vanderwal.net

Presented Personal InfoCloud and Folksonomy to MIM Class

Last night I presented my Designing for the Personal InfoCloud - Including a Focus on Folksonomy to the User Interaction with Information Systems class in the Master of Information Managment program at University of Maryland.

I had a blast doing this, maybe more than last year. This year's class is quite sharp and had great questions during the class and after. I have seen two classes in the MIM program and helped a student project last spring and I think the University of Maryland is on to something. The program is a professional masters program for information professionals in management positions.

Brain Damaging Wind

Could have been a little too much sugar or summer heat, but this is the conversation:

Brian: Wow, the weather alert is, "Rain, damaging wind, and lightening."
Self: Huh? Brain damaging wind?
Brian: No! Rain, damaging wind, and lightening
Self: Brain damaging wind? What is that first word?
Brian: Rain!
Self: Brain?
Brian: No! Rrrrrain
Self: Oh, Rain comma damaging winds comma and lightening.

Speaking at BayCHI August 9th

I will be in the San Francisco Bay Area August 9, 2005 to speak on the BayCHI - Are you ready for Web 2.0? panel. This will be at the PARC's George E. Pake Auditorium (formerly known as Xerox PARC). I am looking forward to the panel and being back in the Bay Area.

Did I mention I am only on the ground for 12 hours? I am flying in from vacation on the New Jersey Shore, but it will be worth it. I have a couple places I need to stop, but shoot me e-mail to meet-up or let me know you will be going to the panel. I have a long string of things to get to in the Bay Area that have been building since January, but this will not be the trip to knock all of them out.

I really need to get to the Bay Area more often, it is home (well where I was born and spent much of my life there).

QI Explained

David has posted about QI (Quite Interesting) after taking photos. I had done some digging, but David has solid info. I am already planning a trip to Oxford after speaking in London at the end of November and QI will definitely be on my list of stops, along with where I studied, read, dined, drank, and lived. Ironically, I received my Oxford University Society Alumni Card and first magazine today.

Make Nice with Mobile Users Easily

Those interested in making friendly with their mobile users trying to consume their content aimed at the desktop browser market should take a peek at Make Your Site Mobile Friendly by Mike Davidson. This is one method that makes for a little less sweat and keeps some dollars in our budgets for other needs.

Jean Jacket Memory Hack

A while back I stopped in the Gap to look at a black mechanic jacket, but they did not have my size. They did have a jean jacket and I put one on for kicks. It was like some trove of great memories from childhood and college were unlocked from the darkness. The fit and feel was just great. My last jean jacket was worn during college, it was a Calvin Klein number with swatches of black jeans on the underside of the arms, under the collar, inside the cuffs, and under the breast pockets. Were that jacket a Levi jacket I would have kept it when I moved.

Well, while in Portland (I lived there from 3rd through 6th grade and I wore Levi jean jackets then - with my Toughskin jeans and LaCoste shrits) I trekked down to the Gap and found they had one in my size. I thought about it through the day and went and picked it up later on. It was like magic with the memories and enjoyment that eased out of me.

Say Hey - If I Knew

I have a deep love of digital technology as an assistive devise and even an enabling device. But, I need something that sits between the digital and the real so to join those worlds.

Here is the problem... I am continually not blanking at who somebody I know in a digital context (through e-mail, a social networking tool (one that works), listserves, blogs, etc.), but their face or just lack of some means of connecting those I know to who they are physically. It continually happens at conferences or when traveling. This happened three times to me at WebVisions with Matt May, Erin Kissane, and Kris Krug. With all three it took some time before it clicked, fortunately with Matt it clicked while I still had time to draw the lines. I would have loved to have chatted with Erin and Kris with the context of how I know them firmly in place. Part of the problem it did not register to me that they were going (I am not sure I checked close enough to the event Upcoming to see who was going to I could make a mental note (or otherwise) to say hey.

What would the solution be? The gap between digital and physical must close. I need my address book crossed with my digital social networks and get all of the pieces tied together with one identity that I can track. Sure everybody can keep their 16 screen names across different communities, but we need to aggregate those to one identity when it makes sense, such as meeting in person. I have been told Sxip can handle this, but I have not had the time to track that down.

The next step is to take the aggregated identity and go through events I am attending or places traveling and let me know who will be there. I am not see this as a privacy issue as there are established friend relationships and set with parameters of securely allowing access to our information, or it has be made public. I usually have a mental list of who I want to see and talk to prior to events, but that group is growing. There is also a group of people I normally only see at events and I always try to hang with that "floating island", but I am usually in contact with them long before.

It seems like a tool like Upcoming would be a perfect place to do this for a large chunk of events. It will still take aggregating the identities across all of the digital communities I belong, address books, and in-person communities. I would love for the next step to include an application in my mobile device that tipped me off to somebody on my friendly "say hey" list being with in "hey" range.

Designing for the Personal InfoCloud presentation at WebVisions 2005 Wrap-up

I have posted my presentation from yesterday's session at WebVisions, in Portland, Oregon. The files, Designing for the Personal InfoCloud are in PDF format and weigh in at 1.3MB.

