The Flicker Blog and Podcast

I read this today, where Tim O’Reilly refers to a correlation (drawn by Ed Kummer of Disney) between solar energy units in homes and the ‘traditional’ understanding of user-generated content. The main point being that ‘users’ can now create their own energy, and sell surplus back to the network – just as users of the web, increasingly share data and content.

I’m very enthused by any technology that liberates and empowers individuals – particularly if individual endevours benefit a community. But, this parallel brought into sharper focus for me, the idea that the term ‘User Generated Content’ is innapropriate, and seems increasingly laboured (even if the parallel drawn here has some merit). Dare I say it, perhaps it’s time we stopped celebrating ‘UGC’ altogether – it’s verging on patronising: ‘Hey,look at what this regular person managed to make!’

People have always made stuff, and generally, improvised means by which they can improve the quality of their existence. Before we had muti-national business, and looked at everything through the lens of globalisation, I’d even speculate that it was considered normal.

Perhaps it is because the Internet was first viewed as a new form of media, and that the media industries have until recently, enjoyed exclusivity? The very term ‘user’ suggests a relationship based around dependence on the provider – or one that’s based on consumption.

Apart from talent, the only thing separating authors, film-makers musicians journalists etc from ‘common folk’ is the sponsorship/backing of a publishing business. The media industries who were the gatekeepers have found that the surrounding walls have come down. People, not users, create content – and the internet dramatically lowers the barriers to distribution.

Sure, none of what I’m saying is any great revelation. I guess that what I’m saying is that drawing a parallel between user-generated electricty and Web 2.0 is looking at it the wrong way round. Web 2.0 is allowing the internet to become more like the real world.

Some time ago, Ian pointed me at a video of two new visualisation tools (Stack and Swarm) that have been developed for Digg. Now that they’re both live (on Digg Labs) I wanted to give them a mention.

Stack is a visualisation tool, showing ‘diggs’ as they occur in real-time. Taking the form of a bar chart, vertical bars along the bottom grow, as blocks (representing ‘diggs’) fall from above. Visually, it feels like an early 80’s video game, and the default zoom level tends to yield little in the way of information. Clicking on a bar (which at the lowest zoom level, requires the manual dexterity and speed associated with playing a video game) gives you a more detailed view on the respective story. Interesting stuff!

Swarm is definitely the approach that I find most interesting. As a real-time visualisation tool, it affords far more information at a glance. Individual stories are represented as circles, growing in size as they grow in popularity. Hovering over a circle reveals not only the headline, but connections (or lackof) to other stories – arcs temporarily appear to illustrate relationships between items as the user moves them.

There’s a nice application of physics employed in the visualisation – ‘loner’ stories push adjacent stories away whilst connected items have elastic connections (causing a lag in movement that’s dependent on the speed with which objects are moved). I did initially find myself questioning the value of some of the interactions. Moving items around seemed to have little purpose beyond sheer playfulness, and any attempt to organise items in the constantly fluid state is futile. That said, I have to concede that the interaction does help the user grasp the relationship (or lackof) between objects in a way that visual stimulus alone, would not.

As real-time visualisations of data go, both approaches are very impressive.

James Surowieki giving an interesting presentation on group behaviour – how and why we behave the way we do – and why groups of mixed ability can actually outperform those of consistently high ability: ‘Even if the less intelligent ones know less, what they know is different. So diversity is really central, and therefore, some measure of randomness is useful.’

On exposure to huge swathes of information vs having seclusion and space to think: ‘whether it’s isolation or cacophony – both things are good. The key thing to avoid is this extensively, tightly networked model’.

Kevin Hale on the importance of RSS.

There’s also a very interesting observation on the power of social bookmarking or ranking:
‘Every time something went up on the site that I felt would be good enough for a wider audience, I added it to my Del.icio.us account with the appropriate tags and descriptions. Our goal was to try and get a feature on del.icio.us/popular by the end of July and to our surprise, we accomplished it in less than a week. After two weeks of diligent posting and tagging, Google gave us a little over 50 referrals while Del.icio.us gave us over 700.’

Seems like this is the most appropriate place to note a recently completed Pew Internet report on the proliferation of blogging.

In the spirit of ‘proper journalism’ here’s the news from a reputable source.
Having just finished We The Media, I’ll be interested to see what he has planned regarding citizen journalism.

At lunch today, Marc Smith (Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group) gave a very interesting presentation on the work his department is doing in researching the use of online communities. Citing Usenet he pointed out that anarchy does not equal chaos. In fact, you actually see order without authority.

He also pointed out that online communities lack many of the visual signifiers that we take for granted in the real world. When we walk into a crowded room, we immediately get a sense of how many people are there, what sex and age the occupants are. In the virtual world, we get none of this.

In a collective commons (ie a virtual un-moderated community) reputation systems are vitally important. Marc talked about Explicit and Implicit reputation systems.

Explicit systems make statements about behaviours and relationships ie. the systems used by Ebay, Amazon & Slashdot. Problems with such systems are that the ratings are misleading – 20 positive comments can be worth as much as 20,000. They are also slow to react.

