sxsw

Social Search Session from SXSW

March 15, 2010 Dawn 1 Comment

Here are my raw notes from the Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends session at SXSW. Like I said, these are raw notes, so there are bound to be some typos / mistakes. Also keep in mind these are their ideas and content, not mine.

Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends

View more presentations from Brynn Evans.

Brynn Evans (digital anthropologist, design researcher, and user experience consultant):

No longer thinking about search as a question inside of a box. What happens when you have a question, we don’t rely just on Google. How can our friends help provide advice or from our social circle. You need to think of search as a process over time – it’s not a single search, it’s usually a series of searches combining friends and Google at various stages.

3 types of social search:

collective: gathering trends from a crowd – many activities from many people.
friend-filtered: Looking at results from your friends (like Google social search)
collaborative: working with someone to answer a question or ask a friend a question (like Aardvark)

2 main social strategies:

Ask the network – some people want to start with friends and get help / guidance before doing a Google search
Embark alone – see what they can gather from Google and then turn to friends for help if you can’t figure it out alone.

Max Ventilla (Aardvark – now at Google):

Web search is great for objective questions, but not for subjective questions. When there is no “right” answer, your social circle can help you find an answer that is appropriate for you (book recommendations, etc.)

Friends can answer subjective questions, but ..
* unreliable
* hard to keep up
* social cost

Intimacy facilitates trust.
Speakers want to know who they are addressing.

Ash Rust (OneRiot):

Realtime search to help people find out what is happening right now.

Scott Prindle (Crispen Porter – advertising company):

Social search in the digital marketing space (like OneRiot model). Give customers something good to talk about, they will talk. And that conversation becomes content for social search, helping to drive additional traffic and conversation.

Enable customers to find the experts within your organization (like Aardvark model).

If there is one factual answer to a question, this isn’t where social search excels. 20-30% of questions can be dealt with via social search. Will it ever overtake Google? No. Social search is useful for certain types of questions, but not all. For 40% of queries, we get good information from Google, but it leaves you wanting a little bit more. Social search can provide this additional context. We need better ways to personalize your searches based on information from your social circle and include it in your Google / Yahoo results.

Who is an authority? What is relevant? How do you index all of it? These are tough questions that still need to be solved for social search.

sxsw

Chris Messina on ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? at SXSW

March 13, 2010 Dawn 2 Comments

Here are my raw notes from Chris Messina’s session ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? at SXSW. Like I said, these are raw notes, so there are bound to be some typos / mistakes. Also keep in mind these are his ideas and content, not mine.

Updated 3/13/10 with his presentation:

ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here?

View more presentations from Chris Messina.

Notes:

Generative structures (rhizomes) – start with small constructs that move into very complex systems. Like in “The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It.” This forms the basis for activity streams.

What if every time you went shopping, you got an activity stream – like a receipt, but electronic and more available. You bank has this information and aggregates it to find useful information & a digital identity for you. He showed a clip from fight club to illustrate this point. Receipts are paper, crappy activity streams – paper-based way of comprehending information. Banks have this, but it’s in a format that suits them (pdf / paper / etc.), and not in a good format for analysis by their customers.

The news feed (Facebook) is the best example of an activity stream now.

Brief history of feeds

1999: RSS moves content from one format / place to another. Initially just titles, description & link
2006: Atom came a little later – similar idea, but it had author, id & updated. Still based on media consumption usage.
Now: RSS more like a news feed, but still not all that complex.

Formats were designed to syndicate basic media content, and now we’re trying to pump a bunch of additional data through it. Format is still stuck in 1999.

FriendFeed problem – it was an aggregation service with a few additional features (comments, etc.) Brought everything together in one place. When it was acquired by Facebook, FriendFeed started to languish.

The solution? A universal format – this is where the idea for activity streams came from. More than syndicating an activity from one place to another.

Russians proposed something called activity theory for how they could make workers more productive with divisions of labor: Subject + tools = object / outcome (triangle). Later expanded by Scandinavians to expand it into communities with mediating artefacts, rules & roles.

In producing activity streams, we want to create meaning and make sense of the information.

If your goal is to produce meaning and culture, then you have a compelling framework for a compelling service.

foursquare + activity theory will help you understand why it has been so successful. It’s not just about the games, but is more nuanced.

Social objects – Jyri Engeström – “people don’t just connect to each other. They connect through a shared object.” Through those connections, people make meaning.

As you roll around the web, you collect all kinds of information. Look at YouTube – adds value to a social object with comments, ratings, etc. Flick is similar – comments, tags, etc. Some people create the content and others curate it by adding comments, rating, etc. Publishers vs. contributors.

Flickr makes it easy to tune the rules (configure licenses, search, etc.)

Control and rules can be set at system or personal level. Life streaming is more than just a news feed.

The Second Coming – A Manifesto by Gelernter (2000) talked about lifestreams as a sequence of all kinds of documents that are retrieved by search and not names or titles. Stream is concrete representation of time with now dividing past and future.

Now we live in an environment with so much information. It seems like information overload, but it’s really that we don’t have the tools to effectively deal with this information.

