October 2007 Archives
Jane McGonigal mentioned "my car is a video game" in her talk at Web 2.0 Summit last week! Check out the Radar post here.
Yay! Maybe I will get a fourth reader now :)
Yay! Maybe I will get a fourth reader now :)
As a follow-up to "what do bestsellers tell us about society?", I thought I'd share a couple of relevant posts by Tim O'Reilly in the last week. Somehow I often find his posts highly relevant to my perspective and sometimes even my research. First, "The Techmeme Leaderboard: The Enduring Appeal of the Bestseller List" is an alternate angle on what bestsellers tell us about society, and precisely why they can be used as such a lens. Or at least that's one thing to take from it!
Second, today he posted a lovely example of the motivation provided by stories I spoke of at the end of my piece:
We need more farmer's stories, especially in the non-profit world! Who is going to go out and write them?
Second, today he posted a lovely example of the motivation provided by stories I spoke of at the end of my piece:
Few business leaders appreciate the power of stories to connect with their audiences. A few weeks ago I was working with one of the largest producers of organic food in the country. I can't recall most, if any, of the data they used to prove organic is better. But I remember a story a farmer told. He said when he worked for a conventional grower, his kids could not hug him at the end of the day when he got home. His clothes had to be removed and disinfected. Now, his kids can hug him as soon as he walks off the field. No amount of data can replace that story. And now guess what I think about when I see the organic section in my local grocery store? You got it. The farmer's story. Stories connect with people on an emotional level. Tell more of them.
We need more farmer's stories, especially in the non-profit world! Who is going to go out and write them?
A post on VentureBeat (via Techmeme) looks at email startups, and buried within is an interesting insight on email as a source of identity analysis.
Rad says that Orgoo's goal is to make a user's past communications reveal deeper patterns about them. If all your messages are aggregated in one place, the inbox can be the target of an automatic analysis to "allow people to expose the hidden social networks and the hidden information," Rad says. "We want to create new ways for you to visualize email, easier ways to navigate through and see things in messages and relationships in a larger context. For example, if you look at Gmail, it groups your emails by subject line. That's good, but there are a lot of other ways to group, whether by sender, topic or something else. You want to create a user interface that allows you to re-thread conversations and put them in context."I never thought of email in this way before. I look forward to trying out these tools and seeing what I can dig up!
Okay, so today I'm going to do a quick analysis of just one tag, titled "useful." I've included some of the bookmarks instead of just the tags here because you'll notice something quickly that's different from my last analysis: there is little cross-tagging for items with this tag. Most things that are "useful" are only "useful," with a few exceptions. So you need the bookmarks to see really what's going on here.So based on the websites, what does "useful" seem to mean to me? I suppose it is a catch-all for tools that help me get things done. The fact that there is little cross-tagging indicates the miscellaneous nature, and also suggests that these items are only relevant to specific tasks instead of general interests.
For example, the latest item is a keypad conversion tool, which as my note indicates is useful because my Blackberry doesn't have number-letter equivalents like traditional phones. Doing this conversion isn't really relevant to any of my other interests, but it is useful for completing a single task.
The other thing interesting about this category is that it keeps useful things from getting buried. For example, the conversion calculators for cooking could easily be tagged as "cook", and indeed are cross-tagged as such. But this single-task item would quickly be buried in an avalanche of general cooking websites, recipe blogs, whatever. Having a single category for single-task items allows quick access.
This is much the same theory behind the frequently-seen "daily" tag. Even though those sites usually have other tags, people using this tags want quick access to things they want to see every day.
For example, the latest item is a keypad conversion tool, which as my note indicates is useful because my Blackberry doesn't have number-letter equivalents like traditional phones. Doing this conversion isn't really relevant to any of my other interests, but it is useful for completing a single task.
The other thing interesting about this category is that it keeps useful things from getting buried. For example, the conversion calculators for cooking could easily be tagged as "cook", and indeed are cross-tagged as such. But this single-task item would quickly be buried in an avalanche of general cooking websites, recipe blogs, whatever. Having a single category for single-task items allows quick access.
This is much the same theory behind the frequently-seen "daily" tag. Even though those sites usually have other tags, people using this tags want quick access to things they want to see every day.
Here's another example of using personal motivation for the greater good: BBC News reports that Carnegie Mellon has started using samples from old books for CAPTCHAs.
But the CMU research team, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has devised an ingenious system to put the time used interpreting CAPTCHAs to good use.What a nifty side effect! I love this because it takes something people have to do anyway, validate themselves as humans, and turns it into historical restoration without the person even knowing it. I am endlessly fascinated by these little backchannel ways of getting people to do good.
Text files
The team is involved in digitising old books and manuscripts supplied by a non-profit organisation called the Internet Archive, and uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to examine scanned images of texts and turn them into digital text files which can be stored and searched by computers.
But the OCR software is unable to read about one in 10 words, due to the poor quality of the original documents.
The only reliable way to decode them is for a human to examine them individually - a mammoth task since CMU processes thousands of pages of text every month.
To solve this problem the team takes images of the words which the OCR software can't read, and uses them as CAPTCHAs.
These CAPTCHAs, known as reCAPTCHAS, are then distributed to websites around the world to be used in place of conventional CAPTCHAs.
