Links on the presenter’s name go to the abstract in the AoIR program.

Hugh Mackay presented part of what seemed like a huge amount of ethnographic data about the role of the net in “normal” households. It’s nice to get a good dose of reality in terms of how people are actually using the internet today. It’s easy to get caught up in the geek world and think everyone is like you. People are actually not using it for a wide variety of purposes, just a few well defined genres, and not very often, usually something quick and specific.

Sabryna Cornish, a UIC alum, presented part of her PhD work on how major print newspapers framed the internet between 1988 and 1994. She has found the words safety, security, and lost as the most frequently associated with the internet in news stories throughout the whole period. I was somewhat surprised at “lost” showing up so high, but safety and security seem to be a pretty strong theme even today. I wonder if the themes have stayed the same through say 2004? I’d imagine that there is more diversity, but these themes still might take the top spots. It’s an interesting finding, if you think about the exuberance about the early internet, but not if you think about the conventions of journalism and scare tactics.

Nancy Baym presented a study of how Ann Landers and Dear Abby wrote about the internet from about 1992-2002. This was very interesting partly because the ‘internet as home-wrecker’ theme seems so funny to us now. She found a major shift in 2000 where letter writers and columnists stopped talking about the internet as a common problem that we face, but as individual issues i.e. the problem is that your husband/wife is having an affair, not the internet.

Richard Smith talked about his experience using podcasts, live streaming media, and many more technologies in his courses. I’ve seen/heard a lot of “how to use podcasts/Web 2.0/etc.” in the classroom, but this wasn’t tool-focused or exuberant. He had actual experience and research to base this on, and focused on learning. He recorded the presentation itself (he walks the walk..).

My own session went well. Although it was fairly early on the last day of the conference I still got some good feedback and questions. I’ve held off putting my part of the research for IRB reasons, and it’s just a first draft right now. We’re clear with the IRB, and maybe someone will find it useful, so here it is. It’s about our experience using tags at AoIR 05.

But now it’s like this:

The stated goal is to help people get at the “conversation around a url”. But it’s not a conversation if there’s no turn taking or response to what others are saying, it’s an aggregation of notes, except in rare instances where one is responding to another – which, while technically possible, is not often the case.

Calling this a conversation is simpler but there’s a lot more to it. It’s like collecting all the reviews of a movie. That’s not a conversation around a movie, it’s a collection of related information; the reviews primarily respond to the movie itself although they may also respond to other critics. To extend the simile, the critics who merit response are those who are most influential. You won’t often see the critic for the San-Diego Union Tribune responding to what the reviewer from the Sacramento Bee said, but both of them might note the criticism from Ebert and Roper.

And that’s assuming that people’s notes attached to a URI are about the URI. It’s often just a sentence or two from the page itself, or perhaps a note that deals with someone’s individual context. This is related info, quite useful in some cases, but it’s not a conversation.

I wonder if there’s a term for what this is? How about “subject aggregation”? I think that will take off about as well as connective efficacy.

There are a few scenarios where this need might arise, but just to give one example, a delicious user who has a web page announced on his page for readers to use a particular unique tag to add things to a linkroll that would be fed to his page. This effort was halted, however, because someone contributed links that seemed unrelated to the purpose / topic of the web site – not spam, just poor identification and tagging of the link. The offending contributor had no contact info or name on del.icio.us (the majority of del.icio.us users do not) so there was no way to contact this person whatsoever.

I just thought of a work-around. Now that we have for:username where you can send links directly to another user you can use the note text to send a message – “Hi, I saw you were contributing to the XYZ tag, I’m Ericka and I run xyz.org…”

Clearly the problem is that the vast majority of users don’t know you can do for:username let alone check that “links for you” box unless someone is known to send them things, or they’re weird like me and subscribe to the feed of that page just in case – But, if the for: feature is ever implemented in such a way that you don’t have to be extremely “in the know” to use it then it can serve this purpose.

Maybe this is extremely obvious, and maybe this is one of the reasons the feature is basically “hidden” as there are good reasons not to have a messaging system (the ‘creep out’ factor, and the additional avenue for spam / spam blocking), but now that the can of worms is open I don’t foresee the shut-down of for: so the only road is improved usability of the feature.

One thing they all agreed about blog content was that the best blogs present a full personality with a diversity of interests. The reason for this was stated as that this promotes the serendipity of print that is often lacking online; that is, stumbling upon something you weren’t looking for, getting out of the wormhole.

I’d say that tags do this too. Just one example is that I used Flickr photographs in my class last semester as an outlining exercise. I gathered photos from different tags and one thing that was interesting was that the football tag was 1/2 pictures of what we call soccer. Just a little “oh yeah, not everyone calls it that” moment I think was a good thing.

I won’t be mixing posts about research findings with pictures of my cat, or at least, I plan to keep a professional focus to the blog. My professed topic – technology & the social – is wide enough for now.

I recently ran into an attempt over on Davey P’s weblog to use subject headings in a different form, a tag cloud. A tag cloud is a term for the types of visualizations that sites like Flickr, del.icio.us and the like use as a part of their navigation. It seems to have been developed to display info that is unrelated structurally (i.e. not in a tree or whatnot) by popularity of keyword tags – very different from highly structured library subject headings.

A tag cloud gives an overview of the whole system in one visualization. The trade off is that there needs to be a threshold of popularity for the keywords so that the cloud isn’t too overwhelming, and in the library example above “sub-subjects … are collapsed into the parent subject” which seems to make sense for a hierarchical system. It is interesting to know the “popularity” of certain subjects in the library, although that’s probably not what most people are looking for – but it could give clues about what terms are used, and that could be useful. As long as the limitations of this navigation are recognized I think it’s a great additional interface for browsing, particularly if people become more familiar with tag clouds.

