Newsfeed Research Journal

Tasks

  1. Use content inventory for reference in Flickr discussion.
  2. Describe how tags are used by different groups for annotating photos for review before submission, etc.
  3. Finish geo part of Flickr analysis.
  4. Write about Flickr interestingness.
  5. Write about Flickr group pools.

2008-01-20 A Receipe for Disaster

Here comes a small update of my work of my master thesis. It would be more correct to talk about the recent lack of work on my master thesis. I took slightly early holiday break from my writing, hoping to jump right back into it after new years. Sadly I became ill on the first day of this year, and have been since then. Things are getting better (at last) so I hope I’ll be able to start working again tomorrow.

I’ve been struggeling with my productivity and I’ll often go into procrastination modus. I read an article about academic productivity today and hope to introduce the following techniques into my work process:

2007-12-04 Supervision Meeting 2007 12 04

The meeting began at 13:00 and lasted approximately 60 minutes.

Feedback on Delivery

Tim Berners-Lee’s point about the Giant Global Graph is quite interesting. It shows how social navigation across several web pages is becoming mainstream with mashups, Facebook’s applications, and OpenSocial. There is a correlation between the Graph (the Semantic Web) and Web 2.0 even though Web 2.0 is a more widespread term. I should state the interesting of this phenomena but that it’s left out of my research due to time concerns.

When discussing collaborative filtering it would be important to differentiate by group and friendship based filtering and content based filtering. Is this two fundamental parts of social navigation categorization? From this we could actually create a hypothesis that social navigation either is friendship based or content based. This could fit nicely into my discussion chapter where we look at larger groupings of social navigation than for instance hyperlink sharing, social annotation, etc. Examples of already defined groupings of social navigation, although at another dimension, is implicit and explicit social navigation.

While studying social navigation it becomes apparent that privacy concerns is a central theme. By using user profiles targeted filtering of for example ads can be archived (and actually is implemented in Facebook’s Beacon). This area of study could warrant an entirely new master thesis so at this point it’s best to state that I’ll have to ignore such concerns.

Separation between the background chapter and the analysis chapter have to be clearer:

In my analysis I could introduce relevant web pages as del.icio.us, trailfire etc. before discussion the other services in depth. Superficial analysis of these should perhaps be described in the methodology chapter.

Future Work

I should finish my background chapter and then begin to focus on my analysis. I could very well begin content inventories for Facebook and Amazon before concluding my Flickr analysis.

2007-11-19 Supervision Meeting 2007 11 19

After talking about minor details that could be improved on (added to my task list) we talked about collaborative filtering being a central part of social navigation. I’ll have to reference systems as GroupLens. The interestingness algorithm of Flickr is interesting in this vein (no pun intended). Several people have tried to reverse engineer it and understand how it works. Whats striking is that comments and favorite attributions from friends counts less than from strangers. Flickr’s reasoning must be that friends is biased and easier to persuade. There is third party applications like Scout that enables you to track your interestingness score over time.

One interesting thing about Flickr is how it separates family and friends. You share you personal photos with your family and share your obscene party photos with your friends. You don’t want these to correlate.

When discussing and analyzing Flickr I need to refer to and use my content inventory more clearly.

I need to establish the broad lines of my thesis:

My working title and working in the introductory chapter is using *web services* and this is currently associated with APIs as REST and SOAP and so on. Web sites is probably a better description than web applications since the latter is more increasingly being used to talk about specific task related applications for end users, leveraged on the web (Google docs, etc).

When writing my literature review it would be sufficient to reference the most recent or the most representative article where there are several from the same authors with the same application and theme.

Lastly it would be beneficial to use the comments field in BibTeX to annotate my readings and thereby be able to create an annotated bibliography for my own use.

