May 3-7, 2005
Thesis Presentations
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| itp Infotracks | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author(s): | Takashi Mizohata | |
| Instructor: | Barton, Jake | |
| Class: | Final Project Seminar | |
| URL: | http://labs.grf-design.com/iit/ | |
| Keywords: | Folksonomy, Group ware, Web service, Web application | |
| A social software to improve the information circulation in ITP community. | ||
| itp Infotracks is a social software for ITP students to see our community communication in a different and supposedly efficient way. For us as a member of ITP\'ers, there are a few ways to communicate each other online. But they are all distributed throughout on the network, and because it is much easier asking something to people than searching by ourselves, we have a tendency to ask too much. And then lots of \"important\" information might be buried in the other chats and become difficult to find it out for most of silent participants. To approach those problems, this project suggests alternative \"tracks\" of information in ITP community. It adopts a folksonomical approach in order to categorize and archive messages. All messages are exchanged in XML format, so people can customize and extend very easily. | ||
| Personal Statement: | As my understanding, we, as ITP students, are here because we deal with a lot of information and express it with a cutting-edge form. There are a lot of great works, but reflecting back ourselves, we only have a few traditional sets of tool at school to communicate each other on the internet. My concern here is that all community information on the Internet is too much scattered. There is no center, it\'s not organized, so that we don\'t know how to search it, then ask somebody like \"Hey, I know this has been brought up before, but I missed...\" again.
Now we are seeing great, typically web-browser-based, modern tools for organizing information, being developed on the Internet. And we do like to use them. We love flickr to share pictures, we love del.icio.us to organize own bookmark and see somebody\'s bookmarks. We use Technorati and bloglines to keep watching blogs. Since we are here to make something, why don\'t I make the tool for solving my concern, picking up good points from those our favourite tools existing on the internet, and make it specialized for the small group of people like us? It should NOT be just an imitation of those tools. Since all tools I make are dealing with personal activities, and making them socialized, it should be some sort of a synergy maker to encourage to share information more. | |
| Context: | What is our current situation, what we have here? We have \"social.itp.nyu.edu\", which offers basically an administrators-controled service. There are Wiki, Weblog hosting service, Mailing-list, and Chat. But honestly, I never use those services, except Wiki. Wiki is getting more and more popular, and everybody seems to like it, but i don\'t think it\'s organized. There is also a student driven software called \"ITP Skills\", which is actually three pieces of softwares such as Skills database, Events Calendar and Floor 4 Public Blog. Skills database is a self assessment \"honor\" system to share our own skills. Events Calendar doesn\'t seem working, and Floor 4 Public Blog is an editor centric way of organizing and archiving the information. They are all for good purpose, but it\'s hard to say that they have a great success, so far.
We have \"stage.itp.nyu.edu\", which is mostly for the students. All students have their own space, shell access and if you apply, you can have MySQL database access too. Many people have MovableType or WordPress blogs on their accounts for class journals. Especially for Physcal-computing class, we are all are required to make it, and on the each instructors\' p-comp sites, they are put all students blog together in one page. And we have ITP Students list, which has the most traffic at this point. It\'s very traditional, kind of old-fashioned mailing-list service. It only has very poor feature, it doesn\'t even keep the archive more than 1 week. And I believe there are some people who keep their blogs on their own sites. | |
| Audience: | All ITP students are audience, and participants. | |
| User Scenario: | (comes here later.) | |
| Methodology: | Aggregate emails from the list. (GMail as a wrapper and archiver, put them into MySQL)
Folksonomy Implementation. Correspondence Scoring Grouping. | |