neilp9 's Public Library

it will have to be fed with a steady stream of content
but there has to be some editorial judgment made for every piece of content and functionality. People are required for that.
1 more annotations...
- A productive social business design will require efforts to prune and weed out material that can inhibit its growth (just like a garden)

28 Jun 09

How Computer Science Serves the Developing World | June 2009 | Communications of the ACM

cacm.acm.org/...fulltext - Preview

From a CS point of view, ICTD can be seen as the next wave in
ubiquitous computing
ICTD is perhaps the next revolution in
computing—transforming the computer and the applications of
computing so that this technology can finally become relevant and
accessible to the other five billion people of the world.
2 more annotations...
- In fact, HCI is arguably the easiest
  discipline within CS in which to work on ICTD research
- Thus the pilot is mostly useful
  to validate prototypes and assess community reactions. The
  understanding of financial sustainability requires a longer trial
  with detailed accounting and no hidden subsidies (unless they are
  expected to continue at scale);

Jake Whitney: Dambisa Moyo and Why Western Aid is Killing Africa

That is because democracy should not viewed as a prerequisite for a good economy. Instead, the opposite is true: a good economy must set the stage for democracy, and there needs to be a middle class before you can even think about having a genuine, liberal democracy.

I persisted. She replied by mentioning an "aid industry" composed of 500,000 people, mainly in the West, and she pointed me to a section in Dead Aid where she asserts that if aid stopped flowing the budgets of the aid industry would be cut and all those Westerners would lose jobs.

www.huffingtonpost.com/...oyo-and-why-west_b_180964.html - Preview

08 Jun 09

Food Web, Meet Interweb: The Networked Future of Farms | Wired Science | Wired.com

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agriculture

15 May 09

kanYe West : Blog : NINTENDO MOUSE

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Kanye

04 May 09

Bringing Design to Software Ch. 2 - Liddle

hci.stanford.edu/...2-liddle.html - Preview

The most important component to design properly is the third,
the user's conceptual model. Everything else should be subordinated
to making that model clear, obvious, and substantial. That is
almost exactly the opposite of how most software is designed.
This model represents what the user is likely
to think, and how the user is likely to respond
2 more annotations...
- The purpose of computer metaphors, in general,
  and particularly of graphical or icon-oriented ones, is to let
  people use recognition rather than recall. People are good at
  recognition, but tend to be poor at recall. People can see objects
  and operations on the screen, and can manage them quite well.
  But when you ask people to remember what string to type to perform
  some task, you are counting on one of their weakest abilities.
- This idea of progressive
  disclosure—providing a great deal of context for everything
  you did, and evaporating the context when you were finished—was
  extremely important.

03 May 09

Anthropology: The Art of Building a Successful Social Site - ReadWriteWeb

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Research social media socialmedia askville amazon stack overflow

28 Apr 09

Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags

www.shirky.com/...ontology_overrated.html - Preview

The question ontology asks is: What kinds of things exist or can exist in the world, and what manner of relations can those things have to each other?
And then there's ontological classification or categorization,
which is organizing a set of entities into groups, based on their
essences and possible relations
20 more annotations...
- The periodic table of the elements is my vote for "Best. Classification. Evar."
- If it's impossible to create a completely coherent categorization
- As the Web expanded more they realized that, to maintain the value in the directory, they were going to have to systematize, so they hired a professional ontologist, and they developed their now-familiar top-level categories, which go to subcategories, each subcategory contains links to still other subcategories, and so on. Now we have this ontologically managed list of what's out there.
- oth of those explanations may have been true at different times and in different measures, but the effect was to override the users' sense of where things ought to be, and to insist on the Yahoo view instead.
- It's easy to see how the Yahoo hierarchy maps to technological constraints as well as physical ones. The constraints in the Yahoo directory describes both a
  library categorization scheme and, obviously, a file system
- They missed the end of this progression,
  which is that, if you've got enough links, you don't need the
  hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file system. The
  links alone are enough
- Let's say I need every Web
  page with the word "obstreperous" and "Minnesota" in it. You can't
  ask a cataloguer in advance to say "Well, that's going to be a useful
  category, we should encode that in advance."
  Instead, what the cataloguer is going to say is, "Obstreperous plus Minnesota! Forget it, we're not
  going to optimize for one-offs like that." Google, on the
  other hand, says, "Who cares? We're not going to tell the user what
  to do, because the link structure is more complex than we can read,
  except in response to a user query."
- Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure. Browse says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance. Given this requirement, the views of the catalogers necessarily override the user's needs and the user's view of the world. If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way you think about it, you're out of luck.
  
