Slashdot pointed me to this fascinating piece by James Grimmelman on LawMeme (which I've never followed before but will watch in the future):
Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet
The article discusses the spread of a personal email by Laurie Garrett, a journalist attending on the January World Economic Forum in Davos. Particularly, iit addresses Garrett's (justifiable?) anger at learned that her "private" email had been forwarded without her permission by someone in her circle of trust and had subsequently been discussed by "techno-liberalists" on lists such as MetaFilter.
All in all, I think that this piece ties together a lot of the themes we've discussed so far in class.
I'm so sorry, folks, but I don't seem to be using this site successfully, even after Danielle showed me how to comment on someone else's post so I could maintain a thread. Can someone help?
I click on "View Site" to read the recent postings. When I want to respond, I click on "Comment," which brings up a window where I can type in my response. After I type in my response, I click on "Post" and . . . my response disappears. I tried this process three times, to no avail.
Any suggestions? I'm really beginning to think I'm jinxed when it comes to technology. This shouldn't be so hard.
I saw this from Wired News today:
Service Keeps Music Files Humming By Katie Dean
It describes an open-source, community-run site, MusicBrainz, that provides metadata for audio files. It's also going to provide some peer-to-peer recommendation features.
I realize this is not on this week's topic, and I apologize - but I'd like to know if others are feeling as down on this discussion format as I am? I've found it is not conducive to good discussions though really good for one-offs/blogs. That is not to say that the content isn't great. The posts that do have comments are quite buried, and the need to scroll forever to see what is new is pretty bad. It is overwhelming on the page and makes me actually NOT want to read. I am spoiled by good discussion boards that show me the latest post under a topic header that doesn't move, with number of views, and yes - a rating. No need to show me the whole message - just the subject line.
If everyone else is cool and I'm the Lone-Anal-Retentive-UI-Designer then so be it. ...and since I hate being part of the problem and not the solution, I will try to offer some ideas for better discussion formats. Of couse, I doubt the content will be exportable so that might kill any wishful thinking.
...and their competitor, vBulletin
and while these might be more $ than free, there are a bunch of less expensive boards out there that have similar functionality.
Thanks for listening ;-)
Amanda
Doing some more research on security issues, I ran across this article, Object Security and Personal Information Management.
It has some interesting applications for business, including outsourcing email and calendars, by having users set their own privacy levels on a system based around Object Security Architecture. The article is a couple of years old, but the scenario for application of the OSA, a company intranet, is pretty relevant to what we're discussing in class.
Microsoft announced late last week that they are developing the Windows Rights Management Services, which will allow companies to protect the privacy of documents created through their Office software. While the outcry over the announcement has centered on how it will impact "whistle-blowing", I think there are some very useful applications. Doctors, CPAs, and others who keep personal records are definitely a market where I see the need for this type of security. As more and more documents become available online, it would be nice to know that some things have the potential to be kept private.
The article, Keeping Found Things Found on the Web analyzed "a fuctional comparison of different methods of keeping Web information for re-use". As a whole, the result of the study is significant, but I cannot understand that the portability of Bookmarks is low. Because we can copy and paste "Bookmarks" easily to our own diskettes, folders and etc., and carry to our home from our offices and vice versa.
Now I'm using Windows XP as an OS. In my case, my "favorites(Bookmarks)" are located in one of the subfolders under drive C.
Anytime, anywhere I can use my "favorites", because they are very "portable".
One of the more useful online KM pubs, KM World, has their 2003 List of Companies that matter (they hope). Many of these would be good candidates for the KM Systems Analysis assignment.
I saw a piece about a new product called Newmonster over on Steven Cohen's LibraryStuff this week (He got it from Catalogblog, which I don't usually follow). It's in beta now, but if they get the bugs worked out I think it will make a really great tool. I've used Newzcrawler (also on Steve Cohen's recommendation), but I think I'd prefer Newsmonster, especially the PDA integration bit.
