An interesting comment by Pete Mortensen on a post by Bruce Nussbaum about the very low number of participation on user-generated content platforms:

“tools that allow people to be designers or broadcasters have been around for years, and they have been niche. What YouTube has done is create a single repository that can find relevant video for virtually any subject you want to know about, and then provided a cross-platform, speedy solution to deliver it. The role of the people posting videos, let alone storing them, is a mechanism to this bigger goal, a place to find the videos you want when you want them. If all the clips were put up by an automated computer, most people wouldn’t care.

This is the great myth of Web 2.0, that its revolution has come from people creating things. It has actually changed the Internet by putting people in control of how to measure popularity and identify your own interests. The actual content is generally from professionals. And that’s a more sustainable view to take, I think. We don’t become creators of entertainment, we become curators for the entertainment of ourselves and others. That’s a very different kind of participation.“

Why do I blog this? some quotes to be used in a presentation about web2.0, user generated content and how this can of interest to the video game industry. I may not entirely be okay with “The actual content is generally from professionals”, the rest of the assertions are interesting. Reminds me of this Guardian article last year: What is the 1% rule which describes that “50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users” or that on Yahoo! Groups “1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content, whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress; 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups“

Although this hard figures are tough, it does not dismiss the “user-generated content” meme (aka craftware), the situation is just different and there are some design opportunities anyway based on these.

I already blogged about onlife, this program now called Slife that tracks and help you to visualizes traces of your interaction with Mac applications. There is now a “social component” called Slifeshare:

A Slifeshare is an online space where you share your digital life activities such as browsing the web and listening to music with your friends, family or anyone you care about. It is a whole new way of staying in touch, finding out which sites, videos and music are popular with your friends, meeting new people and discovering great new stuff online. Take it for a spin, it’s free, easy to set-up and quite fu

The “how page” is quite complete and might scare to death any people puzzled by how technologies led us to a transparent society (a la Rousseau). Look at the webpage that is created with the slife information:

Why do I blog this? Slife was already an interesting application, in terms of how the history of interaction is shown to the user. This social feature add another component: using Jyri’s terminology (watch his video, great insights), it takes people’s interaction with various applications as a “social object”. This means that designers assume that a sociability will grow out of the interaction patterns (in a similar way to the sociability of Flickr is based on sharing pictures).

I am often mesmerized by how people use the terms “Internet” and “Web” interchangeably, as if they were synonymous. Sometimes even in meetings at work, the discuss ends with the differentiation pointed by a person fed up with this (taken from weboepedia):

The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.

The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. (…) The Web uses the HTTP protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the Internet, to transmit data. Web services, which use HTTP to allow applications to communicate in order to exchange business logic, use the the Web to share information. The Web also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape, to access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks.

The Web is just one of the ways that information can be disseminated over the Internet. The Internet, not the Web, is also used for e-mail, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP. So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.

Why do I blog this? Even though this is a mistake and a common one, it’s interesting to see how people name things and it seems that this mistake is made in english or in other language (for example my mother tongue: french). However, I am not nerdy enough to take the piss when people interchange the words, what is rather intriguing is the underlying reasons for that.

Besides, I really prefer the term “information super-highway” which definetely rocks (”les autoroutes de l’information” in french) because it can lead to tremendous wording such as “having a homepage on an information superhighway” or “traffic jam on an information super-highway”.

This also reminds me the discussion Julian Bleecker had about “being in the Internet” or “on the Internet”, or saying “the InternetS”.

Working lately on visualization of coordinating agents, I ran across old work about cyberspace visualization that struck me as very intriguing. See for instance Cyberspace geography visualization: Mapping the World-Wide Web to help people find their way in cyberspace by Luc Girardin (bro of fabien).

The central goal of this paper is to give information about virtual locations to the actors of cyberspace in order to help them solve orientation issues, i.e. the lost-in-cyberspace syndrome. The approach taken involves low dimensional digital media to create the visualization that can guide you. (…) To perform this task, the self-organizing maps algorithm is used because it preserves the topological relationships of the original space, conjointly lowering the dimensionality. (…) By geometrically approximating the vector distribution in the neurons of the self-organizing maps, this method provides a means to analyse the landscape of the mapping of cyberspace.

Here are maps of three websites:

Why do I blog this? The aim and the viz are interesting. At that time, there was this navigational issue of how people would navigate in the hypertextual virtual world. Now things changed a bit actually and it seems to me that the hypertext has been either forgotten or taken for granted (well the wikipedia is a cool hypertext isn’t it?). More here

Some folks already plotted stuff coming form the super-quickly-available-and-vanished AOL datasets. See for instance u500k.erinye.com, who calculated various indexes and plotted some data (below is one of them that I picked up randomly). If you’re one of the 10,000 users, this is a glimpse of your private life:

From the wikipedia: “The Internets“:

Internets was originally used as shorthand for cluelessness about the Internet or about technology in general[citation needed] but is often used today as an homage to when U.S. President George W. Bush referred to “the Internets” in the 2nd Presidential Debate with U.S. Senator John Kerry on October 8, 2004.

