The Internets, really?

From the wikipedia: “The Internets“:

Internets was originally used as shorthand for cluelessness about the Internet or about technology in general[citation needed] but is often used today as an homage to when U.S. President George W. Bush referred to “the Internets” in the 2nd Presidential Debate with U.S. Senator John Kerry on October 8, 2004.

Anyway, even though I am not sure about Bush’s thoughts about the Internet, I think this “the internets” concept makes sense. Besides, I have always been crazy about all the names and the confusion about the Internet and the Web.

Mobile is so not the Web

In his Designing for Mobile, Brian Fling describes why “mobile is not the Web”:

200+ devices
30+ web browsers
Carrier controlled ecosystem
Limited input or output
Limited guidelines or resources
“No Standards”
People don’t “get it”
The list goes on….

Weblog success is associated with the type of blogging tool used

In “Weblog success: Exploring the role of technology” by Du, H.S, Wagner C., explore weblog success from a technology perspective (weblog-building technology or blogging tool).

Based on an examination of 126 highly successful weblogs tracked over a period of 3 months, we categorized weblogs in terms of popularity rank and growth, and evaluated the relationship between weblog success (in terms of popularity) and technology use. Our analysis indicates that weblog success is associated with the type of blogging tool used. We argue that technology characteristics affect the presentation and organization of weblog content, as well as the social interaction between bloggers, and in turn, affect weblog success or popularity improvement.
(…)
weblog-building technology has a direct impact on blog content. Since blogging technology is designed for authors to reduce web publication and communication effort (Du and Wagner, 2005), authors can focus on writing while the technology takes care of publishing, storage, link creation, and so forth. The less time and effort authors have to spend on these ancillary tasks, the more time they should be able to devote to content, thus resulting eventually in better content. A similar argument can be made for social value. Blogging technology that automates link creation, that identifies recent visitors (possibly with clickable back links, such as in ModBlog), or maintains subscriber lists and syndicates their content, will help create and maintain the social circle of bloggers, by significantly lowering the effort to link to and visit other sites. Here, technology’s enabling character is reflected through its usability and sociability of supporting weblog success at both content and social levels.

Du, HS, Wagner C. (2006) Weblog success: Exploring the role of technology, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol. 64, No. 9. (September 2006), pp. 789-798.

The Web as a social hypertext

According to the Wikipedia, Web2.0 “refers to a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online. In contrast to the first generation, Web 2.0 gives users an experience closer to desktop applications than the traditional static Web pages“.

Apart from the underlying technologies that allowed this (public web service APIs, Ajax or web syndication), web2.0 puts the emphasis on the social aspects of the world wide web. This component is connected to the “markets are conversations” concept from the Cluetrain manifesto that evolved in the “blogs are conversation” promoted by doc searls and others (see for instance this post). This has also been termed “l’Entrenet” by Daniel Kaplan.

But what is new here is rather the scale than the phenomenon. See this article by Thomas Erickson: The World-Wide-Web as social hypertext (communication of the ACm) in 1996: the authors admits that he does not pay a lot of attention to the Web (we’re in 1995) and he had been converted to that:

The cause of my change of heart was the widespread appearance of personal pages. Personal pages are similar to informal resumes, except that in addition to professional material they often contain personal information. Hobbies, research interests, pets, professional publications, children, politics, friends, colleagues, all are grist for the personal pagestructed portrayal of a person. This insight leads me to characterize the Web as a social hypertext. The nodes—at least some of them—are becoming representations of people. And this, in turn, enables another critical feature to emerge: links from a personal page often point to socially salient pages. A common feature of the personal page is a list of pointers to “interesting people and places.”
(…)
This insight leads me to characterize the Web as a social hypertext. The nodes—at least some of them—are becoming representations of people. And this, in turn, enables another critical feature to emerge: links from a personal page often point to socially salient pages. A common feature of the personal page is a list of pointers to “interesting people and places.”
(…)
The transformation of the Web into a social hypertext has a number of interesting ramifications. Perhaps the most immediate and practical is that social hypertexts allow a fundamental shift in the way people search for information. Rather than composing queries for search engines or going to likely places to browse, (…) people can instead pose the question: Who would know? Or who would know someone who would
know? Navigating from one personal page to another, we suddenly have a new sort of search strategy.
(…)
The same issues arise, mutatis mutandis, in sharing one’s own work. In short, the ability to find out what someone else is doing, without mutual knowledge of what’s happening, is a boon to both parties. This nonmutuality of knowledge is one of the characteristics that makes social hypertext different from more direct forms of communication

The article also discuss the fact that the web affords “presentation of self” and some goffmanian other issues that I won’t comment here. The conclusion for that matter is great: “Although the Web may be just the latest fashion to sweep the Internet, if it turns out to be a medium that allows the construction, negotiation, and propagation of the styles of appearance we refer to as fashion, its impact may be profound indeed.“,

Why do I blog this? because it’s interesting to trace the previous trend we have today in early days of the web. The web as social hypertext is more or less connected to some web2.0 feature that we now have at a larger scale.