Newsmonster advertises itself as "the cross-platform weblog manager with a brain." It's a plug-in to Netscape/Mozilla that manages RSS feeds. We didn't really talk about that a couple of weeks ago, but RSS ("rich site summary") allows sites to publish their new content to an aggregator, which you can then get information from. So instead of making the rounds on all the sites you visit every day, you could check what's new in your aggregator. In addition to RSS feeds, Newsmonster can also check non-RSS dynamic sites and extract content.
I couldn't get it to work on my virtual test machine last weekend, but Steve Cohen apparently did. I'll play with it a bit more this weekend to see if I can get it to work. Because it's in beta, I can't guarantee that it won't break your system (that's why I keep a virtual test machine, so I can try new programs out!). Keep reading for a list of features:
Coming soon:
Just out of curiousity, how many people in our class use a PDA? I know Don and I do, and I know that Anne Marie won't use one (I'll change that to doesn't use one now, based on her comment below. I'll corrupt her yet!). I have a personal theory that there's a critical threshhold of stuff that you have to reach to really make use of a PDA. I'd like to know what you think.
My first PDA was a hand-me-down Palm V (after my husband upgraded to the Vx). I wasn't sold on the idea of a PDA; in fact, I made a big deal at the time of saying that I preferred my paper organizer. For a long time I used the PDA to organize my address book but I didn't use the calendar. It was only when I came back to school that I became totally dependent on my PDA. I reached a point where I couldn't keep track of my evolving schedule on paper anymore. I think I'd have a hard time going back to paper now.
My current PDA is a Treo 300 communicator, and I'm even more pleased with it than with my previous system (Palm Vx plus Sprint phone plus cable to connect as needed). For one thing, I check my email on my PDA more often now and so am more likely to copy information from email into my calendar, to do, or memos while at work than I was before. It's quick and easy to do on my desktop (although I have ideas for making it even easier), but it used to be just inconvenient enough on my combo system that I didn't do it. Also, I only have to manage one phone list instead of having a list on my phone plus a list on my PDA. I was showing my husband just this morning how easy it is to create a new contact based on a phone number in my call log. So if someone calls me, go to the call log, tap a couple of buttons, switch to my contacts, hit new and paste it in and type a name. I think Handspring could do even more to integrate this, but it's much easier now than it used to be, with much less room for error.
There are apparently ways to integrate the PDA with Outlook and with Lotus Notes, but I haven't really tried it. However, when I go back into a work environment I suspect I'll have to. Those products can make coordinating various schedules somewhat easier, whereas the Palm Desktop is more of an individual PIM tool.
I couldn't help but shake my head and chuckle as I read Malone's article "How Do People Organize Their Desks?", especially the description of Michael's "neat" office.
It helped that Michael had a relatively large office with a variety of furniture. I remember trying to create a similar sort of file management, with just as many live piles, in a tiny cubicle with one desk that my computer sat on and a small bookcase. Although this article discussed the degree to which the study participants were organized, and the degree to which they were successful in finding files, it made no analysis of the equipment/furniture that impacted each person's organization.
Of course, in the digital world, this issue is less important. Or is it?
I too often rename bookmarks usually because the original name is vague or misleading. Organizing the bookmarks in folders also helps provide context.
I agree with Anne Marie that the chronological setup of Lifestreams doesn't seem, um, comfortable? Perhaps the idea of not filing files in pre-designated folders feels a bit like anarchy to me. I like having them organized, compartmentalized. Although . . . you wouldn't know it looking at my email inbox. Obviously the 12 folders I set up in my email client aren't sufficient.
The idea of keyword searching for files seems like a great solution, but only if you're searching your own files. As we all know, different people use different terms for the same things. What about abbreviations?
I also have a difficult time seeing how this system would work effectively for a work environment that centers around product developement, where the product keeps changing hands, sometimes back-and-forth and sometimes along a workflow.
