Google Experiments

I just came across Google Experiments–a kinda of pre-beta test drive of some new things they are working on. Great way to get user feedback. Overall, it doesn’t seem like Google has many secrets to hide from competitors. Are they even worried about competitors? Doesn’t feel like they are, and that’s probably a good thing.

The four experiements currently up for review all have a heavy UI component to them. The keyboard shortcuts don’t seem rich enough to be worthwhile. I’m also wondering if the shortcuts will present conflicts with other browser keys and devices.  I like the alternative views for search. Let’s you switch strategies and see different facets of your search quickly.

People Search Engines

Previously, I wrote about Spock–a new people search engine that scraps all kinds of public person data from the web. Here is an interesting article reviewing Spock and others:

http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=37403

These types of search services are drawing on a lot of resources, including open web pages, but also things like LinkedIn and even Twitter posts. Pipl claims to be doing deep web searches into the databases. This was my favorite of the bunch (apart from Spock) because the entity resolution seemed to be best.

Couldn’t help but think about Mags Hanley’s talk at the Euro IA Summit this year, where we discussed privacy and different levels of personal information. These types of meta-people-search sites are making any distinctions and going for it all, so it seems. It’ll probably be really hard to keep information private in the future.  We’re all giving off enormous amounts of exoinformation whether we know it or not.

Blog Heros – Free Chapters

Chris Anderson, of Long Tail fame, has this post on his blog about free chapters from a new book called Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers by Mike Banks.

The idea from the publisher (Wiley)  is that each of the 30 interviewees gets to give away his or her chapter. Interesting marketing scheme. Sure, the entire book is now available for free on the web, but you’d have to do some scavagering to it all. And along the way you’d be exposed to messages from the authors about their work and about the book. So there may be a powerful marketing effect here.

Others who are promoting their own chapter include Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing, David Rothman at TeleBlog and Steve Garfield.

Not sure if I’m going to buy the book. It’s only $17 on Amazon.com, but €26 on Amazon.de.

Information Quality Article in JASIST

The October issue of JASIST has an article about measuring information quality. (Cite: Besiki Stvilia, Les Gasser, Michael B. Twidale, Linda C. Smith (2007). “A framework for information quality assessment” JASIST, 58, 12 (1720-1733). Here is a copy of the paper in different format, although I think the text is exactly the same.

The authors start off with:

“Information is increasingly becoming a critical resource in contemporary societies and organizations. For institutional and individual processes that depend on information, the quality of information (IQ) is one of the key determinants of the quality of their decisions and actions. The familiar “garbage in, garbage out” mantra of computing expresses the problem succinctly. The amount and diversity of information available, and the number and variety of information publishers have grown at an unmanageable rate. Unfortunately, as more information becomes available for use, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify “garbage.” Historically, there have been culturally sanctioned mechanisms of IQ assurance, such as the peer review process for research, human screening and cleaning for database entries, and careful editing processes for books and magazines. However, these are breaking down for reasons of scale and cost (McCook, 2006).”

They go on with some academic bla-bla-bla-ing before getting to a framework for measuring IQ. This is like a list of heuristics broken into these three categories:

• Intrinsic IQ: This category includes dimensions of IQ that can be assessed by measuring internal attributes or characteristics of information in relation to some reference standard in a given culture. Examples include spelling mistakes (dictionary), conformance to formatting or representational standards (HTML validation), and information currency (age with respect to a standard index date, e.g., “today”).
• Relational or contextual IQ: This category of IQ dimensions measures relationships between information and some aspects of its usage context. One common subclass in this category includes the representational quality dimensions. Those dimensions measure how well an information entity reflects (maps) some external condition (e.g., actual accuracy of addresses in an address database) in a given context.
• Reputational IQ: This category of IQ dimensions measures the position of an information entity in a cultural or activity structure, often determined by its origin and record of mediation.

Here’s the full list of metrics:

Intrinsic
1. Accuracy/Validity
2. Cohesiveness
3. Complexity
4. Semantic Consistency
5. Structural Consistency
6. Currency
7. Informativeness/Redundancy
8. Naturalness
9. Precision/Completeness

Relational/Contextual
10. Accuracy
11. Accessibility
12. Complexity
13. Naturalness
14. Informativeness/Redundancy
15. Relevance
16. Precision/Completeness
17. Security
18. Semantic Consistency
19. Structural Consistency
20. Verifiability
21. Volatility

Reputational
22. Authority

Complete, ain’t it? Not really practical for us regular guys on the street. Someone needs to come along and slim this done before it has any real use outside of academic ivory towers.

I’m most interested in Authority and Credibility, but that seems to stand on its own in this framework, whereas other areas get a lot of detail and attention.

Marcia Bates – What is Browsing?

Marcia Bates has a new, interesting article in Information Research called “What is browsing— really? A model drawing from behavioural science research.” This is an invited paper, and, as the title suggests, it’s a review of empirical research reported in previous studies. Professor Bates is able to draw conclusions based on others’ research and arrive at a model for browsing.

The opening paragraph itself is quite compelling:

“Though often seen as a casual, incidental behaviour in the general society, browsing, in the information world, is widely recognized as an important information seeking technique. In an academic context, scholars have argued that frequent browsing is often the only way to locate information and resources that cannot be readily described by index terms. Further, some kinds of information are recognized as relevant only upon discovery. In short, there are the things you know you do not know and the things you do not know you do not know. Browsing provides an alternative strategy for locating information of the first kind and may provide one of the crucial ways for information of the second kind to be encountered.”

She goes one to review different definitions and models of browsing and concludes that:

“…browsing can be seen to contain four elements, iterated indefinitely, until the overall episode ends:

1. glimpsing a field of vision;
2. selecting or sampling a physical or representational object from the field;
3. examining the object; and
4. physically or conceptually acquiring the examined object, or abandoning it.”

