This is testing the RSS Popper feeds

Social Computing
Lili Cheng & Sean Kelly, Social Computing Grup, Microsoft Research

Lessons Learned
- Microsoft V-Chat "Express Yourself" - built in 6 mos and went live on MSN; ran for about 6 yrs; 100K users; not successful
- Comic Chat - comic book chat style service; fully design experience; released on first versions of IE (broader reach); you are the character and can control your gestures; you could save your comic book in panels
- Virtual Worlds Platform - persistent multi-user virtual worlds; text, 20 or 30 environments; objects programmable, customizable client UI; focused on specific communities, rather than general chat audience; available for 3 yrs (Fall 1998-2001)

Social Support - HutchWorld: Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Ctr - building was wired to allow them to interact; they assumed that patients would want to talk ot other patients but they didn't really use it to interact with other patients but talked to their own family/friends; they wanted to connect to people relevant to themselves

Learning Simulations - virtual trading pit; ancient Egypt
Collaboration - Flatland virtual meetings; project photos of who is participating
Entertainment - virtual album; television

What contributed to sustaining the social interaction in the virtual world?

Individuals - self-representation; me-centered social interaction; repeat users generally use same login names, profiles and graphics and visit friends in same rooms at regular time; fuzzy self-representations preferred; close friends sharing; strangers prefer text description over real name etc.

Environments: Critical Mass - setting expectations; half of all spaces created were never used at all; takes time to evolve (friendships, cities, blogs); personalities and social dynamics of core members; often owners and creators often different people and change over time; most groups are small (most with less than 20 members)

UI: designing for social interaction - easy access to friends and relevant people

How do people think about their social interactions - asked people in a mall to draw the people important to themselves; contact lists on their computer was listed generally alphabetically.

Visualization Contact map created dynamically - people are grouped by looking at communication habits; you move a person to the center and the map dynamically adjusts to show the relationships to that person.
They tried the same thing using the distribution lists of Microsoft to show the relationships within the company (JW: very cool way of looking at the internal organization)

Sharing Today - via email, IM, distribution lists, shares, web

Wallop - social software written in Flash (platform independent)

Focuses on an awareness of people you care about; socializing in the context of your media; projecting yourself via lightweight authoring becomes an activity that is fun in itself; ability to bump into friends and f'riends of friends'

Really concentrating on the benefit to the user (Sean commented on the previous presentation that mentioned most blogs have a very small audience and few that are intended for larger audiences); hover on photo of your friends/contacts displays profile information; scopes activity and puts it in a window of what's been happening with your friends. Threading across Wallop is anonymous and emails are not visible

Important to annotate any media (you can annotate sections of the photo). You can add a comment to a picture (where the photo was taken, who is in the picture, the relationship of the people) and those become objects that create additional connections between people

The network changes over time based on your interactions with people.

Research deployment - will people use this in their daily life? Do they feel more connected to friends? How does it impact your social well-being? Feedback on privacy boundaries and ability to learn what doesn't work; they're also looking how this works for people using mobile devices.

Google spurns RSS for rising blog format
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5157662.html
By Paul Festa , CNET News.com

- story talks about Atom & RSS as standards for syndication and Google's reaction.

Catalyzing Collective Action in Social Cyberspaces
Marc Smith, Microsoft Research

Usenet maps - social cyberspace is a burgeoning environment

Signaling status, location, position - conveying your social status

Social software - community; groupware; networks; worlds

Booklist:
"The Evolution of Cooperation", Robert Axelrod
"Governing the Commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action", Elinor Ostrom - lots of cultures have practices that let them complete jobs collectively
"The presentation of self in everyday life", Erving Goffman
"The Hidden Dimension", Edward Hall
"Social Network Analysis"
Edward Tufte - pictures of what's going on really matter
"Communities in Cyberspace", Marc Smith

"A group is a small population of people who often know who else Is in the group, know if they are in the group, and all roughly equally participate" Brian Butler

Online aggregations resemble voluntary associations far more than groups - larger than groups; memberships are more skewed to power law distributions; boundaries are more porous and memberships less demanding

