via the help of their Popfly tool, sure sounds politically correct. By all means, give it a whirl and let us know what you come up with via an entry or two here.

In fact, anyone who stumbles on our awesome TC 505 blog who has any Popfly experience should leave a comment here (please).

Relevant TED Talks

The secretive, once-a-year TED talks that take place in Monterey, California, are finally being shared with the world via the video publishing craze. I find them strong contributions for stirring important debate in societal issues. Of course you can comment back to the presenter as well and read the comments while listening to the speaker. Three presentations I find most relevant to our time spent this quarter:

How a ragtag band created Wikipedia

How cooperation trumps conflict

Technology evolves like we did

Half of the other talks frame something or other from class with thoughts of the implications

Virtual Cities

Please take a look at my Virtual Cities site and provide any feedback you might have regarding the potential of a community-based, open source virtual city for a city's residents to use. The goal of the site is to motivate potential participants to generate virtual city content after a short demonstration session where the creation process is demonstrated. Before our class together, I would have just sent this link around to try and promote the idea. Now, I hope to get feedback through comments to my blog on the subject. Eventually, I'd convert these Virtual City Web pages to a Wiki once I had enough people interested in maintaining it.

I've started communicating with the Providence Waterfront Park Architects, suggesting a virtual Providence would help promote their project better. In June, I plan to meet with interested city and state government officials to pitch the idea. With so many creative college campuses in the city (more per capital than Boston even), I am hopeful to find a groundswell of interest. I'll demo in class but am providing the site ahead of time for those interested.

Another form of social networking

I found this article really interesting. It features Meetup.com, a website that helps users form social groups. Meetup.com is unique in that CMC social networks translate to real traditional social interactions.

Facebook expansion: from social networking site to a social operating system

Really interesting article on the NYT today about Facebook's plan to expand its services to a massive level. The CEO said that he wants Facebook to be "at the center of its users' online lives in the same way that Windows dominates their experience on a PC". Very interesting plan, a bit too risky I think.

Judge for yourself, read here

Week 9 Reflection

Hi Class,
Link to my reflection on video game articles. Thank you.

Tomorrow's discussion

Yay games!

Here are a few of the things I'll be touching on in class tomorrow.

Neopets - a web based game where you raise and care for "pets" of various kinds. This was the game mentioned the RAPUNSEL article.

Peggle - a free trial download for PCs. Play with the sound on. I don't want to give away the secret, but if you complete one level you'll see why people prefer playing games to doing work.

The power of the DS. This is a YouTube video of a DS party. Turn the sound down for this one because there's a lot of screaming involved. The first minute pretty much says it all... not much changes for the rest of the time.

Pirates of the Burning Sea - This is the website for the game I do playability testing for. Notice the interaction between designers and fans and the socialization that takes place, especially on the forums. This is mostly discussion about the game, but it translates to in-game and real-world interactions as well. (For example, there's a PotBS meetup tonight where developers and fans get to socialize.)

As a side note, we're watching some CMC at work right here on this post. Because I included the string "Pirates of the Burning Sea," the community envoy at Flying Lab is probably going to get a Google Alerts message tomorrow indicating as such. Everybody wave!

where do you live?

The genius behind xkcd brings us a much-needed Map of Online Communities:



(click to see the whole picture)

The Webbys Are In

Forget the Emmys, Oscars, Espys and Tonys. The Webby is the award we should strive for in life, no? As the Post-Intelligencer pointed out this morning, anyone ready to give up on the Web as an overhyped waste of time should at least consider the best of the best. ACTIVISM is just the first nomination category presented (it's alphabetic). Anyone for a game of Zwok? Just bring your laptop the last day of class. It's 3 on 3 (tech comm majors v. others?).

