- Critically Making the Internet of Things (Anne Galloway) — session notes from a conference, see also part two. Good thoughts, hastily captured. For example, this from Bruce Sterling: RFID + Superglue + Object ≠ IoT and the talk I want to see: “A study of how broken, hacked and malfunctioning digital road signs subvert the physical space of roadways.”
- Conquering the CHAOS of Online Community at StackExchange — StackExchange is doing some thoughtful work analysing conversations and channeling dissent into a healthy construction to guide future productive discussion. “We taught the users that it was alright to disagree, and gave them a set of arguments they could reference without every thread degenerating into a fight.”
- Little Big Details — one small detail done right, every day.
- Ranking Live Streams of Data (LinkedIn) — behind the “interesting discussions” report.
ENTRIES TAGGED "social software"
Four short links: 9 December 2011
Designing Ubicomp, Online Community, Design Examples, and Ranking Discussions
Four short links: 14 November 2011
Science Hack Days, YouTube Doggy Science, Antisocial Software, and Mind Reading with Wikipedia
- Science Hack Day SF Videos (justin.tv) — the demos from Science Hack Day SF. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a Hack Day.
- A Cross-Sectional Study of Canine Tail-Chasing and Human Responses to It, Using a Free Video-Sharing Website (PLoSone) — Approximately one third of tail-chasing dogs showed clinical signs, including habitual (daily or “all the time”) or perseverative (difficult to distract) performance of the behaviour. These signs were observed across diverse breeds. Clinical signs appeared virtually unrecognised by the video owners and commenting viewers; laughter was recorded in 55% of videos, encouragement in 43%, and the commonest viewer descriptors were that the behaviour was “funny” (46%) or “cute” (42%).
- RSS Died For Your Sins (Danny O’Brien) — if you have seven thousand people following you, a good six thousand of those are going to be people you don’t particularly like. The problem, as ever, is—how do you pick out the other thousand? Especially when they keep changing? I firmly believe that one of the pressing unsolved technological problems of the modern age is getting safely away from people you don’t like, without actually throttling them to death beforehand, nor somehow coming to the conclusion that they don’t exist, nor ending up turning yourself into a hateful monster.
- Generating Text from Functional Brain Images (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience) — We built a model of the mental semantic representation of concrete concepts from text data and learned to map aspects of such representation to patterns of activation in the corresponding brain image. Turns out that the clustering of concepts in Wikipedia is similar to how they’re clustered in the brain. They found clusters in Wikipedia, mapped to the brain activity for known words, and then used that mapping to find words for new images of brain activity. (via The Economist)
Four short links: 10 June 2011
CS Courses, Crowdsourced Sound Map, CSS Game, and Shared Social Intentions
- Advanced Computer Science Courses — collection of online course notes/lectures for classes in advanced CS topics. (via Hacker News)
- UK SoundMap — very cool crowdsourced audio landscape of the UK. (via British Library)
- CSS Panic — game with no HTML, no Javascript, it’s all CSS. Only works in Safari and Chrome. (via Dale Harvey)
- Sharing Intentions Talk — interesting talk by Jyri Engestrom on building social mobile apps to share intentions as social objects. Gotta love these folks who can read and use Bruno Latour instead of merely reaching for the Advil as I do.
Four short links: 27 May 2011
Twitter DB, Data Reliance, Open Source Architectures, and Short-Form Bullying
- flockdb (Github) — Twitter’s open source scalable fault-tolerant distributed
key-storegraph database. (via Twitter’s open source projects page) - How to Kill Innovation in Five Easy Steps (Tech Republic) — point four is interesting, Rely too heavily on data and dashboards. It’s good to be reminded of the contra side to the big-data-can-be-mined-for-all-truths attitudes flying around.
- Architecture of Open Source Applications — CC-licensed book available through Lulu or for free download. Lots of interesting stories and design decisions to draw from. I know when I learned how Perl worked on the inside, I learned a hell of a lot that I could apply later in life and respected its creators all the more.