In spite of all that, I intrigued by the possibilities provided by this whole new system of file management. I'd hate to think I wouldn't try it because I'm too tied to old systems. I mean, how many times have I been frustrated that I can't seem to file something away because it fits into more than one category.
Yesterday there was an interesting day of "Show and Tell" that was co-hosted by the College of Communication / School of Information / Deptartment of Electrical Engineering / Department of Computer Science. I am not sure why the Scool of Information didn't make this day more apparent to its students but I will be keeping my eyes and ears open for future forums of this sort.
Speakers (including our own Turnbull, Bias, and Chen) spoke on topics ranging from "Autonomous Learning Agents in Dynamic, Multiagent Environments" to "Educational Content in Video Games" to "Data Mining for Informational Retrieval" ...
What was great about this forum is that innovative, dynamic research is being done across campus and it appears that professors and students are recognizing the importance of sharing knowledge throughout the university community.
The speaker, Joydeep Ghosh, (his website) who discussed his research on "Data Mining for Info. Retrieval" was particularly timely to our reading of "Lifestreams ..." because he is researching the idea that "Personal data should be accessible anywhere and compatibility should be automatic" (81). A great deal of the advancement of personal information management seems to be locked in the future of creating intelligent agents that will be able to "interact" with users by being able to differentiate the levels of importance that users attach to the information they encounter.
--- Is a website important because the user accesses it frequently or do they access it frequently simply because it is a default? What banking information is really necessary ... can certain things be hidden, like investment notations, and just appear as a calendar reminders? ----
< short rant >
Presently, I stay away from a lot of PIM programs and devices because I have to go through so many steps to program in my preferences, schedules, etc. What I would use is something that might not "be smarter" than me but that would give me a confidence in that it appears to be ... maybe that is a naive statement but I think that if I purchase a device to be my "assistant" then it should be able to be as assistant-like as possible. Afterall, if a real-life assistant couldn't keep all of a boss' comings and goings straight they'd probably be fired!
< / rant >
To conclude, there appears to be some truly innovative research happening (and/or) on the brink of happening at UT in the fields of knowledge management, data mining, and general information goodness. As a graduate student it is comforting to learn about the various groups on campus coming together because it means opportunities are ripe for fututre research.
I might be the only one who wasn't sure of the meaning of this word but perhaps not.
Daemon: A program or process that sits idly in the background until it is invoked to perform its task.
I see this come up often when e-mail address aren't valid but I never bothered looking up until it appeared int he Lifestreams article. Ironically, it is a varient of demon and daimon which made me chuckle.
I found the Lifestreams storage model to be very interesting, but for me it certainly did not seem to provide an intuitive information organization structure. My primary mental (and physical) organization model is based on taskflow, not timeflow. I don't think I could tell someone what events were occuring across taskflows at any particular moment in my life but I don't see that I would often want to do that. The big pile of chronologically presented stuff interface really didn't appeal to me. However, since one can create sub-streams on the fly, I suppose a task flow presentation of information is easily produced and a presentation of sub-streams could be the primary interface for a task-oriented user. The integrative function of Lifestreams is really intriguing, however, though the article doesn't provide enough information on the "stream filtering" function to give me a good feel for how effective resource integration would really be. It seems that the filtering process presumes a level of resource description that isn't presently available in most desktop applications (at least, not automatically generated description).
While I was browsing for other people's blog sites, something interesting came up. "A Brit living and working in the US has been sacked from his job for running a blog." He is the second person got fired for running a blog after Steve Olafson.
It is amazing to see how much time people spend on blogging once you get into it. There is a very famous Japanese blogger in Japan, whose name is Joi Ito. In one of his blogs, he explained how he got time to blog so much. "I get up 4am and blog in the morning. I usually eat lunch at my desk and blog. The most important thing is that I have stopped going out drinking with Japanese businessmen..... So, if you took all of the drunken businessmen in the 75,000 bars and restaurants in Tokyo and made them go home and blog, the revolution in Japan might happen much more quickly". :)
From last week's discussion about email overload, which is part of information overload, I went off and did some research about information overload.
