Collection of thoughts

A couple of posts captured from RSS feed and a comment from Wendy Mackay e-lab paper

Delver Reinvents Search

URL: Delver Reinvents Search

The most impressive thing about the new search engine Delver is that it knows who you are and who your friends are even if you don't import your address book or add your social networking profiles. Instead, Delver leverages the social graph to map out a user's social connections. Since everyone's social graph is unique, like a fingerprint, the same query will yield vastly different results for each user. The results are more personal and meaningful to users than a generic search using "normal" search engine.

But don't call Delver a "social search engine."

"That name belongs to services like Mahalo," says Liad Agmon, Delver CEO. "We prefer the term 'socially connected search engine'." That term makes sense because Delver is not a social network built around a search engine, but a search engine who indexes and queries your social network to deliver its results. Instead of just looking at a web site's popularity, Delver looks at information like whether your friends have tagged the site or if it's found on their social network profiles, bookmarking sites, photos and video sharing sites, or on their blogs. The results are more relevant because they account for who a person is and what they find valuable.

Agmon adds, "People want trusted information from their friends, but may not know who in their network is knowledgeable about a given topic. We make Web search more fun and meaningful by prioritizing results based on a user's network, while enabling the user to discover others in their extended network who share common interests."

Even without registering for an account, Delver will try to determine who you are by searching any public social network profiles you may have on sites like Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube. If you do decide to register on the site, though, you can then choose to associate your accounts with Delver in order to obtain even more accurate results. Delver currently indexes the entire web, and specifically indexes people's social connections on flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, hi5, facebook, Blogger, and, they are adding more all the time. When they go into public beta (circa May, 2008), an optional email import process will be provided as well.

Maximizing Your "Whole" Social Network

Many of us have friends, family members, or colleagues on sites like MySpace and facebook who aren't into using all the latest and greatest web apps and technologies. These friends may have a MySpace profile or a blog, but without visiting these sites directly, there was no way to gather information from these people before. Now with Delver, their profiles and contributions to your social graph are indexed.

No one has to sign up for Delver for you to have them included in your search results.

This is a real breakthrough since prior to Delver, the maximum value you would get out of social networks was directly related to how many of your friends would join. I don't know about you, but I still have plenty of friends who are on MySpace and nothing else, and are quite content with that. With each new social network I joined, the number of my non-tech friends that would follow me dwindled down to nearly nothing. Now it doesn't matter. They can stay on MySpace forever and yet the content they create there will be valuable to me.

Privacy Concerns?

It's important to understand that Delver doesn't display anything that isn't already publicly available. "If Google can get to it, so can Delver," says Agmon. But Delver just makes it so much easier to do so. You can access people's social information with such ease that anyone who hasn't been good about setting their profiles to "private" (or who doesn't know to do so), may be surprised to find themselves searchable on Delver.

Using Delver

After claiming your identity in Delver, your social graph is mapped and displayed for you beneath the Delver search box. Dotted lines connect you to your friends and your "friends of friends.

- Why blog this?
Insight to how social search could be thought of, and how in fact may provide the desired insight for scientific work ?

Collaborative Technologies and Science: More Tools or More Risk?

URL: Collaborative Technologies and Science: More Tools or More Risk?

Social networking has begun to make inroads in the scientific community. The Scientific American recent article, Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk, discusses wikis, blogs, and other technologies and how their usage by researchers could be transforming how science is researched, published, disseminated, and viewed. Research work is beginning to become available through blogs, wikis, and social networks by a small but growing group of researchers.

In Eric Schell's post, Evidence of the Value of Blogs as Scholarship, he mentions a case where a postdoc geneticist received credit and acknowledgement for his blog entries. Reed Cartwright posted his random thoughts on a mutant plant gene on his blog in March 2005. One year later after reading the post Luca Comai, a plant geneticist, contacted Reed. He and said that he had coincidentally arrived at the same hypothesis, and was about to publish his research in Plant Cell. Comai said he felt obligated to acknowledge Mr. Cartwright’s blog post and offered to make him a co-author of his article. Mr. Cartwright, who is not a plant geneticist, accepted the offer.