- Bullying in 140 Letters — it’s about an Australian storm in a teacup, but it made me consider the short-form medium. Short-form negativity can have the added colour/resonance of being snarky and funny. Hard to add colour to short-form positive comments, though. Much harder to be funny and positive than to be funny and negative. Have we inadvertently created a medium where, thanks to the quirks of our language and the way we communicate, it favours negativity over positivity?
Four short links: 20 May 2011
Digital Forex, Blasts from the Past, Mobile Web Performance, Skype at Conferences
- BitCoin Watch — news and market analysis for this artificial currency. (If you’re outside the BitCoin world wondering wtf the fuss is all about try We Use Coins for a gentle primer and then Is BitCoin a Good Idea? for the case against) (via Andy Baio)
- Time Capsule — send your Flickr photos from a year ago. I love that technology helps us connect not just with other people right now, but with ourselves in the future. Compare TwitShift and Foursquare and Seven Years Ago. (via Really Interesting Group)
- HTTP Archive Mobile — mobile performance data. The top 100 web pages average out at 271kb vs 401kb for their desktop incarnations, which still seems unjustifiably high to me.
- Skype at Conferences — The two editors of the book were due to lead the session but were at the wrong ends of a skype three way video conference which stuttered into a dalekian half life without really quite making the breakthrough into comprehensibility. After various attempts to rewire, reconfigure and reboot, we gave up and had what turned into a good conversation among the dozen people round the table in London. Conference organizers, take note: Skype at conferences is a recipe for fail.
Four short links: 18 May 2011
Future Libraries, Innovation History, Entity Extraction API, and Outside Insight
- The Future of the Library (Seth Godin) — We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime. Passionate railing against a straw man. The library profession is diverse, but huge numbers of them are grappling with the new identity of the library in a digital age. This kind of facile outside-in “get with the Internet times” message is almost laughably displaying ignorance of actual librarians, as much as “the book is dead!” displays ignorance of books and literacy. Libraries are already much more than book caves, and already see themselves as navigators to a world of knowledge for people who need that navigation help. They disproportionately serve the under-privileged, they are public spaces, they are brave and constant battlers at the front line of freedom to access information. This kind of patronising “wake up and smell the digital roses!” wank is exactly what gives technologists a bad name in other professions. Go back to your tribes of purple cows, Seth, and leave librarians to get on with helping people find, access, and use information.
- An Old Word for a New World (PDF) — paper on how “innovation”, which used to be pejorative, came now to be laudable. (via Evgeny Mozorov)
- AlchemyAPI — free (as in beer) entity extraction API. (via Andy Baio)
- Referrals by LinkedIn — the thing with social software is that outsiders can have strong visibility into the success of your software, in a way that antisocial software can’t.
Four short links: 16 May 2011
Minority Report, Embedded Strings, GNU Voice Software, and Nigerian Emotional Masters
- Entering the Minority Report Era — a survey of technology inspired by or reminiscent of Minority Report, which came out ten years ago. (via Hacker News)
- Sally — a tool for embedding strings in matrices, as used in machine learning. (via Matt Biddulph)
- GNU SIP Witch Released — can be used to deploy private secure calling networks, whether stand-alone or in conjunction with existing VoIP infrastructure, for private institutions and national governments. (via Hacker News)
- Chilling Story of Genius in a Land of Chronic Unemployment (TechCrunch) — fascinating story of Nigerian criminal tech entrepreneurs. He helps build them up; he listens to their problems. He makes them feel loved. He calls each an innocuous pet name, lest he accidentally type the wrong message into the wrong chat window. He asks for a little bit of money here and there, until men are sending him steady amounts from each paycheck. He says it takes exactly one month for a man to fall in love with him, and once he has a man’s heart, no woman can take it. I wonder what designers of social software can learn from these master emotional manipulators?
Four short links: 27 April 2011
Ignorance, Crowdsourcing, Click Fraud, and Trolls
- Aaargh! Physicists! –the dangers of venturing outside your area of expertise is that someone will mercilessly point out your overconfident missteps, as happens here. Unless, of course, your new field is social media, in which case there are hundreds of thousands of sycophantic circlejerkers ready to retweet, link back, and Like your misbegotten ill-conceived content-free mindless dribblings.