2007-11-09 Reprise - A Minimalistic Blog

I published my newly written blog software yesterday which was featured on Ruby Inside today. My aim for this little piece of software was to allow me to publish blog entries with as little overhead as possible:

Usage can me summarized in five steps:

  1. gem install sinatra haml bluecloth rubypants -y
  2. wget redflavor.com/reprise.rb
  3. mkdir entries
  4. vi entries/YYYY.MM.DD.Title.Goes.Here
  5. ruby reprise.rb

Thanks to a suggestion from Sime Ramov it now supports proper apostrophes, em dashes and the likes by using RubyPants. I also went ahead and added hAtom support enabling syndication by using third party parsers. Lastly I added CSS3 multi column support for Firefox and Webkit browsers.

2007-11-05 Supervision Meeting 2007 11 05

In my introductory chapter there were several examples where I’d jumped to conclusions without backing them up with data. First my citing about the rise of blog usage from X to Y percent in 18 months was confusing. Was this for the general population? The numbers seemed to high, the study participants had to come from some demographical niche.

Further I had concluded that developers seeking profits wanted as high a user-base as possible. Could it be on some occasions that they wanted a large user-base just for the social benefits it gives (collective intelligence)? I had clearly jumped on a description of the world without any underlying research. Instead I should focus on referencing research on self sufficient user-bases from secondary literature like Jenny Preece (Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability).

When I wrote that innovation was happening because of competition amongst developers I jumped on conclusions again. This can be rewritten by turning it upside down: “When conducting my introductory studies I frequented many social networking sites and my feeling is that lot of innovation is happening in this space”.

Again I make the same mistake when I conclude that one not can create sound navigation systems without using social navigation. I don’t have to say theses things for motivating my research. Be straight, base writing on observations and let the writing reflect reality: “Social navigation have become more important the latest years, it’s more prevalent in mainstream media and is a central term in Web 2.0.” One can quantify media’s use of terms by searching for them in different time intervals (for example the 10 first months of this year and the same period a year ago). Two services for this are ATEKST, a Norwegian media database and Google Trends.

My supervisor also reacted on the fact that I’d written that there were only a handful of research projects on social navigation related to the web. He was thinking on more broader terms and included Web 2.0, social networks into his understanding of social navigation. I focused on navigation only, and therefore had fewer papers to reference. He thought such a tight focus would only be beneficial in my research. This can be solved by writing: “In my literature review I used these methods for searching (keyword, citation) and found X relevant academic articles. In the field of navigation on the web, but not with a focus on sociality there are Y articles. Sociality on the web on the other hand has Z articles.”

It’s quite okay to have an hypothesis, trying to falsify or strengthen it. But one can simply describe phenomenas as one sees fit. This is what separates researchers from journalists.

Lastly we concluded that Second Life probably was to different than other services that I’m about to study. I should focus on 3-4 sites:

2007-10-27 Web 2 Sociology

My supervisor recommended that I read an article by David Beer and Roger Burrows called: ”Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations” published by Sociological Research Online. While reading the article I got some new ideas related to my research:

The authors categorizes Web 2.0 services into:

This categorization seems quite sound and can probably be used in my thesis to differentiate the sites I’ll study.

Note that several of these sites shares characteristics from the other groups it’s not categorized into. Relating to my research it would also be beneficial to study a wiki which I find to be a prime example of fully organic social navigation.

2007-10-22 Supervision Meeting 2007 10 22

The first priority is to create a taxonomy with an associated terminology. When this part of the research is nearing completion one can study Urørt, trying to locate one or maximum two new navigational designs. Based on this one can start to implement the prototype.

When looking at web services as Facebook and Flickr one should focus on the core functionality, not third party applications leveraged either inside programming APIs (Facebook) or outside applications using open APIs. If time permits it could be interesting to look at one or two of these just as an example of API usage and mashups.

Should maybe study Underskog since it’s the most interesting Norwegian service. Gisle sent me an invitation and I signed up for the service.

Another interesting service that could be subject for investigation is Second Life. It’s navigational design is vastly different than any other services planned to research. It’s largely based on spatial navigation.