A Reuters 1997 study carried out a search of Library and Information Science abstracts and social research databases for articles with the term information overload. The study found a low number of inclusions in the 1970s, slightly more mention in the 1980s and from 1992 a steady rise in the number of information overload articles peaking in 1997 with 47 mentions. The problem is getting worse and is expected to get worse still as the number of information sources i.e., the web continue to grow.
“Do you usually experience information overload?” In a questionnaire given to MBA students from Temple University and the University of Waikato, results revealed 64% of the respondents answered “yes” to this question. This university study identified three primary factors contributing to information overload. Two additional factors identified are the poor utilization of information and the time demand to use information.
The primary factors identified are:
Amount of information
Variety of information
Quality of information
In another study, Reuters Dying for Information (1996), a survey of business managers revealed that in a working environment, managers are most prone to and affected by information overload.
Dying for Information revealed a number of unexpected statistics: Two thirds of managers believe information overload causes loss of job satisfaction, two thirds believe information overload damages their personal relationships, one third believe information overload damages their health and nearly half believe important decisions are delayed and adversely affected as a result of having too much information.
Many of those who participated in the studies that we read about for Personal Information Management complained that using the "favorites" tool on browser was insufficient because it often does not explain the website for easy future reference. However, a user can rename the favorites' titles.
I was curious how many characters can be stored in a favorites' title so I keyed away to find that 85 characters fit (I don't know how many more than 85 but I did try 100 and that is too big). I wonder how many people use the "rename" feature (and/or are aware they can) in order to summarize a page they want to add to their favorites list?
Peter has some interesting points about why KM and other collaborative technologies aren't very high in utility: welcome to peterme.com
I extracted main ideas of our class readings, in particular, I am interested in suggestions of future work.
E-mail as Habitat: An Exploration of Embedded PIM (Bellotti, V. & Ducheneaut, N.)
"E-mail has been the knowledge workers’ new electronic habitat, because personal information management (PIM) is embedded where it is most needed and accessible, that is, in e-mail."
Limitation of E-mail
Users want immediate access to information, which limits efficiency of folder organization and the depth of a useful filing structure.
Implications and suggestions
"E-mail as a PIM tool should have more flexible organization of folders. Because users mostly work with ephemeral information, a cache of recently accessed items could be useful.
Incorporation of document management features inside the e-mail client would make sense.
Providing a different design, with different e-mail management options, depending on a user’s role could improve user interfaces."
Understanding Sequence and Reply Relationships within Email Conversations:
A Mixed-Model Visualization (Neustaedter, C. & Venolia, G. D.)
Two models in conflict:
· Sequential Model of Conversation
· Tree Model of Conversation
Solution of conflict is a mixed-model, which strongly supports the two models simultaneously with a visualization design.
Suggestions to improve the mixed-model visualization
· "It could be more compact: The actual message content is small compared with the surrounding graphics. A more compact visualization would allow more relationships to be visible at a glance.
· The visualization should not be overkill for simple conversation, which incurs more cost than benefit. "
Taking Email to Task: The Design and Evaluation of a Task Management Centered Email tool (Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., Howard, M. & Smith, I.)
Glossary:
Threads: Series of topically related messages and replies.
Addressing: Whether each message was individual, multiple or list addressed, implying its likely import in terms of thread tracking.
Interdependent task: Task with obligations that also depend on the to-dos of others. These are characterized by complex threads of email and other communication such as phone calls waiting for responses that enable progress.
The Taskmaster design philosophy is to distinguish Taskmaster from an ordinary mail tool.
Thrasks: Threaded Task-Centric Collections
"Interdependent tasks comprise threads of message files, links and drafts, so taskmaster supports semi-automatic collections of these items, which we call "‘thrask’.
"Taskmaster differs from collation systems that track threads since thrasks go beyond system-defined threads to encompass user-defined task-centric collections. The advantage in Taskmaster is that drafts can be saved within the thrask to which they relate, in the context of the related messages that may need to be accessed in their creation, while classic mail tools put drafts in a separate folder out of context, where they may be easily be forgotten."