- Crowdsourcing to Improve Sales — products sell better if their reviews have good spelling and grammar, so one retailer used MTurk to copyedit reviews and thus improve sales. (via Matt Biddulph on Delicious)
- Converting the Virtual Economy into Development Potential — World Bank reports that online microwork earned $3B for poor countries in 2009, and encourages third world countries to invest in infrastructure to support this. Interestingly, the authors include both gold farming and “cherry blossoming” (clickfraud) as microwork. (via BoingBoing)
- Misery — Drupal module that makes life difficult for trolls–randomly wrong redirections, slow page loads, white screens, forms that don’t submit, etc. Brilliant! (via Andy Baio)
Four short links: 22 April 2011
Markov Logic Networks, Social News, Content Liberation, Rate Limiting Traffic
- Tuffy — a GPL v3 licensed Markov Logic Network inference engine in Java and PostgreSQL that claims to be more scalable than previous tools. (via Hacker News)
- Behind news.me — if you are curious to see what they are reading, if you want to see the world through their eyes, News.me is for you. Many people curate their Twitter experience to reflect their own unique set of interests. News.me offers a window into their curated view of the world, filtered for realtime social relevance via the bit-rank algorithm. A friend and I have been using Instapaper for this, and I’m keen to see how it works. It’s interesting, though: the more people I “share” with, the less insight I get into any one person–it goes from being a mindmeld to ambient zeitgeist.
- Orbital Content — Content shifting allows a user to take a piece of content that they’ve identified in one context and make it available in another. [...] Calling Instapaper a content shifter tells only half the story. It puts too much attention on the shifting and not enough on what needs to happen before a piece of content can be shifted. Before content can be shifted, it must be correctly identified, uprooted from its source, and tied to a user. This process, which I call “content liberation” is the common ground between Instapaper, Svpply, Readability, Zootool, and other bookmarklet apps. Content shifting, as powerful as it is, is just the beginning of what’s possible when content is liberated. I think they’re optimistic about liberation retaining attribution (there needs to be compelling self-interest to retain attribution) but otherwise love this piece. (via Courtney Johnston)
- Rate Limiting Traffic with Varnish (Dan Singerman) — I love that the technology which help you deliver web pages quickly also helps you deliver them not too quickly. (via John Clegg).
Four short links: 13 April 2011
Social Bots, Google Competing with Non-Profits, Open Source EHR, and Javascript Obscurity
- Web Ecology Project — Researching quantized social interaction. Most recent work was a competition to write social bots that would be followed/friended on social networks–essentially scoring 51% on the Turing test. There are privacy implications (often social network buddies see profile information that strangers can’t). (via The Atlantic)
- We Need to Stop Google’s Exploitation of Open Communities (Mikel Maron) — much as Google’s ill-fated Knol smelled like an attempt to sidestep Wikipedia, their MapMaker is directly modelled on OSM [OpenStreetMap], but with a restrictive data license, where you can not use the data as you see fit. Mikel argues passionately and pointedly about this. Also interesting: how quickly OSM’s own community is turning against itself on licensing issues. Nothing else divides open communities as much as the license that makes them possible, not even big companies’ dickish behaviour.
- A Truly Open VistA — the Veterans Administration attempts to build an open source community (instead of simply releasing the source code). This article by RedHat’s Chief Technology Strategist outlines some of challenges they’re facing: obscure source and bureaucracy. The obscure source is a significant impediment: it’s written in MUMPS which predates C and combines the elegance of roadkill with all the capability for abstract expression of a brick. Existing businesses aren’t an impediment, though: Linux has shown that deforking (aka “contributing”) makes sound business sense once the momentum of new features builds up in the commons. (via Glyn Moody)
- Rare Javascript Operators (Timmy Willison) — enlightening, but reminds me of the important gulf between “can” and “should”: Tilde is useful! We can use for any functions that return -1:
// We can do
if ( ~checkFoo ) {}
(via Javascript Weekly)
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