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Retailers such as Amazon and Half use social network methods applied to people’s previous purchasing behavior and demonstrated interest to figure out what other items users may want to buy. MovieLens is an interesting example of a non-commercial service that uses information provided by the user about his or her movie preferences (ratings of movies already viewed) to suggest what additional movies may be of interest to the person based on the movie evaluations of others who exhibit similar tastes. Music Plasma suggests what artists are close to each other based on style and epoch. Unfortunately the site doesn’t tell us much about the underlying methodology.[1] Unlike MovieLens, it seems to rely on information about the position of artists in the network based on shared genre and era to make recommendations (i.e. display linkages) instead of relying on listener feedback about shared tastes. I’d be curious to hear about other similar services resembling any of these approaches. For those interested in visualizations of this type, the search engine Kartoo and the Virtual Thesaurus may also be of interest (the latter is quite restricted for non-subscribers though and I have never been able to access enough of it to be particularly impressed). For more on visualization of networks and an explanation of social network analysis basics, see orgnet.com.

fn1. A few months ago I contacted them for more information, but got no response.

The new tech blog Lifehacker points to Google SMS. Send a text message to 46645 (in the US) with queries about addresses (e.g. of hospitals, restaurants), definitions, names/phone numbers, products and more, and receive a response text message (or two or three) with information. Standard text message costs apply (or so I’m assuming).

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Among other things, my research looks at how people find information online. When I conducted in-person observations of people’s information-seeking behavior on the Web, it was interesting to see how well Ask Jeeves had done in marketing itself as the search engine that answers people’s questions. Even respondents in my study who otherwise relied on Google for almost all of their queries would go to Ask Jeeves to find the answer to the question about what steps they would have to take if they lost their wallet. People would type in their query in the form of a question even though in most cases – and especially if not specified with quotes, which is something few users do – including “what” or “where” in a query does little to improve the results of a search. It was an interesting example of how a search service could position itself in the search engine market by a particular marketing approach. The results to users’ queries on that particular search engine were no better than the results offered by other services, but due to the type of question people turned to that service regardless. Now I have come across something that seems quite unique to Ask Jeeves among the most popular search engines in terms of actual services rendered, for the moment at least.

Reading the Search Engine Watch blog I found out that using Ask Jeeves can cut down on the number of clicks required to find the answers to simple factual questions. Ask Jeeves will now give you a little box with the answers to some of your questions without having to click through to one of the results for the information. For example, wondering about this year’s date for Passover, I typed in when is Passover in 2005 and was given the exact info right there by Jeeves. (Yes, of course it’s enough to type in passover 2005 to get the same result, I was just playing along.) The service seems to cater to more popular forms of information. It will give you information about some celebrity birthdays (e.g. walter matthau birthday) and the names of Academy Award winners (up until 2002 for now, e.g. academy award best actress 2002), but it won’t display the names of Nobel Prize winners directly (e.g. see results for chemistry nobel prize 2002). It will be interesting to see to what other topical domains they expand the service (some geographical information is also available this way already). For now, other search services such as Google and Yahoo require additional clicks to find answers to the above questions. Perhaps in time they will come out with their versions of instant responses.[1]

fn1. Yes, I realize that Google has been supplying answers to some questions directly for a while. That’s what Kieran relied on in this post.

Looking for a fun alternative to the default Firefox theme? I’ve been using Doodle and like it quite a bit.

Google Doodle never disappoints. This New Year’s logo is a bit of a new approach playing with the shadows.. very nice.

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Jeffrey Rosen has a piece in yesterday’s NYTimes Magazine about the practice of blogging intricate details about one’s dating and sex life on one’s blog. (I was going to say “one’s private life”, but how private is it once it’s been blogged and read by hundreds?) As usual with journalistic pieces such as this one, it is hard to tell how widespread the phenomenon is, but it is out there to some extent and may be worth some thought. I certainly know that people in my social circles – friends, family members, colleagues – do wonder what I will and will not blog about from our interactions and sometimes even preface comments by saying “this is not for blogging”. I always reassure these people that I never blog information about other people without permission and in general rarely mention any names or other identifying information (except to give credit, but I check in such cases as well). However, from reading the article one would think my practices are more the exception than the rule.

Since I do not blog anonymously there is more social control over what I decide to make public. After all, everything I say reflects on me in return. Outing information about others that many may find inappropriate will have negative repercussions on me. So even if I had no concerns, whatsoever, about the privacy of people around me – but I do – a solely self-interested approach would still dictate that I keep information about others’ lives private in order not to upset people and in turn lose credibility and trust in the future. However, such social control operates much less effectively among those who can hide behind the veil of a pseudonym.

