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Newsapple

design, internet

June 29, 2004, 03:18 PM

I came across a video of the next version of Safari's news aggregator capabilities (via Andy, via Dave). I was struck by one thing; damn, but it looks a lot like Newsable! Right down to the sort and archive (or "recent articles") options. Of course, I can't really tell that much about its full feature repertoire from peering at the short and small video, but that's the impression I got about the core interaction, anyway.

I'll admit, it's improbable that Apple really got the idea from me (though it wouldn't be the first time ;), but it is encouraging to see that what I came up with was very similar to their design. Seems I must have been on the right track, at least.

On the other hand, this does cast Newsable's future into a certain amount of doubt, since I'm not sure I want to compete with the likes of Apple. Chad and I had some ideas for new directions we could take Newsable (not gonna tell you what they are; Apple might steal them), so maybe we'll have a chance to work on that someday. In the meantime, though, maybe it's time to start thinking about that WYSIWYG blogging tool I've been meaning to write...

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Gmail and the Desirability of Scarcity

internet, society & sociology

June 28, 2004, 12:23 PM

I haven't made a big deal out of it, but I've had a Gmail account since around the time Google publicly announced the service (thanks to Kevin). It's a great little webapp, perhaps the best email client I've ever used, but that's not the point of this post.

Since April, Google has given current users of the service the ability to invite a limited number (2 or 3) of their friends into the fold. This has had the effect of introducing an artificial scarcity of Gmail accounts. I'm guessing that it's also had the effect of making them much more desirable than they otherwise would have been.

When Kevin first sent me the invite, my first thought was "ho hum, another webmail service". But then I got curious, largely because I felt rather privileged. I was cool enough to know Kevin and get early access to this new service. So I signed up, and wound up moving all my email to a webmail client (something I'd never expected I'd do).

Granted, Gmail's superior design and storage capacity were critical factors in this decision. Had Gmail failed to differentiate itself from its competition, I would have taken a look but turned away and gone back to Entourage. But the invite system was enough to convince me to take that first look. Often the weakness of good human-centered design is that it isn't always apparent at first glance, so people may never buy the product even if it would turn out to benefit them greatly. The invite served to make that jump, at least for me.

And it seemed to work for other people as well. During the first round of invites Gmail accounts were going for upwards of $50 on Ebay (now that they're much less scarce, their price has dropped dramatically, of course). The website Gmail Swap was created for people looking to trade things in exchange for Gmail accounts.

I don't know whether this was intentional on Google's part; there are certainly other reasons they might have done it. After all, handing out limited invites makes it easier to control how quickly the application scales so that Google's server admins don't get deluged with an unexpectedly high numbers of new users. But the marketing angle is more interesting; one wonders whether it would apply to other products. Perhaps this is a form of computer-based social networking that 1) doesn't rely on colored bubbles and lines and 2) is actually practically useful.

While we're on the subject, it has been brought to my attention that Google is branching out in new directions. Their next project involves producing a tangy, cheese-based cracker spread. When released, it'll be called "G-Whiz".

Ok, that was bad.

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Making Web Log Analysis Tools Better

design, information, internet

March 05, 2004, 12:22 AM

We're starting our final project in Mapping and Diagramming, which is self-defined. I've decided to focus on designing visualizations of web log data (not to be confused with weblogs, although webloggers are my primary user group), since I've always been of the opinion that the visualizations generated by most current tools tend to suck. So far I've come up with a few sketches and a description of the project.

Some things I want to explore include:

• Better maps of what paths people took through the website (including most frequented paths).
• Information on how long people spent on each page.
• New ways to diagram other important web issues, like page bandwidth consumption, where people come from (referrers), etc.
• Interaction designs for mechanisms to show how these usage trends change over time.

And possibly others as well. I'd like to check out more existing web analysis tools as well as look over some of the relevant research that's been done on the subject, so if anyone has some good pointers, let me know.

Oh, and Dan is doing something wacky with linking together the music people buy, or something.

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Autolinking URLs in Movable Type Comments

internet

January 25, 2004, 06:42 PM

Consider this a followup to my nifty MT plugins post.

Movable Type has a feature to automatically turn URLs embedded in comments into links. Unfortunately, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, you cannot enable this feature and allow HTML in comments at the same time. Fortunately, I found a post on The Girlie Matters that explains how to use Brad Choate's Regex Plugin to autolink URLs in comments even when HTML is enabled.

Make sure you add a no_html="1" attribute to the MTAddRegex tag, however, or the regex will munge valid link tags by trying to turn their href attribute values into links, which you probably don't want, needless to say.

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Ratings and Online Forum Design

design, internet, society & sociology

January 25, 2004, 01:54 PM

Many large online forums such as Slashdot and Kuro5hin support collaborative filtering mechanisms for user-supplied content. The general purpose of these mechanisms is to help make the content people do want to read visible and to hide the content people don't want to read. In both communities mentioned above and many others besides, this takes the form of "moderation", where some users are given the authority to judge whether content supplied by other users is "good". As an aside, Paul Resnick, my former CSCW professor, has a CHI paper coming out on the topic of Slashdot moderation.

Moderation is a feature that tries to deal with many problems at once. The "quality" of a comment or story is subjective and may be based on many factors, and one person's notion of quality may or may not impact another's desire to read the content. Some of these factors may include:

• Spam is generally frowned upon by everyone, and easily identified by everyone. The filtering system need only mark content as "spam or not spam".
• Trolling is harder to detect, and feelings on it are a little more mixed. One person's troll is another person's devil's advocate. Also many people accused of trolling are simply espousing an unpopular opinion, which many forums may wish to actively encourage. So the solution here is less clear; there may need to be more consensus about a comment or story before it gets marked as a troll. And even then the appropriate solution may not be to filter out the content, but merely to mark it as a troll as a warning to other users.
• Information accuracy is theoretically objective but in practice is hard to determine. Truthfulness may be better determined through comments presenting supporting or contradicting evidence than moderation.
• Information interest and relevance may be supported well by moderation, depending on the diversity of the community and how specialized its interests are. A diverse community may have many conflicting opinions among its readership as to what is interesting and relevant, whereas a more specialized community may enjoy more consensus. Community designers need to take into account the type of community they are designing for when judging how (or whether) to address this issue.
• Unpopular opinions can be squelched through collaborative filtering, and again community designers must consider the type of community they wish to create and whether their design goals include encouraging or discouraging heated debate.

The point of all this is not to (necessarily) recommend a more complex moderation system (moderation systems are probably overly complex as it is) but rather to suggest that filtering community content is a complex issue that needs more thought put into it to come up with an appropriate yet simple solution.

The major difficulty with designing collaborative filtering systems is that you must keep the needs of two very different types of users in mind: the reader and the filterer (and possibly the poster of the filtered content as well). The reader wants to see the most interesting content without having to wade through a bunch of crap, but the filterer needs the proper incentives to contribute to the filtering system, and often there is little or no direct benefit to him. How much you can demand from your filterers depends on the type of community; it's worth remembering that the majority of users are social loafers and free riders in any online community (although these terms seem overly harshly judgmental in this context). Its for this reason that I'm always suspicious of collaborative filtering as a panacea; many designers are excited by its potential but, I believe, often ignore the subtle complexities of the design problems it introduces.

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Nifty Movable Type Extensions

internet

January 17, 2004, 09:44 PM

While working on Heimdall, I came across a number of helpful-seeming plugins for Movable Type, so I'm giving them a plug here. Some of these I actually incorporated into the site; others I may incorporate later on but they seemed nifty enough to deserve a mention.

• The comment notifier plugin is what's powering the "Email me responses" option in my comments field, which emails all new comments on a post to anyone who has commented already. An essential feature if you want to encourage discussion on your weblog, since otherwise commenters have to keep coming back to the site and checking your old posts to see whether you (or anyone else) has responded to their words of wisdom. Do note that if you follow Jay's directions for modifying the Comments.pm source, you must have comment emailing enabled in the MT configuration in order for comments to be sent through the notifier. I spent a good couple of hours trying to figure out that one.
• SimpleComments is poorly named, but useful. It lets you intermingle comments and trackbacks, under the theory that they are both forms of commenting on a post. I've had it in use here for awhile now.
• The CAPTCHA anti-spam plugin uses a CAPTCHA to foil spambots from posting junk on your blog. CAPTCHAs are those little images with random words or numbers on them that you have to read and retype into a text box to prove you're a human. You might recognize them from Yahoo or Hotmail or other free email services, which employ them for the same purpose.
• The Bayesian anti-spam plugin was done by the same guy after his CAPTCHA solution was criticized for being inaccessible to the disabled. It takes more work on your part, but it's less of a burden on your users.

The most comprehensive source for plugins is the MT Plugin Directory but there seem to be several that aren't indexed there, so it's worth searching around. O'Reilly has an article on developing MT plugins if you're interested in screwing around with Perl yourself.

I'm still hunting for an MT plugin tag that works like an <MTArchiveList> tag except that its sensitive to its archive context, like <MTEntries> is. In other words, if I'm listing all the weekly archives in a monthy archives context, it should only list the weekly archives for that month, not all the weekly archives in the weblog. If anyone knows of one drop me a line.

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A Deeper Look at CSS

internet, software development

January 07, 2004, 02:37 PM

I've been working hard on my new website design, which is why posting new entries has been so slow of late. Rest assured that I have many things lying around that still need saying, however. The well of my verbosity is far from dry.

I did want to offer a few words of apology to the CSS standard, which I have maligned somewhat in the past. CSS's attention to logical page elements and their properties makes it much easier to work with (and get good results out of) than the standard approach of mucking around with using tables as layout guides. There are still some important things missing from the current CSS standards (I spent all last night trying to get rounded borders on some of my divs, and wound up resorting to tables) but on the whole it's a reasonably well-crafted document formatting metaphor.

That said, there's still two major obstacles that are real showstoppers:

1. Lack of a consistent, correct implementation of CSS in the most common web browser. You wouldn't believe the ugly hacks people have to come up with to get even some pretty simple things to work using CSS in IE.
2. No usable CSS-based authoring environment. It's still easier to create a non-CSS page in Dreamweaver than it is to create a CSS page. And no editor has arisen with a sufficiently usable alternative to get people to switch.

The standard's getting better, though, and hopefully the browsers will catch up with it. But until the perfect solution is crafted, here's some advice on switching to CSS for those who just want to get it done:

• Make a mockup of the page design before trying an HTML/CSS implementation. You'll need the mockup to identify the main logical sections of the document that will need to be styled separately, and thus need to be different classes. I was really glad I had mine handy.
• Don't be afraid to go back to tables for some elements, if it won't interfere with your technical design goals. The semantic markup people would shake their heads at this, but unless you really need a semantically clean document, it's foolish to waste time hacking the CSS to work on buggy browsers or support features it doesn't yet. It's good to have a clear idea of what you're using CSS for, so you can make intelligent decisions about these things.
• As always, when problems arise, Google is your friend. Chances are someone else has had the same problem. Google around and the solution is probably just a few mouse clicks away.
• But a human friend is still even better! Without Dave's advice, this effort would have taken way longer. If you don't already have a friend who is familiar with the ins and outs of CSS, make one.

Now that I've got the main document structures nailed down (so hopefully the worst is behind me) I'm glad I made the switch. I'm excited about the new design; it's getting difficult for me to use the old site now that I know something better is just around the corner.

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A New Year and a New Look

aesthetics, announcements, internet

January 01, 2004, 01:11 AM

The witching hour has come and gone and the year 2004 is now upon us. In this spirit of newness, I've been working on a new design for roBlog as well as the rest of this site, which I'm calling "Heimdall" (the name of the current design is "Odin", in case I never mentioned that). These changes will (hopefully) include:

1. More useful categories
2. Monthly and comprehensive archives
3. The "looking forward / looking behind" feature I mentioned a long time ago
4. Proper print versions of every page
5. Numerous usability-related tweaks

The information architecture of the site shouldn't change much, but I have come up with a proposed new visual design template for the site. Note that this sketch is intended to give a sense of the visuals only, and thus I've left out some page elements like some of the sidebars and the comments sections. In the interests of participatory design, I humbly submit this sketch to you, dear readers, for comments and criticism. If you love it, hate it, or have thoughts on how it could be better, please leave a comment below or send me an email.