Social software builds 'virtual schelling points' - sites of coordination action; affordance for association
Yphrum's Law (Murphy backwards) - 'systems that shouldn't work sometimes do, or at least work fairly well'
"The value of reputation on eBay: a controlled experiment" Paul Resnick, et al http://www.harvardmag.com/on-line/070378.html

Ostrom's design principles for groups to organize and govern themselves:
There should be boundaries; changing rules; respect by external authority (not guaranteed); a system for monitoring members' behavior exists and is undertaken by the community members themselves. Need identity and history (of conversations, people, etc.) Example of finding a restaurant - picking from a list is not helpful, walking around and watching other people's choice is more valuable.

Studied Usenet - 23 years old
8,697,070 unique users
Superset of conversation repositories - newsgroups, authors, threads
Data mining of usenet - collecting message headers and build social accounting metadata
Netscan interfaces http://netscan.research.microsoft.com
Related Visualization Work - various authors including Tufte

Treemap - information visualization technique that takes hierarchies and squishes them into boxes; coloring of squares can be another dimension of the data; series of snapshots of the groups over time to show growth/changes
Another view was a single author over the course of a year - looks like a histogram (above the line are threads they initiated, below the line were threads they participated in but did not initiate). Patterns showed peaks of participation, lulls, etc. and was a profile of a person. Another example of a user was all conversations below the line "answer person". Creating a behavioral history system. Styles of participation are often stable across time.
(JW: Can you create profiles of users based on their patterns and then design towards those profiles?)

Mobile Devices as the new mouse - First waves of practical devices that integrate cameras, phones, network, display

Social implications - laminated reality; cell phones and wireless networks

Spotme.ch - handheld that notifies you when someone nearby is interested in the same topics

nTag is doing this with infrared (tag has a display for the other person) - broker relationships; records who you interacted with

Semacode - two dimensional semacode

Trepia - instant community

Aura - weaving threads into tings; build apps that are built around tags (barcodes, RPID); build sample applications to demonstrate and investigate the value of anchoring data and services to objects, people and places. Link people to people through shared objects and places.

Example idea - use in museum/gallery - barcode near painting is scanned to deliver the full information on the handheld. You can also see your path through the gallery later as a history of your day.
Another example of scanning groceries to find important health info (allergies, recalls, etc.)

http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/foodlab.html - genetically modified foods

Scan your property and upload it into eBay when you want to sell

Scan your personal information (e commerce, credit card info, purchase history, recommendations)

Transcendent Interactions: Collaborative Contexts and Relationship-based Computing
Stewart Butterfield, Ben Cerveny, Eric Costello - Ludicorp Ltd.

Sidenote: Presentation was white text on black background, which was cool.

Don't build applications. Build contexts for interaction.

The architecture of entertainment has been shaped by the idea of "immersion"; Horton Plaza is intentionally confusing and causes the visitor to find places they wouldn't have.

"Play" is about people, not places. Emerges as an act of social bonding and community.

Build an architecture in which people inhabit; play is improvisational collaboration or sharing

Messages delivered became part of a game object

Social Network Explorer - in-game relationship data

GNE Neighborhood browser - transposing relationships from the game context to the blog context (instant blogroll)

Relationship-based Computing (as opposed to Application-based or Document-based) - organized by your relationships with people

flickr - ala friendster; uses your buddy list; groups are also objects in the messaging system; includes photos that can be dragged to your buddy list and brings all the 'friends' profile info with it

These architectures of people allows you to combine text and visual information and enhances the experience of the relationship.

Flickr Adding - authentication service and friend service; another application that uses filtered Amazon content based on friends' recommendations

Applications, like architecture can shut down possibility; buildings that have a sense of order or restraint.

Fluid contexts for interaction are where rich social systems arise. More improvisational experiences.

Mobile Hacks
Brian Jepson

Reviewed data plans (below) and then went into the way to tap into your phone and send AT commands. This part was beyond me so I left.

