A couple of posts captured from RSS feed and a comment from Wendy Mackay e-lab paper
Delver Reinvents Search
URL: Delver Reinvents SearchThe 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.
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