Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Seeing and Tuning Social Networks Greetings, Smart Mobbers!   My Ad here:  I am looking for a professional or academic venue for pursuing these issues.  You might want to check out  JS on one page . Jon Udell's Seeing and Tuning Social Networks is a bit old (2002), but chock full of references to fascinating work: Macroscope Manifesto by Jonathan Schull is a very broad vision, abundantly illustrated, about the use of pattern-recognition and visualization methodologies to make visible a wide range of phenomena, including, but not limited to, the kind of social network visualization that Valdis Krebs has pioneered. [Smart Mobs]   P.S.  2002 may be a 'bit old', but the situation and the opportunity have hardly changed. comments? [] 2:40:07 PM     Newsgator Gotta say I'm very pleased and impressed. Here are a few things that weren't obvious. -Radio must be running to post. -how to modify previous posts -pasting of local images is no easier than in Radio +through some magic, you can reply (by email) to some posters     comments? [] 1:21:32 PM     Hotspots To Make Money For Resellers?   There seems to be an ongoing battle over whether or not commercial WiFi hotspots will ever make money. A few companies have tried different strategies, and so far, all of them haven't done terribly well. The latest move is that Toshiba is trying to increase adoption of their hotspots by signing up resellers to go out and pitch restaurants and cafs. The resellers will also be responsible for setting up the Toshiba hotspots and doing any maintenance on them. This sounds like a positively terrible idea. It adds yet another middleman to the puzzle. Half the problem with most of the commercial WiFi deployments is that you have so many different people who all want to take a cut of the action, that the final price to the consumer ensures there's no action to take a cut from. Adding an extra middleman doesn't solve anything - it just makes the problem worse. [Techdirt Corporate Intelligence: Techdirt Wireless] comments? [] 1:04:35 PM     Mapping Trees to Rooms   Work from HP on Automatically Designed 3-D Environments for Intuitive Browsing and Discovery maps tree structures onto large art-gallery like rooms.  Nifty idea, but I'm skeptical of 3d as a interaction technique for browsing.  The ability to show focus and context makes it a good choice for selection and high level navigation. [Surf*Mind*Musings] comments? [] 1:03:33 PM     Downhill (and the blogging ecosystem, sorta) has an API   Downhill, mentioned a couple of days ago, now has an XML-RPC API. You can also use it to grab little bits of data out of the ecosystem (if you can't be bothered downloading and parsing the whole dataset from the site, or if you don't have a copy of Python handy to do the decoding). Comment [Second p0st] comments? [] 12:59:46 PM     the microblogosphere and nested levels of selection in evolutionary theory I just became aware of this thread Recommender systems and the microblogosphere Michael elaborates on Ming's call for personalized collaborative ranking. (Did you ping the LazyWeb, Ming?) I think the idea has been around in various forms for a while, under the general rubric "recommender systems". I know Epinions features a (probably nowhere documented) personalized web of trust that influences the results you get when searching for product reviews. We want to get recommendations from people we trust, how do we implement that? The obvious way is to just read these people's blogs, but they don't cover everything we might be interested in. Perhaps a good, simple start for ranking Web content would be a customized Technorati that restricts the blogosphere to only take into account blogs that are at most N degrees of separation away from you (link-wise), for small values of N (say, 2 or 3). Call that the microblogosphere that has you as center. I'd love to see what "interesting newcomers" would show up there for me. Seb's Open Research and am struck again by the relation in evolutionary theory to the adaption-amplifying power of nested hierarchical selection systems.  I should write about this sometime.  But or now, some pointers:  William James and the emerging philosophy of the World Wide Web,  William James Writ Large , The View from the Adaptive Landscape , and Are Species Intelligent?   comments? [] 12:58:32 PM     I just became aware of this thread Recommender systems and the microblogosphere Michael elaborates on Ming's call for personalized collaborative ranking. (Did you ping the LazyWeb, Ming?) I think the idea has been around in various forms for a while, under the general rubric "recommender systems". I know Epinions features a (probably nowhere documented) personalized web of trust that influences the results you get when searching for product reviews. We want to get recommendations from people we trust, how do we implement that? The obvious way is to just read these people's blogs, but they don't cover everything we might be interested in. Perhaps a good, simple start for ranking Web content would be a customized Technorati that restricts the blogosphere to only take into account blogs that are at most N degrees of separation away from you (link-wise), for small values of N (say, 2 or 3). Call that the microblogosphere that has you as center. I'd love to see what "interesting newcomers" would show up there for me. Seb's Open Research and am struck again by the relation in evolutionary theory to the adaption-amplifying power of nested hierarchical selection systems.  I should write about this sometime.  But or now, some pointers:  William James and the emerging philosophy of the World Wide Web,  William James Writ Large , The View from the Adaptive Landscape , and Are Species Intelligent?   