Anyway, even though I am not sure about Bush’s thoughts about the Internet, I think this “the internets” concept makes sense. Besides, I have always been crazy about all the names and the confusion about the Internet and the Web.

In his Designing for Mobile, Brian Fling describes why “mobile is not the Web”:

200+ devices
30+ web browsers
Carrier controlled ecosystem
Limited input or output
Limited guidelines or resources
“No Standards”
People don’t “get it”
The list goes on….

In “Weblog success: Exploring the role of technology” by Du, H.S, Wagner C., explore weblog success from a technology perspective (weblog-building technology or blogging tool).

Based on an examination of 126 highly successful weblogs tracked over a period of 3 months, we categorized weblogs in terms of popularity rank and growth, and evaluated the relationship between weblog success (in terms of popularity) and technology use. Our analysis indicates that weblog success is associated with the type of blogging tool used. We argue that technology characteristics affect the presentation and organization of weblog content, as well as the social interaction between bloggers, and in turn, affect weblog success or popularity improvement.
(…)
weblog-building technology has a direct impact on blog content. Since blogging technology is designed for authors to reduce web publication and communication effort (Du and Wagner, 2005), authors can focus on writing while the technology takes care of publishing, storage, link creation, and so forth. The less time and effort authors have to spend on these ancillary tasks, the more time they should be able to devote to content, thus resulting eventually in better content. A similar argument can be made for social value. Blogging technology that automates link creation, that identifies recent visitors (possibly with clickable back links, such as in ModBlog), or maintains subscriber lists and syndicates their content, will help create and maintain the social circle of bloggers, by significantly lowering the effort to link to and visit other sites. Here, technology’s enabling character is reflected through its usability and sociability of supporting weblog success at both content and social levels.

Du, HS, Wagner C. (2006) Weblog success: Exploring the role of technology, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol. 64, No. 9. (September 2006), pp. 789-798.

According to the Wikipedia, Web2.0 “refers to a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online. In contrast to the first generation, Web 2.0 gives users an experience closer to desktop applications than the traditional static Web pages“.

Apart from the underlying technologies that allowed this (public web service APIs, Ajax or web syndication), web2.0 puts the emphasis on the social aspects of the world wide web. This component is connected to the “markets are conversations” concept from the Cluetrain manifesto that evolved in the “blogs are conversation” promoted by doc searls and others (see for instance this post). This has also been termed “l’Entrenet” by Daniel Kaplan.

But what is new here is rather the scale than the phenomenon. See this article by Thomas Erickson: The World-Wide-Web as social hypertext (communication of the ACm) in 1996: the authors admits that he does not pay a lot of attention to the Web (we’re in 1995) and he had been converted to that:

The cause of my change of heart was the widespread appearance of personal pages. Personal pages are similar to informal resumes, except that in addition to professional material they often contain personal information. Hobbies, research interests, pets, professional publications, children, politics, friends, colleagues, all are grist for the personal pagestructed portrayal of a person. This insight leads me to characterize the Web as a social hypertext. The nodes—at least some of them—are becoming representations of people. And this, in turn, enables another critical feature to emerge: links from a personal page often point to socially salient pages. A common feature of the personal page is a list of pointers to “interesting people and places.”
(…)
This insight leads me to characterize the Web as a social hypertext. The nodes—at least some of them—are becoming representations of people. And this, in turn, enables another critical feature to emerge: links from a personal page often point to socially salient pages. A common feature of the personal page is a list of pointers to “interesting people and places.”
(…)
The transformation of the Web into a social hypertext has a number of interesting ramifications. Perhaps the most immediate and practical is that social hypertexts allow a fundamental shift in the way people search for information. Rather than composing queries for search engines or going to likely places to browse, (…) people can instead pose the question: Who would know? Or who would know someone who would
know? Navigating from one personal page to another, we suddenly have a new sort of search strategy.
(…)
The same issues arise, mutatis mutandis, in sharing one’s own work. In short, the ability to find out what someone else is doing, without mutual knowledge of what’s happening, is a boon to both parties. This nonmutuality of knowledge is one of the characteristics that makes social hypertext different from more direct forms of communication

The article also discuss the fact that the web affords “presentation of self” and some goffmanian other issues that I won’t comment here. The conclusion for that matter is great: “Although the Web may be just the latest fashion to sweep the Internet, if it turns out to be a medium that allows the construction, negotiation, and propagation of the styles of appearance we refer to as fashion, its impact may be profound indeed.“,

Why do I blog this? because it’s interesting to trace the previous trend we have today in early days of the web. The web as social hypertext is more or less connected to some web2.0 feature that we now have at a larger scale.

I am not interested that much in web icons and usability but rss syndications icons are sometimes a bit too… different, as workbench points out:

Considering the number of ways that web publishers show their readers they offer feeds, it’s amazing we’ve gotten that many:

In an effort to make the concept of syndication easier for mainstream users, the next versions of the Internet Explorer and Opera browsers will identify RSS and Atom feeds with the same icon used in Mozilla Firefox. Since the market share of these browsers tops 95 percent, the icon will become the de facto standard for syndication overnight when the next version of Microsoft Windows comes out later this year.