I am happy to see that I am not the only one thinking about how IM could be a good interface for information management (search, database query), as I described last year.
John Battelle wrote a clever post about it, connecting this to mobile interfaces:

first of all, a mashup of RSS and IM is just a very cool idea. The medium of IM has been underappreciated by nearly everyone in the “media” business for one reason - the leaders of the business didn’t use IM. But lord knows the rest of the world sure does.

there are other types of branded content that makes total sense in IM: publications and personal web services. A great publication has an intimate relationship with its audience, it’s a trusted source of information, a pal, a buddy. And blogs, as I’ve argued again and again, can be great publications. And great web services like local search have earned our trust, know who we are, and we know that when we ask them questions, useful answers will come back. No one wants a stupid chat bot that tries to be, say, Santa Claus, that gets old fast. But a chat bot that is useful? That can instantly deliver your favorite content to your mobile phone without forcing it through the crappy sphincter of your mobile operators crippled web interface? Or can answer questions like, say, “pharmacy 91106″ with the speed and intimacy of an IM chat session?

Why do i blog this? I like this idea and I am used to ask question to AIM bots about weather forecast, movie schedule… would it work on a mobile phone? I don’t really know but I’d love to have this on my Nintendo DS for sure… There is an interesting debate in the comment part of this post. For instance usabiltiy-guru Jakob Nielsen complains that it’s just re-inventing the command line. Some others expects “that the rich client UI applications of tomorrow will be delivered when the “browser” is merged with an “IM client“…

CODII: Combating the Online Dissemination of Illegal Images is a project developed by Microsoft Research. It’s aimed at examining how people organise themselves online to disseminate illegal images. The underlying issue is to design tools that help hotlines and moderators identify and remove illegal online content.

This project grows from a working relationship with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). The IWF are the charity who run the UK hotline that helps identify illegal online images in order for them to be removed, especial images of child abuse. (…) Our approach is to take an understanding of the area gleaned from working with the IWF, and combine it with a technological and social science understanding of online community systems. This combination helps us to build novel and useful tools.

To date we have worked on two tools. The first was an enhancement of the IWF’s Bulk Image Viewer. The Bulk Image Viewer is used for rapidly scanning newsgroup images. The second was an Unreferenced Picture Finder used to locate hidden pictures on websites.

The next stage of research is to build a tool for moderators of online community platforms. This tool will unite: novel image visualization techniques, social clustering, and linguistic analysis.

Why do I blgo this? I am intrigued by the ’social cluster’ thing. This seems to be the new idea to fight against spam (by checking if the email sender is from you network) and now it’s used to check image dissemination.

Queue, the ACM journal has a special issue about social software.

Among the different articles, the one entitled “Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise” by David Millen, Jonathan Feinber and Bernard Kerr caught my eyes. The tagline is very appealing: “Can your organization benefit from social bookmarking tools?“. Some snippets:

The apparent success of Internet-based social bookmarking applications begs the question of whether large enterprises or organizations would also benefit from social bookmarking systems. To investigate this question, at IBM we are designing and developing an enterprise-scale social bookmarking system called dogear. (…) The first significant design decision was whether to base user identity in the application on real names or pseudonyms. We decided to require real-world identity for the following reasons. First, one of the expected benefits of the system is to allow users to make inferences about the interests and expertise of others based on informal browsing of bookmark collections.

This point is very pertinent and tightly related to a phenomenon called Transactive Memory (a theory proposed by Wegner (1987). This theory examines the process by which individuals determine who knows what and who knows who knows what).

The “dogear” application is then described:

Dogear also exploits collaborative filtering techniques to screen new bookmarks for those that are predictably of interest to an individual (or a group of individuals). Common interests can be inferred based on a number of observable user actions, including use of similar tags and/or tag combinations, similarity of bookmark (URL) collections, common RSS subscriptions, and click streams that indicate interest in specific kinds of bookmarks. Text analysis of bookmark titles, descriptions, and comments will also be used to determine bookmark relatedness.

The article continues describing the research prototype they designed to investigate the usefulness of a social bookmarking application for a large enterprise. Among the results they investigated, there is this: they used social network analytical methods to “begin to understand” the information affinities among dogear users.11 The picture below shows a sociogram showing which individuals have clicked through to another person’s bookmark reference:

Why do I blog this? even though this is more ” we did this to begin to understand”, it’s refreshing to see that some companies are investigating how social bookmarking (as a geek-based/out-of-companies innovation) could be used in companies. This is just the beginning but a social network study of this can be very informative, in terms of information management and transfer.

