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Filtering Feeds to Free Up Focus
design, information, internet
May 09, 2003, 09:52 AM
Micah mentioned to me yesterday that he has been having problems recently with the volume of content he subscribes to with his news aggregator. He says it is getting to the point where catching up on his online reading is a multiple-hour engagement and is starting to take up too much of his time. At least judging from the "in the near future, the scarce resource will be human attention" meme that's running through HCI research circles, this is likely a problem for many and will only get worse.
Micah was thinking of adding a "priority" to posts, where I, as the author, can tag each entry in the RSS feed with how important I think it is. Then Micah, as the reader, can tell his news aggregator something like "Don't show me any posts from Rob, unless they're of High importance or greater".
After thinking about this, I'm not sure how well it would work, however, for two reasons. One is that I can only encode how important I think the post is to me; I don't know how important my readers will think it is. Worse, for most posts I imagine every reader would have a different opinion of its importance based on their interests.
I mentioned using categories to divide up content into topic areas, then provide separate RSS feeds for each category so my readers can only subscribe to the categories they are interested in. Movable Type can probably already support this. But this isn't really an optimal solution either, since my categorization scheme may not be the scheme my readers want, I may not be consistent with my assignment of categories, etc.
So here's my suggestion: what if news aggregators allowed you to have a set of feeds you subscribed to just as they do now, and then a different set of feeds you "monitored"? You could specify certain search keywords or other criteria that must appear in the feed's content in order for it to appear in your list. This way your aggregator could automate some of the weblog filtering process for you so your valuable attention could be directed to more important tasks, like reading the posts you're interested in. Additionally, this may have the side benefit of encouraging sites to syndicate all of their content, rather than just excerpts, in the hopes that the full content will match more people's filter criteria than just the partial content.
Just an idea.
A Note on XML and Single Sourcing
design, information, software development, usability
May 09, 2003, 01:29 AM
In reference to my post a few days ago on a single sourcing paradigm for research content management, Dave asked why I didn't mention XML as a solution to the semantic content / presentation separation problem. That's a good question and raises a point I want to clarify.
XML provides a technical solution to the single sourcing problem by allowing people to define markup languages specifically for semantic content and markup languages for presentation specifications (XHTML, CSS, SVG, etc.) and a means of translating between them given some content-to-presentation mapping rules (XSLT). This is a fairly neat answer for the technical problem, but isn't very intrinsically interesting since there have been other technologies that have purported to solve this same problem before. XML is really only interesting because it has broad industry support and thus has a chance of catching on and lasting.
The interesting and difficult problem that I discussed in my post was the interface problem: the "how do you build an interface that lets the user define semantic content and presentation of that content separately, yet still provides a metaphor that makes sense to the average user?" problem. The difficulty is that we don't think in terms of semantics, we think in terms of how things look. Headings in documents are headings because they are in big bold sans-serif fonts. So when we are starting a new section and want to make a heading for it, our first impulse is to type some text, then change it to a big, bold, sans-serif font. If the program instead requires us to highlight the text and click on "make this a heading 3" then go into a bunch of dialog boxes to say "oh and by the way, heading 3s in this document will be in a big, bold, sans-serif font" then I guarantee people won't use it. This is why so few people use styles in Word, despite their many benefits; they break the WYSIWYG paradigm that fits so well with their tasks. And what if the user underlines the third heading in the document? Should the style change, hence underlining all headings in the document? Should just that heading change, creating a new, local style? And so on. I found an excellent article awhile back that expands on the ambiguity of styling nicely.
It's a hard problem, but one that I think could be solved much more neatly than any interface I've seen (Word's styles and Dreamweaver's CSS support both spring to mind as bad examples). And that's what XML doesn't do for us, and what I was driving at in my post.
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Visions of a Distributed Future
information, patterns, society & sociology
May 07, 2003, 07:00 PM
While walking home today I was thinking about the direction wireless and networking technologies are moving in and what impact this might have on society in the long term.
Since at least the beginning of the Industrial Age, we humans have lived a daily routine that looks something like the following:
- Leave home in the morning and go to the workplace.
- Do work at the workplace all day.
- Leave the workplace in the early evening and go have fun, either by returning home or going to some other location like a bar, a restaurant, a club, etc.
- Go home to relax and sleep.
This has been the structure of our daily life, dictated to us by the protestant work ethic which, according to Max Weber, has defined the spirit of the Industrial Age.
But the sands of time are flowing, and the world isn't what it was. Information technology has already enabled easy, global distribution of information and rapid, decentralized communication, and we are beginning to discover how to harness this power. Moreover, information/communication technology will soon become ubiquitous with the advent of universal wireless networking, wearable computing, and other mobile and embedded technologies.