  The search paradigm says the reverse. It says nobody gets to tell you in advance what it is you need. Search says that, at the moment that you are looking for it, we will do our best to service it based on this link structure, because we believe we can build a world where we don't need the hierarchy to coexist with the link structure.
- When people were offered search and categorization
  side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things.
- Domain to be Organized
  Small corpus
  Formal categories
  Stable entities
  Restricted entities
  Clear edges
- You can also turn that list around. You can say "Here are some characteristics where ontological classification doesn't work well":
  
  Domain
  Large corpus
  No formal categories
  Unstable entities
  Unrestricted entities
  No clear edges
  Uncoordinated users
  Amateur users
  Naive catalogers
  No Authority
- The reason we don't know whether or not Buffy, The Vampire Slayer
  is science fiction, for example, is because there's no one who can say definitively
  yes or no. In environments where there's no authority and no force that
  can be applied to the user, it's very difficult to support the voodoo style
  of organization
- One of the biggest problems with categorizing things in advance is that it forces the categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling. It forces categorizers to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future.
- The movie people don't want
  to hang out with the cinema people." Those terms actually encode
  different things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies
  improves signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference
  itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches.
- The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out. By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.
- "Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them." If you find a way to make it valuable to individuals to tag their stuff, you'll generate a lot more data about any given object than if you pay a professional to tag it once and only once. And if you can find any way to create value from combining myriad amateur classifications over time, they will come to be more valuable than professional categorization schemes, particularly with regards to robustness and cost of creation.
- The signal loss in traditional categorization schemes comes from compressing things into a restricted number of categories. With tagging, when there is signal loss, it comes from people not having any commonality in talking about things. The loss is from the multiplicity of points of view, rather than from compression around a single point of view. But in a world where enough points of view are likely to provide some commonality, the aggregate signal loss falls with scale in tagging systems, while it grows with scale in systems with single points of view.
- The solution to this sort of signal loss is growth. Well-managed, well-groomed organizational schemes get worse with scale, both because the costs of supporting such schemes at large volumes are prohibitive, and, as I noted earlier, scaling over time is also a serious problem. Tagging, by contrast, gets better with scale. With a multiplicity of points of view the question isn't "Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'", but rather "Is anyone tagging it the way I do?" As long as at least one other person tags something they way you would, you'll find it
- Merges create partial overlap between tags, rather than defining tags as synonyms. Instead of saying that any given tag "is" or "is not" the same as another tag, del.icio.us is able to recommend related tags by saying "A lot of people who tagged this 'Mac' also tagged it 'OSX'." We move from a binary choice between saying two tags are the same or different to the Venn diagram option of "kind of is/somewhat
  is/sort of is/overlaps to this degree".
- We are moving away from binary categorization -- books either are or are not entertainment -- and into this probabilistic world, where N% of users think books are entertainment. It may well be that within Yahoo, there was a big debate about whether or not books are entertainment. But they either had no way of reflecting that debate or they decided not to expose it to the users. What instead happened was it became an all-or-nothing categorization, "This is entertainment, this is not entertainment." We're moving away from that sort of absolute declaration, and towards being able to roll up this kind of value by observing how people handle it in practice.
  
  It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you're getting it wrong about the real world.