I'm very late to this. When I first heard about Perceptive Pixel, I was very excited. Several videos of the very slick, very fun wall-mounted multi-touch based interface zipped around the blogosphere last year. But then there didn't seem to be much going on. Meanwhile, a number of companies started popularizing some of the elements of that interface, Apple with the iPhone (multi-touch), and Microsoft with the surface computer to name two obvious examples.
It turns out that Perceptive Pixel were in fact deploying their product. I don't watch broadcast tv so I had missed the fact that it was being used as a differentiator in discussing the primary elections in the US.
Here's an example.
Here's another one:
I'm back in Seattle after attending the excellent Future of News workshop hosted by David Robinson and Ed Felten. There were many contributing factors to the success of the workshop, not least of which was the cross disciplinary nature of speakers, panelists and attendees. In addition to participants in my line of work, or with similar areas of interest, such as David Blei (former colleague at WhizBang!Labs) and Kevin Anderson (whose career spans both the BBC, with some involvement with Backstage, and the Guardian, an organization that is not caught with with fretting about the past; and who blogs on Corante, for his sins) I met representatives (and survivors of) traditional newsprint organizations, individuals centrally involved in transforming news in the Web 2.0 world, academics with impressive access to the entire trajectory of media evolution, hackers and so on.
Given the rich range of voices, while we may not have solved any specific problems (despite Ed's closing remarks) I certainly feel as if we aired a reasonably good sample of them. On reflection, I stand by yesterday's summary: there is plenty of pessimism around old media structures and plenty of optimism around the opportunities that new sources and new forms of information, combined with new ways to filter, analyse and aggregate this data presents. Bridging the two positions, there is concern around issues of quality and value with respect to the nature of the content (that is to say, a contributor's ability to provide transparent and supportable content) - will the new information ecology support reasonable ideals for news? Note, to me, those ideals centre on making the reader better informed and more efficient at selecting content.
For other coverage of the event, a great starting place would be Kevin's posts (starting here with an account of Paul Starr's opening talk). Also Steve Boriss, Tim Lee, and Jack Kemp. Note that the presentations and discussions will soon be available online.
The Industry Standard has produced a list of B-Z blogs of note.
These are the blogs you won't see on the Techmeme Leaderboard, Technorati's Top 100 blogs, or the CruchBase BloggerBoard ... at least not yet. They include VCs, entrepreneurs, coders, experts, and observers, and they bring a delicious mix of insight, experience, and passion to their blogs. While they may not have the right amount of link love, they need to be on your radar screens.
I'm very happy that this blog has been included on the list!
Had a great day of presentations, panels and discussion today at the Future of News event here in Princeton (which reminds me a lot of Cambridge). In summary, I heard both optimism and pessimism regarding the future of news. Things that seem to be of concern:
Optimism was expressed largely by those who were actively trying to push the evolution of the space (the best way to predict the future is to invent it).
I was mistaken for a BBC employee - can I put that on my CV?
Microsoft Research's Worldwide Telescope is available for download. I'd encourage you to go and take a look. I would have been writing up some details of it for this blog, but it is so easy to spend time exploring the sky and the planets that I'm left with no time right now! Note that it does provide planet models (including earth) as well as astral data.
This is a great idea: the user is shown branding and asked to provide a single tag. You can then click through to see the tag clouds (which could be displayed a little better) for each brand.
[Via Nathan]
Powerset, which provides a new relationship with web data via innovative interfaces and natural language processing, launched this evening. Take a look at this video:
I'll write more later, but for now, check out other posts I've made on Powerset and NLP. I'll try to keep abreast of the commentary as it comes in. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for Fernando to pounce.
Update: ok, some comments. A couple of things that people are going to get hung up on. Firstly, writers seem to be referring to the technology as context or contextual search - why not call it NLP. Not sure where that is coming from. Secondly (actually, this is more important) pundits are going to write about the wikipedia-only issue. They're not getting it. 90% of search results come from a tiny fraction of web pages due to the huge redundancy on the web and the differences between searcher needs and author/publisher intents. The task isn't to always search that huge set, but to get the answers to the user.
Another interesting find from Information Aesthetics. News classes, selected via the top menu, populate a rotating column of articles that are then read at the bottom of the display. Fun - not sold on the utility.