So what does this mean for the structure of our lives? This ubiquity of communication is starting to make the concept of a "workplace" obsolete. Projects such as Aura, Civium, and many others like them are looking into ways of ensuring that your information is always with you, will always be there for you when you need it. So there is no need to go to the office to fetch the information you need. Moreover, wireless communication technologies, of which cell phones are only the beginning, make it easy to communicate with the people you work with, either completely virtually or as a quick means of setting up a real-world meeting. So your "workplace" could be anywhere; your project group could teleconference and agree to meet in a coffee shop or a park, then you could go back home to do the work you took on. We're already starting to see this happen technologically with the increasing sophistication of computer-supported cooperative work systems and socially with the popularity of telecommuting.
All this also means that the traditional structuring of the day into work, play, sleep may no longer be necessary in the future. We have the option of decentralizing, working when we want, coordinating our schedules only as necessary to get together with our colleagues. In fact, the entire concept of a "work time" could be discarded, and our jobs can be seamlessly interwoven with the rest of our lives. Work and play will coexist peacefully, and frequently become one.
In "The Hacker Ethic", Pekka Himanen discusses how this has already begun in certain cultures of information technologists, who interweave their work into their lives, their passions, and their dreams. These technologists ("hackers" in the original sense of the word) prefer this method of leading their lives to the "nine-to-five rat race / daily grind" option.
Many people fear the interweaving of work and play, of public and private life. They're afraid of getting "too connected"; they worry that if work can be done anywhere then they will never have time to do what they want. I believe this is an artifact of the protestant work ethic, which has always clearly separated "work" from "fun" and emphasized duty over pleasure. But that was a fact of life in the Industrial Age, and the Industrial Age is fading.
In "A Pattern Language", Christopher Alexander describes the "Community of 7000" pattern as a means of capping the size of towns and other communes to humane limits. Alexander is big on decentralization and distribution as means of building healthy societies. His patterns describe a society that meets these criteria; it lives at peace with nature and provides a humane environment for its inhabitants. What's interesting is how much easier it could be to facilitate many of the changes required by such a society were we to have a robust information infrastructure that gave us all "floating workplaces" so we were free to spend time in the places we want to and cultivate those places to become even more appealing to us and our peers. The chains that pull us all into overcrowded cities out of the sad necessity of centralization would disappear.
In our hierarchical world with global superpowers, multinational corporations, sprawling cities, an obscene rich/poor divide, and many millions of lives choked to death by inhumane conditions of every sort, it is difficult to imagine that a modern society could really work in the way he describes. But perhaps, just perhaps, distributed information technologies can be the catalyst that will bring this about. It is far from certain. No technology can change the world; people change the world, and if this vision is to become real we must make it happen. But I, for one, believe it will soon be in our reach.
Email Rob:
A Wiki for the CMU HCI Master's Program
information, internet, personal
May 07, 2003, 10:49 AM
Awhile back, Micah and I were talking about his excellent MHCI Cheat Sheet and how we were going to maintain it and make sure it is available and useful to new students when he's gone. He suggested setting up a Wiki and putting the cheat sheet in it, and the more I think about the idea, the more I like it.
Wikis are basically web sites where anyone who comes to the site (or at least, a largish group of people who come to the site) can edit every page on the site just by pushing a button. They're useful when you have a large amount of frequently-changing information that needs to be updated by a distributed group of peers, and when things like consistency of appearance and style are not too important. I think this matches the MHCI program fairly well, since what we need is a collaboratively-owned "knowledge space" that makes it easy for information to flow between those of us who have it and those of us who need it. This is especially true when those of us who have it have graduated, left Pittsburgh, and moved on with their lives, and those who need it are new students who just arrived in town and now have to figure out a million little things before they can get up and running. Since this is only a one year program with little student carryover, this is a common situation.
I think an MHCI Wiki could serve several purposes, including:
- Hosting a modifiable MHCI Cheat Sheet, as I mentioned earlier. Micah's Cheat Sheet contains lots of useful information to new (and current!) students like how to get your computer set up on the campus network, how to register for classes, how to figure out what classes are good ones, etc. (Many of these things are much, much harder to accomplish at CMU than you might think.) The problem is much of this information goes stale after awhile as policies change, IT gets upgraded, etc. So a Wiki would help us keep it up to date.
- Maintaining an alumni network. We could keep up-to-date contact information in the Wiki so we could keep in touch after leaving the program and establish a connection between former and current students for networking opportunities.
- Posting finished student projects. Since our program is very practice-oriented, we work on lots of cool projects throughout the time we're here and often want to share the final results with each other. The Wiki could help provide a consistent location to post links to the finished products (if they are digital) or descriptions of the finished projects (if they're meatspace-only).