Equality for All Content
"The thrask model was made more powerful by elevating documents and links to be first-class citizens, therefore, in Taskmaster, important documents and links are much easier to get at. Taskmaster also saves time wasted opening uninteresting attachments because it displays documents and links in the preview pane."
Limitation of Taskmaster
l Taskmaster has technical limitations (e.g. sensitivity to variations in PC configurations) and missing features (e.g. printing and feedback about address completion, omitted due to limited engineering time resources).
l Taskmaster has only a tiny fraction of the feature enhancements that Outlook provides; therefore, switching back and forth to Outlook to use features of Taskmaster is impractical.
Implications and Suggestions
l Thasks could be blended with folders for archival purposes, because Taskmaster’s thrasks are both reliable at collecting threaded messages, attachments and links and a successful in organizing message content.
l "Taskmaster needs better layout solution, because the layout of the three panes of Taskmaster was fixed and the bottom pane was not large enough. These problems take us back to wasting time on window management. Another proposed refinement is to provide a fully functional application preview pane so that items could be manipulated without ever having to open an application."
l "Taskmaster could affect positively email users by embedding task management resources directly in the inbox, where they are most needed, as well as breaking down the barriers between the various components of contemporary email application. "
Dan Gruen is obviously working on even more new ways to re-invent email. Take a look at some of his publications.
Soon you will be able to talk on the phone (in 5 continents), email, play mp3s, send images, keep to-do lists, AND play action packed games. Nokia and Sega (among others) teamed up to create the ultimate time management / time waster. For the kid in all of us (or at least some) we will finally be able to get in some gaming on the fly without having to toot about a Gameboy.
The device is called N-gage will be available in the fall for a mere (est) $200 - $300.
Check it out: www.n-gage.com
Some press links about the Small World Experiment going on at Columbia.
Those of you who liked the Venolia paper should take a look at some of Duncan Watts' work.
The new Microsoft application I mentioned today:
Microsoft Gets a Clue From Its Kiddie Corps from our friends at NewsWeek.
A search from the MS site shows nothing but this link to sign up for the beta:
threedegrees - coming soon.
I'll really look forward to seeing a middle-aged MS executive demo this.
This article by Nicholas Carroll, on mindjack, addresses reputation in a somewhat broader sense than we've discussed in class (via metafilter; also check comments at slashdot).
Links to a few of the articles/events Carroll references:
TXT MSG revolution in the Philippines
Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Nielsen's 1998 Reputation Managers column
It's getting more and more difficult to fit these posts into distinct categories!
Derek Powazek's website addresses issues of community in collaborative online systems. He describes his book, Design for Community: "Mostly it's a collection of lessons learned the hard way – personal stories about websites that have succeeded (and failed) in creating community online..."
You can check out some excerpts (including a conversation with Howard Rheingold) on the site, as well as several essays he has written on online community issues since its publication.
Under this week's "systems" section of the syllabus, the link that currently reads zaplets should be www.zaplet.com.
Zaplet was the first VC funded spinoff of Reactivity, a Palo Alto technology venture accelerator back in early 2001 I believe. They were somewhat consumer based with a free demo anyone could use for a while before going enterprise and b-b. In a nutshell, you could receive one instance of a group email in your inbox and using (i-frames) it would load the current version with each update. The content was usually poll, survey, and/or group decision based.
Here is pic of the original, consumer-oriented ui The current version is described on this version of their website and is described as "app mail".
I find it interesting that Google has purchased Blogger's parent company Pyra, since I wonder what opportunity Google sees in the company. It obviously has a large user base, and Google's newer products like the news front end and image search seem to be about improving access to information (or knowledge, I guess), but I really don't see the connection. Of course, I really don't see the use in the Google Viewer, either. Pyra was trying to move into selling Blogger as a tool for enterprise deployments, sort of like the Googlebox, I guess.