One of the project we selected for LIFT is carried out by Amnesty International and is called “web2.0 mashups and human rights“.

Internet strategists from Amnesty International will present project proposals based on web2.0 principles.

The basic idea is innovation in assembly, using RSS to mashup existing web2.0 services (such as mapping) with Amnesty data (for example, information on people disappeared during the ‘War on Terror’). Making this part of an architecture of participation should allow activists and volunteers to add value to the result and also to generate project communities.

Working from a swift overview of web2.0 examples, this presentation aims at stimulating discussion of concrete projects that apply the potential of new wave internet developments for direct human rights and social impact.

Why do I blog this? I think it’s interesting to see what NGOs like Amnesty can do with Web2.0 concepts and how it can help them to meet their needs.

Rather than being impressed by the Yahoo take-over of del.icio.us, I am more interested in the launch of Yahoo Answers (of course the del.icio.us thing is great and the synergies with flickr are interesting but some other things are going on). This service lets you ask a question and have a real person provides an answer. This new kind of webservice (“new social networking/online community/search/question answering service”) is very close to a new trend in the field of libraries and information science: asking specialists specific questions. Since libraries have to rethink their missions, this kind of service emerges (like Lyon’s municipal library with their guichet des savoirs project last year). Now it’s not only a matter of asking specialist through or in an institution. This is enriched with social software features plus a lazy web spin. I find this model very interesting. Let’s wait a bit to see to harsh criticisms as for Wikipedia…

Update: a commented list of ‘ask and expert’ websites is available on netsurf.ch thanks to Emily

mmh this is so true: a Web2.0 checklist

Give us your email address, we’ll let you know when it’s ready!
Public beta alpha
Tags
Feeds for everything
Built with Rails
Sprinkled with Ajax
Yellow fade
Blue gradients
Big icons
Big fonts
Big input boxes
REST API
Google Maps mashup
Share with a friend
TypePad blog for a peek inside the team
Feature screencasts (thanks, Waxy!)
Hackathons for new features
Development wiki
Business model optimized for the long tail
It’s Free!/AdSense revenue stream

Now let’s discriminate do’s and dont’ts!

Ray Osszie (Lotus Notes creator and Groove founder) introduces a new standard called SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML) meant to support sharing and ‘cross-subscribed’ feeds. It’s actually a RSS extension. What’s interesting is that the SSE specification is released under a Creative Commons license, which is a gooD thing for MS.

The SSE FAQ is available (as well as the SSE specifications):

Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) is a specification that extends RSS from unidirectional to bidirectional information flows.
SSE defines the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely cooperating applications to use RSS as the basis for item sharing—that is, the bidirectional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items among two or more cross-subscribed feeds.
For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse’s calendar, and vice versa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and add new appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or a doctor’s appointment.

Why do I blog this? RSS was already a huge achievement in terms of information management, then I’m curious about this SSE thing.

An intriguing post by Ulla Maaria-Mutanen about thinglink, a concept I was not aware of:

A thinglink is a free unique identifier that anybody can use for making the finding and recommendation of particular things easier in the Internet.

A thinglink identifier is based on the idea that many of the things we use in our daily life are quite particular. Perhaps we know their origin (who has made them, when and how) and something about their history or previous use (like with furniture and cars). Some things have more meaning to us than others.
(…)
Thinglinks are unique, 8-digit identifiers that anybody can use for connecting physical or virtual objects to any online information about them. A thinglink on an object is an indication that there is some information about the object online—perhaps a blog post, some flickr photos, a manufacturer’s website, a wikipedia article, or just some quick comments on a discussion site.

The purpose of the thinglink.org is to offer an easy way to learn about products and artifacts in their various contexts of production and use. Small-scale producers such as artists, designers, and crafters can use thinglinks to bring their products to the emerging recommendation-based market in the Internet

Why do I blog this? well this is very close to ID specifications of Bruce Sterling’s concept of spimes! There is a website coming out about this: Thinglink Besides, it’s closely related to our discussion about blogjects with Julian. This ‘thinglink’ idea could be seen a way of implementing the blogject concept since it’s able to connect information (on the web) and artifacts. So Julian what do you think? Let’s all meet and talk about it. Isn’t there a workshop scheduled about this in 2006 conference? Well, let’s have a workshop about blogject at LIFT then! (something like the day before).