We discussed how throughout I should be when collecting data from the different sites. The technique I used at Flickr could very well not be applicable for Amazon. It’s important to think about what resolution one are looking at the problem with.

We agreed that I should focus on finishing my analysis of Flickr. Mapping the navigational patterns at Flickr could prove very difficult and time consuming. Should not use much time on this, but focus on the textual analysis.

2007-10-15 Joining the RECORD Project at SINTEF

My supervisor advised me to contact SINTEF regarding their research project called RECORD. It was plausible that my research correlated with that of the RECORD project. I attended a meeting with the project’s coordinator Asbjørn Følstad on Thursday the 11th of October where we discussed possible ways of cooperating. The RECORD Project

Shortly summarized this project have three different themes:

  1. Usagepatterns (mainly with regard to audio-visual systems).
  2. Design of navigation (again mostly for audio-visual systems) and design of web communities. How can we design such communities so that become self sufficient (with a focus on not only the technical sides)?
  3. Evaluation by leveraging a community of test users for giving feedback on various prototypical work. One tries to find a golden path between throughout upfront planning and “launch and learn”.

SINTEF have mobilized 3000 users which can be used for survey purposes. A handful of these can be taken in for usability testing in labs.

One of SINTEF’s collaboration partners in the RECORD project is the Urørt service of the National Broadcasting Corporation. After talking to Morten Skogly of Urø it was agreed that I should develop a transparent prototype on top of their service as part of my research. Technically this prototype would be realized by using the Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox and transparently adding a layer of navigational structures on top of the existing service.

Some time during November or December (after I’ve concluded my initial studies) it’s quite possible that me and Asbjørn from SINTEF visit the Urørt team in Trondheim to discuss this project more closely.

2007-10-15 Beginnings of the Introductory Chapter

I wrote the beginnings of the introductory chapter today:

2007-10-08 Supervision Meeting 2007 10 08

The meeting began at 14:00 and lasted approximately 40 minutes.

The Aims of My Research

My thesis should be categorized as one that is informing design. We know what the term social navigation is - it’s (more or less clearly) defined. What we know little about are how to use such navigational paradigms in the real world. There are many examples of web sites/applications where social navigation are blossoming but it’s creators does not use the term. Could it be that such navigational designs are grown organically and implicitly as a result of the creators’ focus on sociality?

My research should answer how social navigation can be (and is) leveraged in our modern web age in real projects. Social navigation is a central part of the web today but it’s now mostly referred to with the broader term Web 2.0.

One part of this work should be to define or redefine several concepts related to social navigation and thereby try to create a clear taxonomy of different types of social navigation.

Feedback on Delivery

My supervisor was confused by my usage of two tables to convey my content inventory of Flickr. Even though both tables have an id column for cross referencing it is hard to keep track of these as the columns in table two refer to content on the previous page (link name and location). Use of URL is probably not needed as it’s the least useful of my current columns and it takes up a great deal of visual space.

He was impressed with the level of detail I had recorded, but noted that I’d have to keep in mind that this process should be repeated on several other sites and this would leave me with a great deal of work.

We discussed that I had noticed several flaws of Flickr’s labeling when collecting data. Irregularities like this are not relevant for my research but it could be wise to note such things and that information architects probably would study this issue further. I could easily choose which of the titles (title tag in the head or h1 tag in the body) to use depending of which were most descriptive. I could even introduce my own title or adaptation of titles (in apostrophes) where the available titles were severely lacking in describing the site’s content (apparent in cluster pages for example).

The use of variables in my inventory was sound and well understood. I could however include examples of what the variables could convey in my tabular listing of them (like Cannon for $camera).

The inventory and subsequent analysis should contain screen shots of the most striking and interesting features.

Graphical representations (I had navigational maps based Beck’s maps of the London tube system in mind) could very well be included in the content analysis phase. These should not be substitutes of textual description and analysis but rather add to it.