- MHCI Quote Board. Whenever someone says something particularly quotable, I always respond, "That would go on the quote board, if there was a quote board...". This would help make that vision a reality! :)
There are a couple of concerns I have about the idea as well.
- The Wiki has to be easy to use. Not everyone in the program is highly technical, and since this is, after all, an HCI Master's program, we're all abnormally sensitive to bad interface design. So if it is a pain to update information, no one is going to do it. I don't know much about the Wiki implementations that are out there, but I know that for some of them usability was not a priority. If anyone can recommend one for whom this does not hold true, let me know.
- People have to update it. People in the program are busy, and so I'm worried that there isn't sufficient incentive to update the Wiki when you learn something new that could go up on it. If we don't keep the Wiki up-to-date, it won't be very useful to anyone. So I'm not sure how to make certain that happens.
I'm thinking of setting one up on Loki's Labs to try it out. If there is enough interest I could probably find some way to finagle CMU into hosting it somewhere permenantly.
Posted by Rob on May 07, 2003 at 12:30 PM
I added the bullet point on "Posting finished student projects" around 12:30. I knew I'd forgotten something when I posted this thing...
Email Rob:
Ebay Cleared in Libel Case: Good News for Online Communities
internet, politics, society & sociology
May 06, 2003, 10:22 AM
There's an article posted to good old Slashdot about the dismissal of a libel case brought against Ebay. An auction winner posted several negative comments about a seller, the seller alleged the comments were libelious and demanded that Ebay remove them. When Ebay refused, he sued them for libel. The judge threw out the case, claiming that Ebay is not liable for users' comments under the 1996 Communications Decency Act. The seller plans to appeal.
This ruling is good news for online community sites, where potentially anyone in the world can post content to the site that could be considered libelious. If community sites can be held legally liable for this content, then its hard to imagine how they could continue to operate since most don't have the resources to check up on the facts behind every comment. This issue came up in my previous post about a recommender system for service providers; I'm glad it appears to be getting resolved in the right way.
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The Community Technology Forum
charity, teaching & learning
May 05, 2003, 03:49 PM
"Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you will feed him for a lifetime."
The old saw has never held more true for me than it has today.
Today was the Community Technology Forum, Joe's end-of-the-semester meeting where all the community partners and student technology consultants to present the work they did throughout the semester. It was quite an encouraging event, due both to the benefits the community partners are getting out of the consultancies and to reaffirm that Joe's vision of the course is moving it in the right direction.
Joe, unusual for a CS professor, emphasizes introducing appropriate technologies through developing an understanding of the organization and ensuring those technologies are sustainable. The spirit of the class at least is less about the technology and more about improving the technological capacity of nonprofits. And sure enough, the most enthusiastic community partners repeatedly emphasized that the biggest benefit for them was the increased understanding of technology they received as a result of working with their consultant. They appreciated when the consultants paid attention to their work and taught them technological fixes that helped them do that work, even when they were as simple as helping them sort emails in Outlook.
Many service learning classes hope to teach students new skills while also helping charitable organizations, but often don't succeed because they have "ulterior motives". For example, if the class is about database system design, then the students are going to develop a database system regardless of whether that's what their community partners need. Joe's class is unique because they focus on these needs rather than predetermined solutions.
This focus on the needs of organizations also relates to my earlier point about the need for usability in open source software. There's been a lot of talk in the open source community about the potential for open source software in nonprofit organizations. The reasoning is that since open source software is free, it is ideal for nonprofits with small budgets. Additionally, since open source projects aren't tied to a particular company, they're more sustainable since nonprofits won't have to worry about the company who provides the software going broke, upping the price, etc.
Although these are both valid points, I am skeptical about this potential for open source software as it currently exists. For example, one organization had a student group (for another class) develop a system for them the previous semester that was intended to speed up their reporting process. The students developed a MySQL / PHP web system that was delivered as promised, but wound up not doing everything the organization needed (a common situation, if you know anything about software development). Unfortunately, no one in the organization was technically sophisticated enough to fix the problems with the system, and the original team was long gone. After getting over a month behind on their reports, they wound up scrapping the system and reverting to their old paper system. One of the student consultants this semester worked with the organization's technical lead to develop an Access-based system that they could maintain.
I'll agree that this problem was due in large part to the failings of the previous student group to adequately understand the needs of the organization, but even so, it's hard to imagine how one could build a database system that was usable and modifiable by nonprofit workers who, while very smart, are not willing to spend months learning SQL, Linux, PHP, etc. We need to start creating systems that are usable by these types of people before open source can make inroads in the nonprofit arena.
In short, my impression is that Joe's class is doing good work and is taking the right approach to the problem. Merely putting the student consultants and the community partners in the same room with each other seems to accomplish a lot, and Joe helps them along by focusing their attention on the organization's short and long term needs. Hopefully the work Matt and I are doing will help improve the student's and community partner's understandings of their organization so that their work can have an even bigger impact in future classes. I guess we'll find out in December at the next Forum.