Heimdall, I should note, was the Norse god who slew (and was slain by) Loki at Ragnarok, the end of the world. In hopes that it won't spell the end of me, I'm making a New Year's Resolution to complete this project by this time next year at the very latest (and hopefully soon before); a feat which is far from certain since I'm at least as bad as Kevin at completing all the projects that I undertake.

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Weblogs: An Antidote To Misquotes?

internet, politics

December 06, 2003, 05:40 PM

One of the biggest problems for people who are in the public eye is published misquotes from reporters or other mass media producers. This ranges from quoting out of context to inaccurate paraphrasing to flat out made-up statements, whether intentionally or by accident. There are several cases of bright careers getting ruined by misquotes, and many more of badly damaged reputations.

Declan McCullagh, the politics-and-technology writer, recently attacked Lawrence Lessig for allegedly promoting the elimination of anonymity online. Fortunately for Lessig, he keeps a weblog, and provides his side of the story there.

This is a direct benefit of personal publication; if everyone has their soapbox, they can use that soapbox to make responses such as these available to the entire world as soon as a potentially damaging misquote hits the public consciousness. This won't guarantee that people will believe them, of course, but at least it removes the barrier of enforced silence through a lack of publication resources. Beyond that, technology can no longer help, and your reputation must stand on the merits of your arguments and the trustability of your data.

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SSL Certificates - Unusable and (Mostly) Useless

internet, usability

November 11, 2003, 02:40 PM

Matthew Thomas has an interesting rant about the poor usability of the SSL Security Certificate system, the mechanism pretty much all web browsers, email programs, and other internet clients use to establish secure connections to servers over the inherently insecure internet. He argues that the usability is so poor that the security mechanism is rendered useless in the vast majority of cases, and demonstrates this with a description of what really happens in an Alice-and-Bob scenario.

I tend to agree, and I can vouch firsthand for the absurd level of difficulty involved in procuring and setting up a certificate from a major certificate authority, since I had to perform this very task for my last job. It took me hours, and required a high level of technical sophistication. Had our security requirements not been so high, I would likely have given up and gone back to my programming tasks, which were already behind schedule.

SSL certificates are just one example of a system that has been studied and engineered to death, but has stopped just short of a usable, human-centered solution. By failing to take that step, we've effectively destroyed all the benefits the system was supposed to provide. I've pointed out that all software quality attributes, including security, are related to usability before. Although there's been some work on designing usable security systems, this area is still sadly lacking in answers. How many compromised systems, virus debacles, and internet-smashing worms do we need to suffer through before someone decides to do something about it?

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Weblog Home Page Design Idea

design, internet

November 05, 2003, 04:51 PM

Mark Pilgrim has an interesting redesign of his own weblog's home page that he posted recently. I'm not sure if I agree with the page as it stands, but it's given me a few ideas for roBlog that maybe I'll try to flesh out and implement when (if) I get a chance. I'm interested in trying out some design solutions for roBlog that get away from the standard "linear news" format and move more towards visualizing it as a personal knowledge management system.

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Why Trusting Pretty Web Sites Is Rational

internet, society & sociology

November 01, 2003, 10:41 PM

Paul gave a lecture in CSCW yesterday on the topic of economic analyses of reputation systems. One of the points he discussed relates to an earlier post of mine on how people judge the trustworthiness of web sites. The upshot of that post was that the quality of the site that was most relevant to its perceived trustworthiness was how pretty it looks, that this is bad, and people are dumb (implied).

Turns out that conclusion is wrong. Paul presented an economic analysis that explains why a rational, self-interested actor should choose to pay attention to things like the visual appearance of a site. The argument goes like this:

1. Imagine a marketplace which, like most marketplaces, has some number of high-trustworthy sellers and some number of low-trustworthy sellers. Imagine you are a buyer. You have to decide who you are going to buy from, but you don't know, a priori, which sellers are which.
2. Consider the position of the sellers. Both types of sellers have some interest in sending signals to buyers that they are a professional, trustworthy organization that deserves your business. These signals may include trust-focused advertising campaigns and/or spiffing up their website design.
3. The high-trustworthy sellers know that any money they invest in sending these signals will attract customers who will be satisfied with their transaction and will continue to be customers of the business. Thus, they invest a good deal of money into making their website attractive.
4. The low-trustworthy sellers know that money they invest will only have a limited return, since they can't scam you forever (eventually you'll find out that they are violating your trust) and then they will lose your business. So they will not invest as much money in making their website spiffy, since the rate of return for them is lower than it is for the high-trustworthy sellers, and thus the market is against them.
5. So as a buyer, you have reason to believe that a site with a spiffy visual design is trustworthy, since high-trustworthy organizations have a greater interest in spending their money on such pursuits. Therefore, it is perfectly rational to associate an attractive visual design with trustworthiness (even though it is hardly a strict guarantee).

Of course, as several people pointed out in class, this "ideal" model doesn't hold true in all markets. For instance, this model assumes that it's easy for a buyer to end a relationship with a seller as soon as he realizes the seller is untrustworthy. But this isn't always the case; for instance, in apartment rental markets, buyers must generally sign year-long leases that commit them to staying with the same landlord even if the landlord reneges on his responsibilities. And even after that year is up, the expenses of moving may keep many tenants in situations they otherwise wouldn't accept had they known before they moved in. So, like any general economic analysis, you have to think about which conditions it will hold under and which conditions it will not.

Still, it's an interesting counterpoint to my more cynical earlier comments.

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Online Community Currency Analysis

internet, society & sociology

October 29, 2003, 09:42 AM

The ever-insightful localroger has an article on K5 analyzing comment moderation system currencies (like Slashdot's Karma and K5's Mojo) and providing some design recommendations for improving these virtual economies.

Although I'm filing this under Meta it is not a specific suggestion for immediate changes to Scoop. Rather, it is a set of ideas I've been mulling over based on what e-community engines like Scoop, Slashcode, and various web BBS packages are all trying to become, and how the next generation might do it even more effectively.

Whether you call it Mojo, Karma, "Standing," or something else, all content rating feedback systems have some sort of currency. While there are many different ways of acquiring and spending such capital, nobody seems to have implemented an economy varied enough to be robust. And this is the key to building a system which can be stable in the long term.

Some of Roger's ideas seem good and others need work, but he's on the right track. We should be doing more of these comparative analyses and reasoning about the effects of community features on the social structures they're supposed to be supporting.

Analyzing Roger's ideas using the social science design principles we're developing in CSCW is left as an exercise for the reader.

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Rethinking File Transfers

design, internet

October 24, 2003, 12:20 AM

Joel is posting about tokens, a new way of transferring large files and/or complex folder structures:

It's hard to believe that here it is, what, 2002? No, I think it's 2003, and when you want to send a really big file or a folder full of little files to someone, you generally wind up messing around with ftp servers and whatnot.

Well, no longer. "A token is like a shortcut or alias that you can send via e-mail or instant message. With just one click you can create a token, and no matter how large the files you want to send are, the token representing them will be very small - just a few KB. Anyone you send a token to can then download the free Creo Token Redeemer software, and with one click redeem the token and download the files. It works for anything - a single file, an entire folder, a huge movie."

What's interesting about this idea, whether or not it takes off, is that it's a new interaction design for a very old problem that has enjoyed virtually no improvement for decades. It's always great to see fresh new solutions for hoary old kludges that, for some reason, everyone's implicitly agreed just can't be improved (even if they are obviously in need of improvement).

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Paul's Online Social Science Weblog

internet, people, society & sociology

October 23, 2003, 07:56 AM

So it turns out one of my professors for CSCW, Paul Resnick, has a weblog (on livejournal, no less). Doesn't look like he updates it very often, but when he does he posts some nice, lengthy reflections on his experiences with online communities research. His most recent entries chronicle his experiences at the Online Communities Summit, which looks like it was a fun event. Might be worth checking out; he's in my Newsable sources list!

In his last post, Paul learned about Technorati and complained that he didn't have too many incoming links. Consider this my contribution to the cause. :)

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Mark's Bread and Online Identity

funny, internet, society & sociology

October 20, 2003, 10:39 PM

Mark Pilgrim is having problems baking bread:

I have been coping with my new bread machine for several months now, with distinctly mixed results. The first loaf came out great, an outcome which I attribute entirely to beginner's luck. The second loaf failed spectacularly, by which I mean that it failed to mix, bake, or rise, three steps which are generally considered crucial to successful breadmaking.

At this point I decided to quietly stop blogging about it, in an attempt to project, as they say in The Matrix, a somewhat fantasized mental projection of my digital self. Online, I am a god who commands the respect and adoration of thousands. Offline, I am a moron who can't bake bread in a bread machine. This blogging thing, it has legs, but not for the reasons you've been told about.

Mark's a funny guy. His quip also brings up some interesting issues with online identity, specifically the identity of webloggers. It's quite true that the persona a weblogger projects online can be quite different from his "real life" persona. To an extent, you get to pick who you want to be on this Internet of ours.

Sometimes I wonder what sort of person those who read this weblog but don't know me in real life imagine me to be. It all smells vaguely of postmodernism. My friend Katie, a sociologist, argues that the Internet is essentially postmodernist. Now I'm wishing I'd asked her what she meant by that.

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Posting Tool Wish List

internet, writing & communication

October 17, 2003, 09:36 PM

Micah has been pondering switching from his beloved Radio Userland to Movable Type, but has found a few of his favorite features in Radio missing in MT. In particular, he wants:

1. Rich text editing. Basically, an embedded HTML editor.
2. Automatic file uploads. I.e., you drag your file into a special folder on your local machine, and the client automatically uploads it to the server.

These sound like some pretty useful features to me. Although I love the web interface to MT (mainly because I can post from any computer) I also wouldn't mind having a more featureful local client, which is quite possible since MT supports the Blogger API. And as long as we're rattling off a wish list, I wouldn't mind seeing the following:

1. Local saving / crash protection. Sometimes I'd like to be able to write entries when I have no available network connection, so a local entry cache would be nice, but even more importantly, the tool should provide crash protection so I don't lose my posts to an application or system crash. Safari sadly lacks such a feature and I've lost more than one post to a badly-timed "unexpected quit".
2. Fix some of the annoying usability bugs in Movable Type. For instance, MT sets the posted-on date to the "first saved" timestamp, not the "first published" timestamp like I want (and which makes the most sense). Not a big deal since I can manually change it, but it's still irritating. A good tool should provide a more sensible interaction design for the posting task.
3. Spell checking. I already get this with Safari, but it's a feature I definitely don't want to lose.
4. Auto-linking certain words. Some words, like the names of my friends, I almost always link to a particular website. It'd be nice if the posting tool did this for me.
5. Smarter link management in general. I link a lot. It's what webloggers do. A good posting tool should make the process of finding and inserting links easier, perhaps through browser integration. For instance, perhaps it could help me track down references on the web for a paper or idea I'm referring to.
6. An embedded outliner. Maybe I'm the only one who does this, but I frequently outline my posts before writing them in full. A good tool should support this progression of outline-to-post in a more direct fashion.
7. Mac support. Again, maybe only I care. But I post from my Mac laptop the vast majority of the time. If a tool doesn't work on my Mac, I'm not using it. Period.

If anyone knows of a tool that implements a reasonable number of the aforementioned features, please do give me (and Micah!) a heads up.

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CSS and Linked File Types

internet, software development

October 12, 2003, 01:13 PM

Andy writes of a CSS rule to auto-insert file type images after your URLs, so that your readers will know what kind of file the link points to. This struck me as a nice, easy way to warn readers about PDF content if you don't want to have to create a gateway page every time you link to one, so I stole his rule for my stylesheet and added one for Flash movies. As an aside, Micah had another nice tip relating to linking to specific PDF pages.

CSS seems to be getting better as a means of separating web content from its presentation. Used to be, you couldn't really do jack squat with CSS except change the font colors (slight hyperbole, but only slight), which really hurt the CSS advocates' case since the kinds of page designs you could do in pure CSS were pretty limited and boring. You still can't do everything you want to in CSS but at least it is getting better. RoBlog still uses table-based layouts, for instance, and will continue to do so until CSS positioning gets better. I heard awhile ago that CSS3 was going to contain constraint-based layout rules; I wonder if that's still true.

