GetSatisfaction‘s “How does this make you feel?” intrigues me: why do people answer this? Conventional wisdom says that people don’t classify their posts.
Presumably it’s polite to ask people how they’re doing — at least in some situations. And technically there’s no post classification going on here: it’s mood classification, which most of us are trained in from a young age.
Get Satisfaction aggregates the mood on each discussion thread:
Tags: customer service forums, feedback forums, forums, GetSatisfaction, help forums, mood, mood classification
Posted in argumentative discussions, PhD diary, social web | Comments (2)
I always appreciate how Geoffrey Bilder can manage to talk about the Social Semantic Web and the early modern print in (nearly) the same breath. See for yourself in the presentation he gave to scholarly publishers at the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors last month.
Geoff’s presentation is outlined, to a large extent, in an interview Geoff gave 18 months ago (search “key messages” to find the good bits). I hope to blog further about these, because Geoff has so many good things to say, which deserve unpacking!
I especially love the timeline from slide 159, which shows that we’re just past the incunabula age of the Internet:
We're still in the Early Modern era of the Internet. Compare to the history of print.
Tags: beyondthePDF, CrossRef, early modern Internet, Geoffrey Bilder, incunabula age of the Internet, ISMTE, scholarly publishing
Posted in future of publishing, information ecosystem, PhD diary, scholarly communication, semantic web, social semantic web, social web | Comments (3)
I’m working on online argumentation: Making it easier to have discussions, get to consensus, and understand disagreements across websites.
Here are the 3 key questions and the most closely related work that I’ve identified in the first 9 months of my Ph.D.
Read on, if you want to know more. Then let me know what you think! Suggestions will be especially helpful since I’m writing my first year Ph.D. report, which will set the direction for my second year at DERI.
Argumentative discussions occur informally throughout the Web, however there is currently no way of bringing together all of the discussions on a given topic along with an indication of who is agreeing and who is disagreeing. Thus substantial human analysis is required to integrate opinions and expertise to, for instance, determine the best policies and procedures to mitigate global warming, or the recommended treatment for a given disease. New techniques for gathering and organising the Social Web using ontologies such as FOAF and SIOC show promise for creating a Social Semantic Web for argumentation.
I am currently investigating three main research questions to establish the Social Semantic Web for argumentation:
Ennals et al. ask: ‘What is disputed on the Web? (Ennals 2010b). They use annotation and NLP techniques to develop a prototype system for highlighting disputed claims in Web documents (Ennals 2010a). Cabanac et al. find that two algorithms for identifying the level of controversy about an issue were up to 84% accurate (compared to human perception), on a corpus of 13 arguments. These are useful prototypes of what could be done; Ennals prototype is indeed a Web-scale system, but disputed claims are not arguments.
Rahwan et al. (2007) present a pilot Semantic Web-based system, ArgDF, in which users can create arguments, and query to find networks of arguments. ArgDF is backed with the AIF-RDF ontology, and uses Semantic Web standards. Rahwan (2008) surveys current Web2.0 tools, pointing out that integration between these tools is lacking, and that only very shallow argument structures are supported; ArgDF and AIF-RDF are explained as an improvement. What is lacking is uptake in end-user orientated (e.g. Web 2.0) tools.
The Web2.0 aspect of the problem is explored in several papers, including Buckingham Shum (2008), which presents Cohere, a Web2.0-style argumentation system supporting existing (non-Semantic Web) argumentation standards, and Groza et al. (2009) which proposes a abstract framework for modeling argumentation. These are either minimally implemented frameworks or stand-alone systems which do not yet support the distributed, emergent argumentation envisioned, as further elucidated by Buckingham Shum (2010).
Tags: DERI, first year report
Posted in argumentative discussions, PhD diary, semantic web, social semantic web, social web | Comments (1)
Salmon, an aggregation protocol, is championed by Google’s John Panzer, and described as an “an open, simple, standards-based solution” for “unifying the conversations”.
‘Conversations’ is deliberately plural, I think, to evoke the many conversations, invisible to one another: “The comments, ratings, and annotations increasingly happen at the aggregator and are invisible to the original source.”
Using Salmon, an aggregator pushes comments back to a “Salmon endpoint” (via POST). These can be published (or moderated) upstream at the original source. See also the summary of the Salmon protocol.