Data Plans
AT&T Wireless http://www.attws.com
Sony Ericsson T68i - capable of 40kbps; painful pricing
With EDGE - Nokia 6200; enhanced data rates; EDGE improves GSM

T-mobile http://www.t-mobile.com
Two phones (SIM swapping)
Nokia 3650 for voice/PDA; Merlin G100 for data

Verizon Wireless http://www.verizonwireless.com
Motorola v120e
Up to 100kbps; data pricing is murky

Sprint PCS Vision http://www.pcsvision.com
Merlin C201 (card)
Up to 100kbps ; $39.99/mo for 20MB; appears as a serial port to Linux, Mac OS X, etc.

Compression
Sprint and T-mobile support transparent compression; gzip photos to reduce size

EDGE, CDMA and other terms/acronymns related to mobile - http://www.pdaphonehome.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5200

Leveraging RSS @ Disney: From Collaboration to Massive Content Delivery
Elizabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Mike Pusateri

DIG - Disney Internet Group

Go.com portal - Infoseek and Disney content partnership (1999); wanted to keep site running because of user loyalty but without cost

Content Aggregation - get content into site - automated & simple; simple templates created to take feeds and reformat them into web page; stressed use of RSS from the beginning

Content from various areas brought into the Go.com portal
RSS allowed them to repurpose for wirelss business; partnering with cellphone companies (WML templates)
Also used for internal Disney Enterprise Portal

Taking RSS Feeds public - how to convince content providers to make the content public; white paper showed that highest hits on "Eisner" were coming from blogs; giving content away doesn't necessarily translate to loss of revenue

ABCNews.com -
XLST based system for repurposing content feeds to the public web site; distribute content create clicks back to the main site from RSS feeds; trying to transition from publishing system that has no standards to the RSS model that has standards (content and presentation are truly separated)
Considering turning parts of site into more 'blog-like' (The Note)

Movies.com -
Blog for Ebert & Roper
Would like to create external RSS feeds for movie news headlines, reviews

Massive Content Delivery with RSS
Challenge to delivery compelling experience to users; aggressive attitude towards broadband experience
High quality video, no waiting. Bitrate of experience is greater than users' bandwidth (high quality video on a page - i.e., ESPN)

Enclosure tag in RSS discussed by Winer/Curry - add rich content payload to an RSS item; Client RSS aggregator downloads video and precaches it on the machine (PC only right now); within 3 weeks they had over 1 million users.

Disney Magic Connection - shipping to client behind the scenes using RSS feeds (ABC Motion Tom Bergeron is the announcer! And its an ad)

Case against RSS enclosures - not enough bandwidth to support them (takes a while to download the client), but Eric argued that they are able to download to scale

Mike (TV engineer)
Information Flow - consistent flow; moved from paper reporting to web applications to email, but became increasingly burdensome
Shift Logs - 24 hour positions necessitate the creation of a shift log to report information to coworkers and management about what occurred on the shift; used FoxPro but lacked functionality; moved to Moveable Type (blog) with wide acceptance. Soon has various shift logs - decided to use the NewsGator aggregator (plugs into Outlook); shows up every 10 minutes in Outlook
Discrepancy Reports - detailed information on mistakes, problems; use software but can send as RSS feeds
Ratings information - daily need for overnight ratings info; Neilsen processes and generates reports on web - they were able to use RSS feeds to syndicate
He argues that syndication needs to have style/format - tabular, etc.
Future directions - news clipping service (web app); looking at ATOM to replace RSS and compliant tools for simple publishing (comment about a feed without using complex publishing tools); syndication of media content for review (clips and dailies shown to executives)
Need to move towards server aggregation rather than client; Need for authentication is immediate

NewsGator via Outlook has a folder called Newsfeeds that includes all the subscribed blogs and their entries
(Can we talk to New Technologies about using NewsGator? Cool idea is to move news/alerts into a blog that is fed into Outlook ala Public Folder)