I have seen a number of attempts to use specific tags to bring bits of info together – most successfully on Flickr, with just a quick search revealing that desktopshowandtell has been in use well over a year now, which makes some sense given its promotion on kottke. I’ve also seen some, mostly smaller & tech oriented conferences using tags to bring some info together. In the paper I try to add a few ideas about practical implementation at a conference & make more info about one particular case available.

For those who don’t know, my thesis is on social bookmarking and its role in meaning making on the web. What do I think about del.icio.us being acquired by Yahoo? I don’t really know. I was a bit worried when they bought Flickr, but Flickr is still Flickr and I hope delicious will still be delicious.

My primary method for my thesis will be interviews. I’m hoping to do many of the interviews in-person (Chicago area), but I’m also doing a Skype (or whatever) online interview as well, so if you’re interested in sharing your experience with delicious please let me know (yes, just delicious, I’m trying to keep things less confusing by limiting to one system). The interviews will start hopefully late-January / early-Feb & I’ll make another announcement about that.

I’m on my way home to Cincinnati for a pre-christmas thing b/c my husband and I will be up in Chicago this year with his family for Christmas – so early presents for us Actually, Jim and I are going to go skiing or something in January instead of giving each other presents.

When you view a social bookmarking system by web page you’re seeing all of the users that have saved the page to the system, as well as the tags they assigned to it. When you view a system by tag you’re seeing all of the web pages assigned by particular users to a particular tag. Tags can’t exist without web pages assigned to them. When you view a system by user you’re seeing all of web pages and tags a person has saved to the system. It’s easy to pivot between these three views, usually with one click.

What’s not shown here is that the default method of organization of items under each view is time. A secondary method is “popularity,” which differs based on which of the three views you’re in. In web page view you could see what the popular tags are for that page, you could also see how many users saved it. In tag view you could see the most popular web pages in that tag – which is calculated based on a mix of recency and overall number of users who have that page in their collection. In user view you could see which tags that person has applied the most frequently – although I wouldn’t call that popularity exactly.

The best way to explain social bookmarking is probably just to do a tour through the system, although even with that I’ve had mixed success in a presentation type of setting.

The proposition, as explained on memography.org, is simple. Create a globally unique string or meme ID. Paste this string into relevant web pages. Wait for search engines to crawl the pages. Then use the meme ID to search with 100% precision and recall. And you can even create an aboutness page to define your meme, so others can use it properly.

The above is from a very interesting post over at findability.org titled The Memetic Web which references memography.org. I didn’t have a chance to look into memography.org much directly, so what I’m responding to is the post on findability.

If I hadn’t had experience with my own name and making up globally unique strings, both by accident and on purpose, I might think it was more difficult than it actually is. To add a little evidence beyond my own experience, the people who run the site Connotea, which is for sharing academic references a la social bookmarking, wrote up a case study of their own service where they found that 14% (460) of the unique tags (3359) on Connotea were used by more than one person – that is, 86% of tags are unique strings within that system (!). Although it’s a relatively small sample I think it’s fascinating.

I use one tag on del.icio.us that I’d like to be more popular (or at least not unique), metablogosphere, which I use for sites that visualize or search in some fashion a large number of blogs. I was using this tag more when I was doing a research project on blogs, but I’ve never blogged or otherwise promoted metablogosphere. When I first started on blog research I thought it would be presumptuous to announce my ‘new’ term, and I was waiting to find the ‘real’ term. Also, how many people are actually interested in this? And would they notice and use this term? The ‘risk’ didn’t seem to outweigh the ‘reward’ – although that’s a dramatic way to put it.

Another case is aoir6 – which my class and I proposed as a tag for the Association of Internet Researchers sixth annual meeting. We used the tag for blog posts via Technorati Tags, for bookmarks in del.icio.us and for photos on Flickr. The string aoir6 didn’t exist 6 months ago (and not much beyond 3 months ago) and I did a search on Google just now and got 9,910 results, all related to the conference from what I can see.

So, in short, I can see what’s interesting about globally unique strings. My examples above have been related to tags, and I see the subject of globally unique strings and tagging as very densely intertwined.

One problem I see is that people get attached to their inventions, so if you have competing strings for a particular concept (i.e. someone has something that already means what I mean by metablogosphere) and I go out and promote my string, then you perhaps have 100% personal / sphere of influence accuracy but not a truly global type of tool. Maybe that’s not such a problem since it’s silly to think we could have a truly global agreement.

The corollary problem is that others start using a string with a different definition in mind. This is what has happened to folksonomy, which is somewhat vexing to it’s originator. This is a much more sticky problem. Does it mean what the person who originated it intended, or does it mean what most people intend when they use it? Being a bottom-up kind of person I favor the latter, but probably not if it were my invention

http://www.mindvalley.com/socialbookmarking/

My answer was: Well, I love visualizations, which I usually see done by third parties with delicious data. I also love exploring to find new sites, although this process is a bit frustrating because I’m always going off on a tangent and I forget what I started off looking for. I’m generally pretty focused, but exploring these SBS I’ll start off looking for resources on social network analysis and end up on a page rating brands of swiss cheese. I’m one of those productivity people so this drives me nuts – except when my tangent takes me to something useful for what I’m working on. I think social bookmarking is going to become more mainstream but it will take some time to convince people to add one more system to their lives.