Oh, and if you're wondering why you can't see any file type icons, do note that this flavor of CSS doesn't work with Internet Explorer (or, as Andy puts it, "it's only gonna work in browsers with a conceptual grasp of the twenty-first century" :).

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Weblogs As Common Ground

internet, society & sociology

October 10, 2003, 07:41 PM

Last week, we had an SSS on weblogs. Unlike last year's hour-long talks, this one was more of a freewheeling discussion session. Neema provides a taste of commentary.

Chad made an interesting comment during the session. He remarked how being a weblogger had created a new kind of social relationship for him. Some of his friends and acquaintances he doesn't see very often, but he reads their weblog and he knows they read his. This creates a novel social dynamic when he does run into these people, since both he and his friend have certain knowledge in common from reading each other's weblogs that they can both refer back to and discuss.

Essentially, what Chad is referring to is a unique form of common ground that he and his weblog friends have established. Both parties in the conversation share a certain form of knowledge (the contents of the weblog posts they've both read) and thus can refer back to them without lengthy explanations of the concepts.

I ran into Chad at Entropy earlier that week, and experienced this phenomenon firsthand. I must say, it's neat to be actually experiencing these new social forms in the flesh!

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Friendster Trading Cards

internet, society & sociology

October 10, 2003, 05:53 PM

My friend Scott Davidoff and I were discussing Friendster this afternoon. Scott is not normally a big online communities fan, but he checked out Friendster since it relates to his CSCW project.

Now, one of the interesting (although not so surprising) phenomenons in Friendster is the "friend collector". Certain users of the system use Friendster as a kind of online popularity contest, where they invite just about anyone they know to be their friend just to rack up the number of pictures on their page. Scott and I have a mutual acquaintance (let's call her "Elise") who apparently engages in this practice. Although Scott barely knows her, Elise sent him a "let's be friends" invitation. Scott said, and I quote, "I felt like I'd just received an 'Elise' trading card!"

Turns out it's been called that before, but still, this has got to be the single best metaphor I've heard yet for Friendster. Perhaps they should capitalize on this concept and make a sort of mainstream "Magic: The Gathering"-style MMORPG with your friends (and friends-of-friends, and friends-of-friends-of-friends) as the game pieces.

If I wind up taking Game Design next semester, maybe I'll do it myself as one of my projects! ;)

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Welcome to Wiki

internet, usability, writing & communication

October 08, 2003, 04:50 PM

I set up a Wiki last night for Dana and I to use for our CSCW project (sorry, no link to the actual Wiki; it's an invitation-only affair for now). I happened across PmWiki (which is open source) when searching for options on Wiki software (through a Google text ad, no less) and installed it to give it a shot.

So far I'm pretty happy with it, both with regards to the Wiki concept and Patrick's implementation. It's even pretty usable, all things considered, which was something I was worried about. In fact, I was browsing the documentation for PmWiki and found that Patrick had actually done some user analysis for his system. It's not quite personas, but he's definitely on the right track.

I'm hoping that the wiki will help Dana and I collaboratively distill operational design principles and heuristics from all this social science reading that we are (supposed to be) doing, thus fulfilling Bob and Paul's (and our) vision for the class. We'll see how it goes, but in any event, if you're looking to set up a wiki of your own, I'd recommend checking out Patrick's offering.

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The Ivory Blog Bubble

internet, society & sociology

October 06, 2003, 10:13 PM

Oliver Willis asks whether webloggers are taking themselves too seriously:

During one of the Saturday sessions a member of the audience referred to the assembled crowd as "utopia". Now, yes, I loved the blog camaraderie but quite frankly I don't want to be the only black person in utopia. I was the only black person in that room, and was one of a few minorities. I'm not whining about that, but simply stating the fact that a technology that is mostly the pursuit of upper middle class white males does diddly to change the real world. I'm a geek through-and-thorough but when I hear tooth gnashing about issues like copyright as if they were the most important issue in the world - it tells me that the blog world is somewhat out of touch.

Again, it is quite similar to the web bubble. For a while when you were inside the industry (as I was) it would be easy to think: everybody is doing this. When the truth of the matter is that they weren't and they aren't. The vast majority of Americans are not online, and even those that are online only a small portion of them are reading blogs, and an even smaller amount are reading politically oriented blogs. That small percentage does tend to be quite influential (particularly if they're a part of the media) but it is our duty as bloggers to understand that we aren't exactly changing the world yet.

A too-true point, and one that I don't have much to add to (for once). Just a single thought: Whose world are we changing? We should think about these things, much more than we do. Before our time to think has passed us by.

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Newsable: Ready to Rock!

information, internet, software development, usability

October 04, 2003, 01:14 PM

It is, after all, Rocktober.

I've just unveiled Newsable 0.8 beta to a breathlessly-awaiting public (this public, in case you were curious, consists of Kerry and Jordan), thus marking the first release of my web-based news aggregator / modest experiment in merging open source and usability. The low-down on the current status follows.

First off, go ahead and create an account to take Newsable for a test drive. No, I really mean it. Go do that now.

Ok, now that you're back, let me confess that a few things still need work in the current release:

1. The interface is ugly as all hell. Jordan is kindly lending me some of his awesome graphic design skills to help fix that. Additional help would of course be greatly appreciated.
2. There are still known bugs. Namely, the harvester isn't entirely behaving itself, and the RSS autodetection algorithm needs a bit of improvement to handle the real web. I'll try to get these cleared up ASAP, but the system should be usable in the mean time.
3. The help system isn't available yet. If you get confused about something, feel free to email me. This will help me know what needs documentation / usability improvements as well.
4. Some of the interaction design decisions are tentative. The "Archived Stories" tab exemplifies this best. I don't yet have enough user data to make guided design decisions about these features. The personas still need some refinement.
5. Some more advanced features aren't yet available. OPML import / export support is one of these. I hope to have these in place before 1.0

As you can see, there are many opportunities to get involved with improving Newsable even if you aren't interested in writing Perl code (unlike the majority of open source projects). Please email me if you have any ideas for improvements in the aforementioned areas. I may try to set up a mailing list soon to create a central place for discussion.

Happy reading!

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An Online Community for U&SA

internet, society & sociology, software development, usability

September 29, 2003, 09:02 PM

As many of you already know, I am currently employed here at Carnegie Mellon as a research assistant for the U&SA project. By day, I investigate the relationship between the usefulness, usability, and desirability of software systems (the human-centered view) and the architectural decisions that dominate the construction of these systems and ultimately determine what is easy to change and what is hard to change (the machine-centered view). Specifically, I work to improve our U&SA technique which involves general usability scenarios and considerations that impact software architecture design decisions and design recommendations for developing architectures that better implement these scenarios. (By night, I'm either an overworked graduate student or a hard-boozin' party animal, depending on the phase of the moon and the moods of my professors...)

When I leave here, one of the projects I hope to have time to start involves developing an online community for improving and refining the U&SA technique. Essentially, I believe we've got something good here but that it could benefit from more industry feedback and the infusion of best-practice wisdom. Hopefully CSCW will better prepare me for this task by the end of the semester, but in the meantime, here's a few thoughts on what such a community might look like:

• The scenarios could go in a wiki so that several people could propose and refine examples of architecturally-sensitive usability issues. This way, every time someone encountered an important usability concern that turned out to be difficult to add later and that wasn't covered by our material, they could add a scenario for it or modify an existing scenario to include it.
• Discussion boards on applying the scenarios to real-world projects and technologies. These boards may focus on discussing technology-specific patterns for the scenarios, such as implementing Cancel in a J2EE system, or on existing toolkit and framework support for the scenarios.
• Moderated essays on distilling out considerations and patterns from the scenarios and technology discussions. These essays would necessarily entail a lot of meta-analysis and require a higher degree of accuracy, so they should require more community consensus for publication. I'm thinking something like a Kuro5hin-style voting system for determining whether they're published or dumped.

So those are my initial, very rough ideas. If you're interested in helping me flesh them out some time, please do let me know.

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Libel Laws and Blogging

internet, politics

September 17, 2003, 12:54 PM

This is old news, but I think it's worth repeating (I'm just no good at being an information courier... :).

Last June, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that webloggers can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish. Newspapers and other official media outlets can be sued if they republish false information that causes harm to someone (even if they themselves didn't make up the information). But the court decided that weblogs are more like informal discourse and less like carefully fact-checked news publications, and thus fell under the rules for speech rather than news.

I've ruminated about the issue of speech laws online before, as well as some other good news. Nice to see that the courts appear to be making sensible decisions about these sorts of things.

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A More User-Centered HTTP Log Analysis Tool?

internet, usability

September 06, 2003, 12:39 PM

I was pouring over my logs yesterday and I realized I'm getting more and more frustrated with the inadequacies of Webalizer, especially with regard to performing log analyses for the purposes of enhancing usability. Webalizer takes a very system-centric approach of basically compiling and graphing HTTP request data, rather than a user-centric approach of trying to generate visualizations of the log data that answer the questions of its users. Although there are a few promising features (tracking "visits" and extracting search query terms from referer URLs), in general the tool leaves much to be desired.

So I'm wondering if there are any better tools out there, ideally open-source but I'd be willing to purchase a proprietary product if the price is reasonable. Here's some of the kinds of features I'm looking for:

• Better capabilities for associating visitors with the URLs they viewed. It's less helpful for me to see the top 30 URLs by hits than it is to see what sites visited what URLs and how many times they visited them.
• Some tracking of the paths visitors take through the site. This can help give a sense of what content people are most interested in, what content is hard to find, etc.
• Association of search terms with the pages they linked the visitor to.
• Better graphing of hits, sites, and visits, such as the ability to view daily trends over multiple months.
• Just working better in general; for instance, allowing me to tell it to completely ignore requests from htdig in performing the analyses. I've supposedly told Webalizer to IgnoreSites from the Labs itself, but this only works for some of the calculations.

I realize that much of the data users really want to see (exactly who is reading their site, how many real people are reading, etc.) cannot be obtained from HTTP request headers. But all the features I've mentioned above are perfectly implementable. The designers of these tools just need to take a more user-centered perspective.

So, anyone know of any better alternatives? 'Cuz I'd sure like to.

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Teaching, IT, and Making Research Matter

internet, teaching & learning

September 05, 2003, 07:22 PM

Last Wednesday, I attended a discussion forum on "Information Technology and the Research University", which I mentioned I was invited to earlier. There were a bunch of bigwigs from the National Academies present; they were apparently interested in how CMU faculty and students were using IT currently, what IT research was going on to try to improve education, and what the future trends appeared to be. Ken Koedinger, the cognitive tutors and educational technology expert from the HCII, was there to talk about his research. So was Jared Cohen, the president of CMU, so this must have been a reasonably big deal to the university.

I spoke a little about the types of communication mediums that students commonly use nowadays, including weblogs, instant messaging, and email. Some of the committee members seemed very interested in multiplayer gaming, which I didn't know too much about although some of the other students did.

They were also concerned about how many of the CSCW technologies introduced into classrooms to foster community tended to get dropped after a few weeks of use. I pointed out that part of the reason for this (I believe) is that these technologies tend to get imposed in a top-down fashion without much regard for whether they will fit into the students' (and teachers') styles of working and learning. Most of the technologies that have been successful (email, IM, file sharing services, and now, perhaps, weblogs) were not imposed from above but instead were picked up by students and pulled into the classroom. The committee didn't seem to have much to say about this; one of the members responded by claiming (essentially) that attempts to impose technologies in a top-down fashion has worked successfully in the Army, so why not in the university? I don't think I have to elaborate on the problems with that reasoning. My hypothesis is that educational technologies (community-oriented or not) have to take into account their users (teachers and students) and their users' goals if they wish to be successful. And this means properly integrating themselves with the lesson plans and the student and teacher work flows. Hopefully I'll have more to say about this as CSCW wears on.

