Here is the revised version of my paper
Smart Mobs: Their Pervasive Computing in the Wireless Age
Katherine's presentation reminded me of an interesting use for GPS technology I came across a year or so ago: Geocaching. Basically, someone hides something, provides GPS coordinates, creates some mystery, and waits for others to find, comment, and leave other things... like a less passive Where's George or Bookcrossing. Looking at the site again after several months, it seems to have really taken off, which reflects well on the amount of trust that has developed among users. I assume that some of these people have purchased GPS devices just for geocaching.
Privacy and Trust are major issues in promoting corporate portals' functions-gatherig, sharing and disseminating of information. Those issues are also related to all topics of KMS.
This article provides "new non-third party mechanisms to overcome" the barriers against privacy and trust, and also solutions for "finding shared preferences, discovering communities with shared values, removing disincentives posed by liabilities, and negotiating on behalf of a group" ,and techniques "to enable these new capabilities".
Lotus Notes is one of best-known groupwares providing effective knowledge management by enhancing communication, collaboration, and coordination among groups of people.
Here is the link to my system evaluation of three degrees; Microsoft's [NetGen's] beta release of a cute little P2P networking application. Lot's of hype, not so much substance as far as kms go - but aren't the winks cute! You decide....
Here's a story from the popular press about mining email to reveal social networks. Johnson suggests ad hoc social networks are more powerful than imposed organizations and mining software could help meld these together.
One of the articles about "Intranets and Knowledge Organization", Web Work: Information Seeking and Knowledge Work on the World Wide Web dichotomizes Information Trait, specifically on p. 5.
Among those, I have not understood why the authors divided information trait by Clinical/ Aggregated.
Please answer for me.
John Lester's paper, Integrating and Evolving a Mob: The Growth of a Smart Mob
into a Wireless Community of Practice
...it appears that by having ubiquitous mobile data communication devices and a successful communal blog, it is possible to create an ideal environment within which a smart mob can grow into a goal-oriented mobile community of practice.
Now, where do we get this "successful communal blog" thing?
This paper is being presented at HCI International 2003 in Greece.
via hiptop.com
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 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.
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.
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!
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!