As I prepare for my upcoming undergraduate class in which students will be required to maintain blogs, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). According to FERPA, I have to make sure that certain details about student enrollment in my classes are kept private. In the process, I have realized that this is a one-way street. There is nothing preventing my students from blogging whatever information they decide about me. Of course, social sanctions may still exist. Students may decide it is not worth upsetting their instructor through such practices. Nonetheless, there will be plenty of opportunities for blogging things after class is over. Moreover, they may have individual blogs not associated with the class that are written anonymously and can serve as an outlet for commentary about others.

Of course, we all have different selves depending on the social situations in which we find ourselves and there is no reason one should let down certain guards in front of a classroom or when with a group of colleagues. Perhaps the most disturbing part about the phenomenon described in the article is that people are blogging intricate details about their private lives, which in turn includes the private lives of others. Of course, as long as this is a known fact one can accept it and behave accordingly (or not accept it and stop spending time with the person assuming that’s an option). But it sounds like this practice often only becomes clear after the fact, which seems to put unfortunate added pressure on private interactions.

This on CT.

I am teaching an undergraduate class this Winter called “Internet and Society”. [1] I am going to require each student to maintain his/her own blog. This poses some challenges from keeping up with the amount of written material to assuring a certain level of privacy for students (as per related federal laws). I still have a few weeks to think about the specifics and thought would see what experiences and wisdom others may have accumulated in this realm.

The course is a social science course (half the students will be Communication Studies majors, half of them Sociology majors) with a focus on exploring the social, political, economic and cultural aspects of the Internet. I do plan to teach students some technical skills, but that won’t be the focal point of the course. I will provide basic installation of WordPress and then will work with students to tweak the layout and style to their liking. Those who are especially interested in this aspect will have the opportunity to personalize the blog considerably, but that will not be a requirement.

The closest analogy to requiring blogs seems to be classes where students are required to keep journals. I have only seen this done once so I am curious to hear about additional experiences (or, of course, any experiences people may have with blogs by students in particular). The idea is to ask students to comment on their readings and class discussions on their blogs. They would be required to write a certain number of entries (I am not yet sure how many). They would also be required to comment on other students’ blogs (I am not yet sure how often).

One challenge of this method is that it creates a lot of material for the instructor to follow (there will be around 30-40 students enrolled in this class). In fact, it is probably not realistic to expect the instructor to follow all this writing, or even to ask a teaching assistant to read all the blogs constantly. One way I thought to evaluate this amount of material is to ask students at the end of the quarter to submit their best X number of posts for evaluation and perhaps the best Y number of comments they made on other people’s blogs. Nonetheless, I would like to keep up with the material as the quarter progresses so thoughts students express on blogs can be incorporated into class lectures and discussions.

As to why require blogs in the first place, here are some reasons. First, I like the idea of asking student to keep journals. It is hard to get students to do class readings, but requiring constant reaction to the readings and discussions should help. Second, I think asking students to maintain blogs will help convey some points to them about the potential of the Web to help people reach wide audiences. Of course the particular point there is that simply having a Web site in no way guarantees that someone suddenly has a wide-reaching public voice. But I think this will be easier to convey if students experience it first hand. On the other hand, the blogs will be public and it may be that people not associated with the class find them, read them and comment on them, which could be an interesting experience for students. (I have specific plans in mind to encourage such outside involvement.) Finally, knowing that one’s peers are reading one’s writing seems to encourage more serious reflection on the part of students than simply handing in assignments to an instructor so the overall quality of writing should be higher. That’s more of a hunch than a claim I can back up by any systematic evidence.

Due to federal laws about students’ privacy, there is the additional concern of keeping students’ identities private on their blogs. Information about what classes students are taking is not supposed to be made public. My thinking on this right now is to recommend to everyone that they blog under a pseudonym, but if they decide on their own to make public their identities that is up to them. What I have not yet decided is whether I should suggest that everybody stay anonymous to each other. Commenting on course material anonymously may allow certain people to open up more than they would otherwise or express opinions they may not want to if their identities were known. But it may make the incorporation of blog material into in-person class discussions somewhat tedious.

Fn1. The syllabus is not yet available, but you can view a brief class description here.

This on CT.

I have updated the graph that looks at the words “weblog” and “blog” in mainstream print media since 1997. I am sure nobody is surprised to see the large increase during the past year.

The graph represents the results for a search in LexisNexis Academic for “weblog” and “blog” in the General News section of Major Papers from 1997 to 2004 (these searches also turn up results for the plural of these terms). This section includes 47 (53 in 2004) papers from across the world including 24 (29 in 2004) US dailies.[1] The figure shows the change over the past eight years. The 2004 numbers include coverage until November 28, 2004. I also ran the searches for 1995 and 1996 but there was no mention of these terms then either so I decided to follow the suggestion made by a commenter to my previous post on this topic and now just start with 1997.

