March 03, 2006
Notes from today's meeting with Clay
list of main ideas from our presentation:
- weblogs have done this for text. Video is different.
- social filtering tools.
- display material on a timeline (ability to go back)
- translation & alternate views
- bridging push&pull (RSS feeds & social filtering-> gives a more complex way to receive data)
- scaling between freinds -> haveing a mix of friends (personal) data with traditional news
- economic models
He said that these topics were the main things he picked up from our presentation, and that we definitely have to narrow it down. I think it is obvious which 2 we all like. Probably not going to be difficult to choose.
SOCIAL FILTERING:
filtering of the data that reaches you, through your peer network (1st neighborhood - most affect,2nd - less... etc). By the 6th neighborhood of peers, we should be basically reaching the whole WWW. "The Daily Me" - this model of social filtering exists nowadays, but too self-centered -> doesn't take into account outside news, this way the user can miss out on important events. Also, this model allows for little serendipity (which we all love), as well as it being hard to know what will be interesting for me (how do i know, when I don't know what's out there?!)
Clay said that we should basically take social filtering for granted - we should think that in a couple of years the technology is there, and that we can apply it to our application.
PROBLEMS WITH VIDEO:
ALTERNATE POINTS OF VIEWS / GLOBAL INTERESTS:
translation & thresholds. Networking local sites. Clay talked about how there is a loss of control -> beforehand, there used to be only 3 news networks, which everyone looked at to see the news. That was the absolute truth. Nowadays, there are so many sources, each one telling the story a bit differently. "Fake neutrality is gone!". How can we trust the news? There is a movement from authority to proxy-> peer review is a better model (wikipedia vs. Britanica).
- But how can we bridge these cultural gaps and get people to know things that they don't know?
- how do we say to someone "you should see this, for different values of 'should' ??"
his suggestions:
- translate 3 weblog posts for the ITP community / pick a few topics to translate for the ITP list -> find something thats not translated regularly and that people would be interested in reading
- write to the ITP list and ask who wants to subscribe
- need to find sources of video (maybe from ITP students)
- who are the users? Interview them about their interests from foreign countries. What would they like to see? Have no more than 10 questions.
- something good & linguistically remote -> is always a problem to find and bring to people! will be a challenge.
- he suggested that we "take advantage of the potential for the international social capital" that exists through the internet, and that is still fairly untouched.
WE NEED TO SEND CLAY A PARAGRAPH - "we are working on x" - explaining which part we're going to concentrate on in the next couple of weeks.
Posted by Gilad Lotan at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)
March 02, 2006
Design Expo - first big presentation
Comments from critics:
- better to make it platform independent
- look at dabble.com
- regular people can't take the spot of journalists (they misunderstood us)
- lower transaction cost -> TV price is a big deal here, not lowest common denominator
- look at the participatory culture project
USER TESTING - try to build something small and test it out. Document with video, etc...
Clay's notes:
- 2 minutes in, the audience needs to know what the application is
- if it is platform based, first need to show an example of an application
- assumptions should be made CLEAR! -> TV will not disappear. Media from this century hasn't disappeared. lean forward media & lean back media -> this is how we're bridging the gap.
... try to take only MAX 4 problems to solve...
- Backwards - people we can talk to who can give us user testing (video cam - question them & get reactions)
- Under - research similar projects that exist.
- Forward - what can we model or build -> specificity
(go from width to depth now -> lower down, spread, choose, specify)
Social Filtering: aggregate & filter news and posts by using your social network as a filter. A critical mass of users with overlapping interests is needed for social filtering to be effective.
- David Weinberger
- "Collaborative filtering"
Posted by Gilad Lotan at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2006
Design Expo - Feb 20th, thoughts
From an article about Wikipedia in China - "Wikipedia is special because other places don't have this kind of discussion, at least not such an intellectual discussion. It's a place where people with different backgrounds interact," said Shi, a prolific contributor to the Chinese Wikipedia. "But that wasn't even our goal. Our goal was just to produce an encyclopedia."
Looking at Wikipedia entries I realize how important it is to keep track of all this information and to have this 'hub' where people store and update their stories. Just from spending 10 minutes reading the Myanmar page I learned so much information. These are all virtual webpages. But what if each piece of information represented a physical space/spot. The connection between this information and the physical space seems very important to me.