comments? [] 12:56:32 PM     Group Voice (wikis vs weblogs) We aren't the only one to think of the differences between weblogs and wikis as individual and group voices.  Elwin Jenkins describes it as weblogs turn individuals into webpages while wikis turn communities into webpages. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog] comments? [] 12:32:17 PM     Get or Post? A must read light hearted techy article from Tim Bray in response to Dave Sifry's new Technorati API (especially for... [Mike's Digital Laboratory] Indeed, and if it leads me to add a footnote:   The free http://tinyurl.com   service converts this complicated but RESTful get-style URI http://api.technorati.com/bloginfo?format=xml&;url=http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000286.html&;key=27a4ad9b8d5df406a0f93d7a1b1d6652 into this opaque but simple one:  http://tinyurl.com/e1u0  (TinyURL sends a redirect to bounce your browser to the full-blown URL.) Now, put a metering or e-commerce system behind tinyurl....   comments? [] 12:00:21 PM     WiFi Around The World   Douglas Heingartner, of The New York Times, did a nice job writing "Roving the Globe, Laptops Alight on Wireless Hot Spots" in today's Circuits. In addition to a comprehensive discussion about how and where people are using WiFi around the world, he included a nice sidebar entitled Eureka: Prospecting for Internet Access which provides a good reference to finding WiFi access. Some of the sites Douglas highlighted included hotspot-locations.com, wi-fizone.org and wifinder.com. He pointed out that it is worth checking all three, because their listings may not overlap. For noncommercial networks, he suggested wififreespot.com. The most exotic listings may be at nodedb.com, which includes a large database of WiFi nodes with maps showing the locations. [John Patrick's weblog] comments? [] 11:16:37 AM     Measuring blogs, part 1   I was doing some thinking about measuring blog usage today[base ']Äînot how many blogs there are, but how far blog content reaches....  What about treating RSS like newsletters? Subscriber count is hard to gather since there[base ']Äôs no [base ']Äúformal[base ']Äù subscriber process to get an RSS file. Likewise download count for the RSS file: while the latter is feasible, platforms like Manila don[base ']Äôt render a static XML file that can be tracked in a traditional web hit log, and counters like SiteMeter only track files that can embed their counting code (which leaves out RSS). [Jarrett House North] Why not slip a 1 pixel "webbug" into the RSS feed? comments? [] 11:10:12 AM     mapping heads - Ideagraph, Tinderbox - interfaces and authoring tools for the semantic web Excellent review! [headmap] comments? [] 10:30:15 AM     Who's In The Loop? USC Tool Maps The Email Labyrinth Called "eArchivarius," Leuski's system uses sophisticated search software developed for Internet search engines like Google to detect important relationships ... Google News by CodingTheWeb.com] http://www.usc.edu/isinews/stories/91.html comments? [] 10:15:47 AM     The Knoppix AP Challenge   A bounty of booty is being offered for the first person or team who can make a bootable CD distro ala Knoppix that will make a standard x86 pc with standard wifi gear a NoCat splashing/authing, Apache serving , Wifi broadcasting, wireless community network AP simply by insertng the CD and rebooting. The big picture goal is to make a solution we can hand out to anyone who wants to run a node but maybe is not up to speed on the tech, maybe never will. By making it easier to run a node the hope is the coverage possibilities will increase. The more coverage, the better our networks. Read the full details on how to win fame and glory for the betterment of the community wireless sceen on the PTP wiki [FreeNetworks.ORG] comments? [] 10:07:22 AM     Co-operative World Wide Wireless   Folks, please check out:WiFi Coop, an organization which seeks to create a world wide, non-profit, network of wireless access providers. My white paper explains the rationale for the organization. The gist is, member/user supported (i.e. NOT free) in order to sustain the access points and provide central (democratic) network management. This is still a work in progress obviously, so feedback would be appreciated. [FreeNetworks.ORG] comments? [] 10:06:43 AM     applications of wifi to community development?   What significance could wireless technologies have in under-developed countries? Where is wireless tech currently being used successfully, anywhere in the world, to build a sense of community, to give people better Internet access, etc., and do/could these applications have significance in under-developed communities or countries? Online volunteers and the United Nations Information Technology Service are exploring these issues. [FreeNetworks.ORG] comments? [] 10:05:57 AM     Generation i: Coming soon to a family near you The future is always here, but...   Generation i: Coming soon to a family near you The future is always here, but unevenly distributed. A joint San Jose Mercury News / Kaiser Family Foundation survey of kid's use of the Internet in Silicon Valley shows a remarkable degree of adoption, and social adaptation, in just a few years. If you're outside the Valley or other early adopting areas, this is what awaits you. If you can overlook the obligatory down-side stories in the linked SJ Merc coverage, it's remarkable the degree to which Internet adoption in households with kids has smashed through the 60% nationwide average, and right into socio-economic niches that were supposed to be digitally divided. Thanks to Smart Mobs for link to the survey material. [Due Diligence] comments? [] 9:57:08 AM

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