October 4, 2007
Lens
I'm working on a project right now that's an honest-to-goodness social network. Gee, that's what the world needs more of, you hiss. But it is different. No, really. Hope to launch by the end of the year.
Anyway, one of the things we're grappling with is the idea of using someone's profile as a filter for the web. It sounds simple, but it is a profound thing when you consider that my profile, say on Facebook, is the sum of the biographical info I've entered, the friends I have, the apps I've chosen, the posts I've made, the conversations I'm in, plus every other feed I have spliced in from around the web. It is a web snapshot of my behavior and my perspective.
Now what if you could be shown the web through this perspective? That is, what if you could filter your searching based on the lens that is my profile? Just another filter (like by file type, date, or geo) but this filter is the sum of another person's (or group's) outlook. Could be cool, no? Some call it social search, but it really is much more than that. And of course it is mostly conceptual at this point. Who knows if we'll actually get it implemented.
Recently I was the guest editor contributing to the daily flow of links at Coudal Partners called Fresh Signals. It was during this month of link-harvesting that the practical application of lensing hit me. I come across hundreds of links each day, but the truth is that I was manually filtering by trying to assume the perceived perspective of the Coudal crew. I was trying to look at the web through Coudal's eyes. It worked, mostly, though being imprecise (that is, human) the process produced links that had a flavor of my own.
Right now the best blogs are precisely this: content from all around the web manually sluiced through the personal perspective of the site author(s). This is a good thing. But you can imagine a day when a person's perspective -- such as it is online -- can be easily used as just another search filter.
Tags: lens, profile, coudal, search
Posted at 7:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
September 6, 2007
Editorial
The good folks at Coudal Partners have asked me to guest edit their wonderful, ceaseless flow of linkage known as Fresh Signals (feed) for the month of September. I'm jt.
Apparently I didn't scare Coudal too badly at dinner last week. Or perhaps that secured the job for me?
This should be fun.
Update: I probably should take this opportunity to remind readers that I have my own fresh signals (lowercase), called Marginalia, which is a list of interesting stuff found around the web. It's in the right column on the web or you can subscribe to it separately or as a feed blended with the posts.
Tags: coudal, freshsignals, guestedit, links
Posted at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 28, 2007
Data in the cloud
In response to my weak rationalization about why I am getting an iPhone Ian asked about which web apps I use. So here they are (with the offline apps they synch with on both Mac and PC).
| function | web app | offline Mac app | offline PC app |
| Gmail | Thunderbird | Thunderbird | |
| calendar | Google Calendar | iCal* | Sunbird** |
| contacts | Plaxo | OSX Address Book | Thunderbird |
| lists/notes | Backpack | Packrat | [none] |
| project collaboration | Basecamp | [none] | [none] |
| RSS | Newsgator | NetNewsWire | FeedDemon |
| blog authoring | Movable Type | Ecto | Ecto |
[*] Does not support two-way synching.
[**] The latest build of Sunbird (0.5) does support two-way synching. If I have to do that (like on an airplane) I use Sunbird on the Mac.
Of course this says nothing of all the other data that lives out in the tuboverse. Flickr, Ancestry.com, Google Spreadsheets and on and on. But these have no desktop equivalents at all so I don't include them here. Suffice to say, most of my most critical data lives somewhere online.
iPhone, I am ready for you if you will have me.
(HTML tables! Yay, old school layout!)
Posted at 7:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
June 9, 2007
Socio
Been thinking a lot about social networks lately. This is mostly because I am part of a team building one. But is just as likely due to Facebook's amazing proliferation lately.
Figured I'd collect all my nets in one place. Because, you know, I need more friends. (* means you gotta be a part of the network to see the profile.)
Cork'd
del.icio.us
Dopplr* (Closed beta, unfortunately. I have a few invites left if you are interested.)
Facebook*
Flickr
Last.fm
Library Thing
LinkedIn
Twitter (And my car's Twitter page.)
And let us not forget Isolatr, the anti-social network. Helping you find where other people aren't.
Tags: people, socialnetworking, web2.0
Posted at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
April 1, 2007
Rock your tonsil rock
I've been interested in what makes a vibrant online community lately. How to begin one? How to sustain one? How not to let it spiral out of control? Ascent Stage is not in any sense a community. Traffic is too low, posts too infrequent.
But recently an old post came back to life and has me wondering. In June 2005 I wrote about a disgusting biological phenomenon known as tonsiloliths. I wrote it after one of my co-workers plucked one from her mouth. Being a fan of all things disgusting I had to write about it. Turns out lots of people suffer from these nasties. My post was not a first-hand account of a sufferer or a source of any medical advice. In fact, I was pretty crude about the whole thing. But, it attracted relieved commenters early on who were simply glad to find others like them.