Please note that this figure does not give accurate information about the total sum of articles on the topic because 1. some articles mention both “blog” and “weblog” and are thus counted in both columns (which also explains why I decided not to stack the two columns on top of each other); 2. I did not do a search for other related terms such as blogger or blogging which may have excluded some articles. Moreover, although for the earlier years I checked each article to verify it featured related content, I did not do this for later years when the numbers became too large (given that this is not a research project, just something I’m doing for fun:). The information on this graph is thus just an estimate of the actual occurance of these words in major print media outlets. Also, because it seems that the General News search of Major Papers in LexisNexis Academic searched more newspapers in 2004 than earlier years, the change in coverage may explain some (although likely not all) of the increase from 2003 to 2004.

(I posted earlier versions of this graph in April, 2003 and May, 2004.)

fn1. It looks like there are quite a few additions/deletions in the LexisNexis Academic database over the years.

My School did quite well at the National Communication Association’s award ceremonies this weekend. My colleague Bob Hariman received two awards, E. Patrick Johnson from Performance Studies received one, and I got a nice plaque about the G.R.Miller Outstanding Dissertation Award. Some of our alums got awards as well, like Cara Finnegan now at UIUC.

This on CT.

It’s interesting to see how Web sites may alter their presence this evening to deal with their anticipated traffic. Earlier today when I visited Zogby International they still had all sorts of graphics on their front page. Now they just show their predictions on a text-only page. I’d be curious to hear if people have come across other sites that have altered their homepage content in anticipation of unusually large traffic tonight that they are not otherwise prepared to handle.

I just returned from a workshop held in Santa Clara, California by the Digital Cultural Institutions Project of the Social Science Research Council where I was a fellow this summer. I met some very interesting people working on important projects regarding digital culture (broadly defined) mosty focusing on how the particular ways in which content is presented and made available to users in digital form may influence the ways in which people are then able to use said content. It is clear from the presentations and discussion that we are facing some huge challenges when it comes to retaining the rights of users to interact with digital cultural projects the way we have been used to in the past (one case in point: Digital Rights Management).

There was one quite amusing component of the meetings. On Thursday, as part of introducing the fellows to each other, we went to San Francisco to check out The Zeum and the virtual arcade at the Metreon. I had never played virtual bowling before nor tried dance dance revolution. It turns out that both are really fun and make for a serious work-out.

This at CT.

Here’s a little Flash movie about how the media are covering the presidential campaigns. I doubt any of it will be shocking to most readers of CT, but it’s still worth a pause and some thought.

The site that features the video offers much information about media ownership and is quite a resource. But I found it difficult to locate concrete things one may be able to do, except donate money to the cause.

One section suggests ten policies to fix the media. Do you find them convincing? Realistic? Necessary? Unnecessary? Hopeless? Too vague? Too ambitious? Not ambitious enough?

This at CT.

As I scanned the hallway for signs of the party, an arch of red, yellow, green and blue balloons extended a welcome. I entered the grand ballroom where fun sounds of karaoke and a sea of neon green glassware greeted me. To the left was a large screen with random words scrolling quickly: Elmers glue effect on skin; [Hebrew characters]; [Chinese characters]; pokemon cards. Scattered across the room were people forming small lines for massages, caricature drawings and tarot card readings. Ninety-five percent of those present were women. It reminded me of my college years – having attended a women’s college – and what a blast you could have putting a group of women in a room with great music. This is probably a cliché, but you really could feel the excitement and energy especially when people – whether in their 20s or 40s – crowded the dance floor for the Macarena and the electric slide. I couldn’t help but think that the songs for karaoke were not randomly selected as I listened to people sing the words to “I’m a Barbie girl” and “I’m a bitch, I’m a lover”.

Welcome to the party hosted by Women of Google at this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Chicago. The meetings were sponsored by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Association of Computing Machinery. Anyone doubting whether there are still social barriers for women in computing fields needs only talk to the attendees. The young women – undergraduates or just a few years out of college pursuing graduate degrees in computer science and related fields – cannot contain their excitement of and appreciation for what this meeting offers them. Unlike the vastly male-dominated conferences and classrooms that make up most of their professional experiences and that are still often hostile to women, the Grace Hopper Celebration affords them a chance to see and meet extremely successful women in their fields – corporate VPs, university deans, inventors, inspiring mentors – who are supportive of their pursuits.

I never met Anita Borg, but listening to people makes her contributions to women in technological fields obvious. As one of the hosts put it: he had never felt her presence as much as in that ballroom.