Wiki - notification brings people to the site via email; requires people to be collaborative and share information; Wireless group uses Wiki to discuss the games they produce for phones (JW: Nemo holding a cellphone - they are having just too much fun at Disney); XML RSS software infrastructure can be reused for a variety of needs: inexpensive solution

DIG has one blog (50 users); Operations has 6 blogs (100 users); Wiki at DIG is very popular and has several groups using it to contribute

FlashCast - "Information Finds You"
Jim Morris, Macromedia

Nokia phone (displayed on projector) - viewing flash news (entertainement, news, etc.); color ; toggles left & right; updated within 15 minutes; pushed to user

Mobile space - mobile phone use is growing rapidly; more data services becoming popular, but technology still has limitations (slow, expensive, display size, battery limitations, short attention span of users)

Handsets are improving: memory, screens, CPUs; data transfer is increasing

Next killer app?

Experience matters - needs to be enjoyable for the user to return

Flash widely accepted on web and becoming popular on other devices (including TV); Leapster is completely based on Flash as the user interface

NTT Docomo (Japan) 505i and 505iS handsets are all Flash enabled; taken browser model and extended to include Flash content

Technorati Hacks
David Sifry, Sputnik, Inc.
Over 1.6 mill sources tracked
11K new weblogs tracked/day (new weblog created every 7.8 seconds); 35% abandoned (no posts in 3 mos)
Over 100K updates per day
Median time from weblog post to live index is 7 minutes

Results page: capturing the links on blogs referencing this conference (JW: eek! I feel violated)

Keyword search released Monday (2/9); increased ability to respond to big queries

Typically create deep links to things like Amazon (not the root URL)

'whipped up' top products discussed in the last 24 hours (7 hours of coding)
http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/products.html

Social software - annotating the web; i.e., I link to an amazon page and write a comment - technorati pulls out that conversation and brings them together into one page.

Salam Pax - Baghdad blogger; who was the first to find his blog, how did it grow so fast? Technorati can look at the links in terms of their timestamps to see how it grew in popularity

Powerlaw - www.technorati.com/blogpower.html - Ranking vs inbound links - Flash link (can zoom in); when you have fair access to media, by its nature you will have a curve where there is a relatively small number of things logged by a lot of people; the really interesting ones are the guys at the bottom of the curve - a community that can still be effective
www.technorati.com/bloglinks.html - Ranking vs total no. of inbound blogs

XMLAPIs for all functionality
• free for non-commercial user
• REST based architecture (GET/Post syntax)
Link Cosmos, Keyword search, Top 100, Breaking news, current events
Perl, Python, Radio, C#, ASP interfaces
http://developers.technorati.com

Joi Ito - IM/SMS notifications of new links; anytime someone links to his blog he gets an IM

High Priority Indexer www.technorati.com/ping.html (you can have technorati index your blog on your command)

Technorati is working on…
• Subscribe to a set of keyword and Cosmos filters (an alerting/current awareness service)
• Notification of updated content through IM (you put your OPML file in and it gets reordered and given back to you); goal is tell the reader that a blog has updated and push the content to them
• Vote Links - add to the URL a "vote=" statement that either gives endorsement or not (vote=1 is "for" vote=-1 is "against" vote=0 is "no comment")

Q&A - Where should 'we' go?
Suggestion that Votelink be extended more to dimensions based on the topic
More structured formats over blogs (one big text blob is not structured enough); more metadata is good; shift is that people are using tools to publish to the web, rather than Frontpage, that provide more structure

Breaking News (www.technorati.com)
New news reported in the last 12 hours
Story with links to blogger comments on the story
Professional news but uses bloggers as editors/filters
Reversed chronologically ordered

Current Events vs Breaking News
Ranked by popularity (number of conversations)

Suggestion - send cosmos links to the authors so they can see who is talking about their articles (some journalists in the audience loved the idea)

O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference
2/9-2/13

Day One

Keynote - Tim O'Reilly

Sidenotes:
• Social software - ways that allow the users to contribute
• Wiki - Hawaiian "easy"; world writeable web site to allow contribution; honor system that folks will be responsible
• Geo-annotation; onsite conference project to place folks at different locations throughout downtown SD and provide annotations of what is around them; tying location with other types of data (illustration had poor metadata, which Tim joked about)
• Mac OS10 preferred platform of attendees

