Research Journal

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:

  • Hard deadlines. I have a hard deadlines on May the 1st this year. A pitty it’s quite easy to get an extension to this deadline.
  • Soft deadlines. Last year me and my supervisor agreed that I’d deliver written material fourthnightly. This worked quite well, but often I felt I worked hard one week before the delivery and not so hard the other week.
  • The martini method. Write n number of words each day before going home. 500-1000 is a good number.
  • The chain method. Cross of your calendar each day if you’ve completed what you intended. Try not to break the chain.

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:

  • The background chapter should reference and comment on third party literature and data.
  • The analysis chapter should introduce my findings from primary data.

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.

Eivind Uggedal