I wonder if Google will develop blog analysis tools like Blogdex and Technorati. Former Pyra employee Meg Hourihan says she's working on a similar project to develop a more robust blog analysis product.
A link for the School of Information and Systems, Berkeley project to estimate how much information (all media) is produced annually in the world. These people are talking exabytes of information. The link for Internet (including email and usenet) is at http://sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/internet.html You can find an executive summary for the project findings at http://sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/summary.html
The link for one of our readings, "Taskmaster: recasting email as task management" seems to be broken. I've found another e-copy at the Toronto site: http://peach.mie.utoronto.ca/people/jacek/emailresearch/CSCW2002/submissions/PARC-Taskmaster%20position%20paper.pdf
Found an article that was pretty interesting about MS's SPOT technology
they're working on which reminded me about ubiqutous computing.
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=ces09&date=20030109
short blurb from the article:
SPOT technology may also power alarm clocks, refrigerator magnets and other
devices. It is designed to accomplish several goals for Microsoft:
. Allow users to access computer data in different locations and on
different devices.
. Provide opportunities for programmers using Microsoft software to build
new applications.
. Provide a new opportunity for Microsoft to sell subscriptions to data
services.
The fact that Movable Type is not Free Software has been a constant refrain among its critics, and this is perhaps the reason why. The Trotts' company, Six Apart, announced yesterday a pay version of MT, Movable Type Pro. The release says pricing and features won't be released unti the summer, but a few of the planned features include workflow management, mobile communication interfaces, and an integrated traffic and statistics system.
The site suggests MT Pro is professional grade "nano-publishing," which makes me wonder if this is for doing small news sites or KM in small businesses, rather for individual blogs. I can't imagine there would be enough demand for a pay version of MT, unless they really start crippling the non-pay version. Blogger Pro is certainly more robust and feature-rich than Blogger (but that's not saying much) driving people to upgrade, if only out of desperation. I tend to think that on the consumer end, hosted and pre-installed Blog Management Systems or BMs (pun intended) are a better business proposition than charging consumers for a bunch of scripts they have to fool around with and cuss at. Maybe they'll make the software available at no charge and charge for decent documentation
They also released MT 2.6, an updated version of the no-cost product, yesterday. I suppose they'll continue to upgrade this version as well.
Some call Collaborative Filtering - "Recommendation Systems" or "Recommender Systems". This Workshop includes many of the people who have been working in this area. Note that previous workshops may provide great CF insight as well. Recommender Systems Workshop 2001 - Workshop Notes
Our class discussion reminded me of an article I read last fall. The article illustrates an application of semantic web services for workforce training.
The author is my boss at the E-Learning & Training Lab. If we are looking to add guest speakers, Mr. Woelk could speak to some of UT's work in KM applications.
Let me know what you think -
Cooltown in a "futuristic" project that HP Labs has fully embraced. It is "a vision of mobility, connectivity, community, and transformation based on open standards and user needs". This project brings in some nice real world applications beyond what we read in The Semantic Web. Cooltown is the name of the project ... here's a link to the hompage.
I really appreciated what was said about articles like The Semantic Web being a springboard of new ideas ... innovation is so closely related to imagination.
Take a quick look for a quantitative way to measure the marketplace of ideas:
Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
Here are some examples that I found from some articles that I read for a project last semester. I think some of them are well suited in the category of knowledge management systems. They integrate many of the technologies that we talk about in class, such as instant messaging, email, etc, to serve communites' interest.
-Everywhere Displays Projector (EDP) by IBM is created to consolidate many access points to information. The EDP displays an application on a surface that users can interact with and runs multiple applications in sequence giving it the ability to localize different information sources. This concept relieves the user from having to check many different knowledge resources, saving time, effort and cost.