Jeff Jarvis writes up some thoughts spring boarding from Nick Denton's post regarding the news/opinion divide. At the highest level, this is about the value of humanizing information. There are two related points that I think are missing from this discussion. The first is the value a source of information provides to the user by enabling them to be efficient consumers of that information. The second is a little more complex, and is to do with network effects and homophily.
Efficiency: news sources, or rather, news aggregators, must make decisions about which pieces of news to present to the consumer. In addition, they must figure out how to present this news. Objectivity and the editorial role play in to this by removing distractions and providing a relevance function to the possible set of news items. Opinion - that is to say - removing either or both of these filters - may well lead to a lack of efficiency on the side of the consumer.
Homophily: consumers, being human, are subject to homophily. Thus, the more human/emotional an information source is, the more it will strengthen reading behaviours that are driven by this seeking of like minded writers. With ideal information distribution goals in mind (allowing information consumers to be more efficient and better informed) this will do a disservice to readers.
I think the bigger picture here is to do with trust. If we could trust our news sources, then objectivity and editorial control would be fine. However, the forces that determine what a news source reports work directly against trust as they are financial. Bringing in the emotional element - the personality of the writer - into the picture provides a powerful connection with the reader, thus replacing trust with a personal relationship.
The discussion over the definition of blogging is as old as the practice itself. For some all a blog is is a publication mechanism - thus any use of that mechanism is blogging; for others it is a certain publication and interaction behaviour through the web. One aspect of the application of social media infrastructure that I'm becoming more aware of is the level of engagement. For example, a typical blogger may write posts that link to other bloggers, and is likely to follow up with comments posted on their own blog. In addition, such a blogger may well respond to posts that link to their blog via the comments on that other blog or via posts on their own blog. Such an individual is engaged in the blogosphere.
At the other extreme, we have those who write blog posts that never link to other bloggers and, though they may receive a large number of comments, don't respond to these comments via their own commenting system. Such an individual is, we might say, a non-engaged blogger. Another example of this being the tweeter who has plenty of followers but who never issues an @'d tweet.
While the definition of blogging may still be in debate, the behaviours above can certainly be determined from pretty clear signals automatically. I'm guessing that someone has already done this analysis - anyone know of a paper?
An area of social media research that this measure has impact on is social network analysis. Typically, when inducing a social network from blog data, researchers look for reciprocal links. However, many political bloggers, while being of the non-engaged type, catalyze discussion in other blogs, or even simply within the many comments that each of their posts receive. Thus, one might argue, the simple notion of a tie between nodes should be abandoned for a model that can capture the different types of behaviour precipitated by different types of applications of social media publication technology.
I've long be suspicious of the wholesale adoption of real world social network analytics applied to social media, and blogging in particular (just as I am skeptical of the use of terms like 'conversation' when applied to this data). The above ideas, to me, seem to capture something of the reason for this discomfort.
Some stats regarding the distribution of headlines on TechMeme between A-listers and others seems to be getting some attention. Attention, but little real thought. The basic observation is that while 70% of the headlines on TechMeme are accounted for by the top 100 ranked sources (according to the leaderboard), 30% is from the long tail.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the data is static - that is to say, that the leader board 100 is always the same (it isn't). Let's also assume that TechMeme crawls 10k weblogs (I don't know that it crawls that many). Let's make some more assumptions: that every weblog posts 1 post a day and that there are 10 headlines per day on TechMeme. Thus, there are 100 posts per day from the top 100 sources and 7 of them will appear on TechMeme. Thus, each of the top 100 sources has a 7% chance of producing a headline on any given day.
The other 3 headlines come from the remaining 9, 900 sources. Thus, if they are also producing 1 post a day, each source has a 3/9, 900 = 0.03 % chance of getting noticed. So while the 2:1 ratio of A-listers to others sounds good, for any individual, it actually translates to 233:1 odds (7/0.03).
Of course, the assumptions above are a little rough and there is absolutely no accounting for how network effects really get things done in the blogosphere. The point is, there is a 2 orders of magnitude difference in these numbers between what an individual can expect and what the groups (A-listers/others) can expect.
Dan Taylor at fabric of folly writes up a summary of a number of trending tools (particularly for social data). I've not yet blogged about Facebook's Lexicon, so check it out in Dan's post. Dan's blog looks pretty interesting in general - subscribed!
Paul posts some interesting (verifiable?) stats on data centre environmental impact. Arstechnica has a longer post.
See related posts on externalities.
Update - probably worth cross referencing this with this recent Larry Page interview.