Recently the post has reached a bit of a tipping point. Comments are way up; most are relatively long, breathless expressions of gratitude to be part of a small group of people helping each other. I read along as a third-party, an accidental self-help guru.
Over a quarter of all site traffic (27.45%) to Ascent Stage goes to this post alone.
(Rounding out the other big slices of the pie in order are How to create a LEGO mosaic, everything else, and the home page.)
So what's the lesson for online communities here? Well, probably that there's a lot of luck in fomenting one. The web is the perfect medium for yoking together micro-communities. You'd think that all you have to do is write about a topic that's not been covered elsewhere (especially if it is medical in nature) and you'll probably have a little tribe on your hands. But really, it can be just dumb luck.
Kinda warms the heart, though.
Tags: community, medical, nasty, tonsilolith
Posted at 9:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 26, 2007
The joy of spreadsheets
I'm really liking Google Spreadsheets.
Fact is, I've never had much use for spreadsheets, which is why I'm hopelessly lost in pivot tables and anything more complex than a sum formula. (My wife, by way of contrast, can make a spreadsheet compile to solve prove Fermat's Theorem, I am quite sure.) Still, I have always loved spreadsheets' boxy structure. I keep lots of data in spreadsheets, but it doesn't do anything. Just sits there. Tabularly.
But a shared online spreadsheet is a different beast altogether. I have a variety of home-related data in gSpread (sounds dirty, no?) so my wife and I can reference the same stuff. Two co-workers of mine and I keep track of daily You Don't Know Jack scores in a shared sheet. (By year's end -- assuming Google adds charts to the tool -- the YDKJ score log should be an interesting set of data to mine.)
This weekend my college pals and I conducted our annual fantasy baseball draft. It is an excuse to get together in person for much hazing and idiocy, but this year gSpread made it much more efficient. Most of us had laptops open with a Excel sheet imported into Google. One person updated the main player list, another the By Pick list, and another the By Team list. We all saw everything instantly, editing the same tables simultaneously. As did a friend at home who could not make it to Chicago. A perfect use for shared data.
But the best use by far is what I call two-player, slow-motion Tetris. Actually it is a kind of a merger of Tetris and checkers or Connect Four. Each player (or collaborator in gSpread parlance) clicks on cell that randomly selects a piece (=randbetween(1,7)) then places that piece in whatever rotation desired. The goal is to clear a line as in normal Tetris but also to block someone else from doing so. Letters in the pieces let players know which pieces are theirs -- useful since the game takes weeks to play out. Fun, but dorky. No, fun because dorky. Who's in?
Tags: google, spreadsheets
Posted at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
October 18, 2006
Museum-as-website
Paul Bausch makes some good points on why museums should be more like today's web. What's interesting is that the spark for the post came from an expectional interaction with a human tour guide.
The tour included a stop at a recreation of an 1800's store run by Chinese immigrants. As you step inside you see lots of stuff that would have been for sale at a store like this, Chinese newspapers and inventory lists from the period, and an audio track playing with people speaking Chinese. Someone in the group asked what the people were saying on the audio track, and the tour guide launched into a story. It turns out he'd had several Chinese speakers on previous tours, and he'd started to piece together what the audio was. Apparently, the museum curators had recorded a mahjong game in progress, and audio in the store was simply some people sitting around playing a game and having a conversation. Most museum-goers in Bend, Oregon would never know what exactly the conversation was about, so it didn't matter that the audio didn't faithfully recreate an 1800's Chinese store.I was struck by this little exchange, because the tour guide had gone from adding a layer about the exhibit to a little behind-the-scenes information about the construction of the exhibit. And the information hadn't come from the museum curators, it had come from fellow museum-goers.
Along the way, I noticed other types of information the guide was relating such as trends. He'd say, "everyone always asks about this piece of equipment right here." And then he'd explain what that was. He was using audience patterns to tune his presentation.
Bausch isolates the characteristics of a great interaction with a knowledgeable human guide and expresses them in terms that sound like what the web does very well: deep info, layered perspective, visitor trend analysis. Many museums have tried to make their physical experiences more interactive, of course (see here, here, here and oh yeah here), but the holy grail of a physical space as malleable and two-way as the web has not been achieved. My team refers to such as a space as a "flexhibit," but it is more concept at this point than reality.
It is curious that Bausch suggests we use technology to do what the best human guides already do. I can hear a museum director arguing the reverse: that what we really need are more human guides that synthesize info and have a depth of knowledge that equals the best websites. That's a solution that doesn't necessarily scale, but then scalability has been the biggest obstacle to making museum exhibits technologically interactive. (Gotta wait in line to punch that button for more info on the wall.)
