Thoughts across disciplines by Engin Erdoğan
I made a simple flash toy to create seals out of my new year’s resolutions. In case you are into seals too, you can play with it here.
I wanted my resolutions list to look a bit more glorified, since it will be the to-do for one year. Otherwise, it might feel like Tufte’s example of Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint.
Anyhow. Wishes, seals, happy 2009.
I am reading Seth Godin’s most recent book Tribes these days. In this book, Seth Godin provokes people to step up and let the driving purpose surface followers, their tribes. Overall, it feels like Seth Godin could not sleep one night and ended up writing the book that night.
I like the way he differentiates management (looking backward) from leadership (looking forward). My favorite quote from the book so far:
“The art of leadership is understanding what you can’t compromise on.”
The art part is somewhat business guru-ish, still well put.
I captured the video below at Twitter Election 2008 website at 11:45pm on Monday, November 3, fifteen minutes before the 2008 American Presidential Election day. It is a one-minute long segment of real-time updates from election-oriented minds from all over the world.
I followed the election news on Twitter’s Election 2008 website. It is filled with pointers to quick news, facts, speculations, little emotional explosions, debates, lies, hates, etc etc, from people to people, in real time. I feel like this is where people have been so honestly upfront with all their beliefs, like it or not. It is difficult to get that anywhere else, so I recorded it to have a reference to it later on.
Besides I use it sporadically, Twitter has never been this useful for me - one pretty much witnesses history in real time on this website. I guess this is what happens in Twitter everyday anyway, however, this one has a greater historical implication.
Good times Twitter.
I have been using this lifestreaming service called FriendFeed. If you don’t know about it, it logs your web activity from the websites you choose and makes it easy to share with others.
For example, people see when I upload photos to Flickr, change my status message at Twitter, bookmark something with Delicious while reading something in Google Reader, or love a song at Last.fm.
I like the (rather perceived than actual) immediacy of it. You can initiate/join really quick (and ephemeral) conversations with people around shared content.
I decided to show my activity on my website as well, through this Wordpress plugin, hence the sidebar on the right. The information is not up to date to the minute, since it takes a while for FriendFeed to receive information from other services added on RSS updating issues. But it’s definitely more up to date then the rest of my website ;)
This sidebar makes me think: what if I can host my own FriendFeed like I do Wordpress? And, the wonderful world of internets (Chris Messina, to be more precise) leads me to this emerging, open source, self-hosted lifestream software called Sweetcron, from the prolific Yongfook. I even downloaded and set it up to try, you can see a running demo at xdiscipline.com/lifestream.
Sweetcron is nowhere close to Wordpress right now, with its bugs and naive admin interface. But I must say, I see a lot of promise in this thing. It is sustainable in the sense that it keeps your audience connected through automated micro-updates. In other words, it recycles web activities so that even if we don’t post, we have something going on our sites. This way, we all might not have to write those apologetic posts about how we have not been updating.
This clipping is from MIT Technology Review’s August issue. It tells us about some scientific research on (ultimately) restoring vision for the blind.
The title is written 3 times in different ways: First one is catchy for everyday folk, second is intro to behind the scenes for more curious/hobbyist, third is the research article’s title itself. Great example for how science could be communicated to different audiences.
Today is Labor Day, a celebration of the economic and social achievements of workers around the world. Just the right time to introduce our new project, User Labor, to address the issue of the economic sustainability of social web services.
With User Labor, we propose an open data structure, User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web.
Web 2.0 services have been assuming the availability of user-generated content in exchange with the utility they offer. For example, in a (needless to say, social) photo sharing service, people upload photos, which create traffic. Traffic creates advertising revenue, which sustains the service. In this cycle, what is supposed to sustain user-generated content is access to the service. However, some user-generated content creates more value for the service than the other. So, how does the service sustain the one that offers higher value, relative to others? In order to answer that question, we need to know how much potential value (i.e. ad revenue) a user generates with how much traffic, through how much content. This is the idea behind User Labor, to determine metrics.
What next? Potential outcomes are, finer use typologies (instead of just power user), richer service offerings (instead of just free and premium), even a new resume format for users to be used across online services… Also, discussions to emerge around how different users can be rewarded, in what terms.
You can read more at User Labor website.
Also see Burak, my partner in crime reporting on User Labor in his blog.
On April 7, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) put a new rule into action. According to this rule, the reports of all NIH funded research must be made available to public within one year in PubMed, a free-access digital library of biomedical research. This is a great step towards increasing the public accessibility of scientific research. After all, if public pays for the research, the work should be accessible to public.
But why one year? Why is the arbitrary limitation? Because, otherwise the business of scientific journals would be threatened. Apparently, some of these journals have hired an aggressive PR firm to work on this “issue” of open access. Funny how scientific journals are dealing with this similar to how the oil companies dealt with global warming, or how cigarette companies lobby to influence policies.
In spite of all the business shadiness, it is quite exciting to think what open access would enable. This is an infrastructural step for open accessibility. Next step is to make it more user-friendly. For example, Public Library of Science (PLoS) already requires a more user-friendly abstract in research submissions, to make the submission easier to understand for people outside of the field. Ultimately, advanced science may find interfaces for capturing larger audiences. This is particularly hopeful for new generations who would grow up with such access.
On the other hand, having an expert community is still instrumental, just like in any other field. However, an expert community can co-exist with public access. On a similar note, the expert reactions and reviews on scientific research can be also open, which makes me think about the traditional peer-review systems. The journal editor-expert review cycle is already being re-considered, maybe this news will be of inspiration to those who is in the process of re-shaping the peer-review systems.
NPR’s Science Friday has a nice program on this issue, you can listen to it here.
A couple of late night snapshots from my sketchbook on two-way consumption in (mostly ad supported) web services.
At a recent travel, I came across the real-time feedback devices in Beijing Airport. These devices are situated right in front of the passport police, and the traveler can rate passport police’s service.
I like the idea because it gives the traveler a quick opportunity to react to good service or poor service without writing a letter. Also, it is incentive for the officer to think more service-oriented. Finally, this is an interesting instance of real world adopting a digital convention, immediate feedback.
I am curious who collects this feedback and how it is processed.
Yesterday, a bunch of social network services (Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Hi5, Engage, Ning, etc) agreed upon a new platform called OpenSocial, initiated by Google. With this new platform, developers will create applications that work across services and people will be able to reach out to their friends in other networks through these applications. Basically, this is like Facebook’s functionality enabled across other social network sites. The scale has just got much larger.
My friends in Facebook, created by Friend Wheel Application
We are witnessing the emergence of a new medium, where the user is the content. It’s no coincidence that social advertising networks upon these platforms are being developed as we speak. From a business perspective, there is a huge potential. The continuity of social interactions through little applications (as we see in Facebook) can be overwhelmingly high in these networks, which is free content for the service. Applications, or ephemeral tools for engagement are developed virtually at no extra cost. The more user activity, the more knowledge for the service, the more basis for targeted advertising.
I think it would be quite fair to say that users work for these services. With advertising or other revenue models, the service can make a lot of money through the immaterial labor of users. The scale is no joke, we are talking about approximately 100 million users (and increasing).
Two questions:
1/ Will the users ever get compensated for the value they bring to the service?
2/ If so, how much would that be and who will determine this value?
Related links:
Also check out Burak Arikan’s provoking points on OpenSocial at his blog.