Of course this method of information and knowledge sharing is not without controversy. While there are researchers praising the transparent and "open notebook" approach citing various success stories like OpenWetWare, UsefulChem, Chembarkothers, there are others worried about potential minefields. The fear of being scooped and the lack of attribution and credit can be huge barriers to overcome in a system where being the first to report a discovery, publishing peer reviewed journals and having heavily cited articles is the foundation for promotion within scientific community.

I like what Bora Zivkovic said in the Scientific American article, "It's a Darwinian process. About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread." I think that not only sums up the evolution of these tools in science but other disciplines as well such as medicine, education, and libraries.

Why blog this?
Raises some of the issues of the potential of Web 2.0 and the areas of sharing and collaboration where may need consideration, think enforces the link with Bruno Latours model of creditability and how scientists search for this in their work. Question in how to overcome this for collaboration?

Extract from The Missing Link: Augmenting Biology Laboratory Notebooks Wendy E.Mackay

"This project is one of a series that examine settings in
which attempts to replace paper artifacts have failed
[16,17,18,19,20 ].We observe and work with users as we
try to understand their interaction with both paper artifacts
and on-line systems.Then,through a series of
brainstorming and prototyping participatory design
sessions,we create prototypes that integrate paper and on-
line documents,attempting to integrate the different media
and benefit from the advantages of both.Each setting poses
unique design challenges,but when examined together,
they begin to offer a more complete understanding of how
to effectively manage the link between physical and on-line
documents and questions the assumption that documents of
the future will exist solely in electronic form."

16.Mackay,W.(1998)Augmented Reality:Linking real
and virtual worlds.In Proceedings of AVI'98 ,L'Aquila,
Italy:ACM.p.1-8.
17.Mackay,W.(1999)Is Paper Safer?The Role of Paper
Flight Strips in Air Traffic Control.ACM/Transactions
on Computer-Human Interaction,6(4),p.311-340.
18.Mackay,W.and Pagani,D.(1994).Video Mosaic:
Laying out time in a physical space.In Proc.of
Multimedia '94 .San Francisco:ACM,p.165-172.
19.Mackay,W.,Fayard,A.,Frobert,L.&Médini,L.,
(1998)Reinventing the Familiar:Exploring an Aug-
mented Reality Design Space for Air Traffic Control.
In Proc.of CHI '98 ,L.A.:ACM,p.558-565.
20.Mackay,W.,Pagani D.,Faber L.,Inwood B.,
Launiainen P.,Brenta L.&Pouzol V.(1995).Ariel:
Augmenting Paper Engineering Drawings.In CHI '95
Video Program ,San Francisco CA:ACM.

Why blog this?
Think the extract captures the way in which existing e-lab book work has gone and focused upon the action of emulation of paper, where must acknowledge the evolutionary process of paper as a technology and so open a direction to open up for new technology to strive too.

Collection of really useful other blog thoughts

Great post on Recursive affordances - post from Past&Vineger

These two ash-tray found in Geneva and Lausanne are two impressive examples of an object affordances:

Why do I blog this? This is utterly curious from a design perspective. the artifacts designed to received trashed objects looks like the object itself. A sort of recursive affordance to some extent. What does that mean? It’s actually not that recursive and the second example if maybe more self-explanatory since the two different garbages are next to each other. Besides, the first one has a little hole that only allow to receive small things like cigarettes.

Style of posting taken from this blog
- The "Why I blog this?" point is a great way to capture the reasoning behind the post and so I will look to adopt this approach as think it could provide more clarity for reasoning behind each posting of thoughts.


Why do I blog this? - recursive affordances

I have some thoughts to draw up a table of the range of affordances of the lab book as I have provided/put forward an argument that the affodances of paper and so lab book is the foundations of what makes it a ideal mobile ubiquitous artifact, with the ability to fit int work practice.

Some thoughts now maybe with gather the existing range of affordances from Gaver, Sellen & Harper etc to collectively put forward which of these are why the lab book works and where the shortcomings have been in existing technology.

