Archive for the 'stuff' category
Notes reception in Second Life
May 2, 2007 8:33 am
Spock – The people search engine
April 22, 2007 10:51 amOver at O’Reilly Radar Tim has a post about a new company that just launched at the Web 2.0 expo called Spock…
You can search for a specific person — but you can do that on Google. More importantly, you can search for a class of person, say politicians, or people associated with a topic — say Ruby on Rails. The spock robot automatically creates tags for any person it finds (and it gathers information on people from Wikipedia, social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook), but it also lets users add tags of their own, and vote existing tags up or down to strengthen the associations between people and topics. Users can also identify relationships between people (friend, co-worker, etc.), upload pictures, and provide other types of information. This is definitely a site that will get better as more people use it — one of my key tests for Web 2.0. It also illustrates the heart of a new development paradigm: using programs to populate a database, and people to improve it.
Go to the article for more detail, but here is a quick screen shot to peek your interest:
Fascinating. IBM offers some products for entity analytics, but none that I know of that are aiming at web scale analytics, or combining it with social software.
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TED Talks – Charles Leadbeater & Collaborative Creativity
April 21, 2007 10:28 amA thought provoking talk by Charles Leadbeater on the notion of "Collaborative Creativity".
From the site:
In this deceptively casual talk, Charles Leadbeater weaves a tight argument that innovation isn’t just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies cant. He describes the rising role of serious amateurs ("Pro-Ams," as he calls them) through the story of the mountain bike.
Also on the site, a version of the player that is really neat:
When you roll over the timeline its displays a chapter visualization that allows you to page through sections of the talk.
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Fools v Jerks
April 5, 2007 10:00 pmA couple of professors from Harvard and Duke business schools got together and examined the relationship between affability and competency at work. They generated a magic quadrant diagram like this:
Their findings are surprising.
Our research showed (not surprisingly) that, no matter what kind of organization we studied, everybody wanted to work with the lovable star, and nobody wanted to work with the incompetent jerk. Things got a lot more interesting, though, when people faced the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools.
Ask managers about this choiceand we’ve asked many of them, both as part of our research and in executive education programs we teachand you’ll often hear them say that when it comes to getting a job done, of course competence trumps likability. "I can defuse my antipathy toward the jerk if he’s competent, but I can’t train someone who’s incompetent," says the CIO at a large engineering company. Or, in the words of a knowledge management executive in the IT department of a professional services firm: "I really care about the skills and expertise you bring to the table. If you’re a nice person on top of that, that’s simply a bonus."
But despite what such people might say about their preferences, the reverse turned out to be true in practice in the organizations we analyzed. Personal feelings played a more important role in forming work relationshipsnot friendships at work but job-oriented relationshipsthan is commonly acknowledged. They were even more important than evaluations of competence. In fact, feelings worked as a gating factor: We found that if someone is strongly disliked, it’s almost irrelevant whether or not she is competent; people won’t want to work with her anyway. By contrast, if someone is liked, his colleagues will seek out every little bit of competence he has to offer. And this tendency didn’t exist only in extreme cases; it was true across the board. Generally speaking, a little extra likability goes a longer way than a little extra competence in making someone desirable to work with.
I’m sure that we can all reference experiences where we had colleagues that were less than affable (or even down right nasty). One particular person comes to mind for me – he shall remain anonymous, but he is extremely bright and reviled by almost everyone who has to work with him.
There is a lot of stuff in his head, none of which could be found in "How to Win Friends and Influence People", but for the technical details in a few areas there aren’t many people that know more than him.
I wonder what the implications are here for social software… There is a is a level of abstraction that social software provides that might act as a sort of "smoothing function". Perhaps smoothing the rough edges on the "competent jerk’s" personality, or allowing the relatively few areas of competency of the "loveable fool" to be highlighted, along with their natural proclivity relate to other people.
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PS3 Virtual World
March 20, 2007 5:21 pm“The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized”
March 6, 2007 11:38 pmA blog post about the first month of public access for the IBM Research project called "Many Eyes" (mentioned at Lotusphere)
Many Eyes was launched a little more than a month ago. By the way, the original Read/Write Web article listed "Fernanda and Martin" as the developers – in fact everyone in the IBM Visual Communication Lab has worked on the site, and probably the two of us did less of the actual development than anyone else!
So what has happened? Was our hypothesis about the social use of visualizations correct? It’s too early for any scientific conclusions, but that won’t stop us from giving some anecdotal evidence 
Here are three anecdotes:
[More...]
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Live Blogging – WSJ’s take on the subject
March 3, 2007 10:58 amAn article on liveblogging from the Wall Street Journal.
Obvious LLC’s nine-month-old Twitter.com is dedicated to the question, "What are you doing?" People send in their answers (up to 140 characters) by cellphone, by instant messenger or on the Web, which are posted on their personal page for viewing by a limited group of friends or anyone on the site. The site has received more than one million real-time posts, including one sent in via cellphone by Peter Kruse while he was sitting in the back of the church at his former pastor’s funeral in September. "It did distract me for about 30 seconds," says Mr. Kruse, 25, an aide to adults with disabilities in Elgin, Ill.