WIKI: Where Information Keeps Interacting

I relly enjoyed our class discussion on Monday. One part of the discussion in particular, involving design principles behind the creation of wikis and blogs, their unique purpose and corresponding audience, reminded me of a similar conversation sparked by students in TC 510 (Information Design). The interaction of information that occurs on Wikis is truly amazing and would probably not occur in the absence of that medium; the same can be said about blogs. Wikis promote collaboration in the form of an online workspace by giving users the power to create new and change existing content. Potential challenges and "competitive natures" could arise when individual egos resist the notion of being "corrected" by others. Only those who are wise enough to correct yet humble enough to be corrected will survive the place in space "where information keeps on interacting"....the place known as WIKI.

UW President's Blog

This is the UW President's blog I talked about in class today. Mmmm contrary to my assertion, I note that you can leave comments. But you must login with your UW Net ID.

Week 8 Response Paper

Here's my response paper for our readings on collaboration and CMC. So much to discuss!

More on Computer-based Collaborative Tools

This week’s readings encapsulate what we have been discussing in the last couple of weeks.

Kolbitsh and Maurer’s article, “The Transformation of the Web: How Emerging Communities Shape the Information we Consume,” presents an overview of a broad selection of computer-based collaborative tools: wikis, blogs, social networks, file sharing tools, and other social media. It enumerates information transformations that the world experienced courtesy of these social networking tools. The article lists advantages and disadvantages associated with each of them. This, perhaps, gives us an insight of opportunities for future trends. The internet is growing, and hence its users.

The “Are Wikis Usable?” by Desilets, Paquet and Vinson, explores the usability of wikis. Specifically, the authors try to establish users’ knowledge of hypertext, an important feature of wikis. Wikis are supposed to be easy to use. But is this the reality on the ground. A study, like the one reported in this article, shows some wiki users have a problem hyperlinking one page with another.

There two articles on blogs. Their themes revolve around the status of bloggers in today’s society. Compared with journalists in the mainstream media, can bloggers be looked upon to inform, educate and entertain the public? This is an important question considering that bloggers have brought to the limelight issues that the mainstream media otherwise shunned.

“Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations,” by Viegas, Wattenberg and Dave, is a riveting article about the dynamics of Wikipedia. The article discusses wiki technology, and, perhaps, most importantly explains the workings of Wikipedia, itself.

The article introduces the history flow visualization, an exploratory data analysis tool, which helps in revealing patterns within a wiki.

MySpace changing the music scene in Mexico City

Check this cool article on today's NYT. It nicely illustrates the effect of social networking tools in the spread of Indie Mexican music. It is very interesting

Read ahead

Week Nine Musings

Kolbitsch and Maurer's The Transformation of the Web article frames many of the points we've already touched upon in previous in-class sessions with a focus on transformation. We really haven't talked much about chaos, complexity, and the theory of self-organizing structure. The current transformation they write about (driven by blogs, wikis, podcasts, vodcasts, etc.) seems rather dependent on it. I am sure Monday's class discussion will thrive, but since I will miss the discussion upon attending the 2007 VAC consortium meeting, I feel the need to offer up some thoughts in advance:

1. Regarding the issue of a "neutral voice or point of view", I believe Wikipedia should continue to try and find that middle ground. And yet, as Burt Kosko points out so well in his book Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic (published by Hyperion in 1993), the middle ground is often not very sexy and our human brains aren't really wired well to retain or respond to neutrality in fact.

2. The concept of using taxonomy and ontology to organize social media as it bubbles up through participation of the masses is difficult to do. And yet, I am hopeful that someone will come up with a better solution than what we have today: Free form tagging systems and overly architected top-down approaches that inhibit growth while standards are thoughtfully derived. Anyone have a solid middle ground process worth trying?

3. Does StumbleUpon have the right mix of features to help us socially mediate what constitutes the best Web pages out there and provide a solid opportunity to channel surf the Web as we similarly channel surf the television? Seems like there is an opportunity to help us encounter new ideas through a socially-assisted suggestion process that blends all the available information streams out there.

4. In regards to faster publication cycles, there is a limit to how fast we can publish news and information. We really can't do any better than instantaneous. And, so, although we see dramatic changes now in terms of how fast information is made available to us for discovery and comment, we will run up against a wall someday soon. Just like we will run into the spatial limit of our geography here on Earth (very few of us will be connected from space in the short run). Time and place are being redefined right now, but that sense of change has to settle down eventually.