Toward a common RSS icon

I am not interested that much in web icons and usability but rss syndications icons are sometimes a bit too… different, as workbench points out:

Considering the number of ways that web publishers show their readers they offer feeds, it’s amazing we’ve gotten that many:

In an effort to make the concept of syndication easier for mainstream users, the next versions of the Internet Explorer and Opera browsers will identify RSS and Atom feeds with the same icon used in Mozilla Firefox. Since the market share of these browsers tops 95 percent, the icon will become the de facto standard for syndication overnight when the next version of Microsoft Windows comes out later this year.

Social search issues

Business Week featured an interesting article about Yahoo’s strategy and social software as a global paradigm on the Web. The author (Ben Elgin) address Yahoo’s bet: changing the way people find information online by relying on “social search”.

Although I am a regular user of flickr or del.icio.us (not to mention others) and though I find the ‘social search’ idea useful/relevant for my interests, I think I can buy some of the author arguments:

• It’s time consuming: “Most Internet users haven’t even heard of Flickr or del.icio.us, let alone spent time sharing photos online or posting bookmarks of their favorite sites. Alexa Internet ranks del.icio.us as the 364,886th most trafficked Web site. Google is ranked third by the researcher. (…) the first major effort involves selecting a circle of friends. That means e-
  mailing people, inviting them to join a network, and responding to requests from others. After that, the more users interact with content, the more power social search will have. But that could
  involve more time-consuming online activities, from simple bookmarking to labeling and reviewing Web sites. It’s not clear users will make that kind of investment.
• Others doubt the wisdom of crowds will offer much of an upgrade over the feats of raw computing power. (…) “The best description of a document is the document itself.”
• As with all community sites, the benefits grow with the size and activity of the group. That means Yahoo’s social-search trial, still in its infancy, could take months or years before reaching its potential. “Social search is not one of these things that will take off overnight,” says Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. “It will take a lot of time to build.”

I don’t want to play the part pooper but some of those claims are important and it seems that some Web2.0 platforms try to address this by various means: not allowing the ‘tag thing’ but having au automatic parser of the document (text/pictures…) for example.

Still, it does not mean that it can’t work but there are some things to consider. I would add that in some domains it can work; especially when there is a certain density in conversations about a certain topic.

Blogging and authorship

In The Role of the Author in Topical Blogs (Proceedings of CHI 2005. Extended abstracts. Pages: 1256 – 1259), Scott Carter presents a compelling study about blogs and the role of authors in this context. He puts the emphasis on how blogs challenge the notion of authorship.

Seemingly, rather than a model in which the author’s writings are themselves a contribution, the blog author weaves a tapestry of links, quotations, and references amongst generated content. In this paper, I present a study of the role of the author plays in the construction of topical blogs, in particular focusing on how blog authors make decisions about what to post and how they judge the quality of posts. To this end, I analyzed the blogs and blogging habits of eight participants using a quantitative analysis tool that I developed, a diary study, and interviews with each participant. Results suggest that authors of topical blogs often do not create new content but strive to, often follow journalistic conventions,use the content of their blogs as a reference tool for other work practices, and are connected as a community by a set of source documents.The contribution of this work is to provide insight onto the notion of authorship with respect to blogs. I address this by looking at both the practice of blog authorship as well as the ways by which blog authors judge the success of posts.

The results are quite interesting:

• Participants overwhelmingly commented that a good post is one that contributes new information or, to a lesser extent,
  extensive commentary about some issue on which the participant is an expert
• Some participants included the timeliness of the post with respect to its subject material as being important as well. When asked to specify a particular post that they had written that they judged to be high quality, respondents usually chose posts that had much lower link and quote densities than average for their blog.
• participants said that it was best to link to completely new information or at least source information, bypassing other filters and news sourcesmaking
• Participants reported judging the quality of a post primarily by trackbacks (links from other blogs to their post) or by their own analysis of server traffic. Another metric that most participants used was links from blogs with a much larger perceived audience than their own. Participants did not attribute much value to the size and quality of comments left on the blog.
• participants said that they followed journalistic convention when updating posts — explicitly marking changes and using extra text or color to call attention to the fact that the post had been changed.
• participants described the use of their blog as an archive tool directly linked to their work practice. In these cases,
  posts often served as way to save information that would later be used in the construction of other documents.
• Participants said that their goal was to make their posts as broadly understandable as possible, but that usually time constraints restricted them from doing so.
• Participants relied on news feeds and e-mail lists to find sources for their posts. All participants also reported perusing topic related blogs and news sites.