Privacy

Privacy was included as one of the topics in my thesis proposal. We discussed whether I should focus on this issue. We concluded that I should ignore this issue in the beginning and maybe focus on it later on if time permits since it’s a topic of high interest to my supervisor.

Further Work

We decided on a fortnightly schedule for my supervisions every other Monday at 15:00. I should aim to deliver products that my supervisor can read trough on Fridays the week before.

Until my next delivery (before Friday 19th of October) I should take a step back and try to think about the broader issues of my research and with this write a first draft of the introduction chapter. After this is completed I should continue with my grunt work on Flickr (content analysis), creating my method as I go and thinking about my supervisors comments above.

2007-10-05 Doing Qualitative Research

I’ve been reading David Silerman’s Doing Qualitative Research the last few weeks. I’ve currently read most of the chapters that I find relevant at this time in my research:

The following chapters should be read next (when they become relevant):

The rest of the chapters can safely be skipped just by looking at their titles.

I think it would be beneficial to revisit parts of this text at later stages in my research to check that I’m asking the right questions and taking the best approaches. All in all I found most of the advice in this book to sound very sound (even though parts of it are geared to far away from the part of social science that is interesting for general computer scientists).

2007-10-04 Rewrite of Rakefile

I started to rewrite my rakefile for latex authoring today. The focus of this endeavor is a more modular and object oriented design in addition to more intelligent decisions about how many latex runs that really are needed. Stripping of LaTeX’s overly verbose output would also be nice (inspiration drawn from latex-make). My last effort in this vein was more of a fast hack. I have thought about maybe using behavior driven development with rSpec on this project down the road. I also plan to release my results under a liberal license once I have something that is ready for human consumption.

2007-10-03 Beginnings of Flickr Inventory Delivered

I delivered my work so far with conducting a Content Analysis phase for Flickr. Currently it only contains verbal discussion of my methodical approach and a complete content inventory of the relevant parts of Flickr for my research. This delivery was tagged with draft.0.1 in SCM.

2007-09-30 LaTeX and Rake

I created a Rakefile for compiling, viewing, and cleaning the latex source tree. This would need further work and probably a hefty dose of refactoring. I plan to implement reporting functionalities (mainly word count) and spell checking of all involved files with Ispell.

2007-09-27 Move to One Document

Created one base LaTeX document (using the book document class) referencing other documents as chapters and appendices. Changed the standard font to 11pt Palantino. Added the appendix package as part of the source directory for making appendix handling easier (with the appendices environment).

2007-09-26 Huge Tables in LaTeX

Displaying all 5 columns (Page Id, Page Title, Link Name, Link Location, URL) of my content inventory table of Flickr required me to use a \tiny font declaration and flip my tables to be horizontal. This severely hampered readability so I decided to split the content into two tables. Cross referencing should be possible since both tables contain a page id.

2007-09-20 Starting Content Inventory of Flickr

The past days I’ve been doing a pretty throughout content inventory for Flickr. I decided to introduce a set of variables to better describe the sites different pages (prefixed with a dollar sign as found in UNIX shell scripting). The better part of the day was involved with finishing data collection for the content inventory, typing up a tabular explanation of these variables, and further describe my approach for content inventory.

I did some library searching for academic papers where content inventory was used as a method. I did not find any good hits, just some papers where IA were discussed in general with only on or two sentences describing content inventory.

Also got a hold of my supervisor and made an appointment for supervision on Monday the 8th of October at 14:00. Written material should be delivered within Thursday the 4th of October.

2007-09-19 Beginnings of a Research Journal

This blog will function as a digital research journal during the work on my master thesis in Computer Science. I’ll be noting down thoughts on paper as I go and later write them down here. Its not expected that this blog will be of any use to anybody but myself (and maybe my supervisor).

My topic for research is whats called Social Navigation: navigation where current users leverage traces left by past users actions for finding their way in an information space.

Eivind Uggedal