Social bookmarking.

This is another aspect of knowledge management. Still figuring out how best to use it, and how the various social bookmarking services differ/overlap. Once you get the hang of using other people's bookmarks and tags, you can save quite a bit of time in your searches for information -- as long as everyone is tagging in some rational way.

CHI 2006: Dogear, Social Bookmarking for the Enterprise. (Notes from a talk about IBM's Dogear.)

Social bookmarking is a central store, where you can put keywords (tags), discover via "pivot" browsing, and subscribe to link feeds.

[Seb's Open Research]

10:49:37 AM    

Some different approaches to games and virtual life.

As reported by Seb from CHI 2006. I've edited his post. These sessions are more "idea generators" than research that actually answers questions in a way that a designer could use directly (or so it seems to me). World of Warcraft is an eye-opener if you are new to MMORPGs. Also see Business Week (cover story here) (author's comments here) this week for Second Life. These are far more open-ended than any e-Learning game available today, but I think they show us where we are headed.

CHI 2006: Games & Performance session. Alone Together? Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games is the title of a very interesting study of World of Warcraft (WoW) social dynamics by Nicolas Ducheneaut and collaborators.
Basically they used WoW's open API to scrape data about hundreds of thousands of players on five servers, registering who was present where and when and what character they were playing. The paper is surely worth a look if you're interested in online social interaction patterns from data.

Next I listened to a talk about Interweaving Mobile Games With Everyday Life, which dealt with an urban multiplayer PocketPC game called Feed the Yoshi. It gave me some game ideas for the Ile Sans Fil community wireless project.

10:43:57 AM