Blogs

If anyone is interested in Aaron Swartz's last writing, here is the link for it: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00481ED1V01Y201302WBE005

This short work is the first draft of a book manuscript by Aaron Swartz written for the series "Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web" at the invitation of its editor, James Hendler.

I today came a cross to MIT technology review that investigated which Q&A site is best; the author, Wade Roush asked the same two original questions at each site: “Why did the Mormons settle in Utah?” and “What is the best way to make a grilled cheese sandwich?” The first one is a fact-finding question and the second one is opinion-seeking question. (http://www.technologyreview.com/news/407029/whats-the-best-qa-site/)

The author awarded each site up to three points for the richness and originality of its features, and up to three points for the quality of the answers to my three questions, for a total of 12 possible points. And here is the result:

1. AnswerBag
2. Askville
3. Live QnA
4. Wondir
5. Yahoo Answers
6. Yedda

The time when he reviewed those sites for his two questions is outdated (other QA sites such as Quora have been emerged, and such expert-based Q&A sites (e.g., Google Answers) did not included, though), but it is interesting to see how each site works for his questions.

How to make home-made whitening stuff for your teeth?
How to remove stains on your carpet?
How to make your own spaghetti sauce?

Pinterest is a sort of newer version of image bookmarking system in which people are allowed to create and manage images based on his/her personal interests. The early stage use of Pinterest among people was limited to browse other users' images on the pinboard, re-pin some images that you are interested in, and organize your pinboard by personal interests. But, I've recently observed many use Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/) to learn things, i.e., cooking exotic foods, cleaning stuff, decorating houses... you name it.

It is an interesting phenomenon that people adapt the Pinterest's structure for their social interactions in order to seek and share information to learn and explore that triggers one's interests. There are many sites like e.g., Yahoo! Answers, eHow, etc., where interest users whom want to receive "how to" information based on their needs. But, people always need to specify what they want to learn, know, or get information every single time. In addition, information provided by those sites are limited by their query. However, in Pinterest, it allows the users to view and learn various information based on his/her interests. For instance, if a user follows someone who constantly provides interesting recipes for Italian foods (it's assumable that this user is interested in cooking), he/she can receive a variety of information to learn how to cook Italian foods based on the recipes that are posted on that someone's wall. Note that the user can definitely follow other users who also provide other recipes.. This signifies that the user is easily exposed to enormous information of how-to depending on his/her personal interests. Not only following someone because of similar interests, Pinterest also allows the users to view other posts that are not necessarily attractive to one's interest by giving the options of choosing different categories like health & beauty, humor, celebrity, etc., to browse which will eventually allow the users to explore and learn.

I think Pinterest not only provides the services and community for users to learn in depth of one's interest but also allow users to explore different things that weren't necessarily related to them but allow them to observe and learn so that one's interests level expands.

I thought you might want to see this this, if you haven't already. It was posted today.

So, I came across these short articles here and here

They basically say that Google is getting smarter at understanding the content behind Java Script and AJAX. As a highlighted result, the text from FB comments now appear in Google‘s search indices. I believe it raises even more privacy concerns for FB users for the most part.

What is your take on this? What are the pros and cons of this for FB in large scale (e.g. Is FB actually going to take advantage of this?) and for the individual users (e.g. Are they going to be dissatisfied with their private comments being visible/searchable? Are they going to reduce their daily dose of FB?, ...) Do you think there is a possibility that Google has done so in order to challenge FB?

http://chronicle.com/article/Maps-of-Citations-Uncover-New/128938/

(re-posting from Jaqueline's FB post)

I have been seeing the news and videos for the past couple of days. So far not very impressed. It looks like a part FB and part Skype with a few of the Google things integrated (like Google Alert, which they call "Spark" in this). It's no FB killer and Google is calling it "project", which means it's way behind even a "beta". They are being careful this time and introduce things in small doses as compared to what they did with Google Wave.

One core notion of Google+ is the idea of "real friend", rather than all kind of people that we add to our FB as our "friends". However, in my opinion, it may already be too late for people to start making distinction between "real friend" and "FB friend". We have been FBfyied when it comes to social networking, just like how we have been Googlefyied when it comes to the web.

This xkcd cartoon says it well.

Sounds very interesting. Here's more information about it:

http://sm.rutgers.edu/hats/

Hi!

I'm Roberto González-Ibáñez, a PhD student in the LIS department. This is my second year in the program and since 2009 I have been studying collaboration in the domain of information science. In 2010 I started working with Dr. Shah in the design of a user study involving 140 participants in pairs. Our goal in that study was to evaluate different scenarios of collaboration, this in terms of space and communication channels. Considering the large amount of data collected (both quantitative and qualitative), so far our analyses have been focused in the following areas:

1) Synergy in collaborative information seeking (CIS)
2) Performance measures
3) Behavioral studies
4) Emotions in CIS
5) Relevance

By mid April I will be conducting new studies involving 30 more participants. In addition to this research I also helped Abhijna and Kanan in their study about query reformulation. My role in that research now is to analyze the eye tracking data and look for possible patterns. Another objective in this study is to identify states in the ISP of users on Internet and create a model that later can be use in simulations.

I am also working as a research assistant in a project leaded by Dr. Jacek Gwizdka about Relevance. So far my role in that project is to help with the synchronization oif multiple devices and the implementation of a software for reading galvanic skin response (GSR) data from a device and analyze that data.

http://collab.infoseeking.org/node/19