5. Seems like we are ripe for a consolidation service that will cross-link all of our socially mediated information. We enter something in Facebook or MySpace and we gain access to it from either client. If we do that right, we'll find it easier to add new features and have everyone participate. We're bound to get past text as a potentially limiting common denominator faster that way.

Web 2.0 Video

I came across this again (originally saw a few months ago). Really creative video that's right up our TC alley...

Web 2.0 in 2 Minutes on YouTube

Integrating Social Media Into Education

I think we hit the nail on the head yesterday by griping about how little impact the Internet and all its innovations has had in the classroom. I am very hopeful that the MacArthur Foundation is getting a picture of how best to invest in promising digital learning projects. Take a look at their digital learning site to see if you agree. $50 million should be a decent infusion of support for starters. I am hoping a snowball effect can come from it.

If you want a name of someone to follow who seems to be on the right track to changing the public primary and secondary school experience, search on the name of James Paul Gee. His classroom of popular culture article to Harvard is representative of his perspective.

Wiki article

In my reading for the class project, I found this fun article on wikis and the term "wikiality" along with other new terminology.

read here

Feevy: New tool for networking blogs

I heard today about this tool to aggregate blogs. I checked it out briefly, not sure how it works yet but it seems to be an RSS feed that allows you to add blogs to your site and updates the content. This is very cool. It is being used in the University of San Francisco to aggregate all the blogs from campus (students, staff, faculty).

Lots of possibilities tools like this open for networking blogs socially and content wise.

More on social networks, Friendster

I came across the site of Danah Boyd who wrote the first article this week on "Friendster and publicly articulated social networking." She's been nice enough to put links and pdfs of many (all?) the articles she's written:
http://www.danah.org/papers/

I find the rise and fall of Friendster really fascinating. While its arc has as much to do with business decisions as CMC, it's a reminder to study the underlying aspects of what makes a CMC system rather than focusing just on the "brand." That brand can vanish if it doesn't meet the expectations of its users. This NY Times article chronicles the Frienster story, focusing a lot on the business -- going from scoffing at Myspace to now having only 1/50th of myspace's traffic and being unable to find any company interested in buying the site.

New form of HCI

My apologies, I wanted to post this earlier around the time we visited the HIT lab. This video demonstrates the potential of a multi-touch interface. I can envision a group of people gathered around something like this looking at blueprints, where anyone could manipulate or add to the print by just touching the screen. They wouldn't have to worry about finding a keyboard or passing around a mouse. I was reminded of this when we were playing with the IR pong table. I think Janice was thinking the same thing. I think it would be neat if AR was integrated to it some how. The AR stuff just blew me away.

Second Life in Europe

The virtual game Second Life is catching on in Europe in a big way. We talked about Second Life in past classes. It's a virtual environment, where you establish your avatar and your "second" life. It is very unlike the traditional video game. It would interesting to study the popularity of Second Life, and why might certain regions log on more than other regions. It's amazing to see 1.7 million users have logged on in the past 60 days. The website itself had 3.6 million visitors in March.


Article

Typology of Tech Users

A new report from the Pew Research Center entitled A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users suggests that with

the advent of Web 2.0, the ability of people to use a range of information and communication technology as a platform to express themselves online and participate in the commons of cyberspace is often heralded as the next phase of the information society. Yet little is known about which segments of the population are inclined to make robust use of information technology and which aren't.

Links to other similar resources are available as well from the full report

Week 8 Readings Reflection Paper

1. “Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networking,” Dana Michele Boyd

University of California, Berkeley.

The article, “Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networking,” by Dana Michele Boyd of the University of California, Berkeley, is an ethnographic study of users of Friendster, a social networking site. Boyd labors to investigate the forces that drive the building of social networks in Friendster.

Using social theory, she presents to readers the complexities of forming lasting social networks. “Friends of friends” is a phrase Bond repeatedly uses in this article to explain how Friendster users negotiate context when presenting themselves.