Although I am not a computer scientist, my interests are closely related to many of the issues relevant here (e.g. I study technology use where questions about gender come up quite often). I owe much of my training with technology and invaluable initial mentoring about academia to one of my college professors, Joseph O’Rourke of the Computer Science Department at Smith College. Joe’s contributions reach well past his own students. He was instrumental in the early 90s in setting up a mentoring program that matches female college computer science majors with female faculty at other schools for summer projects. I worked with Joe one summer tabulating information about the applicants. You could tell it was a popular program. Since then the project has grown manifold to fund these important experiences of even more young women. My colleague Justine Cassell hosted two students this summer on this program. One of them was able to make it back to the celebrations this weekend and talking to her at the party made the value of this experience extremely clear.

The party hosted by Google was both fun and inspiring. It is great to see important companies so supportive of women in technological fields. Among the gifts given to guests was a copy of Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. I suspect many present will have already read it, but it is always good to have an extra copy on hand to give away. It is important to help people understand that there is nothing inherent in computing as a male field. It is the myriad of social interactions that people face from a very young age that lead girls and boys down different paths. In the end this can cost us a lot as it may channel very talented women out of fields in which their contributions may well be very significant.

I just heard a song on the radio that reminded me of the year I spent in Geneva my junior year in college exactly ten years ago (* gasp *). How could I forget the familiar lines we used to listen to all the time.. “I’m the lyrical gangster, excuse me mister officer.” (from Here Comes the Hotstepper by Ini Kamoze) Oh, the days…

I decided to email the group of friends with whom I spent that marvelous year. Within minutes I received a couple of responses with the full lyrics and someone even offering to bring the song to our upcoming reunion. These friends were also “thanking me” for getting the song into their heads to the extent that they can’t stop singing it now. I find it amusing to imagine these friends sitting in their offices across the globe, from the State Department to grad student carrels, from embassies to law offices singing “naa-nanananaa-nanananaa-nananaa-nanana”.

Thanks to email, the dissemination of that important little phrase took only a few minutes!

I gave a lunchtime talk at the annual meetings of the Illinois Library Association today. It was more of a skit than a talk, actually. Ed Valauskas – known in IT-research circles mostly for editing First Monday – and I were invited to participate on a session with the following title: If Google is God Who are Reference Librarians? (not our title, theirs). Given that we were lunchtime speakers, we decided to take a lighter-than-usual approach and we prepared a skit for the occasion. I was the venture capitalist approaching Reference Librarians, Inc. for a potentially lucrative arrangement about tweaking their referral services. Then I played a first-year college student asking all sorts of questions from Ed, the reference librarian, about obtaining information regarding various issues that come up in the life of a student newly arrived on campus. In response to my questions, he just “happened to” recommend the various products suggested by the venture capitalist. In the end Reference Librarians, Inc. decided to return some of the funds to the funders, because the goup’s members felt that they were not ready to compromise their service in that way.

After the skit, we spent a few minutes discussing the ways in which reference librarians do offer added value when compared to search engines. We wrapped up on the point that one of the biggest challenges reference librarians seem to face is more a question of PR. They need to help people understand that they do offer much more than running simple queries on a search engine may yield, especially for the average user.

We have finalized our Technology and Social Behavior Speaker Series for the 2004-2005 academic year. We have quite an exciting line-up, it’s fun to be in such an interdisciplinary group.

Did you know that you can get excerpts from books and other material otherwise not online by searching on Google Print?

You can search using this feature of Google by adding the following bit to your search query: site:print.google.com.

Example:
site:print.google.com chocolate mousse

This query yields a list of resources with all sorts of excerpts from books that talk about chocolate mousse, including some full recipes.

It’s unclear how copyright owners are/will be reacting to this. You would think as long as the excerpt is just an excerpt and the page includes a link to online book retailers where users can then purchase the book they would embrace it. It may be a bit more complicated with magazines as copies of those for sale are usually not just a click away.

I spent the last few days in Minneapolis at the Carlson School of Managements of the Univ. Minnesota participating in a great digital divide symposium. Although I have been doing research on this topic for years, I got to meet several people new to me who are working on interesting and important projects in this area. Many of them were from management and information systems/science programs, a field whose interest in the digital divide may not be obvious to some. One interesting question that came up more in the proposal to the meeting than the actual workshop was whether the existence of a digital divide is bad or, in fact, possibly good for business. This was a whole new angle on the topic, and although many would likely claim that this is not the right approach to take to the question, it is certainly an interesting one.

This little Flash movie by the ACLU about the loss of privacy is hilarious and, of course, scary at the same time.

When I was in Paris I spotted a guy sitting on a corner on the ground just outside a bank with a laptop. It looked pretty random, but then it occured to me that perhaps this was the best location he could find for WiFi signals. Now I see that CTD over at ionarts blogged what he considers a possible |AMP|#8220;techno-geek historical first |AMP|#8230; |AMP|#8216;warboating|AMP|#8217;|AMP|#8221;. He and his brother went out on a fishing boat for signals. Not bad. I|AMP|#8217;m curious, what|AMP|#8217;s the craziest/weirdest thing people have done to find wireless connection?