Many agree that it’s hard to fully participate in an event if you’re trying to compose pithy, thoughtful notes at the same time. Some academics say the live posts are the latest twist in the decades-old conflict between living in the moment and memorializing it from behind a camera lens, only worse. "People who are live-blogging are psychologically more distant from the event," says Clay Shirky, a professor of social software at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
After doing some Live Blogging myself at Lotusphere my experience is less one of distance from the event and more of an alternate form of note taking. I do suspect that live blogging from a conference vastly different from doing the same at a child’s birth 
I like the comparison to ‘memorialzing from behind the camera lens’ as that is something that I had struggled with in the past. I used to consider taking pictures a very "meta event" and as a result have about 2 or 3 pictures from all of my 5 trips to the Turks and Caicos islands. After getting a small Cannon Elph with long battery life a year or so ago I realize that my previous experience had more to do with the cost of operation of the picture taking experience overall, not the general activity. Now I’m much more likely to take a picture when I just have to pull the camera out of the bag to catch the scene. Having a flickr account doesn’t hurt either b/c it is a low cost way to organize and share all of the photos.
I’ve recently started thinking about how much more I would capture if the cost of operation was even lower – if I blinked my eyes and decent quality picture was saved. I think that I would not only take more pictures, but would also feel less distant from the event. I imagine there is a very close analogy for live blogging. The cost of operation, even with t9, is high enough for me at the moment to use my mobile phone as a frequent input device, and my laptop is unweildy in most situations. But if the cost of operation were lowered with respect to entry of my thoughts, I suspect I would (and could) live blog more often, with a greater feeling of emersion in the experience.
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Email meet Virtual Economies
February 28, 2007 3:41 pmHaving done a little bit of reading on economics in the recent past, this idea is really intriguing. I’m not sure how exactly they can implment it to keep it from being easily hacked, or gamed, but I like the idea…
From : A cure for e-mail attention disorder? | CNET News.com
Corporate managers concerned about the amount of time employees spend sifting though mountains of unwanted e-mail may soon have World of Warcraft to thank for providing a solution.
That’s because a Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up called Seriosity has come up with an e-mail management system that borrows heavily from the virtual economies and currencies found in WoW and other large-scale online games.
Known as Attent, Seriosity’s system is essentially a new currency–called the Serio–that corporate e-mail users spend to indicate a message’s importance: the more important they believe the message is, the more Serios they spend on it. Recipients keep the Serios in the messages they get.
Similarly, when someone receives a message with Serios attached, they can indicate how important they believe it is by responding with an appropriate number: none or very few if they think the message wasn’t valuable, an equal number if they want the sender to know they appreciated the message, or more than the original number to show they agree that it truly was crucial.
But Serios is a currency, and therefore a scarce resource, so people get a limited amount. The idea is that they have to spend the currency wisely, always making sure they have enough to send more with future messages.
[via Mike Gotta]
technorati tags:email, social-software, economics, virtual-economies
Anti-social software: Fear the Mooninites
January 31, 2007 9:15 pm
I walked into the gym today and saw the row of TV monitors. The first thing I notice is an image of a Moonintie from the TV show Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I’ve seen the show a few times, but among the people I know that introduced me to it I’m not nearly the biggest fan. Despite this I still recognized it the character, and since I remember hearing something about an ATHF movie in the works I assumed it was a marketing stunt for the movie. This was all in a glance – a very Gladwellian “Blink” moment.
So after I ‘blink’ they cut back to Lou Dobbs and I read on the closed captions that they have no idea where these have come from and officials have been engaging the bomb squads to blow them up. Shortly after that on CNN I see that they have indeed sorted out the perpetrators and now the coverage turns to why it was done and who to blame. CNN.com summed up the “damage” done by this stunt:
The discovery of nine of the devices around metro Boston led state, local and federal authorities to close the Boston University and Longfellow Bridges, and block boat traffic from the Charles River to Boston Harbor.
In addition, the Pentagon said U.S. Northern Command was monitoring the situation from its headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but said none of its units were sent to assist.
And Boston’s Mayor chimed in:
Mayor Thomas Menino’s office said nine of the light boards were found around metropolitan Boston.
“I want to be certain that we take all of these reports very seriously,” Menino said in a written statement. “The coordinated response by all departments proves the system we have in place works.”
“The system we have in place works” … Really? It seems like the system is broken. Really broken.
What does this have to do with social software? Nothing, unfortunately. If I was able to spot a Mooninite and at first glance why weren’t the police. Not necessarily individuals in the police department (or the pentagon), but either as a service…
What if instead of closing down the bridges and blowing up these marketing pieces they were able to harness the collective intelligence of all the Adult Swim watchers out there who would have said “its a promotional scheme for ATHF – call Turner broadcasting to verify”?