Hackers:
• New technology emerges; push the limits; try to make software better
• Entrepreneurs apply hacker insights and make technology easier for user
• Trickle down; innovative things become part of the platform

What's on the Radar? Hacks on Killer Apps (google, ebay, etc.)
What makes them killer apps interesting?
• It is the platform, not PC
• Built on top of open source, but not themselves open source
• They're services, not packaged applications
• Exploring how to be platofmr players via web services APIs
• Data aggregators, not just software
• User contributions (illustration of amazon search of 'javascript')

Social Software - 'most popular results' uses userbase to tell you what's best; ListMania - users add additional functionality of other spins of how to get to data (workspace gadget?? Other ways to organize ); user reviews also add to social software aspect of the service
Google harnesses the way people make links on the web
Mapquest does not have social software but would be a good opportunity to let users contribute; Tim: ads flashing on the site say 'go away user'

Web sites will be syndicated and bring content together (RSS); tie into mapping services to see who is getting together at locations

A lot more activity on the net to mobilize people; MoveOn.com - started by Berkley folks ; largest advocacy organization in the worldfigured out how to leverage the internet
Deanspace - Howard Dean used the internet to reach out and raise campaign money (patient died bu the operation was a success)

The Word Spy - dictionary style entry of new words; snapshot of culture evolving; "metrosexual"; "bluejacking" - stealing someone's blue tooth connection; a lot of techy terms

MovileWhack - untethered wireless devices are high on the radar; key part of the new platform

iPod 0 rich interface; "rendenvous-enabled" - who else on my LAN has music to share (Mac); Copyright wars causes limitations, but it will be figured out; features are uneven (rendezvous and buddy list not used across all the interfaces tha apple came up with related to iPod and iTunes

orkut - competitor to Friendster

Peer to Peer data sharing; if you're in my address book you are my friend and I should be able to manage sharing locally

Network-enabled Market Research - 10 yr web service market share chart displayed; little consultancy in the UK spidered computers to research the market; stock market visualization; Netscan (visualizing usenet/sector maps ; Technorati - stats about blogging (to say which ones are most powerful or have the most influence); Alexa View of Friendster vs Orkut (Friendster is way behind Orkut); Amazon related books feature to see what people are reading - Visualization (http://www.orgnet.com/divided.html)

Using blogs in business: http://www.blogroots.com/chapters.blog/id/4

News headlines: http://www.allheadlinenews.com/addnews/xml.shtml

Lots of blogger presentations at Internet Librarian

Also, the presentation by Darlene Fichter on blogging tools may be useful:
http://library.usask.ca/~fichter/talks03/il/2003.11.04.cyber.blogging.tools.pps

Hubmed – An alternative interface to the PubMed medical literature database; PubMed is open source and using RSS

NewsGator RSS news aggregator for Outlook.

NewsGator is a "news aggregator" that runs in Microsoft Outlook. It allows you to subscribe to various syndicated news feeds (such as weblogs, news sites, etc.) and have news from these sites be delivered right into your Outlook folders. There are thousands of sites which syndicate their content in RSS format, and many more being added every day.

NewzCrawler - trial available

US News is using RSS/XML (see orange button at bottom right).

Using Daypop to search blogs and RSS feeds (I limited it to RSS Headlines and searched "therapy")


Results

Movabletype - server software that allows community blogging. Allows you to build categories of blog postings. It also allows you to add comments to blog postings others have submitted (blogger.com doesn't have this functionality but some other sites do). Other difference - movabletype does have automatic RSS feed, but blogger.com does not.

NEASIS presentation "Blogging, RSS Feeds and News Aggregators: a hands-on workshop with Steven Cohen" at MIT (DIRC, 14N-132).

• Presentation (web)
  
• Presentation (PPT)

Buy the book Keeping Current