Traveling in Japan one gets an immediate impression of the impact that mobile devices is having here. One would be hard pushed on a train to not see someone doing something online. In addition, a number of developments (initially centered on continuing automation of ticketing on the rail networks) have led to deeper integration of pay-by-cell phone mechanisms.
It is tempting to look at Japan (and Tokyo in particular) as a vision of the future for other countries or cities. For example, cell phones in Japan are getting larger (while the rest of the world is still in, or recovering from a smaller is better approach) - this is a trend we can expect to see in the US soon (thanks in part to the iPhone). However, there are more fundamental aspects of a society that cannot be disentangled from their attitudes and integration of technology. Two come to mind in the context of mobile devices in Tokyo.
Firstly, Tokyo is all about public transport. Trains run at minute intervals and are packed. Public transport is prime info-snacking space.
Secondly, population density in Tokyo results, obviously, in small accommodations. One consequence of this is that people, and young people in particular, spend a lot of time outside their place of residence, thus providing many user needs for mobile devices and information services.
The point I want to make is that these two factors, I believe, lead to increased use of mobile devices and, importantly, they won't be replicated in most US cities.
This is off topic, but given that it is about news media and a little about science, I thought I'd squeeze it in. ABC News has an article today, authored by Ashley Phillips, about pollution in American cities. The article is fronted with an image of Pittsburgh (on top of the list of polluted places) in all its smoggy glory. However, the image includes the Three Rivers Stadium. This stadium was demolished early in 2001. So why post an out of date image with this story? Are the images of the other cities somehow incorrect as well? Perhaps the image is doctored to boot.
I'm guessing that 'news' sources of this type have a constant stream of such inaccuracies - more strength to the fifth estate and algorithmic news.
Briefly, Photosynth was used in an episode of CSI. Very cool!
Update: CBS, which produces CSI, has a pretty rich online experiece for the show. Apparantly you can watch the latest episode including Photosynth right here. I'm waiting for the episode to start streaming, but as I'm in Japan, I suspect it isn't going to happen. Let me know if you have any luck!
Below is a pic from the episode provided by USA today.
William forwarded me a link to this awesome site: Cooperative Research History Commons. The site is a cooperative approach to history and presents data in timelines (here is the list of events in the Nixon Administration and Watergate timeline). I like this vertical approach to wiki data as it has the potential to focus both expertise and data structures, making the data more valuable in a number of dimensions.
The website is a tool for open-content participatory journalism. It allows people to investigate important issues by providing a space where people can collaborate on the documentation of past and current events, as well as the entities associated with those events. The website can be used to investigate topics at the local, regional, or global level. The data is displayed on the website in the form of dynamic timelines and entity profiles, and is exportable into XML so it can be shared with others for non-commercial purposes.
I'm sure we are only moments away from seeing a slick visualization of this site.
(It would have been interesting to see the interaction between an objective project like this and historical memories such as those which the BBC's The Time When project aggregated - it is now, sadly, closed).
I'm still making my way back from Beijing, and have plenty of notes to write up for WWW 2008. However, I thought I'd point ahead to my next trip: The Future of News - a workshop being held at Princeton's Centre for Information Technology Policy. I'm really looking forward to this event as it ties in some recent work I've been doing at Microsoft (including supporting MSR's Blews team), some broader thoughts about the relationship between politics, broadcast media and social media, and my current (belated) reading of Lessig's Code (v 2.0).
Some thoughts starters:
I've been a loyal Wired subscriber for many years. I've suffered through its affairs with neon ink, but am getting more and more frustrated with its dependence on noxious substances (adverts, bits of cardboard, subscription postcards,...). Then along came Seed. If you are a Wired reader, you will probably like Seed. If your Wired reading experience ends in navigational frustration as you hop over adverts, get stuck with cardboard popups and have trouble stitching the article you are reading together (continued on page X) you should certainly give it a go.
When thinking about writing about this, I started wondering: how much would I pay for Wired without the adverts? Connecting that thought with the slow rise of on-demand printing and binding for paperback books and one can imagine a market where you could choose to remove some percentage of adverts, or, say, only those adverts which include page-flipping interruptions (i.e. bits of cardboard designed to force you to read the advert).
Is the future of physical magazines to go out in an orgy of adverts (as the economics of the model force more and more adverts to be included - as appears to be the case with Wired), or is something which better blends the online and offline experiences, user preferences and on-demand printing and binding technologies. Perhaps Chris has the answer.