As we were wrapping up, Joel asked the committee if they had recommendations on what future research should be done in the area of IT and the university. Their reaction was surprising and encouraging. Pretty much all the committee members responded that we already know quite enough; the problem isn't that we need more research, the problem is that we need to figure out a way to take the research we do have and actually put it into practice. All of them seemed to be aware that very little of the work that gets done in the modern university actually influences the work of industry and government. (Interesting factoid: I was talking to a woman who works for the Office of Technology Transfer. She said the government gets a return of two cents for every dollar they spend on university research. That's a net loss of 98%. Think about that for a minute.)

Several of the faculty who were present pointed out that there currently exists no incentive structure for them to work towards getting their research adopted in practice. There is also little incentive structure in a research institution (like CMU) for the faculty to spend time improving their lesson plans and teaching skills. President Cohen and the Vice Provost of Education resisted this claim on the grounds that CMU had many wonderful teachers, but the committee responded that they didn't doubt that; they were just asking if there were better ways of doing business at the organizational level. And of course the committee is right. Sure there will be those who take initiative on their own, but if there is no organizational support and award structures to support good teaching, this will be the exception and not the rule. Matt made this point quite nicely in a discussion of one of my old posts. Essentially this is the same argument that the CMM makes about the importance of software development processes; relying on virtuosos may produce great results sometimes, but these results won't be repeatable. If you want your organization to grow, you need a good process.

At any rate, it's good to know the decision makers seem to be thinking about the right issues. Whether they do anything effective about them remains to be seen.

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Spam-Protect Your Email Links

internet, software development

September 05, 2003, 12:49 AM

I've been putting the finishing touches on the MHCI students' bios page this evening. One thing I wanted to do was spam-protect everyone's email address (we get enough web-harvested spam already since the SCS, in its infinite wisdom, posts our addresses unprotected in its directory). I was going to roll my own perl script to scan the HTML files and replace mailto: links with impossible-to-harvest javascript generation code, but instead I decided to search the web to see if someone else had thought of this already and came across a very nice solution already put together for me.

Jody Brabec, if you ever read this, thanks for the great script! And the take home lesson for the rest of us is: oftentimes spending five minutes with Google will save you hours of coding, testing, and debugging time (just to be safe, I took a few minutes to modify the variable names in Jody's javascript to fool spambots that might happen to know of his script; I'd suggest you do the same). Reuse is a Good Thing™ when you can get it.

[ Permanent Location ]

Analyzing Communities

internet, society & sociology

September 01, 2003, 12:57 AM

The fall semester has begun here at CMU, and I'm taking a class in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) from Bob Kraut. This semester, the class is focusing on Designing Online Communities and Bob is co-teaching it with Paul Resnick, a recommender systems (think Amazon.com ratings) expert who is visiting from the University of Michigan.

In the first class, which was last Friday, we discussed several types of social structures that exist both in the real world and online:

• Groups are a small number of people who come together to accomplish well-defined goals and have a specific, agreed-upon purpose. Most of the teams you may have worked with for projects in a class or at a workplace fall into this category.
• Voluntary associations are generally larger collections of people who all share common goals or interests and have agreed to congregate around those interests. Unlike groups, the goals of a voluntary association may not be very well-defined. Voluntary associations tend to last longer than groups, however; many may even have indefinite lifespans. An example is your local chapter of the YMCA.
• Communities are like voluntary associations but might be more loosely organized. I don't believe we talked much about this category, so I don't recall a whole lot of distinguishing features. I'd imagine communities involve people coming together to socialize and share in each other's lives, and are potentially even longer-running than voluntary organizations (you may belong to some communities for your entire life).
• Third places are locations people go to socialize that are separate from the home and the workplace (which are the first and second places). Third places are characterized by people coming together to revel in the uniqueness of each others' personalities; the patrons of the third place go for each other and not as much because the place is enjoyable per se. An example would be a neighborhood bar. Cheers is kind of the prototypical third place.
• Social networks are collections of people who are associated with one another through social interactions such as friendships, working relationships, etc. Your social network defines who you talk to, who you can ask favors of, who you can get information out of, etc. Bob went into an interesting digression where he showed a drawing of a social network some sociologists had observed; he pointed out how the network formed certain "clusters" that were only connected to other clusters through a single link between one node in each. Bob remarked that the two people who formed that link were frequently (de facto) powerful individuals since they controlled the communication between those two social clusters. This is especially true if the groups must frequently exchange important information, since they get to play gatekeeper for that information.
• Social capital describes the sense of trustworthiness and shared identity that people feel towards one another. Your social capital is a measure of this sense that people experience towards you; if you have high social capital among a certain group of people they will tend to value what you say and listen to you; if you have a low social capital, they're more likely to ignore you. This is a different way of looking at social relationships than the more structural ones I mentioned before.

Bob also made an interesting point about how physical architectures (as in, the structures of buildings) define the environment in which a community operates and thus has a large influence on the community itself. The readings drew a metaphor between building architectures and city planning (the kinds of things Alexander discusses) that physical communities live in and the design of the software systems that virtual communities live in. The suggestion, of course, is that the software system design influences these virtual communities in a similar fashion. This was really interesting to me; I had originally thought of going to grad school to study online communities in general and specifically how the design of social software systems influenced the way their communities operated. I hope we'll talk more about this issue in later classes.

Neema is also in the class and has posted his thoughts on his weblog. Chad is taking the course as well; hopefully he'll put up a few reflections as the semester wears on. If you, dear reader, happen to be a member of the class and have a weblog of your own, please post it in a comment below or send me a trackback ping. I'd like to keep tabs on what other people think of the course.

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Information Technology and the University

internet, teaching & learning

August 15, 2003, 12:40 AM

Last week I randomly got an email from Joel Smith, the CIO and director of educational technology here at CMU, asking if I'd be willing to meet with him to discuss "IT and the research university". Apparently Ryan pointed him in my direction; why he thought of me I'm not sure.

I met with him today; he's part of a group from the National Academies that is looking into how information technology (IT) is used in universities for education and research, what new trends are appearing that may indicate how it will change in the future, and what direction students and researchers feel it ought to be going in. He is putting together a panel of students and faculty for the National Academies people to talk to about these issues and wanted to know if I was interested in participating. I remarked that it sounded like an interesting problem since it was similar to what we do in HCI, where we study how people use technology and then try to design new technologies that will work better for them. I spouted some of the truisms in HCI ("users can tell you what they do but not how they can do it better", "users know what the problems are but may not know the right solutions"); Joel seemed interested.

I thought as we were talking how it was sometimes surprisingly hard to articulate what exactly it is that we do over in HCI, why there's a need for us, and what our methods and techniques involve. It may be a good exercise to get several good usability people together in one room to come up with "elevator speeches" (assume you have to give a pitch for or an explanation of a given topic in the time it takes for an elevator to get from the starting floor to its destination) for some of these HCI-related issues. For instance, can we give a quick explanation of what a Contextual Inquiry is and why you'd want to do one? I think this could be very useful if we ever find ourselves in the position of advocating usability to the grand poobahs of our companies (which we will, I don't doubt).

Joel was also interested in weblogs, especially when I mentioned I kept one. He asked why I decided to start one and whether they were a major form of communication among students. I gave some of my thoughts on the different uses of weblogs, but I felt like it should really be someone like Micah, who's practically a certified expert on the topic, sitting in that chair instead of me. But Micah, alas, has left for good. And I suppose I ought to start considering myself a serious weblogger, especially considering that I'm writing my own news aggregator.

At any rate, it sounds like an interesting investigation, although I'm not sure what will come out of it. I plan to try to get involved.

[ Permanent Location ]

For Wont of an Aggregator the Linking Was Lost

internet

August 14, 2003, 12:52 AM

Those of you who are particularly observant might have noticed that I haven't been linking to too many articles on external websites as of late and roBlog has gotten a little more introspective as a result. I credit this largely to the fact that I'm no longer using a news aggregator. I've been using the "Friends" sidebar on this weblog as a poor man's substitute while I plow away at Newsable, but my little friendFeed perl script doesn't have the breadth of capabilities of a real aggregator. As a result, the number of sites I visit regularly has declined greatly. This is in accordance with my observations in the Newsable user studies, where I noticed that the participants who didn't use news aggregators read around 3 or 4 periodically updated web sites daily, whereas those who did use aggregators read upwards of 100.

From this, we can deduce two prescriptive courses of action:

1. If you aren't using a news aggregator, get one and start using it! Or wait... scratch that. Wait until I've released Newsable, then starting using the best news aggregator known to man.
2. If you are a website author, publish your content in RSS! Those who have news aggregators will be reluctant to revert back to the old, slow site-by-site method just to read your site, and those who don't won't have time to read yours anyway since they only read 3 or 4. So there's no good reason not to publish in RSS. The advocate for the users has spoken.

At any rate, apologies for all the navel-gazing I've been doing lately. Once I finally get this software up off the ground I'll probably find all kinds of insightful content out there in the blogosphere and will happily link away.

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roBlog's Scannability

internet, personal, writing & communication

August 02, 2003, 10:15 PM

Neema told me yesterday that he finds all the content on this weblog hard to digest. He suggested I provide a summary or bulleted "main points" section for each points so he could get the gist of the content without having to read the entire article.

I tend to post a lot of content on this forum because I see it primarily as a form of personal reflection and only secondarily as a form of communication. However, I'd love to improve on the second goal if there are ways of doing it without sacraficing the first, and I do realize that having several paragraphs of dense text is asking a lot from my loyal readers :). So I'm open to comments, ideas, and criticisms on how best to fix this problem.

For now, I'm trying a technique Jacob Nielsen uses on his Alertbox: he recommends highlighting important words and phrases to improve scannability. Personally, I feel this makes his essays "shout" a bit too much, but I'll give it a shot anyway. Feedback would be greatly appreciated.

[ Permanent Location ]

The Last Straw and a New Itch

internet, personal

July 04, 2003, 02:15 PM

AmphetaDesk has annoyed me for the last time. After having to manually change the localhost port from 4888 to 8888 since it sometimes randomly decides to launch the browser with the wrong port number in OS X, I wanted to see the exact time a couple new weblog entries it harvested were posted on, and of course it does not display this information. So I trashed it, for good. The next news aggregator I use will be Newsable, or my name is not Robin James Adams.

Which it is.

So there.

[ Permanent Location ]

Anatomy of a News Aggregator

design, internet, patterns, software development

June 28, 2003, 05:44 PM

For the past couple of days, I've been working on the interface and architectural design for Newsable. Since I am a strong believer in the claim that the design decisions that determine whether an application is usable are not purely screen deep, but may reach far into the application's architecture, I wanted to get a rough idea of the interface design and information architecture of the application before deciding on the core components and patterns of the internal design and how they will interact. That said, I don't yet have digital copies of the screen designs, so I can't easily post them. Once I get some prototypes together I'll put them up along with a justification for my design decisions.

So on to the architecture. Newsable is divided into two parts, the Harvester (whom I'm code-naming "Cain") and the Publisher (whom I'm code-naming "Able"). This reflects the two main functions of a news aggregator; it must collect news stories from several potentially disparate sources and pull them all together into one location. Then it must catalog and organize these stories and, most importantly, provide an interface so the user can peruse them in the ways that are natural for her. And thus we have developed Newsable's core metaphor: Newsable is a gatherer who searches the various news sources looking for new stories, a librarian who catalogues these stories and manages their metadata, and finally a publisher that arranges this information into a form that is presentable to the reader.

First, we'll examine Newsable's preliminary object model. The details of this diagram are likely to change frequently, but it's worth examining now to take a look at the key terminology and metaphors in Newsable:

Newsable works with any number of users subscribing to any number of sources. A "source" is a single news producer. Note that a website may have multiple sources. Usually, a source will be a feed, but Newsable supports providing "alerts" to users that a web page has been updated since they last visited it in case the website doesn't yet publish their content in RSS. The content Newsable extracts from sources is "stories". A story is usually a news item, an article, a weblog entry, etc., but it may include stuff like weather reports, stock quotes, etc. So "story" may not be an entirely accurate term, but since most stories published through RSS really are stories I felt this was currently the best choice of terms.