(Pinhanez, C (2000). IBM T.J. Augmenting Reality with Projected Interactive Displays. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. P.O. Box 218, New York)
-Nynex Portholes (Lee, Girgensohn, Schlueter, 1997) integrates and builds on past efforts allowing distributed work groups to access knowledge via general and peripheral awareness. This is accomplished by providing access to people via constant video and audio feeds of each other’s movements within an environment. This system increases the awareness of others locations and in so doing increases access to people who provide needed information.
(Lee, A., Girgensohn, A., Schlueter, K. (1997). NYNEX Portholes: Initial User Reactions and Redesign Implications. In GROUP’97, International Conference on Supporting Group Work, ACM, New York, 1997.)
-Portholes is a desktop application that takes information from a central server and displays it to the user. Each user has a camera at his/her workstation, which transmits video signals to the server, allowing any user of the system to see if other users of the system are in their workspaces. While in the picture view mode, people can click on a user’s portrait and send an email or an audio message to him/her directly. The information transferred between users can be in broadcast mode (publicly available) or directed mode (available only to a single user).
(Dourish, P.& Bly, S. (1992). Portholes: Supporting awareness in a distributed work group. Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), Monterey, Ck ACM press, 541-547. 21.)
-To make unstructured information more organized, a team of researchers at Microsoft has developed a notification system called Scope (Dantzich, Robbins, Horvitz, Czerwinski, 2001). Scope allows users to stay aware of communications from multiple sources such as email, instant messaging, information alerts and personal calendars.
Thought I'd kick off this topic with a reference to this weeks reading on the Semantic Web, in Scientific American.
I found the software agents diagram particularly interesting as it points to the potential of agents in the front and back end using the notion of a semantic web.
One thought I had while reading the article is whether the idea of a error free semantic web can really exist. The article is convincing, but after considering the idea of "knowledge brokers" in the first week of class, I wonder if there might be a faster, more efficient semantic web? That is, one agent serves the front end, the semantic web provides for a backend (system to system) agent AND - there is a knowledge broker agent which serves up the information from the backend agent more efficiently by aggregating information. Just a thought - might be making it more complicated than it needs to be.
Any other thoughts?
Amanda
XML makes its mark - Tech News - CNET.com
You have to wonder what XML can't do, from this article. The concept of XML coming across to most people is still its greatest victory.
What gaps do you see here?
Another Call for Papers that I spotted in last month's DLib Magazine:
ACM CIKM 2003, 12th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2 - 8 November 2003, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Preliminary Call for Papers. The deadline for submission is 20 May 2003.
"Since 1992, CIKM has brought together leading researchers and developers from several areas of information and knowledge management, database management systems (DBMS) and information retrieval (IR). We continue this tradition of collaboration between information and knowledge management. Only the highest caliber papers submitted to CIKM 2003 will be accepted."
"We have a special interest in papers that bridge the areas of databases and information retrieval."
For details and additional information, please see http://bit.csc.lsu.edu/~cikm2003/CIKM_CFP.html
In the January DLib Magazine, there was a call for papers relevant to this class:
7th Annual KMWorld & Intranets 2003 , 14 - 16 October 2003, Santa Clara, California, USA. Call for Speakers. The deadline for submission is 4 March 2003.
KMWorld Conference and Exposition - "The 7th annual KMWorld Conference and Exposition offers a wide-ranging program designed to meet the needs of executives and strategic business and technology decision makers. This is a [conference] for those concerned with improving business processes and productivity, streamlining operations, and accelerating development and innovation in their evolving enterprises. This year's theme, Business Critical Knowledge Management, emphasizes that KM is not a stand-alone initiative, but totally integrated into an organization's business and work processes. As in previous years, the conference encompasses programs on strategies, practices, processes, tools and solutions for enterprise knowledge networks. This year there is a particular emphasis on knowledge based collaborative organizations as well as the infrastructure necessary to support such organizations."