E-politics is also a very interesting route to take. Virtual democracy, where the majority is obvious and truly represents the users of the application.
Clay's reactions and notes on PNN:
- The RSS part of the application we can take for granted. I've been playing around with Netvibes this week, and amazingly its almost IDENTICAL to what we were envisioning. It is also important that we keep that one layer of friends almost as a 'filter', so its not just friends of friends of friends, but what's important to the people around you might be important to you. And you can only directly affect the people around you. It is interesting to use the Internet only as a transport layer this way, for our information, and as a connection between people, but not have the application open and free for everyone and anyone. Basically, if we take on this project, we should concentrate on the distribution part of it and not the aggregation part.
For next presentation - we should put the important points on cards, and then sort the cards out into a logical presentation.
Posted by Gilad Lotan at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2006
readings
David Isenberg
The need to communicate is primary, like the need to breathe, eat, sleep, reproduce, socialize and learn. Better connections make for better communication. Better connections drive economic growth through better access to suppliers, customers and ideas. Better connections provide for development and testing of ideas in science and the arts. Better connections improve the quality of everyday life. Better connections build stronger democracies. Strong democracies build strong networks.
F2C:Freedom to Connect begins with two assumptions. First, if some connectivity is good, then more connectivity is better. Second, if a connection that does one thing is good, then a connection that can do many things is better.
Global Voices aims to redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media. We’re using a wide variety of technologies - weblogs, wikis, podcasts, tags, aggregators and online chats - to call attention to conversations and points of view that we hope will help shed new light on the nature of our inter-connected world.
“We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech.
To that end, we seek to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak — and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it.”
Q: What is a bridgeblogger?
A bridgeblogger is someone who uses her weblog to increase understanding between people from different countries or cultures. Bridgebloggers sometimes are people who write about their home countries for a global audience, like Jeff Ooi in Malaysia, Issac Mao in China or Big Pharaoh in Egypt. Often they’re expatriates, like Hossein Derakshan, who writes about Iran from Canada, or Ory Okolloh, who writes Kenyan Pundit from Cambridge, MA. And sometimes bridgeblogs are written by people who are passionate about another culture, even though they have no ethnic link to that nation - your hosts Ethan and Rebecca both fit that description.
Not every blog written about politics, global cultures or current events is a bridge blog. A blog about Basque politics, written in Basque for a Basque audience is probably not bridging between cultures - a blog about Basque politics written in Basque and Castellano might well be. A blog written by Basque and Castellano speakers to encourage communication between the two groups certainly would be.
We are trying to create a global index of bridge content. For examples of what people are trying to do with these index pages, see Ghana, Antarctica or Morocco.
Feel like watching a nation? Please add your name next to the country in the list below, and add the page itself to your watchlist (follow the "Watch this page" link once you're looking at the page itself). Then watch the feeds listed on the page for new bridge sources, and add them to the page when you find them... or add your own favorite feeds to the list.
Posted by Gilad Lotan at 07:15 PM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2006
Feb 13th meeting
Main ideas:
- Real time learning (of software) through other people's usage of the program. This should somehow be extended to learning languages... or anything. Best if you could learn passively, through another person's actions.
- P2P phone application - connects between needs of people in the same location (ikea shared van...)
- visual display of map - geography of media coming in from different parts of the world.
Posted by Gilad Lotan at 01:07 AM | Comments (0)
February 09, 2006
Design Expo - Lesson #4, thoughts
Things that I liked, and thoughts that came up from today's lesson:
- physical exchange -> electronic notification. Is there some physical action that could use an electronic (digital) system to back it up? (postal). Physical action in 3rd world country-> can turn into something virtual. This leads to some options:
a) the 'personal news' idea that we had where each person can bring out their own personal story.
b) points of access to the network in 3rd world countries, where people would gather, mainly to receive data and receive education.
- In a free system, there will always be spam
- Is there a way to organize all of the data that we have so that we'd be the 'mesanenim' and each of us is in charge of our own personal 'desk'?
- I like the idea of a chip that's shut most of the time, and only when triggered, emits some signal.
- Multi-networks - doesn't depend only on a certain network. That's 'shakuf'
- telecom network that's under the ground? Possible? Which radio frequency?