Comments swimming upstream…
Tags: activity streams, aggregation, distributed commenting, distributed sources, Salmon protocol
Posted in information ecosystem, social web | Comments (0)
In a post at ZDNet, Dion Hinchcliffe delineates 7 problems of today’s social web:
- Fragmentation of conversation.
- Disconnects between older and newer generations of social media
- Lack of control of identity, contacts, and data.
- A better social Web on mobile devices.
- Poor integration between social media and location services.
- Difficulty of coherently engaging in social activity across many channels.
- Coping with and getting value from the expanding information volume of social media.
from “The social Web in 2010: The emerging standards and technologies to watch” encountered via Ed H. Chi’s post at the PARC Augmented Social Cognition blog.
The trends? Openness, portability, aggregation of distributed content. Hopefully we’ll see more on all these fronts in 2010 and beyond. Hinchcliffe also suggests that we want “Better social and location capabilities added to the core of mobile devices.”
See the full post at ZDNet for more discussion and references to a number of standards, formats, and related developments. In the next post, I’ll highlight Salmon, a protocol for distributed commenting, which I’d neither encountered nor heard of.
Tags: activity streams, aggregation, mobile web, Salmon protocol, social media
Posted in information ecosystem, social web | Comments (1)
Here’s a taxonomy of tweets from an experiment at SemanticHacker Blog:
Tags: taxonomies, taxonomy, twitter
Posted in social web | Comments (0)
Based in Silicon Valley, Ribbit is an internet telephony startup and a subsidiary of British Telcom. Ribbit has an “open platform for voice innovation”, with API access for developers (see also getting started) and several end-user products.
Ribbit Mobile is similar to Google Voice: it’s a next-generation phone system currently aimed at the US and UK markets. You use your own (presumably mobile) number. What really got my attention, though, was a new social feature they call “Caller ID 2.0”:
Ribbit wants to leverage your social networks for Caller ID
When a call comes in, Ribbit Mobile will reach into the social web and bring you the recent LinkedIn updates, Facebook updates, Tweets, and Flickr photos of the person calling you. Ribbit Mobile lets you know not just who is calling but what the caller has been up to on the web.
I was already excited about Ribbit when I first encountered them.
I guess it’s time to try out their Google Wave gadgets! And if Google Voice or VoIP with your mobile number has any appeal, I’d advise you to request an invite for their beta. Note that they’ve already got plans to charge for their services.
Tags: British Telcom, BT, Google Voice, internet telephony, Ribbit, VoIP
Posted in social web | Comments (0)
Rights to data may depend, says Bruce Schneier, on what type of data it is and who provided it. He provides a useful enumeration:
1. Service data. Service data is the data you need to give to a social networking site in order to use it. It might include your legal name, your age, and your credit card number.
2. Disclosed data. This is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on.
3. Entrusted data. This is what you post on other people’s pages. It’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over the data — someone else does.
4. Incidental data. Incidental data is data the other people post about you. Again, it’s basically same same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that 1) you don’t have control over it, and 2) you didn’t create it in the first place.
5. Behavioral data. This is data that the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with.
See Schenier’s post for discussion. Via a pointer on Rob Styles’ blog, in turn via Rob’s tweet.
Have you come across other taxonomies for social networking data?
Here’s a simple but far less expressive one way to characterize data on social networks. Is it “about you” or “from you”? Either the first, the second, neither, or both. “Aboutness”, however, is ontologically challenging. Any use for this?
Collaboration/shared control isn’t considered in this taxonomy. For instance, “entrusted data” doesn’t capture the notion of “shared data” in a collaborative system such as wave, a wiki, or perhaps even email.
For behavioral data in libraries, see also “intentional data”, as used by Lorcan Dempsey, back to 2005 (and many times since) [for instance, in discussion with “emergent knowledge”]. I prefer “behavioral data” since much data about intention is by no means deliberate/intentional!
Tags: Bruce Schneier, taxonomies
Posted in social web | Comments (3)
blog ‘reactions’
Instead of enabling commenting on your blog, you can let readers ‘react’ by marking the post as ‘funny’, ‘interesting’, or ‘cool’. So far I’ve only seen this on one Blogspot blog, Galway Library’s blog.
Is this post funny, interesting, or cool?
If you know whether there’s a plugin doing this, or if it’s a general (optional) Blogspot feature, please let me know in the comments.
Tags: alternatives to like, blogging, commenting, like button
Posted in argumentative discussions, PhD diary, social web | Comments (1)