It's a tough problem actually and it is complicated by the fact that many museums (like traditional encyclopedias) operate as keepers of culture rather than sharers of it. People can write really informed articles for Wikipedia, but replicating the experience of a museum collection without access to the original material history at your disposal is tricky indeed. Yet we have to try. It isn't really a cabinet of curiosities if you can't open the cabinet door or doesn't make you curious, is it?
I don't think the solution is standalone kiosks or "information hubs" per se, though they may be part of the solution. The most interactive museum spaces will in fact mimic the best websites as mixtures of superb technology and human community -- and that community should necessarily include human guides and docents such as Bausch encountered. What we want is technology that facilitates interaction with humans and with the knowledge embedded in the material history contained in the museum.
Posted at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 18, 2006
Online calendars get serious
Last year I went through Outlook detox and successfully created cross-platform, web-synched versions of my mail and contacts. The calendar part was tougher, since there was no really good online app for the task. In the last couple of months this has changed. Kiko retooled, 30 Boxes launched, and Google Calendar cannonballed right into the pool.
I've spent some time really working with 30 Boxes and Google Calendar (Kiko, not so much). Google is the one to bet on, I think, because of their momentum in the space and track record. Also, as Web 2.0ish as 30 Boxes is I've come to agree with others that a duration view of events by day and week is crucial (and kinda pretty too) in that you can squint your eyes, find some white space, and simply know that you're open during that period. The views on 30 Boxes are all list-based and make this kind of spatial reading of your calendar impossible. 30 Boxes does have the edge on integration of non-calendar data, though. You can pop in online web calendars, of course, but you can also read in any RSS feed imaginable. This is very useful for blog posts, weather, and anything else that makes sense to see in a calendar layout. Right now Google only does webcal, no RSS. (Anyone know of an online converter of an RSS feed to webcal?) Integrating specialized calendar feeds (such as those from Basecamp) is especially nice.
30 Boxes also has taken the tagging angle which allows you to filter and syndicate just about any slice of your calendar. Google only allows syndication of whole calendars. They'll need finer granularity eventually. Google does repeating events and specifically modifications to repeating events much better than 30 Boxes. This becomes a huge deal when you want to skip or modify a particular instance of a repeating event. Obviously Google is well-integrated with GMail.
The glaring omission from all online calendars -- and the reason they are not yet on par with mail and contacts -- is synching. I can view my calendars in desktop apps (iCal and Sunbird) but I cannot modify them there for synching back to the server. You have to imagine that they are working on this, but from what I read the CalDAV spec is anything but ready for primetime. Also, the PC desktop apps that read iCal are godawful right now. That's not Google's or 30 Boxes problem, but it is a hindrance. MozCalendar/Sunbird is way behind Thunderbird and Firefox for sure.
Happy calendaring!
Posted at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
October 17, 2005
Me and my three readers disagree
Jakob Nielsen, geek advisor to the corporate masses who think they grok usability, has a column on the usability of weblogs this week. Over the last year or so I've watched Nielsen's always-tenuous grasp of the relationship of style to user experience slowly give way to a highly corporatized version of what constitutes good web design. In the current column he advises all kinds of wacky stuff but the one piece that clinches his inability to grasp what is truly happening in the blogosphere (yes, Jakob, I know you hate that word) is that he actually advises personal bloggers to stay on-topic or else risk appealing to the "low-value demographic" who actually read for diversity rather than singularity of topic. On-topic for a personal blog? Isn't that the opposite of writing about and for yourself?
If you have the urge to speak out on, say, both American foreign policy and the business strategy of Internet telephony, establish two blogs. You can always interlink them when appropriate.
Oh, really? A separate blog each time I plan on changing topics?
Good god this man does not get it.
Posted at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
July 14, 2005
Anti-bacterial
Never read this blog before in my life, but I really liked this assessment of the extremist tendencies in political blogs.
Conclusions: The left is full of crop circle paranoids. The right is full of stupid angry people. The sheer volume of information in both does manage to strip things to bare bones facts, but not by virtue of intelligence, just volume - like a colony of bacteria feeding on a corpse.
Posted at 2:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 24, 2005
Olde media vs. the blogosphere
I must heartily second this rant at Whole Lotta Nothing.
For the new year I promised myself (#4) that I would not make fun of sites that position blogs and the "mainstream" media diametrically, but after reading this I think I'll go back to heckling.
Here's an axiom to live by. If you have to cast an issue as good vs. evil, you're probably masking your own insecurity or the indefensibility of your position.
Posted at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