Implicit systems base reputation on observed behaviors ie. Google, Amazon, Blogdex, Technorati. Google being the best example – a page’s reputation is improved by the number of pages linking to it. There is no sense of why it’s being linked to. Saying ‘this is the worst page in the world’ is the same as saying ‘this is the best page in the world’ with Google’s reputation system – any link improves the page’s rating. Hence, implicit systems are full of ambiguity – observable behaviour is not always an endorsement. Marc suggested that an 80/20 system would be good – 80% implicit/20% explicit.

Marc also suggested that in terms of implicit recommendations, that ‘Email this page’ and ‘Print this page’ were very good signifiers of user approval.

Valuable Contributors
The most valuable community members are those who post to few groups, regularly. Analysis done on usenet stats (and searchable on Microsoft’s Netscan site) reveals that around 2% of contributors post daily. Out of many million users, that’s still a sizeable community helping out others and giving their time for free.
Netscan essentially gathers meta data about communities which can be used to assess their ‘health.’ For instance, are they active and growing, with regular, trustworthy contributors?

Using this data as a source, Marc showed a very interesting example of Tree Maps (a space-filling approach to the visualization of hierarchical information structures) created by Ben Shneiderman, to make visual, usage patterns over time.
(Ben has also written some very interesting papers on Information Visualisation.)
Such data visualisation for instance made it easy for Marc to show how usenet groups in China have increased with incredible speed over the last 18 months.

We also saw other visualisation techniques (bubble and piano roll) that enabled a user to be classified by assessing their postings over time. Spammers, Regular Posters, Those who only show up with questions could all be identified from a visual representation of the statistical data.

As Marc pointed out, these ‘measurement tools actually become evaluation systems’. As a casual visitor to an online community, access to this data allows me to (at a glance) evaluate the trustworthiness of an individuals posts based on their posting history. ‘Usenet Views,’ the tool used to create these visuals should be made public soon.

Marc demonstrated work by Gina Venolia on thread visualisation, or ‘the social life of a conversation’ From these visualisations, UI components have been created that allow better tracking of threads in an interface than the conventional ‘Explorer’ metaphor. These UI components are freely available from microsoft for non-commercial use.

Finally, Marc talked about AURA (The Advanced User Resource Annotation system (A.U.R.A.) – designed to provide the ability to access and author annotations on objects and places using machine readable tags). Put simply, it turns the world into a webpage. Currently, barcode readers are fitted to handheld devices, enabling a shopper to scan an item in a store, and immediately read usenet (or equivalent) posts, reviews and recommendations. Useful examples were given in the case of identifying foods with GM ingredients, or product recalls etc. In the extreme, giving users access to information such as ‘this will kill you’ because it has been discovered to contain peanuts.
The interface not only allows users to scan items, but to post comments about them, and make them public if they wish. Essentially allowing any consumer to connect with an online community about any object that can be identified.

Just discovered a very interesting South Korean news site that allows the audience to publish articles of their own by agreeing to a code of ethics. Looks like participatory journalism is coming of age.

Louise sent me a link to a very interesting discussion about the impacts of the internet on journalism – essentially how blogs, RSS feeds, collaborative publishing etc is moving journalism away from the traditional media model of ‘filter, then publish’ to a ‘publish, then filter’ model.

I’ve just downloaded the PDF to read later.

My, my, my – haven’t I been slack?
I feel like I should be making excuses here, but I don’t have any adequate ones I’m afraid!

However, I did download and install the latest version of Apple’s iTunes last week. I have to admit to becoming very interested in how this once straightforward software is evolving into an interesting product.

I’ve also been marvelling at the ingenuity of many individuals at work. The shared music library in iTunes is one of those really straightforward ideas that on a large scale LAN, suddenly comes into its own. On a daily basis, there are new ‘libraries’ appearing online that I can browse. These are the music collections of individuals all across the organisation, whose identities I do not know. It’s interesting how something as intimate and personal as your music collection can, if you wish, be shared whilst you yourself, can remain anonymous.

Around the time that this sharing started to become a more common aspect of the iTunes experience, I started wondering why there wasn’t some kind of IM client built in. There are so many unknown individuals on the network whose music I can browse and play, yet I can’t communicate with them.

Funnily enough, as a consequence of the upgrade (and the rather sneaky sharing limitations that Apple built into it) I saw user’s initiative demonstrate that I wasn’t alone in this need – users want to communicate! Put simply, the early adopters amongst us were disconnected from those running the earlier version. We could still see one another, but could no longer share music with users of prior versions.

Within hours, those of us who had upgraded started editing the name of our shared libraries so that rather than giving a name or alias, they now made a statement. So ‘Paul’s Music’ became ‘Early adopter Paul(who upgraded to 4.5 too soon)’s music.’ Another user simply became ‘Everyone upgade to 4.5 now’ and so on.

Very shortly after, user names became questions, and subsequently, answers. I found this user behaviour fascinating – not least because it clearly demonstrated that my own thoughts on inter-user interaction were not isolated.