Mapping of behavior becomes interesting when you can look at your behavior along with the data that other people have about you. In 10 years, your kids could look back on the profile of your history via foursquare, etc. and see how you spent your birthday (example from Kevin Rose).

What if you could use your status information to train your computers to better meet your needs. Fitbit tracks behavior over time. You need to accrue data over time and compare it to other people’s data to make sense of it.

Look at Feltron annual reports. He collects information about himself and summarizes it (not real, but an example of what you could do?)

The solution to data overload is more data (metadata).

Take the basic construct of RSS and weave in some metadata about the data: Actor (author), verb, object & target – all are added to basic atom / rss feed info. It’s trivial to add these 4 elements to make an activity stream based on basic Atom / rss data.

Verbs & objects:
verbs: favorite, follow, like, join …
objects: article …

Process inspired by microformats. Why: Ask why you are doing this? Homework: Do you homework and document what you think. Propose: Bring it back to the community for input. iterate: Use an iterative process to make it better. Inter-operate: find ways to collaborate.

This looks similar to the semantic web, but it’s a little less ambitious. RDF is pretty hard to use.

More information can be found on activitystrea.ms.

elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

March 13, 2010 Dawn 2 Comments

Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of weeks:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

The Crazy Neighbor*

Another Gargoyle in Portland

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

*Disclaimers:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily: I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
The Crazy Neighbor: This is a Fast Wonder LLC venture.

shared links

Blogging Elsewhere

February 28, 2010 Dawn 1 Comment

Here is this week’s summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

Backup Strategies For the Paranoid

Intel Software Network*

The Crazy Neighbor*

Pink Flamingos in Portland

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

*Disclaimers:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily: I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
Intel Software Network: I provide consulting services to Intel, and these blog posts are one part of my consulting engagement.
The Crazy Neighbor: This is a Fast Wonder LLC venture.

intel

Joining Intel as Community Manager for MeeGo

February 23, 2010 Dawn 31 Comments

Big changes are coming my way in March. I will be joining Intel on March 1 as Intel’s community manager for the newly formed MeeGo open source community. MeeGo was formed out of a merging of the Moblin and Maemo communities, and I am really excited about the opportunity to work on this new project. As I dig into MeeGo and get more familiar with my specific role, I’ll post more details about exactly what I’ll be doing.

This is my second tour at Intel; I first worked at Intel from 2000 – 2006. At that time, I had never worked for a company with less than 20,000 employees. All of my work experience was in large corporations, but I had no startup experience. I left Intel specifically to spend a few years working in much smaller startups and to focus on roles where I would be building online communities. I worked in 2 startups, including Jive Software where I built and managed the Jivespace developer community. When I joined Jive, there were only 50 employees, and a year later when there were nearly 150 people, it started to feel less like a startup. At that point, I decided that it was time for me to break out on my own to do freelance consulting, which was something I had been wanting to do for a while. Freelancing was another first for me, since I had never owned my own business or done any outside consulting.

I have been consulting for almost 2 years, and there are parts of it that I love and parts that aren’t as awesome. I love working with clients to build communities and having copious amounts of flexibility in my schedule and working arrangements. However, I don’t enjoy doing business development, invoicing, and many of the other tedious business tasks. As a freelancer, I pay more in taxes and many things become much more complex, difficult and time consuming: health insurance, retirement savings, etc. There are also the inevitable ups and downs that cause plenty of stress when you are trying to line up that next gig to replace the one that is wrapping up.

The biggest challenge for me is one that sounds almost counter-intuitive, but it is the biggest issue that I have with my freelancing career. By becoming a freelancer, I took my hobbies and turned them into paying gigs. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? Well, it was great … at first. Recently, I realized that many of the things that I used to do for fun now seemed like work, and they became less fun over time. All of a sudden, activities like blogging, attending events, speaking at events, and more felt like a big weight on my shoulders, since I needed to use these as ways to generate more business. They started to feel more like marketing and less like something that I was passionate about and doing for fun. All of a sudden, my hobbies had mostly disappeared, and I was spending all of my time doing things that felt like work, which has left me burned out. This is the primary reason that I recently decided to go back to corporate life.

I’ve been doing a bit of consulting at Intel, and I’ve enjoyed seeing some of the changes that have happened while I was gone. I’ll be joining the Open Source Technology Center, which has grown since I left, but I still have many friends working on open source at Intel, and I am eager to work with them again. I’ve also been really impressed with how other groups at Intel have embraced social efforts through the work of people like Josh Bancroft, Kelly Feller, Bryan Rhoads and many others.

I’m looking forward to working on MeeGo and am truly excited to be going back to Intel.

shared links

Blogging Elsewhere

February 19, 2010 Dawn

Here is this week’s summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

Google Buzz: Responding to the Community

Intel Software Network*

The Crazy Neighbor*

Free Copier in the Rain

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

*Disclaimers:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily: I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
Intel Software Network: I provide consulting services to Intel, and these blog posts are one part of my consulting engagement.
The Crazy Neighbor: This is a Fast Wonder LLC venture.

shared links

Open source, research, and other stuff I'm interested in posting.