Note that the author herself recognizes that this is visually based, and it omits browsing such things as sound files or the type of browsing a blind person might do while listening to a screen reader. So we have to understand “glimpses” as both visual and auditory–and perhaps even as tactile when considering a Braille reader.

Interestingly enough, Bates pins browsing back to a primal urge all animals have to explore their environment. This recalls Peter Pirolli’s and Stuart Card’s Information Foraging Theory work. Bates writes:

“The in-built motivation for this exploratory behaviour can be called curiosity. Because humans are so strongly reliant on vision, bodily motion often mirrors visual search, in that the second stage of browsing often involves physical movement toward items of interest, which movement, of course, also supports closer visual inspection.”

The last paragraph of the article is disappointing, however:

“The design of interactive information systems needs to incorporate an awareness of human browsing characteristics. Specifically, browsing for information in such systems should not be limited to the opportunity to scan, but instead enable the searcher to manifest the instinctive tendency to engage in a browsing sequence: to glimpse, then to examine or not something glimpsed, then to keep or not the things examined.”

Such vague recommendations for someone who isn’t really in the business of desiging systems always makes me cringe. What does this really mean to any of us who actually design interactive information systems? Not much, I’m afraid.

This article is timely for me, though. I’m scheduled to give a talk at the IA Konferenz in Stuttgart in November on the integration of search and browse. I’ll of course be citing berrypicking material from Bates, but there may be more stuff in this article I can use too. My talk is based directly on Chapter 11 from Designing Web Navigation, where I write:

“From a user’s perspective, navigating and searching aren’t necessarily contrasting activities. People just want to find the information they need. The two aren’t mutually exclusive and really different sides of the same coin. Integrating navigation and search, then, better supports how people really look for information.”

Two New Videos from Michael Wesch

Michael Wesch, creator of the famous Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us video, produced two new videos. He’s now made them publicly available:

Information R/Evolution
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM
This is based on the observations of Clay Shirky and David Weinberger that the order of information in the ditigal has very different rules. It’s nice to watch, but the argument is an old one.

A vision of college students today
http://youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
This one is about the state of secondary education in the U.S. Some interesting statistics here.
Both  make you think, so I have to give credit to Professor Wesch once again.

FeedHub

Jan tipped me off to FeedHub. This is a beta attempt at filtering lots of RSS feeds. I have to admit I’m not 100% what it tells me, but it appears to be doing some kind of text analytics on my feeds. It then personalize a structure around those feeds. The goal is to reduce RSS clutter and noise, so I can focus on the topics and subjects I want to (so they claim).

Here is what mSpoke, the creators of FeedHub, have to say about its inner workings in a blog post:

“Very simply, we learn about you based on the implicit usage of your personalized feed and any explicit gestures you choose to share with us. We use this information to distill a set of “memes” that describe your preferences. Each meme represents some characteristic of a post, like its topic, popularity in del.icio.us, or number of Diggs. Each meme also has a strength that indicates how predictive FeedHub expects it to be in choosing content you’ll like. As we learn about you, FeedHub automatically discovers new memes for you and strengthens or weakens memes appropriately.”

So you basically give FeedHub your feeds as a OPML file, it analyzes them for you, and then builds a profile of your interests that you can manage and customize.The basic building block of all of this is what they are calling a meme, or an extracted category.

I’m quite confused about the overall experience and how this really helps me make sense of the feeds I currently subscribe to. If anyone has more experience with it, I’d like to hear about it.

Euro IA 2007 – Kars Alfrink: Playful IAs

Another stellar presentation at Euro IA in Barcelona was Kars’ Playful IAs (see presentation on SlideShare). This was a really inspiring talk. In fact, I referred to his point about IA becoming second order design in my talk. Thanks for that tip, Kars.

He talked about how the approach game designers take to creating video games can be applied to web design. I quite like this cross-disciplinary approach. There are four points to consider:

1. Challenges – You want to engage users. This doesn’t mean pissing them off, but “Don’t Make Me Think” is really a misnomer: make people think (or enable them to think), but don’t make them frustrated.
2. Rewards – Games reward you for completing a task or level. How can your site reward visitors for completing a step towards a goal?
3. Goals – Of course, people come to your site to accomplish something.
4. Feedback – Sounds like a standard design guideline, but it’s worth repeating. Let people know where they are and what they’ve done.

These aspects–borrowed from game design–can be used to approach the design of emergent web systems. The goal it to create a small rule or system or pattern that can then expand out or up as needed.

Maybe we need to start talking about fractal patterns or self-similar patterns in information architecture? Now there’s a PhD dissertation topic for you: fractal information archticture.

New Radiohead Album – Pay What You Want

All the kids are talking about it, so I thought I’d join in. Radiohead is selling its new album In Rainbows for whatever price you’d like to pay. Check out the site for online orders for In Rainbows.

Coincidentally, I’m also reading Freakonomics at the moment. The authors discuss incentives at lengths–that’s what drives business, the economy, and most of human behavior, they claim. One example used in the book is of a bagel seller who puts a basket of bagels and a box in business offices. The employees are on the honor system to pay for the bagels they eat. The return rate is something like 87%, so the owner of the business can make regular plans around revenue and costs and such.

Without any predetermined price on the new Radiohead album, maybe fans will be motivated to pay more than you’d think out of good will, or maybe they’ll just pay for the download to ensure the band will stick around?

This isn’t the only time such a payment model has appeared. When you decide to buy an album for download from Magnatune, for instance, you can choose the price you’d like to pay. Very counter-intuitive business idea. I wonder if such models can sustain.