I really had a blast at the conference and wish I could have been there the whole day. I will have to say from the perspective of a speaker it is a fantastically run conference. Brad Smith of Hot Pepper Studios did a knock out job pulling this conference together. It should be on the must attend list for web developers. I was impressed with the speakers, the turn out, and how well everything was run. Bravo!

WebVisions is held in one of my favorite cities, Portland, Oregon, which has some of the best architecture and public planning of any North American city. I have more than 300 photos I have taken in 48 hours and will be posting many at Flickr in the next couple of days.

Passion and the Day-to-day

This has been an up and down month so far with health, work, technology, and time. In general 2005 has been a rough year for respiratory issues already for me as I am nearly 3x the normal problems for a full year. These issues zaps energy and fogs the brain (something I really loathe).

The day-job is muddled in past problems, issues that have been plaguing people and have been solved years ago, but where I am resources and bureaucracy keep the long past current. Outside of the day-job I am working with the now and future, which I have really been loving. I have been working on responding back to many questions that have come in through e-mail about possible work and helping people through problems grasping and implementing efficiencies for current web development, folksonomies, and Personal InfoCloud related items.

I have also been working on my presentation for WebVisions, which involves completing it, tearing it apart and nearly starting over. To date I have nearly 25 hours working on this presentation, mostly integrating new material and editing out past content. This is in contrast to day-job presentations, which take me about an hour to build.

In a sense I am still time traveling on my daily commute. The gap is about four to six years of time travel in each 40 minute to hour commute. This is really wearing on me and it is long past time to move on, but I have not had the time to put forward to nail down the essentials for moving my passion to my day job (time and family needs that have filled this year).

So today, I was quite uplifted as my subscription issue of August 2005 MIT Technology Review arrived. The cover topic is Social Machines and I am quoted and have a sidebar box. That was up lifting as it relates to my "real work". This is right up there with Wired's Bruce Sterling article on folksonomy and Thomas Vander Wal.

Now the real work continues. If you are in Portland for Web Visions or just there in general later this week, please drop me a note and I will provide my contact info. If you are not in Portland and would like me to come to you and discuss and help along these topics please contact me also.

The World in Our Hands

SmartMobs announces It is official, there are more cellphones lines than landlines in the U.S.. I was thinking about this in the past couple weeks. We have already started seeing text and data uses tipping our mobile hands (it is about time we started getting to where much of the rest of the globe has already been).

Now if I could just keep my finger on the number of data enable phones and the lesser number of laptop/desktop internet connections for the globe. Every time I see this number I forget to mark it or grab it.

[Hat tip Anne]

Snippet on Getting Folksonomy Right

Today's summary on folksonomy... taxonomies and ontologies can help the many find information, but never help the whole of the people. The role of folksonomies is to fill in that gap to get far closer to the whole.

The failure that Google noted in other search companies in 1997 being happy with getting 80 to 85 percent of the correct answers for people, meant 15 to 20 percent of the people found the tools failed them (for me it seemed far higher than a 20 percent failure rate in 1998, which is why I switched to Google quite early). There are far too many that are complacent with their development of taxonomies and ontologies that are only helping the many and have no desire to change their practices to get to closer to the whole. It takes a diverse toolset to get the job down, which means including taxonomies and ontologies as well as other newer solutions.

So what is needed in a folksonomy? It must be broad to provide the best results. People must be tagging content or objects for their own purposes. The tags must be separated from the object so they are a point of reference. The person tagging must also be distinguishable from the objects to they are a point of reference. The objects must provide a point of aggregation to find common tags and common people and the matches on these three points. Tools like del.icio.us and CiteULike.com do this very well.

When we have these distinct elements we can begin filtering and aggregating, just as Jon Udell has been doing in his collaborative filtering.

London Wishes

To those in London and surrounding areas all our thoughts, wishes, and prayers are with you.

Peace

Social Machines in MIT Technology Review

In the August issue of MIT Technology Review in Wade Roush's cover story on Social Machines (posted on Wade's site) I get a nice quote. The article is well worth the read, even worth picking up the issue when it hits the stands. The article covers the social, mobile, and continuous computing world that some of us live in and many more will be doing soon. Those of us working at the front of the curve are working on ways to make it smoother for those who will follow along soon.

Convergence and the seamless transfer from stationary computing to continuous computing leads to drastically different interactions with information and media. We are already seeing the shift of people using mobile phones as just a voice communication medium to one that includes text and media interactions, or the from people listening to their mobile phones to looking at their mobile phones. Three years ago I made this shift and I was extremely frustrated as I had many more desires than my mobile phones could assuage. But, it is getting better today even if it takes more human interaction than is really needed to sync information, let alone have moved close to me (or whomever is the wanting to have the information or media stay attracted to themselves or have attracted in certain situations). It is this that is my focus of the Model of Attraction and the focus of the Personal InfoCloud.

Tagging Article at OK/Cancel

OK/Cancel posted a quick article on tagging I pulled wrote (mostly pulled out of e-mail responses). The article is Tagging for Fun and Finding, which includes mention of folksonomy.