Next, we'll take a look at Cain, Newsable's Harvester:

Here's Cain's basic algorithm:

1. Cain is triggered by the operating system's command scheduler; since The Labs is running Linux, this would be cron. I may add a means for the user to trigger Cain to run on the subset of feeds she is subscribed to, this means Able will have to have a way to send events to Cain, but this won't exist in version 0.1.
2. The scheduler triggers the Gatherer, which reads the list of feeds Newsable is currently subscribed to from the MySQL database (the database is wrapped in a Data Abstraction component that hides the details of the underlying SQL data source and performs object-relational mapping) and checks each feed to see if it has updated since the Gatherer last visited it (using a HTTP HEAD). If it has, the Gatherer fetches the feed content with GET, otherwise it ignores the feed.
3. Once it has all the new feed content, the Gatherer sends the list to the Librarian.
4. The Librarian is responsible for comparing the information in the feeds with the information in the database and updating as appropriate. But the Librarian can't read RSS itself, so it sends the feeds to the RSS Parser module.
5. The RSS Parser first attempts to determine the format of the feed (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, or RSS 2.0, or a broken variation of these. "Broken" means the feed is not well-formed XML. The "Broken" parsers will do their best to extract content anyway, probably using some horrendous kludge involving regular expressions. These probably won't exist in version 0.1). The RSS Parser then internally loads the appropriate specialized parser to extract the content from the feed, which it returns to the Librarian.
6. The Librarian checks the database to see which stories are new and which already exist. It adds the new stories and updates the feeds' last updated times.

I plan to extend the Gatherer to honor the "skip" elements in RSS feeds that indicate how long a harvester should wait until re-harvesting the feed. Moreover, there is a publish-subscribe mechanism built into RSS which I believe is intended to allow clients to request that the server send them updates as soon as they are posted. I don't think this is widely implemented, however. If I discover this is possible, then I'll add another component to register and listen for these events to allow Newsable to update itself immediately when new content appears in its feeds.

And that's Cain in a nutshell.

Finally we'll examine Able, Newsable's Publisher.

Able is more event-driven than Cain, so it's a bit harder to give an algorithmic explanation for. Able follows the Model-View-Controller pattern. The Controller is played by the Input Processor Script, a CGI script that interprets the HTTP GET and/or POST parameters, determines the operation the user wishes to perform, then calls the appropriate method on the Command Processor component, which collaborates with Newsable's data source to play the part of the Model. When the Command Processor has finished its computations, it returns its results to the Input Processor Script which selects an Output Template, playing the part of the View, to display these results in.

Much more remains to be said about Able, but the details of its design are likely to change as the needs identified by the personas evolve, so I'll leave it at that for now.

And there you have it. The guts of an up-and-coming news aggregator laid bare.

[ Permanent Location ]

The Ways We Read

internet, psychology, usability

June 25, 2003, 12:22 AM

Earlier this month, I ran an investigation of how people browse periodically updated websites (such as news sites, weblogs, or any page whose content changes and people keep coming back to view these changes). I ran these studies to inform the design of Newsable. They are directly intended to feed into the development of Newsable's user personas, but I promised several people I'd post the results when they became available, a promise I've been remiss in fulfilling thus far. So, at long last, here's the full writeup of my findings.

Experimental Method

To collect the data, I followed the basic Contextual Inquiry technique as described in Contextual Design. In essence, Contextual Inquiry is a quick-and-dirty form of ethnography. Like more rigorous ethnographic techniques, Contextual Inquiry relies on observing study participants in their "natural environment", i.e. while they are performing the tasks you are interested in as they would normally perform them. Unlike other techniques, Contextual Inquiry calls for lots of interaction between the experimenter and the participant; the experimenter constantly interrupts the participant's work to ask questions, clarify assumptions, explore areas of particular interest in greater depth, etc. A good contextual inquiry, then, keeps the participant "in context", or requires them to show the experimenter how they do their work rather than asking them to give vague summaries that won't contain many important details, while at the same time getting at the behavior the experimenter is interested in without having to spend months as a "fly on the wall" while dispassionately observing the participant.

For me, this translated into sitting down with the participants as they read their daily websites and asking them about what they were looking at, what they were thinking, why they chose to click this link and not that one, etc. In total, I observed eight users for about an hour to an hour and a half each. People who are trying to be rigorous about their contextual inquiries often videotape the entire session for later analysis. I just took notes.

Note that the nature of the data Contextual Inquiry is designed to collect is not statistically generalizable. Ethnography emphasizes deep investigation of the full range of rich behaviors for a small number of participants, not narrowly focusing on one tiny aspect of the behavior for a large number of participants that will yield a p of less than .05. This means that the findings I'm about to present are (hopefully) sufficient to guide the design of a news aggregator but not sufficient to make timeless generalizations about human behavior.

Results and Findings

Of the eight users I observed, two already used a news aggregator (NetNewsWire and Radio Userland). There was a clear correlation between the number of sites participants read and whether they used a news aggregator. The six who did not use an aggregator read around three or four sites every day. The two who did read upwards of fifty different sites on a daily basis. I think this speaks to an interesting quality of news aggregators. At first blush they don't appear to be very useful programs, after all, all they do is save you the minimal effort of clicking on a few entries in your bookmarks sidebar to hop from site to site. But by collecting the news from various sites into one easily-scannable location, news aggregators actually greatly increase the amount of content the reader is willing and capable of skimming regularly. This has the potential to expose people to a much wider variety of news sources and their corresponding perspectives.

All the participants I observed spent a lot of their time skimming content to see if it looked interesting to them. They all liked to visually scan for content that looked interesting; they didn't approach the news-reading task with many preconceived notions of what kind of content they were looking for, but instead glanced over what they found and made a judgement call on how interesting it was on a story-by-story basis. They generally preferred having both a title and a summary or short excerpt for each story rather than just the title; more information was more better (these observations explain why Google News decided to eschew Google's characteristic minimalist design in favor of a much denser information display).

For the most part, all participants appeared to prefer to see only the items that were "new to them", i.e. that had been added or modified since the last time they visited the site. Participants expressed a preference for sites that listed news stories in reverse-chronological order so they could read until they hit a story they recognized. A couple participants, however, actually preferred to read through the listing in chronological order and would skim down to a story they recognized then read backwards up to the top of the list. Finally, one participant remarked that she actually preferred to see the old stories as well as the new ones since the old stories helped her remember the context in which the new stories took place (if they were continuing coverage of some running event, for example).

Another common theme was the importance of the reputations of the authors of the stories and the publications they were writing from. As I've already mentioned, the participants depended heavily on their knowledge of the reputation of the authors of news commentary to determine whether they were worth reading or not. Participants would frequently read their favorite authors even if the topic of the essay didn't particularly interest them. Moreover, several participants had developed an understanding of the personality and interests of the people they read, and used this knowledge to help determine whether an article by that person was worth reading. Of all the criteria people used to determine what to read, the reputation of the author was consistently the most powerful.

Almost all of the participants would occasionally send stories they found interesting to friends via email or instant messanger. One participant remarked that she viewed reading the news as a very social activity and relied on her friends to keep her informed about sites she was interested in but not sufficiently to read on a daily basis. Another mentioned that he liked it when his friends read different websites than he did so they would have something to talk about later; he liked to be able to trade interesting news tidbits with his buddies.

After running two or three of these observations I become interested in how the participants reading habits changed over time. Although I wasn't able to observe this directly, participants generally described their reading habits as changing gradually, especially those without news aggregators who only read a few sites. Frequently, they would discover new sites by following links on their current news sites, and if the new site continued to come up with interesting content, they would sometimes add it to their daily "rotation list" of websites to check. Participants reading patterns also changed with their current interests; one participant was taking a photography course and thus was starting to read more weblogs on photography than she had before. Additionally, many would learn of new sites through friends who emailed them interesting stories, and sometimes these sites would be interesting enough to check daily. Some of the users without aggregators remarked that they knew of many sites that were interesting but not interesting enough to check every day, and thus they tended to check them very infrequently since doing so wasn't part of their daily habits. Participants with news aggregators tended not to have this problem.

Finally, one common theme was that participants tended not to remove sites from their daily rotation lists very frequently; one user (who did use a news aggregator) remarked that the cost of leaving a somewhat-uninteresting site in his list was so low that it wasn't worth the couple of clicks it would take to remove it, he only removed sites if they were both uninteresting and posted a lot of content that got in his way. Of course, this participant was also confronted by upwards of 300 stories on a daily basis...

Conclusions

The observations presented here have been distilled into the user personas of Newsable, the usable news aggregator (coming soon). If you're interested in this research, you may wish to read over the personas to get an idea of how all this comes together into a coherent picture of the user that website authors can design for. The personas are the "cannonical version" of this research and will be updated as new findings become available.

Thanks to everyone who put up with my obnoxious questions about their news reading habits to participate in my studies (without any compensation, no less). My understanding of what people need in a news aggregator has changed dramatically as a result of talking to you all.

If you have any questions or comments relating to these findings, please feel free to email me or leave them below. I plan to continue these studies as an "open source user research" project; more on that shortly.

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On the Properties of Links

information, internet

June 22, 2003, 11:40 PM

I've recently become peripherally aware of a discussion that's going on among the widely-read webloggers on what makes a weblog a weblog (as opposed to a normal website). This reminded me of a discussion I had with Micah after his CHI Weblogs BOF. At the session, Micah gave a quick definition of a weblog entry, which he described as necessarily having four components: a main link, some commentary on the link, a "posted at" date by which the entries are ordered, and a permalink. At the time, I took issue with the "main link" idea; I felt that this assumed a certain type of weblog, namely the "MLP-style weblog" that tends to be centered around spreading links to interesting content. Kevin, who was also participating in the discussion, remarked that he frequently posts entries that are spawned by his own thoughts and not directly from something he read on the web, a sentiment that I echoed (to be fair, Micah emphasized that he wasn't trying to present a rigorous definition so much as he was trying to give an idea of what a weblog is).

Since then, however, I've been thinking a lot about links and how they are used in weblogs. There's been a call recently for more expressive links on the web. Right now, all an <a> tag can really say is "this text refers to this other document". As a human, you may be able to infer the author's purpose in linking that particular text to that particular document, but a machine cannot do so, limiting the analysis capabilities of web robots. But what if you could, through a more powerful <a> tag, say things like "this text is rejecting the argument presented in this other document" or "this text refers to the person who wrote this other document". This is in line with the "semantic web" concept: Berners-Lee's vision of a more meaning-driven web that internalizes the separation of content and presentation. I find this idea quite intriguing; I have a strong intuition that there are lots of interesting things we could do with the web if links could express why they were made. Merely knowing whether the author agrees or disagrees with the documents he links to could open up whole new dimensions for social network analysis tools, for instance.

This lead me to reflect on my linking habits for these weblog entries I write every now and again. I realized that I have several types of links:

• Inspiration Link: I read this document, and it directly spawned this post. This is in line with Micah's "main link" concept. If you take a look at my post about Kevin's Fury redesign project, you'll note the link to his post that reads "a project to redesign Fury" is of this category.
• More Information Link: This document contains more information about the object or concept that the text refers to. The "eat your own dog food" link in my Natural Programming and Open Source post is an example of this type.
• Definitive Referent Link: This type links to a definitive depiction of the thing the text refers to, perhaps a picture of a person or their homepage (the links to people like Micah, Kevin, and Tim Berners-Lee in this post are examples) or a book's listing on Amazon. In the most direct case, the text names a specific HTML document and the link takes you there (an example is the "Natural Programming and Open Source post" link just above).
• Supporting Document Link: This document supports the point made by the link text. The "by his own admission" link in the Fury redesign post is an example of this type.
• Source Link: This document is where I got this information from. Basically the equivalent of a reference in an academic paper. In the Corporations are Plural Nouns post, the "Center for Auto Safety article" link is an example of this type (it doesn't look like I make extensive use of the Source Link type on this weblog, at least not in its pure form).
• Related Post Link: The document I'm linking to is related to the current weblog entry. Usually I use this to connect two posts on my site that are part of the same train of thought. The reference to the CHI BOF post and the Justifying My Existence post in the first paragraph are both examples. My "Threads of Thinking" idea (whoops, I just did it again :) is intended to help visualize the structure created by these types of links. Sometimes, these also seem to double-up as a Supporting Document or Source Link.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of the purposes of links; I can think of many more. But I think this post demonstrates that even within the limits of roBlog, the diversity of purpose that lies behind those little blue words is astounding.