Why do I blog this? even though these results are quite common for bloggers, they give a relevant picture of one part of the blogosphere to those who think blogging is limited to personal life accounts.

Mash-up of IM/RSS and publishing services

I am happy to see that I am not the only one thinking about how IM could be a good interface for information management (search, database query), as I described last year.
John Battelle wrote a clever post about it, connecting this to mobile interfaces:

first of all, a mashup of RSS and IM is just a very cool idea. The medium of IM has been underappreciated by nearly everyone in the “media” business for one reason – the leaders of the business didn’t use IM. But lord knows the rest of the world sure does.

there are other types of branded content that makes total sense in IM: publications and personal web services. A great publication has an intimate relationship with its audience, it’s a trusted source of information, a pal, a buddy. And blogs, as I’ve argued again and again, can be great publications. And great web services like local search have earned our trust, know who we are, and we know that when we ask them questions, useful answers will come back. No one wants a stupid chat bot that tries to be, say, Santa Claus, that gets old fast. But a chat bot that is useful? That can instantly deliver your favorite content to your mobile phone without forcing it through the crappy sphincter of your mobile operators crippled web interface? Or can answer questions like, say, “pharmacy 91106″ with the speed and intimacy of an IM chat session?

Why do i blog this? I like this idea and I am used to ask question to AIM bots about weather forecast, movie schedule… would it work on a mobile phone? I don’t really know but I’d love to have this on my Nintendo DS for sure… There is an interesting debate in the comment part of this post. For instance usabiltiy-guru Jakob Nielsen complains that it’s just re-inventing the command line. Some others expects “that the rich client UI applications of tomorrow will be delivered when the “browser” is merged with an “IM client“…

Combating the Online Dissemination of Illegal Images

CODII: Combating the Online Dissemination of Illegal Images is a project developed by Microsoft Research. It’s aimed at examining how people organise themselves online to disseminate illegal images. The underlying issue is to design tools that help hotlines and moderators identify and remove illegal online content.

This project grows from a working relationship with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). The IWF are the charity who run the UK hotline that helps identify illegal online images in order for them to be removed, especial images of child abuse. (…) Our approach is to take an understanding of the area gleaned from working with the IWF, and combine it with a technological and social science understanding of online community systems. This combination helps us to build novel and useful tools.

To date we have worked on two tools. The first was an enhancement of the IWF’s Bulk Image Viewer. The Bulk Image Viewer is used for rapidly scanning newsgroup images. The second was an Unreferenced Picture Finder used to locate hidden pictures on websites.

The next stage of research is to build a tool for moderators of online community platforms. This tool will unite: novel image visualization techniques, social clustering, and linguistic analysis.

Why do I blgo this? I am intrigued by the ‘social cluster’ thing. This seems to be the new idea to fight against spam (by checking if the email sender is from you network) and now it’s used to check image dissemination.

Social bookmarking in companies: IBM example

Queue, the ACM journal has a special issue about social software.

Among the different articles, the one entitled “Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise” by David Millen, Jonathan Feinber and Bernard Kerr caught my eyes. The tagline is very appealing: “Can your organization benefit from social bookmarking tools?“. Some snippets:

The apparent success of Internet-based social bookmarking applications begs the question of whether large enterprises or organizations would also benefit from social bookmarking systems. To investigate this question, at IBM we are designing and developing an enterprise-scale social bookmarking system called dogear. (…) The first significant design decision was whether to base user identity in the application on real names or pseudonyms. We decided to require real-world identity for the following reasons. First, one of the expected benefits of the system is to allow users to make inferences about the interests and expertise of others based on informal browsing of bookmark collections.

This point is very pertinent and tightly related to a phenomenon called Transactive Memory (a theory proposed by Wegner (1987). This theory examines the process by which individuals determine who knows what and who knows who knows what).

The “dogear” application is then described:

Dogear also exploits collaborative filtering techniques to screen new bookmarks for those that are predictably of interest to an individual (or a group of individuals). Common interests can be inferred based on a number of observable user actions, including use of similar tags and/or tag combinations, similarity of bookmark (URL) collections, common RSS subscriptions, and click streams that indicate interest in specific kinds of bookmarks. Text analysis of bookmark titles, descriptions, and comments will also be used to determine bookmark relatedness.

The article continues describing the research prototype they designed to investigate the usefulness of a social bookmarking application for a large enterprise. Among the results they investigated, there is this: they used social network analytical methods to “begin to understand” the information affinities among dogear users.11 The picture below shows a sociogram showing which individuals have clicked through to another person’s bookmark reference:

Why do I blog this? even though this is more ” we did this to begin to understand”, it’s refreshing to see that some companies are investigating how social bookmarking (as a geek-based/out-of-companies innovation) could be used in companies. This is just the beginning but a social network study of this can be very informative, in terms of information management and transfer.