Ok, there’s a new buzzword around here (Web2.0 spin): “third generation of social-networking systems” as attested by this TR article by Wade Roush. Instead than focusing on this ‘3rd’ thing, the interesting point of this article is that it highlights the new important feature of social software: the ability to manipulate user-generated content:

“We’ve listened to our user base very closely, and we’re also paying attention to what the competition is doing, and we’ve formulated a new strategy that is really about personal media,” says Jeff Roberto, a marketing manager at Friendster. For example, users can now create blogs, control the appearance of their profiles, upload up to 50 photos, watch slide shows of the photos most recently uploaded by their friends, post classified ads that link back to their profiles, and share audio and video files stored on their PCs using peer-to-peer technology provided by Grouper.

“The uptake we’ve seen has been incredible,” Friendster CEO Taek Kwon said in October, about a month after the new features were introduced. “We’ve seen substantial increases in media being uploaded, profiles being customized, and people posting classifieds.”

It also talks about a new player: iMeem who puts this idea into practice, using an interesting model:

iMeem hopes to attract members to by building all their activities not around a virtual representation of their social network, but around instant messaging technology.

That’s exactly how iMeem works. A downloadable application similar to Yahoo Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger, iMeem is built around a buddy-list window that shows a user which of her friends are online. From that window, she can send and receive instant messages, join group chats, keep a blog, and share photos, videos, podcasts, playlists, and the like with other users using a peer-to-peer system related to the technology behind the original Napster.

Aggregating all of these functions into one program sounds like a recipe for information overload. But Caldwell believes that iMeem users will act as each others’ media critics, perhaps bringing real effectiveness to the much-heralded idea of “collaborative filtering.” “There’s too much stuff out there,” Caldwell says. “Too much data, too much content, too many blogs. Collaborative filtering is one of the most important things that’s happened on the Web over the past couple of years. It’s holding back the tide of overstimulation.”

Why do I blog this? This ‘iMeem’ makes me think of a 1st generation social software called Huminity I tested long time ago mixed with this user-generated content trend. I like the ‘collaborative filtering’ feature but I am wondering how it would work.

Just found this on Roger Cailliau’s webpage, which seems to be a NeXT computer:

This early CERN browser is also cute:

ZDNET reports this interesting fact: IBM said it is developing an application to analyse how discussions on blogs and other Web sites are affecting a given corporation’s image. It’s called “Public Image Monitoring Solution” and it’s based on IBM’s text analytics and search software, WebSphere Information Integration OmniFind Edition. This would certainly be of interest for some e-marketing companies down there (among others).

The Web-based program could cull results on the topic of fuel efficiency from various sources and generate reports by categorizing the information. If many consumers or news stories are making negative comments about a product, for example, a marketing person would know and could react,

Why do I blog this? this seems to be a tool that would be of interest for other purposes than just marketing. I don’t know whether this service will be affordable…

The latest report from the Pew Internet, which deals with ‘teen content creators’, is very insightful. It reports that more than half of online teens have created content for the internet; and most teen downloaders think that getting free music files is easy to do

Some 57% of online teens create content for the internet. (…) These Content Creators report having done one or
more of the following activities: create a blog; create or work on a personal webpage; create or work on a webpage for school, a friend, or an organization; share original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos online; or remix content found online
into a new creation. The most popular Content Creating activities are sharing self-authored content and working on webpages for others.
(…)
Bloggers and to a lesser extent teens who read blogs are a particularly tech-savvy group of internet users. They have more technological tools such as cell phones and PDAs and are more likely to use them to go online. Not only do they live in technologically rich households, but they are more likely to have their own computer at home and to be able to use it in a private space. They help adults do things online. Most strikingly, they have more experience with almost all online activities that we asked about. Bloggers are more likely than non-bloggers to engage in everyday online activities such as getting news, using IM or making online purchases, but content creating and sharing activities are the areas where bloggers are far ahead of non-bloggers.

The report is of great interest. In addition, people interested in sort of content creation might been interest in check this “I want to” webpage which summarizes the large number of web applications to manipulate content on the web (sharing pictures, do podcasts, share bookmarks…)

Yesterday I attended a presentation about dangers and opportunities fostered by weblogs (of course ‘danger’ is where the emphasis where). One of the most interesting presenter was certainly David Sadigh from IC Agency (internet marketing firm in Geneva) in the sense that his presentation achieved to show how weblog and their corollary tools (e.g. search engine a la technorati/blogpulse) could be used for marketing/data collection/competitive intelligence issues. His pragmatic view of how using such tool was very refreshing among those talks who more focused on conservative topics.

This made me think about my own practices about intelligence gathering; which are certainly close to what to do, except that the focus is less business-oriented but rather purposely aimed at being part of a research community, finding new information about specific topics and in the end discussing about innovation. But the approach is the same.

