Archive for the ‘Online communities’ Category

My KartOO Map

Tuesday, January 18th, 2005

My Kartoo map shows up some good results and relations: software engineer, epfl, craft, tecfa, partick jermann, pascal betz. Funny that it does not show information from the past (isbiel, california, …). Kartoo does not seem to be much blog aware.

Viral Marketing, Classification and Community

Saturday, January 8th, 2005

In Pay-off from a social web? Andy Oram talks about viral marketing and how it could fit to social networks and Web Services. Currently, two diametrically opposed ideas attract both money and attention: Classification and Community. I completly disagree with him comparing the degree of seperation to trust.

- The public has mostly lost interest with the first wave of sites that offer social networking, probably because what they offer seems to add little except extra overhead to current Internet services such as email and newsgroups.
- No wonder companies chase after viral marketing, looking for ways to leverage the reports of early adopters and harness social networks to create buzz for their products.
- A friend on Friendster is different conceptually from a real-life friend; it basically reflects the architecture of the software and means you can reach this person directly.
- This is the mushy concept of “degrees of separation” turned into a network protocol.
- But how primitive email appears next to other ways of communicating!
- Eventually, to really take off, social networks should provide alternatives to email rather than relying on it.
- The draw is not what you do on the social network, but whom you have a chance of doing it with.
- But if I want to target someone for a specific purpose, I find it much easier to use a search engine or a private network of informal contacts than to go through the slow and unreliable process provided by the social network.
- I find that the “degrees of separation” concept becomes meaningless after the second degree of separation.
- These criticism apply to social networks they way they’re currently implemented. Because viral marketing and new media have an excellent possibility of becoming important social movements

Panorama du e-learning en Suisse par Martin Lehmann

Saturday, January 8th, 2005

Martin Lehmann président de l’European Knowledge Media Association (EKMA), livre à swissUp sa vision de l’emploi qui est fait de l’informatique dans l’enseignement et la pédagogie dans Les nouvelles technologies pourraient révolutionner l’école!:

“L’ordinateur ne rend pas individualiste. Les enfants s’entraidaient en utilisant leur propre langage, qui n’est pas celui des enseignants.”

“Le métier va changer. Les professeurs créeront des scénarios. Les informaticiens ne vont pas s’occuper de cela!”

Email’s Efficiency Falls in Terms of Promptness, Convenience and Credibility

Wednesday, December 1st, 2004

Via In Korea, Email Is Only For Old People

The reasons given for shunning email are that it’s impossible to tell whether an addressee has received a message right way and replies are not immediately forthcoming. Still another reason is that you send messages through SMS or messenger as if you were playing a game, while doing so through email makes you feel as if you are doing homework or performing a task. “The new generation hate agonizing and waiting and tend to express their feelings immediately,” said Professor Lee. “The decline of email is a natural outcome reflecting such characteristics of the new generation.”

BlogStreet with Visual Neighborhood

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004

Blogstreet just launched a new tool that uses Java to let you view your Blogstreet “neighborhood” and click on your neighbors to expand and see their neighborhoods. Most probably uses TouchGraph.

Classroom tech-etiquette

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004

Cheap thoughts on franglish about the tech-etiquette in the classroom, since I had to report on it today…

The tech-etiquette: Along with the technology comes a new set of rules, both written and unwritten, for decent behavior. Now, a classroomm etiquette should also include a tech-etiquette.

Le manque de tech-etiquette s’accrue dans le monde du travail.
In a recent Robert Half Technology survey, 67% of chief information officers polled said breaches in technology etiquette are more common today than three years ago.
Tech-etiquette’ blunders more common

LES PROBLEMES
- a laptop clearly represents an intervention in the classroom; thus classroom etiquette may change.
- Instabilité initiale des élèves (Elle est naturelle, mais ne dure pas)
- enregistrement à fond perdu du travail, la page est parfois considérée comme virtuelle et plus jamais utilisée.
- Etudiants de deconnectant du moment: chat/surf personnel effréné

LES SOLUTIONS
Quel type de charte/règlement?

Sur l’utilisation
* L’utilisation des ordinateurs portables a pour objet exclusif de mener de actes d’enseignement ou de documentation. Sauf autorisation préalable ou convention signée par le/les coordonateur(s) du projet, ces moyens ne peuvent être utilisés en vue de réaliser des projets ne relevant pas des missions confiées aux utilisateurs.
* Use laptops for taking notes, conducting research required for activities, and other specific classroom tasks as assigned by the instructor. During class, students should not check e-mail, browse the Internet, instant message, play games, or perform other off-task activities.

Le respect des autres
* Students may take notes on laptop computers in class unless members of the class complain that the noise of the computer is disruptive.
* If you bring a laptop/notebook computer to class, sit in the back of the room so that your typing does not disturb anybody.

Le respect du professeur
* Check with your professors as their preferences and guidelines for your laptop use within their class. This will vary from professor to professor and from class to class.
* ménager des temps de liberté : contrat moral

NOUVEAUX COMPORTEMENT INDUITS
Le multi-tasking est-il vraiment inefficace?
http://www.hci.cornell.edu/LabArticles/Multitasking_Hembrooke.pdf

Le “backchanneling” est utilisé maintenant lors de conférence.
Backchannel refers to making the crowd chatter public, the idea that the students or audience can discuss during a lecture in a way that becomes part of the shared intellectual space.
http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/11/11/on_the_academictechnical_divide_in_social_computing.php

http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2004/10/30/backchannels.html

Location Blogging with Wavemarket

Thursday, November 4th, 2004

Emeryville based start-up Wavemarket launched an application for location-based community blogging on mobile hansets.

ShoutBlog Spam

Saturday, October 9th, 2004

After more than one year of existence, the ShoutBlog unexpectedly received its first spam message. A sign of maturity?

It’s Not Just Usability

Thursday, September 16th, 2004

Another guy who screamed “Nonsense” when hearing about eBay :) Wrong, wrong, wrong, but at least I was not alone :)

Via Usability & Social Interfaces. It’s Not Just Usability is about usability to being the major focus in the field of human-human interaction. A lot of sotware is still about human-computer interaction. But the Internet brings us a new kind of software: software that’s about human-human interaction (software that mediates between people). The best UI in the world won’t save software with an awkward socila interface. Other quotes:

“With social interface engineering, you have to look at sociology and anthropology”

“Whereas the goal of user interface design is to help the user succeed, the goal of social interface design is to help the society succeed, even if it means one user has to fail.”

“Software used in teams usually fails to take hold, because it requires everyone on the team to change the way they work simultaneously, something which anthropologists will tell you is vanishingly unlikely”

“Ergonomics experts knew a lot about the right height for a desk, but they didn’t know how to design GUIs for file systems”

“Over the next decade, I expect that software companies will hire people trained as anthropologists and ethnographers to work on social interface design. Instead of building usability labs, they’ll go out into the field and write ethnographies.”

Communities Visualizations

Tuesday, June 29th, 2004

Nice visualization of collaborations and communities done at the MIT Sociable Media Group.