Email Rob:
Weblogs for Student Technology Consultants
internet, teaching & learning, writing & communication
May 05, 2003, 10:28 AM
As part of our work on redesigning Joe's class, Matt and I are suggesting that the students use weblogs to record weekly status reports on their visits with their community partners. Now, I realize that using weblogs for educational purposes isn't a wildly innovative idea; Don Turnbull, who co-organized the Weblogs BOF at CHI 2003 last month with Micah and Andy, has been using weblogs in his classes for awhile. But I thought I'd provide a quick discussion of why we think they're an appropriate technology for this class.
One of the big problems we found was that Joe isn't always able to get a clear picture of what the students are doing at their community partners' sites, and thus he can't know what problems they are running in to so he can help them get back on track. Currently the students submit status reports but they tend to contain insufficient information for Joe to provide helpful feedback. We're hoping that if we turn the status reports into weblog entries, Joe will be able to comment on them more easily and request additional information if necessary. It should also be easy for the student to revise his post to provide this additional information.
A second problem with the written status reports is that Joe isn't able to provide feedback fast enough to influence the students' work. Feedback often comes after the student has moved past the part of the consulting process to which it applies. We hope that the combination of weblog posts, weblog comments, and news aggregators for Joe and the TAs (teaching assistants) will help encourage more informal communication between students and instructors.
Another option we are looking into is having reusable "case studies" of past consultants to help teach current consultants about the consulting process and to help them avoid previous consultant's mistakes and bank on previous consultant's successes. We're hoping that having an archive of weblogged status reports will make it easier to develop these case studies.
Finally, we hope that making the consulting process more visible, both to the student herself, the instructors, the community partners, and the other students in the class, will help encourage collaboration between all the stakeholders in the course to help solve each other's problems. However, we're also concerned that this level of visibility may encourage students to censor themselves out of fear that telling the whole truth will bring reprisal to them, other students, and / or their community partners.
I think it's worth noting that this idea is just one component of our proposed solution; we aren't telling Joe "just have all the students use weblogs and all your problems will be solved!". We've learned from our studies that Joe's TCinC tackles a complex problem that can't be solved just by dumping any technology on top of it. But weblogs seem to fit well into this one portion of the class at least, so we're planning to give them a go. Hopefully by the end of this summer we'll have some real experiences to report on.
Email Rob:
What's in a Name?
internet
May 04, 2003, 02:33 PM
A couple days ago I was talking to a friend of mine who recently had a bad experience with losing her top-level domain name (this is the part of the URL in your location bar that appears after the "http" and "www" stuff, for example, my top-level domain name is "lokislabs.org"). She purchased web hosting from a company that also registered her domain name as part of the package deal. Unbeknownst to her, the company registered the domain in their name, not hers. Recently the company went out of business and took all the names it registered with it. It will be a good six months or so before she can get it back.
My friend's mistake is understandable, and fortunately for her it was mostly an annoyance. For some it would be a disaster. If you've spent a fair amount of time building an online reputation, you probably have many people who link to your web site, many business cards and resumes floating around with the URL on them, etc. If you lose control over that URL, all that work may be for nothing since most people won't look any further if they try a link and get a "Server not responding" or "404 file not found" message.
So if you have or are thinking of starting a web presence, I have two pieces of advice:
Get a top-level domain name, don't let your site sit on "http://www.yourprovider.com/~yourname/" for very long. Decent registrars charge less than $20/year for them, and maintaining your own name allows you to change hosting providers without changing your URL. If the only name you can get is long, cryptic, or has a funny postfix (".info" and ".ws" come to mind) don't sweat it too much. Most people will come to it via links, Google searches, or printed URLs anyway. Try to keep it as memorable as possible, though.
I'm pretty happy with Domainsite.com so far. They're cheap and have a nice web interface for managing domain name to IP address mappings, mail forwarding addresses, etc. I've also heard good things about Register.com. I wouldn't recommend Verisign unless you like to pay too much for substandard service.
Make sure your domain name is registered in your name! If your hosting provider wants to do it for you, fine, but make sure they're putting you down as the administrative contact. You can check to make sure they did so by querying the Internic's Whois database (it may refer you to your registrar's whois database for authoritative information). However, at this point it may be too late if the company refuses to reregister the domain in your name. It's best to register your name directly with the registrar yourself. A decent hosting provider will help you configure the domain name to point to your new site.
I hope this is helpful to those of you who are considering starting a public web site. I'm thinking of writing more elaborate instructions on this topic for a nontechnical audience, let me know if you'd be interested.
Email Rob:
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