"Intranets 2003 - "Now in its fifth year, Intranets 2003 addresses the management, implementation and business implications of the next generation of collaborative intranet and portal development and technology. Conference sessions will cover strategies and case studies for preparing, implementing, and sustaining intranets and portals, practical methodologies for design, content management solutions and software, and ROI and the business of content collaboration. The conference program is designed to take intranet professionals and managers to the next level, helping individuals and companies:
For additional information, please see http://www.kmworld.com/kmw03/CallforPapers.cfm
This looks like a good hub for Semantic Web links. Check out the list of topics that the site's authors make relative to the Semantic Web. Almost everything seems semantic...
After today's meeting, I was reminded of a behavior I came across at my last job that represents an aspect of reputation ratings we didn't discuss.
I worked for a small corporate services firm which relied heavily on communication with in-industry sources (over 23,000 in the db). No one wanted to waste their time calling unhelpful people, so we implemented a commenting/rating system, with a 1-5 scale or helpfulness, expertise, friendliness, etc. The system was a complete failure, but not because people tended gave bad ratings to unfavorable sources, as we discussed in class. It was actually the opposite.
The few ratings that were filled out were almost invariably 5s, the highest rating, but less than 1% of those contacted received ratings. I never saw a score below 4.
When I questioned those using the system about this peculiar use pattern, it became apparent that no one wanted to rate anyone as a 3 or below, because the implication that we dealt with such low caliber sources challenged our position as a top-tier firm. Those who did rate people seemed to do so as a boost to their own pride, that is, when talking to a source who seemed more intelligent or useful than they perceived themselves to be, that source was rated as a 5 in all categories. This source's 'coolness' was then made known to the entire firm, but in a manner that seemed less like information sharing and more like an advertisement that the rater was astute enough to recognize a genius. The result was a completely useless frame of reference.
Sorry to go on so long about this, but I wanted to provide an example of ratings of reputation being used primarily as self-endorsement by the rater, to enhance his own reputation.
So, now we have pride and fury as ulterior motives of reputation ratings... has anyone come across other motives for posting comments and ratings that disrupt the integrity of such a system?
Regardless of all that, I found a paper from the Proceedings of the 3rd ACM conference on Electronic Commerce, Computing and using reputations for internet ratings, that highlights the complexity of determining useful ratings. It gets technical in a hurry, but also offers a summary of research on internet ratings and a good bibliography.
The brand-spankin'-new Austinbloggers.org, which I mentioned in class today, went up in the last week or so. It uses MT's TrackBack functionality to aggregate posts that ping a particular URL. The idea is to provide a one-stop-shop for Austin-related blog posts. Previous iterations of this project required users to post unique entries to an Austin blog, so this allows Austin-related blogging with no duplication of effort. MT allows you to set your categories to automatically ping a site when you post in a particular category, so, on my blog, when I post to the "Austin" category, it automatically posts a teaser on this site.
I caught this on Slashdot today: Mother Jones Magazine has an interview with John Perry Barlow in which he "discusses the Total Information Awareness project, online activism, file sharing, and the prospect of a digital counterculture." It's short but fun. Actually, Slashdot has a number of good article today. Enjoy!
I've been doing some background reading on knowledge discovery and information retrieval and I find myself lost in the mists of time. The importance of writing to human memory is something I had thought about before of course, but I had not thought of it in the context of early pictographic writing and how it was used to record data and establsh collective knowledge bases. The idea being that an individual's knowledge was no longer bounded by what he/she could remember.
If you, like me, think that reading science fiction counts as research (!), then you might enjoy this article by Henry Jenkins in the MIT Technology Review: Science Fiction and Smart Mobs: Dystopian visions of the future explore the power of virtual communities. Jenkins singles out Warren Ellis's Global Frequency, which he calls a "comic book series." I haven't seen it, but I'll look for it in the graphic novel section next time I'm at Barnes.
TWiki . KMD1000 . AssignmentOne
This assignment for a class at utoronto works through some of the issues in evaluating blogs as a "knowledge medium". They are installing a number of blogs, so it's worth tracking what they come up with for analysis. Also a long list of links to check out.