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Waypath: A "What's Related" for Weblogs

information, internet

June 13, 2003, 07:50 PM

I ran across a service called "Waypath" today that basically implements the "Related Entries" functionality I discussed last April. You can give Waypath a URL to a weblog entry or a few keywords and it will return a list of related weblog entries. They even appear to have plugins available for Movable Type and Radio that allow you to query their server for posts related to yours and embed links to those posts on your site. Very cool.

It doesn't look like they are implementing it in quite the way I concieved of such a system; they are polling the "recently updated weblogs" lists such as weblogs.com and blo.gs instead of having each weblog ping them when they update, which makes more sense than the pinging model given that they aren't very popular yet. If they take off, however, a pinging model will probably prove much more efficient, as it did for weblogs.com. This is actually a nice feature of the recently-updated lists; if you're trying out a new metablogging tool you can use them as a source of active weblogs until you get your feet off the ground and build your own user community.

I tried out a couple of searches using Waypath; some of them were pretty accurate and relevant, others were pretty mysterious. But this is my impression of most automated "what's related" engines I've encountered, including Google's. And as of now Waypath seems to be just a couple of guys hacking in their spare time, so you can't expect a polished product yet.

Best of luck to them, though. They're working on a cool technology.

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Friendster and Digital Identity

internet, society & sociology

June 12, 2003, 06:41 PM

At Kenneth's urging, I joined Friendster today, mostly just to poke around. So far it seems like an interesting place that takes a new angle on the whole “meeting people” problem; it leverages social networking concepts to introduce people to one another (basically, “I know Bob who knows Joe who knows Jane who has interests in common with me, so maybe I can get Bob to get Joe to introduce me to Jane”). Micah pointed out that there isn’t any good way to visualize your social network right now using Friendster, which is a fair criticism, but it’s good to see that people are doing something useful with all this social software rhetoric.

Currently, however, Friendster has a problem with “fake users”, generally imitators of celebrities. Since anyone with an email address can create a Friendster identity, some people make up these fake identities as a joke, which several others add to their list of friends. The problem is this breaks the intent of the system, since this fools the system into linking you to several people who you actually have no social network connection with. (At least, no known connection with. Six degrees and all that notwithstanding.) It seems Friendster needs to implement an option for people who aren’t directly connected to one of these users to “bullshit” a friend-of-a-friend, thereby removing that connection from their own social network (although without disturbing the networks of everyone “upstream” of them).

However, this design idea is a point solution to a larger issue that affects not only Friendster but most any social software running on a network like the internet: there is currently no way to maintain a consistent digital identity online. This is essential for most social systems, since most such systems must have a way to link actions to individuals over time. We humans use identity for many, many things; I’m finding from my news reading inquiries that the author of a piece of commentary or analysis is one of the main considerations people use when determining whether or not to read that piece (people read articles by authors they have read and liked before). In the real world, we have people’s physical appearance, voice, etc. to define their identities. We will need something comparable in the virtual world to replicate this same sense of familiarity and trust, and prevent problems like the one facing Friendster. Until such a mechanism exists, social networking systems must blindly trust the population of the entire world, and there will always be someone who wants to screw around.

The problem, of course, is that privacy comes up whenever anyone mentions digital identity. People are skittish about entrusting their personal identities to the computer; most don’t understand it well enough and are scared off by stories of hackers and identity theft. They need to feel comfortable that they exert control over what information is provided to whom, that they can provide highly personal information when they wish and little to no information when they wish. Some of these issues were raised at the CHI privacy, security, and trust talks. Maybe I should go back and read some of the papers.

Not all of these fears are groundless. Aside from the numerous technical security hurdles, there is the problem that if you have a unique identifier associated with your online activities, anyone can associate any information they wish with this identifier. If this identifier is traceable to you, which it must be for it to fulfill its purpose, then this information will stick permanently, which opens up whole new possibilities for slander. The internet is a big place. Its hard to find where all the rumors lie.

Building unique digital identities online is simultaneously one of the most promising and most dangerous tasks we face in this new society we’re starting to form. I’ll be interested to see how it plays out.

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Weblog Redesign Cocked, Locked, and Ready to Rock

announcements, internet, personal

June 11, 2003, 07:03 PM

As you have probably already noticed if you're reading roBlog dot org through the web interface rather than through a news aggregator, I've finally rolled out the new design I claimed "should be changing soon" when I started this damn thing over two months ago. Some nifty new features to note: the "active discussion" sidebar lists the top two most-recently-commented-on posts so you can see where conversation is happening at a glance, the archives have better(?) navigation controls, weekly archives are generated instead of the (overly long) monthly archives, the categories are finally reader-visible and category archives are generated, and the general look and feel of the weblog is consistent with the main site. The design isn't finished by a long shot; I still have a bunch of ideas I want to implement including the "Threads of Thinking" I mentioned awhile back. Most of these changes require modifying Movable Type, however, and since I have a few other projects that need my attention, these changes are going to need to move to lower-priority threads for the time being.

I've added some PHP code to the pages to handle the rotating quotes and taglines up at the top, which has unfortunately necessitated a file extension change that has un-perma-ed the permalinks. I put a mod_rewrite rule in place to hard redirect visitors from the old links to the new ones, but I can't guarantee it will be there forever so if you've linked to my site in the past, please update those links at your earliest convenience.

If you have any comments on or criticisms of the new design or find any lingering bugs, please do let me know. Feel free to comment on this post or send me personal email.

Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback about the mockups; I've tried to take everyone's reactions into account and I think that has improved my initial design tremendously. And special thanks to Mathilde and Kelly for their help with the visual design of the site. Everything that looks good about these pages is a result of me following their sage advice, everything that looks bad is a result of me ignoring it.

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Innovation and Shifting Web Standards

internet, software development, usability

June 08, 2003, 02:24 PM

I wanted to add a quick (and slightly belated) blurb to the recent buzz over the release of Mozilla Firebird, Microsoft's comments on how they plan to stop releasing standalone versions of IE, and the Microsoft-AOL deal to include IE in future versions of AOL-Win instead of Gecko.

Some have suggested that Microsoft's sins with IE have involved stifling innovation in web browsers. The argument is that since Microsoft has now clearly "won" the browser wars, they no longer have any incentive to innovate as is clearly evidenced by the fact that no significant improvements have been made to HTML/CSS in the past four years.

I mostly agree with these sentiments, although I'm not so certain that changes in the core standards are appropriate at this time. Marc's post above implies that browsers have failed to add new features in recent years, they've only been playing catchup with old features (like CSS) by providing better (or more pessimistically, less broken) implementations of the standards, and this is a bad thing.

I agree that new features are good, but I disagree that freezing the standards and taking the time to get solid implementations of them out on the market is a bad thing. I like the comment on the need for decent CSS authoring tools, however. CSS2 is a pretty nice standard already as far as they go, but most website authors don't make full use of it since its so hard to create good CSSified web pages with current tools. As long as authors have to muck around with editing text languages to make websites that take advantage of the content-presentation separation that CSS offers, only the technically sophisticated few will benefit. What's needed is a good single-sourcing normative interface like I've called for before.

Innovation occurs at many levels in computing. Sometimes innovation must slow down at the lower levels (the core standards, such as HTTP, HTML, CSS, etc.) so that effective innovation can occur at the higher levels (such as web browsers, WYSIWYG web publishing tools, content management tools, etc.) The weblogging community is going through this phase now with RSS, an important standard for both publishing tools and readers. It's hard to create effective tools when the standards they are based on keep shifting underneath you.

On the other hand, there are some instances where a new feature in a tool requires a change to the core standards. For example, back in the '90s Netscape wanted to allow website authors to embed aribitrary media content in their pages, so they created the <EMBED> tag. IE had the same idea, but since there was no standard defining how to specify this behavior they made up the <OBJECT> tag, which of course was completely foreign to Netscape's browser. For a long time, authors had to kludge together both tags to consistently include media elements in their pages.

The basic problem is that the usability of any software system is not screen deep, the central point in our U&SA research. Many functions that users want reach far deeper into the software system that just the surface interface, and may require changes in the lower-level protocols and data formats themselves. If these formats are standardized, then the standards may need to be modified, or violated with vendor-specific extensions like <EMBED> and <OBJECT> which are rarely compatabile and cause large amounts of pain for users and developers.

So how do we ensure that the majority of these functions get written into the standards themselves, thereby preventing this problem? Perhaps standards need to be developed in a more user-centric fashion; they need to be informed from the beginning by tool development teams that investigate how the needs of users are going to affect the lower-level formats. Or perhaps this can't be done; the needs can never be determined except through painful, long iterations involving standardization, new needs uncovered, incompatable vendor-specific extensions, arguments and flamewars, and finally consensus (or at least cease-fires) and restandardization. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

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Consolidating Bookmarks

internet, usability

June 06, 2003, 11:52 PM

For my ongoing effort to construct a usable open-source RSS news aggregator, I've been doing some modified contextual inquiries of several of my compatriots in the HCII and elsewhere here at CMU. So far, I've observed five participants as they checked various web sites that update on a periodic basis and that they return to frequently to locate fresh content. I plan to run three more users to refine my personas which will feed into the interface design of my new aggregator.

As an unexpected side effect of the experiment, I've run across a real need for a centralized bookmark system in web browsers. The basic problem I continue to encounter is that all the participants I've observed have multiple computers they use on a regular basis (usually one at home and one at work, sometimes a separate laptop to boot). This creates a problem with bookmarks, since if they bookmark a page on one computer then want to access it from the other, they're out of luck. Many people didn't bother using bookmarks for this reason, and instead just remembered a few sites that they typed into the location bar manually. Some people even use Google to find sites they return to on a daily basis!

This is a problem I've confronted myself since at least 1998 (I now have a work laptop, a home desktop, the home server that handed you this page, and a home "backup" desktop, all of which I still use at varying degrees of frequency), and it's nice to see that I'm not alone. Granted, since all of my participants are from CMU, it is possible that they are unusually computer-oriented and thus are abnormally more likely to have multiple machines they use regularly. But I doubt this is the case; many white-collar workers nowadays have one or more computers at work as well as owning a home computer for their personal use. Even people who own laptops often like to keep their professional and personal computer usage physically separate.

To solve this problem for myself, I was thinking of installing a server-side bookmarks application on the Labs, but this is an inelegant solution that's only appealing because there are no better alternatives. Mozilla should provide built-in support for a centralized bookmarks repository (and possibly history and settings as well) to eliminate this problem, or possibly look into other design ideas for helping users to keep track of sites they wish to return to (since bookmarks have a tendency to get cluttered, similar to file folder hierarchies). I know Netscape used to have a concept of "roaming profiles", and IE supports a similar feature on LANs, but these tend to only work on intranets, if I recall correctly. If there are any available solutions, then they are obviously too difficult to set up, since no one I observed was using them (or even aware of them).

So enough ranting for now. I intend to run three more users, then pull together the observations to refine my personas and scenario analyses. Some people have expressed an interest in seeing the results of the study itself, so I'll probably try to put together some small report about it to share with you all. Stay tuned!

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Another Adams Awakens

announcements, internet, personal

June 01, 2003, 09:09 PM

My brother, Geoff, has started a weblog on The Labs with the apropos name of "Geoff Adams's Weblog". He is the only person I know who is (possibly) lazier than I am, so it remains to be seen how often he will choose to update it, but the first steps have been taken (and so far he's not doing half bad).

A warm welcome to him from my modest little corner of the blogosphere!

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Justifying My Existence, or Why I Have A Weblog

internet, personal, society & sociology, writing & communication

June 01, 2003, 01:57 AM

Back when I first set up this here weblog, Micah asked me what my reasons were for doing so. At the time, my answer was "I want to have a place to record my ideas" This was accurate if rather vague; I wasn't even sure then if I'd continue to maintain roBlog dot org or if I'd get bored after a couple weeks and take it down. Since then, I've obtained more experience with weblogs as a medium (I'm even planning to write my own news aggregator), and I think I've managed to refine that initial thought a bit.