Then I made a quick list of the tools I used on a daily basis for various purposes connected to my research activities (be it for my phd funded by public fundings or for my R&D projects for private copmanies):

Scientific database/search engines: web of science, scopus, citeseer (+ less professional but useful: google scholar)
• Web search engine: google, ask keeves, jux, A9, alexa
• Blog tracker/search engine (to see who talk about what + who talk about certain things I blogged): technorati, icerocket, blogpulse, pubsub, google blog search, daypop, g-metrics
• Social Bookmark Managers (to share my bookmarks, I also use them as search engine): del.icio.us, blogmarks, citeUlike
• News aggregator: my offline aggregator is NetNewsWire and my online is rss4you, My opml is there for people who wants to see what I read.
• txt file still rocks: I then have a list of all the books I’ve read + movies I’ve watched here
• Bibliographical references are managed through a bibtex file with bibdesk; there is also a RSS version but it’s down

I should make the same list for statistical sources.

The other day, after reading (and writing about) Stowe Boyd’s post about IM rules, I made a quick scanning of the HCI recent literature about IM and found this article: Broadcasting Information via Display Names in Instant Messaging by Stephanie Smale and Saul Greenberg (ACM Group 2005 Conference)

It’s a good study about why and how people display and change their names + other things in IM. Here are their research questions:

This study investigates how people use the display name feature in IM clients to broadcast information other than one’s name. We do this by capturing changes in each person’s display field as they appear in contact lists over time and over everyday use, by asking people to explain what these changes meant, and by counting, categorizing and analyzing these changes.

1. At what frequency do users change the information in their display field when using an IM client such as MSN Messenger?
2. What are the main communication categories that represent the information held by these display field changes?
3. What is the frequency distribution of these categories?
4. Are changes to the display name related to the demographics of age or sex?

Here are the main results:

1. results show that 58% of our 444 contacts (258 people) never changed the contents of the display field during the three week period. For the remaining 42% of contacts (186 people), we counted a total of 1968 display name changes, or an average of 11 display name changes per person over the three week period, or up to 4 times a week.
(…)
2. the new information fell into seventeen different categories of communication supplied to others. Three themes encompass these categories: Identification (“who am I”?), Information About Self (“this is what is going on with me”) and Broadcast
Message (“I am directing information to the community”).
(…)
3. Younger users may change their display names more frequently than older users; sex does not make a difference.

The figure below shows the different categories they gathered (extracted from the paper):

Another relevant point is that this phenomenon lead to an interface change on MSN:

Some of these capabilities are only now being supplied by a few major IM vendors. For example, the new version of MSN Messenger (v. 7.0), released shortly after our study was performed), includes a dedicated space for adding and editing a personal message.

Why do I blog this? this phenomenon always amazed me (because I tended to do it few years ago and also from an tech observer), so I was pleased to see a study about it. Moreover, it’s connected to research projects we conducted in the past at the university of geneva about awareness and communication (The authors also expands their discussion to a ‘a community bar’ that could display personal messages with presence items, a very greenbergesque topic).

Stowe Boyd sketched an interesting set of cardinal rules about IM uses:

The social aspects of real time life will swamp any specific technology’s impacts. I believe in tools, but effective application requires changes in behavior. For example, effective use of IM in groups means people must adopt the five cardinal rules of IM which I tend to agree with:

• Turn on your IM client, and leave it on. (The Turn It On rule).
• Change your IM state as your state changes. (The Coffee Break rule.)
• It is not impolite to ping people. (The Knock-Knock rule.)
• It is not impolite to ignore people. (The I’m Busy rule.)
• Try IM first. (The IM First rule.)

Moreover, a good paper about it is The Character, Functions, and Styles of Instant Messaging in the Workplace By Ellen Isaacs, Alan Walendowski, Steve Whittaker, Diane J. Schiano & Candace Kamm:

Current perceptions of Instant Messaging (IM) use are based primarily on self-report studies. We logged thousands of (mostly) workplace IM conversations and evaluated their conversational characteristics and functions. Contrary to prior research, we found that the primary use of workplace IM was for complex work discussions. Only 28% of conversations were simple, single-purpose interactions and only 31% were about scheduling or coordination. Moreover, people rarely switched from IM to another medium when the conversation got complex. We found evidence of two distinct styles of use. Heavy IM users and frequent IM partners mainly used it to work together: to discuss a broad range of topics via many fast-paced interactions per day, each with many short turns and much threading and multitasking. Light users and infrequent pairs mainly used IM to coordinate: for scheduling, via fewer conversations per day that were shorter, slower-paced with less threading and multitasking.

Why do I blog this? this is not my research but since I am an active IM users, it’s sometimes interesting to see how people reflect on IM practices.