The Sociable Media Group is interested in questions concerning society and identity in the networked world. Some of the group’s research questions include: How do we perceive other people on-line?, What does a virtual world look like?, and How do social conventions develop in the networked world? Visitors can learn about the most recent research projects, along with taking a look at the thought provoking blog. [Via the Internet Scout Report]

Blogs: Des Scénarios Académiques est un article à la mode Cooltown de Nicolas, Patrick et moi décrivant des scénarios d’utilisation des blogs dans le monde académique.

Craigslist is one of these things that makes the SF Bay Area so special to live in. Craigslist is an old but very fine (with its daily geniuses and assholes) community web site. The best of Craigslist is online. We are talking about creativity here: “Toilet Bowl Brush - $4″ to “SALE: A singing refrigerator” and “Ever witnessed a UFO or Alien Abduction?”.

Like more and more big names in the industry (including MS, IBM and Sun), Borland now provides RSS feeds from its developer network. A trend is set!

A few terms from Nicolas Nova’s Locative Media: a literature review:
Awarness: the understanding of other’s person’s interaction with a shared workspace.
The awarness tool: The lack of information about the geographically-dispersed partners is addressed by providing users with tools that try to “recreate the information landscape of a real-world landscape
Locative media: every information about the physical location as well as other contextual cues. It can be decomposed into three awarness components: presence, location and direction.
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The Access in Distance Education website, has been designed to “meet the needs of faculty teaching students with disabilities in the online environment.” Based in the Office of Distance Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of Maryland, the site both explains accessibility problems that may be faced by students with disabilities and also helps them develop solutions within their course websites.

The most visited web site in Switzerland is no more a newspaper (was the NZZ I think), but, according to REMP, a portal called tillate. It illustrates well the current trend of social surfing.

As part of the TECFA “Informative Art” competition, Patrick Jermann and I did a joint project and developped a few “arty” visualizers that show the usage and activity thru time, tools and means of the TECFASeed portal. Description, running applications, videos and screenshots are available on the our Portalvisualizer project page.

In my contribution to the TECFA informative art contest, I finished the first part of the implementation of my PortalVisualizer which was to gather all the data and create a valid model. I have a very basic viewer which displays contributions and interactions by historical periods within a postnuke portal. Aspects of a portal community can be visualized: its growth (with ups and downs), the roles (community leaders, outside contributors, newbies, …) and the social interactions. The goal now is to transform the viewer into an “portalart” visualizer (the John Madea way).