The News Hour with Jim Lehrer did a report a few weeks back on weblogging. One of the people interviewed half-jokingly gave the reasons people blog (I still can't stand that word, but when in Rome...) as "narcissism, creativity, and a desire to connect with like-minded people". Not bad as one-sentence summaries go, but I think the reality is more complicated.

At Micah, Andy, and Don's CHI BOF on Weblogs, we talked some about the reasons people have weblogs. From that discussion and others, I've learned that there are myriad varieties of reasons why people choose to share their thoughts online. These range from:

• Emotional exhibitionism, or the thrill of sharing the intimate details of your personal life with (potentially) complete strangers. This works into the "narcissism" comment, and unfortunately is what some people tend to associate with weblogs.
• Communication with friends, which also involves sharing personal details, although possibly of a less sordid nature. Usually these types of weblogs are of little interest to those outside the author's immediate social circle.
• Sharing ideas with friends and strangers, so the author's thoughts can get wider circulation.
• Getting feedback on ideas from people with a different perspective, which may be the main reason the author wishes to share them.
• Recording thoughts and experiences for the purpose of having a "backup brain" that you can refer to later when your primary wetware has failed you.
• Improving writing skills, which was mentioned in the News Hour piece. Writing is a skill that requires frequent practice and good feedback to maintain and enhance.
• Reasoning through ill-formed ideas, since having to articulate an idea in written form is often a good way to identify where the idea is weak and needs further development, as well as identifying those ideas that sound good in your head but look pretty stupid when the (metaphorical) ink hits the paper.
• Connecting with others, since weblogs are a good way to express your interests directly without having to work them into a conversation. Others who are interested in similar things may find your weblog and get in touch with you about your common interests.
• Influencing others, since reading your thoughts may cause others to change theirs. You may express some insight they wouldn't have come to on their own, and thus start the spread of a meme. This is innately satisfying to many.
• And many others I've probably missed...

There are other dimensions of differences as well. Some authors tend to restrict their weblog posts pretty religiously to a single predefined topic, others write about whatever happens to be on their minds. Some authors post lots of personal details, others prefer to keep it dry and intellectual. I believe this variety is a tremendously good thing. Weblogs are a medium, they should be used for whatever people find them useful for.

I don't want to digress too far into ruminations on why other people use weblogs, however, since this post is supposed to be about my reasons for doing so. I set up roBlog dot org for several reasons. First off, as I said initially, I want to record my ideas, to have a "backup brain" where I can look back a couple of weeks, months, or years later and see what I was thinking about in June of 2003.

I also want to be able to see how my thinking has progressed over time, which gets to my second reason; I want to have a means of connecting ideas explicity, both my own and other people's, and if there's one thing the web is good at, it's connecting ideas. Within the context of roBlog, however, I'm hoping to develop a better way of accomplishing this.

I also hope to improve my writing skills and ability to articulate myself clearly, which helps me reason through my thoughts in ways that I couldn't if I just kept them in my head. On several occasions, I've written up a weblog post just to sit back and remark "Ya know what? I'm not so sure I'm entirely convinced of that anymore." I've rethought quite a few points as a result.

Finally, I hope to share my ideas with others, get interesting and helpful feedback, and hopefully influence others and help them think about things just a little bit differently. I've already received lots of interesting comments from my friends (often in person, but sometimes on roBlog itself), and I know my thinking has been stimulated by the thoughts of others I've encountered on their weblogs. To me, this is the most unique and exciting property of weblogs as a medium, this ability to spontaneously share ideas and form connections between them.

In closing, I'd like to present my current vision of the site. I think of roBlog as my open notebook on life, intended both for my future reference and as a window into my head for others, both strangers and friends. I see life as the ultimate research project that never ends, and I hope roBlog continues to reflect that. Stay tuned for as long as you'd like.

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Threads of Thinking

design, information, internet

May 24, 2003, 01:21 PM

One beef I've had with the generally excellent Movable Type engine that I use to maintain this here weblog is that it doesn't have any convenient way to connect posts that are continuing the same basic topic thread. You can categorize posts to organize them by topic, but most posts, although nominally on the same topic, discuss completely different things. What I need is a way to get an overall picture of an entire rolling thought process that I've posted about. This need also arose in the Weblogs Informal SIG at CHI last month.

Right now, I do this by posting links to related previous posts in the text of the weblog entry (like I just did in the previous sentence). This works reasonably well, but it would be nice to have a convenient way of seeing the entire topic thread in one glance. So in a future iteration of this weblog, I'm thinking of adding a sidebar to the individual entry template like the following:

The "Looking Forward" posts are future posts that reference this post. The "Looking Behind" posts are just the collection of links to previous posts that appear in this posts. I'm hoping this will help make it more clear which posts are connected to this one and afford reading entire threads of thought at once.

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Website Redesign Rollout Has Begun

announcements, internet

May 18, 2003, 05:38 PM

I've finally converted the main pages of my website into the new design I talked up oh so long ago. I warned you I was lazy...

Check out the new design and tell me what you think. I'll be converting this weblog over to the same look and feel shortly. In the mean time, I'm open to visual design criticism, information architecture complaints, implementation bugs, anything.

For now, however, I have to devote my time to Bonnie and Len's U&SA website, which should be a great resource for our (hopefully) helpful new technique when it's finished. This has been a very webby weekend, all things considered. I even got wind of a rumor that Kerry is finally working on her long-anticipated wearables weblog, but don't tell anyone you heard that from me...

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The Spread of Misinformation

information, internet

May 13, 2003, 10:05 PM

There was an article on Slashdot yesterday that makes an interesting case study in how easily the truth can get warped as information propogates from person to person (or website to website), and should make us all very cautious of blindly believing what we read, online or off.

The article was titled "Google To Create "Blog" Search; Potentially Remove From Main". The upthrust of the writeup was that Google had announced that (1) they were planning on creating a special "blog" search engine and (2) this means they would be removing all weblog posts from their main index.

(1) is not too surprising; after acquiring Blogger this is the logical next step for Google to take. But (2) is a big deal, especially to webloggers like me who are fairly fond of having Google index our writings. From the comments, it appears most people took this point at face value and produced reams of commentary about it (mostly in favor of Google's supposed decision, I might add).

The problem is Google has decided no such thing. They haven't even hinted that they are considering removing weblogs from their main search index. So where did this idea come from?

The story links to an article by Andrew Orlowski, who is known to have some issues with the whole weblog concept. Andrew links to a Reuters story on Yahoo News, which contains the following comments from Google's CEO:

Google allows people to search Web pages, as well as search specific types of content such as news sources, shopping sites through its "Froogle" service, Usenet groups. Soon the company will also offer a service for searching Web logs, known as "blogs," Schmidt said.

That's the only reference the original article makes to weblogs. But over at the Register, Andrew adds:

It isn't clear if weblogs will be removed from the main search results, but precedent suggests they will be. After Google acquired Usenet groups from Deja.com, it developed a unique user interface and a refined search engine, and removed the groups from the main index.

He provides no further evidence for this hunch than what appears above; that based on a "precedent" of one very different situation, web-accessible usenet news, Google's mention of a weblog search tool meant that they were removing weblogs from their main index.

What's amazing is how quickly Slashdot's readers took his words at face value, even though the original source material that would have thrown doubt on these claims was only a couple of clicks away. The sad fact is that most people don't bother to check the facts too carefully on most of what they read, even when checking the facts isn't onerously difficult. And I include myself in that statement; I frequently don't bother to follow the links in a K5 story, or do a quick Google search on a meme mentioned on Slashdot.

And this isn't just limited to online, collaborative media like Slasdot, either. K5 has a story on the Klingon language interpreter myth that gives an example of this principle in a traditional media setting.

In today's world, where we experience an enormous information influx as the result of advanced communications technologies, it's more important than ever to reserve a certain amount of skepticism for every new fact we read about, and try to check up on the facts when possible even when we would like to believe what's being said.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

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Online Publishing, from the Trenches

aesthetics, internet, society & sociology, writing & communication

April 28, 2003, 08:15 PM

There's an interesting article over on Kuro5hin about localroger's experience with publishing his book online and the success (or not) of the "tip jar" economic model for freely available online works.

For those of you who don't read K5, localroger (Roger Williams) is a member there who also happens to be an excellent amateur (in the not-getting-paid sense) writer. Awhile back, he posted a short science-fiction story called "Passages in the Void", which I've read and highly recommend. It went over so well that Rusty (K5 founder and proprietor) created a fiction section to house such content. Roger mentioned in the comments that he'd written a novel called "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect" but was unable to get it published via conventional means, so several K5 users convinced him to publish it online and Rusty agreed to host it. I haven't read it yet (although I intend to). From people's comments I expect it will also be quite good, although apparently it contains some content that many may find disturbing (rape, violence, etc.).

Roger's analysis of his online publishing experience is thoughtful and objective, and his conclusions, although not unexpected, are worth pondering. Basically he found that he has attained a much wider distribution and rate of feedback through the web publishing medium than he ever would have through conventional publishing. From the tip jar he made around 760$, which, although not insignificant, is much less than a typical publishing advance and not something that he could quit his day job over. And he admits that his is really a best-case situation; he had the backing of Rusty and the benefit of two appearances on Slashdot, which is more than the average budding author is likely to get.

Roger's experience highlights the fairly obvious fact that many people still fail to admit: artists just can't make money by giving their work away and relying on audience generosity. On the other hand, Roger was approached by an agent who is now interested in publishing his work via conventional means. So we see a pattern which crops up frequently where the internet is a good way for budding content creators to get "known", but one that they quickly must switch out of and lock up their content into for-pay conventional schemes if they want to make a living. And maybe this is a fine role for the internet to play. However it doesn't take full advantage of the potential of the internet's highly efficient content distribution systems (which provided Roger with the wide distribution and quick feedback he discusses) and may not even be a viable option in a future where all content is digital and copying is quick and easy.

As a society, I think we're going to have to get over this "content on the 'net must be free" mentality. Someone's going to have to pay, one way or another, and that someone is going to be determining what the economic incentives for artists, writers, and other content producers are. Do we the people want to be determining those incentives, or are we willing to leave it to advertisers who are more interested in selling their products and services than in appreciating art and literature? To me the answer is clear. How about you?

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A Recommender System for End-Consumer Service Providers

information, internet, society & sociology

April 25, 2003, 08:46 PM

A sector of the economy that I've always experienced problems with, and I think many others have too, is the end-consumer service providers industry. This is just a fancy way of referring to auto mechanics, maid services, landlords, and anyone else who sells a service directly to individual private citizens (as opposed to other businesses or government organizations, which are a different story). Note that many companies that nominally produce goods may fall into this category as well since most provide some sort of service to support their products. For example, Compaq makes computers but also has a tech support line.

I don't mean to imply that its impossible to get excellent service from this sector; the problem I'm describing is that its hard to determine who will provide good service and who will not without a lot of trial and error. Part of the problem is that many of these services have slow cycles; unless I frequently experience car problems I won't need the services of a mechanic too often. Landlords generally sign leases for a minimum of one year. So you may have to go through several providers before you find one that's good. Meanwhile the not-so-good providers may stay in business through people who are uninformed or just don't want to have to take a chance with someone else. To compound the problem, if you're like me and you move fairly frequently then even if you do locate a good service provider, you'll have to start all over again when you reach your new home.

To help solve this problem, I propose a web site that allows consumers to rate service providers and discuss their service experiences. Kind of the same intent as Amazon.com's product rating system, except for service providers. This would allow consumers to mobilize and take crappy service providers to task, while promoting the businesses of honest, competent providers.

Aside from all the problems that normally confront recommender systems, one obstacle for this system might be slander and libel laws. Users of the system who are upset at a service provider may post comments to the site that aren't true, and of course it is impossible to check up on the facts for all comments. I'm no lawyer, but I have listened to lectures on business law and torts, and my understanding is that you can get sued for publishing libelious comments that another person made. I'm not sure if this applies differently to community web sites, but I imagine the proprietor of such a system might need to be prepared to defend himself in court.