Friendster allows users to form friendship networks based on testimonials generated by other users of the site. This sounds pyramidal, where new users look upon established users to build their own social networks. This is a big plus for Friendster and might explain its unprecedented growth. At the time of this study, the site boasted 5 million members, but this has since ballooned to 40 million (http://www.friendster.com/info/index.php). One would rightly argue that people looking for real dates find it credible.

Because Friendster facilitates social networks “within four degrees” users, no doubt, tend to gravitate towards it, compared with other existing dating websites. It’s the nature of human beings to establish relationships with people who’re close to them.

Friendster, however, has found that it’s not always easy to make users adhere to the mission for which it was established. Some users, who Boyd variously describes as “Fakesters” and “Fraudsters”, for instance, set up fake profiles to confuse their fellow users. This poses a great challenge to the owners of Friendster because as Boyd puts it some users see value in Fakesters, especially their creativeness in a bid to mask their real identity, and wouldn’t entertain their removal from the system. The question this raises is, “Who has the upper hand in what goes on in social networking sites?”

2. “Leveraging Social Networks for Information Sharing,” Jeremy Goecks and Elizabeth D. Mynatt, Georgia Institute of Technology, GVU Center, College of Computing.

As I have noted above, social networking heavily relies on trust and familiarity. Users want to form social networks with people they know, trust and share common values. Given, users want greater leverage on social networks. They want to dictate membership and the way information is shared. The big question is whether the existing social networks allow for this.

Goecks and Mynatt, in their article, “Leveraging Social Networks for Information Sharing,” explain how Saori can help social networkers leverage their own social networks. Saori, as these two authors put it, “…enables users and end-user applications to leverage social networks to mediate information dissemination.”

Saori:

q Enables users to employ both technological and social methods to manage information sharing.

q Enables users to create policies that mediate sharing by exploiting social networks.

q Provides social data to users

Saori, just like Friendster, enables users exercise control over their social networks. Perhaps, more importantly, Saori enables users to track the movement of their information within their social networks. Goecks and Mynatt incorporated Saori in a Wiki, to allow users to dictate which pages to make public or private. Saori is a good idea, but I am concerned about the possibility of it trampling on the privacy of those taking part in social networks. Another concern is its application in Wikis? Doesn’t this amount to redefining the purpose of Wikis?

3. “Mapping Networks of Support for the Zapatista Movement,” by Maria Garrido and Alexander Halavis

Maria and Halavis discuss the power of social networks in the articulation of nationalistic causes. They studied the Zapatista movement, which in 1994 took up arms against the Mexican government. The movement charged that the central government ignored the southern state of Chiapas. These two authors’ attempted to establish whether mapping the Zapatista movement’s online-based social networks would shed light on the personalities of the people and groups that supported its cause. Principally, they argue that there exists cognitive, social, or structural relationship between websites.

Week 7 Response paper

Hello, here is my response paper. I think we will have lots of material for good discussion.

The Feral Meme

I guess Janice was not kidding. People love the cat images with sayings written across their pose. Wired magazine covers the phenomenon here. You can branch off to all kinds of examples and commentary, if you wish. I'd trade it all to have my beloved cat Squeakers back in the flesh.

Google's influence on the way we manage information

A cool article about Google: Google' ranking system and how it influences trust on the highest-ranked retrievals even if they are not that relevant to our search.

Access and a good UI not enough to make CMC more democratic

This is a great article about a blogger in Egypt whose dissident voice is being silenced by the government. Good demonstration that access and a good user interface are just two silos that need to be glued by institutions (government, private sector, civil society, etc)

Read ahead if interested

So, Who Owns Social Network Websites?

This is a very interesting story. It just demonstrates the increasing influence of online communities on social networking sites. When you set up a social networking space, it's no longer yours. Is this an emerging trend? What would happen if some unhappy users gang up against a social networking site like MySpace?

Email article

We've covered a lot of these points in class already, but here are some more stories in this article about email and the difficulty in presenting tone.

Read here