- community system for crime prevention
- pen that's networked, uses magnets to guide its user. Learn how to write.
for next week:
20 min. presentation, visually rich, more sketches and diagrams. In the effects part, can have just single words on page. Try to script it a little more.
Posted by Gilad Lotan at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)
February 03, 2006
Inspiration from Feb 3rd meeting
Different thoughts of what we think will happen in a future world that's more connected came up today. Some personally very strong.
I've been to so many places that mean a lot to me, my family's history, and generally the world's history. Thinking of places where unimaginable disasters happened like Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and even Ko Phi Phi. What if greater connectivity meant that we can have certain places on earth connected (somehow physically). For instance, make a connection between Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor, both sides of the same event. So instead of having just a Japanese war memorial in Japan, and an American war memorial in Hawaii, somehow to show both sides of the story. This relates to a future world where one person can have the ability to broadcast his/her personal views to many people. Taking this idea to a different level, this could somehow connect between classrooms from different sides of the world. Generally, the idea of being able to offer education worldwide through the greater amount of bandwidth/connectivity is a dream.
I think this idea of keeping a place's history has immense potential. Need to research more.
Posted by Gilad Lotan at 10:38 PM | Comments (0)
February 02, 2006
Reading for week 2 - Open Source TV
The internet is a medium for communication between humans (through computers). As humans, we are distiguished from apes by our flexible communicaion strategies, the essence of what makes us social beings. Language defines the scope of consciousness. Wittgenstein believed that all philosophy was a result of the imperfections of language. Orwell created Newspeak to portray the prison of a language which extinguished all political thought. By definition, communication is a social act-> hence a political act.
Information has to be free. When the Chinese try to create a "wall" to block free flow of information, an alternative spontaneously arises. In this sense, the Internet is endlessly protean and autopoeic. There is an interesting borderline here, between whats free and whats not. Should software be free? Should searching google be a free service? Should access to the internet be free?
As media consumers, we need to liberate ourselves from the anti-market forces of the free-to-air commercial networks, and, as creators and purveyors of audiovisual content, we need to free ourselves from the anti-market forces of commercial networks as programme distributors. In other words, we need to develop a comprehensive computational and emergent strategy to disintermediate the distributors of audiovisual media, directly connecting producers to consumers, and further, erasing the hard definition between producer and consumer, so that a producer’s product will only be identifiable by its inherent quality, in the eyes of the viewer, and not by the imprimatur of the distributor => GET RID OF THE MIDDLE MAN!
The digital TV is a great output device, but a lousy tuner, because the design of the device reinforces the psychology of spectrum scarcity. What we need, therefore, is a new device, which sits between the Internet, on one hand, and the digital television set, on the other, and acts as a new kind of tuner, thereby enabling a new, disintermediated distribution mechanism. The basic specification for this device is quite simple: it would be capable of locating, downloading and displaying audiovisual content, in any common format, on the viewer’s chosen display device.
Interface is communication, interface is a language, and the user’s fluency in that language determines their level of satisfaction as they interact with the device. Interactions do not occur in isolation. Every time a user interacts with a device, he brings with him the memory of all prior interactions with that device. Some of the best interfaces maintain a memory of their use, and employ persistent data to reconfigure their behavior. Interaction must be seen as a continuum; it is not a single event but an evolving relationship which, if properly constructed, evolves the interface as the user grows more familiar with it. “If you liked that programme, you’ll probably like this one as well.”
Technology that disrupts copyright does so because it simplifies and cheapens creation, reproduction and distribution. The existing copyright businesses exploit inefficiencies in the old production, reproduction and distribution system, and they'll be weakened by the new technology. But new technology always gives us more art with a wider reach: that's what tech is for.
Posted by Gilad Lotan at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)
January 31, 2006
Week 2 readings
* Rise of the Stupid Network, David Isenberg,
http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html
"Why the internet is a good idea."
* My Fiendster Experience, "Terbo Ted"
http://www.somalit.com/Fiendster_Experience.html
"Getting addicted to human connectivity through network connectivity."
* What is P2P, Clay Shirky
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/11/24/shirky1-whatisp2p.html "Topology is destiny."
* Open Source Television, Mark Pesce
http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle4565.html "Media, post-scarcity."
Posted by Gilad Lotan at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)