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What's Related to this Post?

design, information, internet

April 23, 2003, 06:31 PM

One question I've frequently wanted to know the answer to since I started this here weblog is: "Now that I've finished this entry, what things are other webloggers saying that are related to the topics I discussed?" So I have a modest proposal for a solution to this problem.

I propose someone create a server that listens for weblogs.com XML-RPC pings from weblog updates. But instead of just providing a recently-updated list like weblogs.com does, when this server receives a ping it will fetch the weblog's RSS feed and extract the entry content and any associated metadata (title, category, whatever). Then it would run a "what's related" algorithm comparing the new post to all the posts in its database. Finally it would generate a report of weblog entries that are related to the new entry, and spit out an HTML page to a web server that could distribute this information to the masses.

The final system would look like this:

A nice extension to the system would be to send the URL of the final report back to the weblog tool so it could include a "Related Entries" link next to the post (if the weblog's author wanted it to do so, of course). But I don't know of any way to accomplish this without extending existing weblog tools.

I must confess I'm not sure how "what's related" algorithms work or how useful the current state of the art tools are. Google's concept of what's related to my page is a little strange (why does Micah's gesture literature review page come up, but not his weblog? And why does Mathilde's friend Mav's page appear?) although not completely inaccurate. But hey, that's a problem for the Language Technologies people to solve :).

Currently, the automatic notification ("ping") features built into most popular weblog tools are, in my opinion, underexploited. We could probably think of lots of other cool things to do with them if we tried.

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MAYA's Marketplace of Mutable Meanings

design, information, internet, software development

April 17, 2003, 12:36 AM

I went to the HCII Seminar Series talk today given by Peter Lucas, the CEO of MAYA Design (which is where Mathilde works nowadays). He talked about Civium, a "vision and architecture for a seamless, distributed public information space".

Civium is a distributed data storage system that implements an information commons through location-transparent persistence. In this sense, it's similiar to Gnutella or Freenet: information can be widely distributed across machines to provide effectively limitless physical storage space and no one machine contains the cannonical representation of one piece of information, so information is much harder to destroy. So in this sense, Civium's not very interesting.

Civium also provides various clients to visualize the information present in the distributed database. Peter demoed a geographic information system (GIS) client that accessed information MAYA obtained from publically available government sources. But I've seen several such systems before, and this one didn't appear to do anything particularly novel (except that it was potentially more extensible, as we'll see). So in this sense, Civium's not very interesting.

What is interesting is the way that Civium handles data semantics and their dissemination. At the core of the system lies VIA, a universal database. VIA isn't entirely relational or object-oriented, but instead is based on three types of entities:

1. U-forms are sets of attribute name / value pairs with a Universal Unique Identifier (UUID) bound to them. So essentially, they're glorified hashtables that can be uniquely distinguished from all the other glorified hashtables on the network. Note that this is essentially what a RDBMS row is (provided it has a UUID primary key), so U-forms can work similiarly to relational table rows in terms of building more complex data structures using foreign keys, etc.
2. Shepherds are software agents that push U-forms around from repository to repository (a repository is any physical storage medium connected to VIA) without having to understand the semantic meaning of the U-form content. They take care of the whole "distributed" part of the system.
3. Roles are the schemata that define the semantic meaning of the data that appears in U-forms. But the neat thing is, Roles are stored in U-forms themselves. So if you need to discover the semantics of data in a U-form you've found, you just need to locate the data's Role U-form from the VIA system. If you want to extend an existing Role, you just need to insert your own U-form into VIA that includes the modifications you need and references the original Role.

Assuming that the semantics of Role U-forms are defined by the system (Peter skipped most of his slides on Roles, unfortunately), then this system essentially implements a "free market of data formats" in which anyone can create new formats or use existing ones, no one has control over a particular format, and market forces can determine which formats become "standards". I don't know of any other systems that provide real architectural support for this concept.

Granted, I have my doubts as to whether this approach would truly be effective in improving computing's recurring "format wars". After all, the browser wars of the ninties between Netscape and Microsoft were a good example of market forces influencing a shared format, HTML, while the relevent standards body, the W3C, stood by and watched, irrelevent. And that was a bad time to be a web developer. But at least in Civium, we wouldn't wind up with one powerful monopoly corporation controlling the format that won out.

Whether market forces, rather than standards committees, are truly the best way to produce consensus on data semantics and representations is a question I'm not prepared to answer. But Civium, if it ever becomes a major force, will certainly put this idea to the test.

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CHI Report, Recommender Systems

design, information, internet, society & sociology, usability

April 12, 2003, 04:40 PM

After lunch, I went with Mathilde to a short talk session on Recommender Systems. Three out of the four talks were interesting, so I considered it a pretty successful session.

The first talk was on how the ratings in systems like Amazon.com's customer-supplied product rating system can influence future customers ratings and lead to inaccurately high or low ratings for some products. The speaker studied a system called MovieLens, which looks similiar to an Amazon.com that only does theater movies. He found that around 8% of the time people would raise or lower their ratings based on the rating that was already present. Thus if users would rate a movie as 2 stars, but see a rating of 4 stars on MovieLens, they might adjust their rating, consciously or unconsciously, up to 3 stars. Though these individual effects may be slight, the inaccurracies may spread.

Another interesting finding he reported was that users could tell if a system had wildly inaccurate ratings, and that this would effect the users' opinions of the system. So if users found good movies rated low or bad movies rated high consistently, they reported a much lower opinion of the system as a whole. Unfortunately, he did only study a fairly extreme case of inaccuracy so it is difficult to say where the relevant threshhold value is.

The next speaker, David McDonald from the University of Washington School of Information, discussed a recommender system for group-ware tasks such as finding the relevant expert in a company who may be able to answer a given question. What made his talk particularly interesting was that he was using social networks to build such a system for a medical software company. Here are my main takeaway points:

• David built his social network through ethnographic observations. He discouraged the use of automated tools, such as tools that examine email sending patterns, since he felt these tools do not accurately approximate the real social network but instead are byproducts of the medium (a secretary may send lots of announcement emails to people she is not socially close to).
• He ran into a couple problems where one person was socially close to another even though few people knew it; they were buddies outside of work. Thus their connection didn't come out through his initial observations. Many users felt the tool should reflect their own personal social network rather than the socially perceived network of the entire workplace.
• Social networks are dynamic beasts, so the network had to adapt to changing social environments over time.
• The interface needed to provide a way to "escalate" the results, or expand and contract the number of recommended experts shown. Users reported that they often preferred many choices rather than a single choice, even if the single choice was in fact the best person to answer their question. They also wanted a good deal of control over the direction of the escalation.

The final interesting speaker was Thomas Erickson from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He discussed visualizations of social activity, such as those produced by the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab (which I applied to, by the way, and never heard back from...). He had a few interestiing things to say:

• There are two purposes of social visualizations: one is for an individual's information, the second is to portray the social state of a group back to the whole group. The two should not be confounded, and frequently shouldn't be combined in one interface.
• A completely accurate visualization of a social situation may be bad; many situations depend on face saving, "first impressions", etc. The little white lies that keep our social lives going...
• Ambiguity is often useful in these visualizations depending on the user's information needs. Large differences can be exaggerated, whereas runs of similar-looking data may be compressed. This is probably true of most visualizations

One side comment I thought of while watching these presentations: talks such as these are useful for making a few small, well-argued points that are interesting enough to encourage your audience to look into the area in more depth (or just take away your main points). The speakers who tried to go into great detail and make complicated arguments quickly lost the audience, whereas those who had simple points that powerfully portrayed their message were more effective. More on this when I get to Norman's closing plenary.

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CHI Report, Weblogs

internet, society & sociology

April 09, 2003, 06:50 PM

The final professional activity of the day was Micah, Andy, and Don's Informal SIG on Weblogs. It was a great experience; a lot of people came with widely varying backgrounds on weblogs, yet I felt that everyone took something important away from the session.

Lots of great ideas flew around. One woman was doing research on separating weblogs into genres; she mentioned they found that weblogs were much less anonymous, on average, than many other online mediums. I brought up a concern I've had for awhile that weblogs as a medium encourage the accidental sharing of personal details to people you may not ordinarily share them with. This is essentially a problem of visibility; unlike many other mediums, on the web you have very little sense of who your audience is and hence may be encouraged to share information with people that you might feel uneasy about if you were speaking face-to-face. Mathilde brought up the point that for many people (I'll call them "emotional exhibitionists" for lack of a better term) sharing personal information with strangers is part of the appeal. I agree (I've seen this with certain other webloggers I've known) but still feel that for most of these people, if they had the opportunity to stand in a room with all the people who would read their post online and shout out this same information, they might think twice before doing it.

We talked a lot about the benefit and disadvantage of having only a single "voice" or perspective in weblogs, as opposed to discussion boards that mix several points of view. One woman raised an issue I've also started to confront that there is no way to pull together ideas in a weblog; no way to find other posts that are "related" to this one or "part of the same thread". I can manually link posts together and I can categorize them, but this process is tedious and fixes the relations between posts statically. I'm not sure yet how best to solve this problem.

Finally, we talked about how there are few ways to locate weblogs by interest, search all weblogs on a given topic or written by a certain group of people, etc. There seems to be lots of potential for robust data mining in this area; weblogs have all the benefits and problems of any decentralized, grassroots method of organizing.

Micah, Andy, and Don put together a weblog where you can find more information on the session (of course :).

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CHI Report, Privacy, Security, and Trust

design, internet, usability

April 09, 2003, 06:48 PM

This marks the end of my second day here at CHI 2003. So many things happened; a thick swarm of ideas buzzed around my head, flew into my ears, nose, and mouth, got into my eyes and made them all watery, and generally became very annoying until I realized the analogy had gone too far and cut it off.

The first session I went to was on Privacy, Security, and Trust. Most of the talks didn't particularly interest me. One person had done a study of an online community in a small Massachusetts town and concluded that when you ensure people are using their real names, it tends to raise trust and civility while lowering people's willingness to disagree about controversial topics. Another woman had done a study on people's level of distraction while using cell phones, she found people tend to pay less attention to traffic lights while talking on their cell phones. Fairly common-sense stuff.

The one presentation I really liked was one on "Prominence-Interpretation Online". The doctoral student giving the talk, B.J. Fogg, argued that the credibility of a website was a function of two properties of the experience: the prominence of information (she must notice the information) and interpretation (she must make a judgment about the information). What's more, he did a study that found that the top factor people used to interpret information related to the design look and feel of the site, which was almost doubly more important than information design and structure. Which is disconcerting for those who expect that consumers in a market will make informed, researched decisions when assessing credibility. When asked whether we can design our websites to encourage a more robust credibility assessment, Fogg said he thought the only way to improve this situation was through educating people on their limitations and, in the meantime, make sure you have a nice site design.

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Hello, World!

announcements, internet, writing & communication

March 27, 2003, 08:33 PM

So I finally got around to putting my personal server online and even set up this slick-looking weblog thing that you're staring at. If I recall correctly I first started aspiring towards having my own server way back in, oh, 1998, so that should give you some sense of the Rob Laziness To Productivity Ratio. Personally, I prefer to think that the Internet finally caught up to me :).

I hope to update this site frequently (we'll see how that goes) with reflections on the things I've learned, the people I've encountered, and the half-baked ideas I dream up from time to time. Partially this is for my own recording and mental processing purposes (I still think you can't understand a concept until you have to articulate it in writing) but also because I'm hoping to get feedback from people whose opinions I value (this means you). So if you have something to say about any of this, post a comment, send me an email, or talk to me in person and let me know how stupid I am. Because dammit, someone has to tell me these things.

Anywho, the design of this weblog and the whole site should be changing soon (I hope) (barring unforseen waves of laziness). I just wanted to get something up and running to start with, so don't have a heart attack if the whole thing looks completely different from week to week for awhile. Feedback on how ugly and stupid it looks is also highly appreciated (which I'm sure some of you won't hesitate to provide :).

Movabletype is pretty neato. I could click on all these pretty buttons all night. Hey, I wonder what this "Save" button does...

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