Steve Portigal on scanning/meme-broking

URL: Steve Portigal on scanning/meme-broking

There is a great interview of Steve Portigal in influx. Some excerpts I found relevant:

“A great design strategist (…) someone who has had a few different professional identities and gets excited by the spaces where disciplines, schools of thought, and methods overlap. They are curious and easily intrigued: they like to observe what’s going on around them and they’re good at listening to people. And they know how to use all this data to synthesize new patterns and communicate them clearly to a range of audiences. Charlie Stross, in the sci-fi book “Accelerando”, describes the profession of a “meme broker” and the intense amount of content they have to assimilate every day in order to do this. Bruce Sterling calls this activity “scanning“ looking at all the sources one can and constantly asking what does this mean for my clients. Being able to work through all those data sources and pull out the implications is crucial for design strategy.
(…)
The best research brings to life the imperfect and messy stories of real people and presents generative frameworks that lead the way forward for new designs, products, services, features, communications, or whatever is needed.“

Why blog this ?
Some good insights here that rings a bell with personal thoughts, especially concerning the messiness of reality and the need to uncover quirks, peculiars situations, extreme users as well as exceptions.

Love the idea too of what design strategist should represent and what I think the different perspectives that are required to allow for insight - nice to point to think on for my own work as would like to look for a final position to allow for recommendations to be made in a design strategy context - drawing on use from work and in particularly table of affordances from lab books.

I agree massively with too:

"The best research brings to life the imperfect and messy stories of real people and presents generative frameworks that lead the way forward for new designs, products, services, features, communications, or whatever is needed."

Feel the methods selected for my own research will be part of the comment by Bruce Sterling:

"Bruce Sterling calls this activity “scanning“ looking at all the sources one can and constantly asking what does this mean for my clients. Being able to work through all those data sources and pull out the implications is crucial for design strategy."

- Feel this relates to the conversation that was had with Richard Coyne from Edinburgh and his talk on design tunning - do have his slides to verify/support this.

Web 3.0: Is It About Personalization?

"On the UK's Guardian newspaper site today, writer Jemina Kiss suggested that Web 3.0 will be about recommendation. "If web 2.0 could be summarized as interaction, web 3.0 must be about recommendation and personalization," she wrote. Using Last.fm and Facebook's Beacon as an example, Kiss painted a picture of a web where personalized recommendation services can feed us information on new music, new products, and where to eat. It's a marketers dream and it's really not far off from the definitions we've come up with in the past here on ReadWriteWeb. We've written about web 3.0 and attempted to define it many, many times here over the past year. One of the common themes between almost all of the posts is that Web 3.0 and the vision of the Semantic Web are joined at the hip. Last April, we held a contest asking readers for their web 3.0 definitions. Our favorite came from Robert O'Brien, who defined Web 3.0 as a "decentralized asynchronous me." "Web 1.0: Centralized Them. Web 2.0: Distributed Us. Web 3.0: Decentralized Me," he wrote. "[Web 3.0 is] about me when I don't want to participate in the world. It's about me when I want to have more control of my environment particularly who I let in. When my attention is stretched who/what do I pay attention to and who do I let pay attention to me. It is more effective communication for me!""

Why blog this?
My own work is directed to both web2.0 and incorporating its concept so I am particularly interested where the next step is with the web 3.0 direction - in order to give further power of a tool for scientists, especially when a concern for scientists is about privacy of their own environment and the background to what 3.0 is building towards is "control of my environment particularly who I let in."

Finally -Quote of the day, Feb 3rd, 2008: Interaction-Design.org Quote-of-the-Day

"On the one hand, design must be firmly rooted in the work practices of both users and designers; on the other it must confront these practices with their existing shortcomings and introduce new artifacts such as mock-ups, prototypes, or metaphors, and potentially cause breakdowns. This is how we may lean to transcend our own tradition as users and as designers. -- Boedker, Greenbaum and Kyng, p. 147-148 in "Setting the stage for design as action""


Why do I blog this?
My interpretation of this quote is to take the best of both worlds work practice of users and designers & then how must have ability to confront practices with shortcomings I think this is where continued research questions lie...