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User Profile Here are two people's work that give me a lot of pleasure
Peter Kollock
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/
Marc Smith
http://research.microsoft.com/~masmith/
THE SOCIOLOGY OF CYBERSPACE:
Online Communities and Markets
WINTER 2003
Instructor
Peter Kollock
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/classes/cyberspace/
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User Profile Judith S. Donath
Assistant Professor of Media Arts And Sciences
Director of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab
http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/judith/
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User Profile "The Research Methods Knowledge Base is a comprehensive web-based textbook that addresses all of the topics in a typical introductory undergraduate or graduate course in social research methods"
http://trochim.human.cornell.edu/kb/
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User Profile "The Theory Into Practice (TIP) database contains descriptions of over 50 theories relevant to human learning and instruction. Each description includes the following sections: overview, scope/application, example, principles, and references. Relationships between theories are identified by highlighted text within articles"
http://tip.psychology.org/index.html
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User Profile ONLINE ETYMOLOGY DICTIONARY
"It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial
repositories, put together well after the languages they
define. The roots of language are irrational and of a
magical nature."
-Jorge Luis Borges, Prologue to "El otro, el mismo."
http://www.etymonline.com/
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User Profile Classics in the History of Psychology
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/author.htm
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User Profile Vladimir Batagelj
Graph Theory and Network Analysis
http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/vlado/vladonet.htm
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User Profile Marshall McLuhan, the Man and his Message
http://archives.cbc.ca/300c.asp?69-342-1-69
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User Profile Plant, Sadie. (2000): On the Mobile. The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life. http://www.motorola.com/mot/documents/0,1028,333,00.pdf
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User Profile technology and children's development: a course blog
This is a blog site for a class called "New Technology & Child Development" being taught in the Cognitive Studies in Education program at the University of Washington by Philip Bell.
http://faculty.washington.edu/pbell/kidtech/
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User Profile Seeing Through Computers
Education in a Culture of Simulation
By Sherry Turkle
http://www.prospect.org/print/V8/31/turkle-s.html
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User Profile Hi all
Last year I read a book called Linked which introduced me to this
power law concept.
LINKED: The New Science of Networks
(Paperback available!). "LINKED: The New Science of Networks". How
Everything is Connected to Everything Else
http://www.nd.edu/~networks/linked/
In his latest book Linked; The new science of networks Barabasi
continues to explore the Web's connectedness and network theory.
Barabasi has found that the websites that form the network (of the
WWW) have certain mathematical properties. The conditions for these
properties to occur are threefold. The first is that the network has
to be expanding, growing. This precondition of growth is very
important as the idea of emergence comes with it. It is constantly
evolving and adapting. That condition exists markedly with the world
wide web. The second is the condition of preferential attachment,
that is, nodes (websites) will wish to link themselves to hubs
(websites) with the most connections. The third condition is what is
termed competitive fitness which in network terms means its rate of
attraction. Babarasi, as quoted by Boyle said:
"We have this very inhomogeneous Web structure — many pages and
nobody points to them — and there are a few sites that have millions
of links pointing to them…… "Yes, you could have a Web site out
there, but will anybody point to it"
Boyle (2003)
Barabasi's team says that there is another common kind of network
that has hither to been neglected: the 'scale-free' network, in
which there is no meaningful average number of links--no 'scale' to
it, in other words. In a scale-free network the number of nodes with
a given number of connections simply declines as that number of
nodes increases. Many nodes are linked to the network via just one
connection; fewer have two, even fewer have three, and so forth.
Unlike an exponential network, there remain small but significant
numbers of nodes with many connections.
Ball (2000)
In this book Barabasi makes these main propositions. One, the
Internet is a scale free network. A scale free network means that
many nodes (websites, on the web) will have only a few links to
them. Other sites will have more, and that a very few will have lots
of links, and in network terms be transformed into "hubs". Two, that
a Power law operates in these self-organising networks and is a
property of scale free networks. The power law is driven by
preferential attachment, that is nodes in a network will associate
themselves with the larger hubs of the network, and that this
phenomena breaks the Internet into 4 continents. Those he calls the
central core as well as islands and tendrils. The size of which
roughly approximate each other in size, being 1.2 billion webpages
(as of 2002) divided by 4.The distribution of links to all sites on
the web approximates a "power law", that is, a small number of sites
receive the majority of links and most sites receive very few links.
As Barabasi (2002) has explained in his article in physicsweb
a `scale free network "is similar to an airline route map where
there are few hubs (fatly connected) which link almost all other
airports(nodes). He makes the point that the majority of objects on
the web have only a few links. Growth and linkage preference are key
characteristics of this and other scale free networks.
"According to a recent study by Steve Lawrence of the NEC Research
Institute in New Jersey and Lee Giles of Pennsylvania State
University, the Web contains nearly a billion documents. The
documents represent the nodes of this complex network and they are
connected by locators, known as URLs, that allow us to navigate from
one Web page to another."
"The finding that the Web is a scale-free network raised an
important question: would such inhomogenous topology also emerge in
other complex systems?Recently an answer to this question came from
an unexpected direction - the Internet itself. The Internet forms a
physical network, the nodes of which are "routers" that navigate
packets of data from one computer to another, and groups of routers
and computers that are called "domains". The links that join the
nodes together are the various physical connectors, such as phone
wires and optical cables (figure 2). Due to the physical nature of
the connections, this network was expected to be different from the
Web, where adding a link to an arbitrary remote page is as easy as
linking to a computer in the next room. To the surprise of many, the
network behind the Internet also appears to follow a power-law
distribution…. This indicates that the wiring of the Internet is
also dominated by several highly connected hubs. "
Barabasi (2001)
The Internet is represented as a network, as can strategies for
solving a problem, topics in a conversation, and even words in a
language. Many networks, turn out to be small worlds.
Network works as a descriptor because we can invoke a mental picture
of connectedness to describe something that is not physical like an
object, but is real and occurring over time. You can record "its"
traces and thus measure "its" existence. What we know about the
Internet is that it is scale free. There is a power law in operation
that allows that powerful property. It is also self-directed and
operates by preferential attachment. Just as in nature one species
preys on another but never the other way around.
"Today we know that, though real networks are not as random as Erdos
and Renyi envisioned, chance and randomness do play a n important
role in their construction. Real networks are not static, as all
graph theoretical models were until recently. Instead, growth plays
a key role in shaping their topology. They are not as centralized as
a star network is. Rather, there is a hierarchy of hubs that keep
these networks together, a heavily connected node closely followed
by several less connected ones, trailed by dozens of even smaller
nodes. No central node sits in the middle of the spider web,
controlling and monitoring every link and node. There is no single
node whose removal could break the web. A scale-free network is a
web without a spider."
Barabarasi (2002, page221)
The Power law is a property of scale free networks. Preferential
attachment is the driver of this property. As networks grow, new
nodes don't attach themselves randomly. They prefer to connect to
the nodes that are already the best-connected. This is a "Power law
distribution".
"Power laws rarely emerge in systems completely dominated by a roll
of the dice. Physicists have learned that most often they signal a
transition from disorder to order. thus the power laws we spotted on
the web indicated, for the first time in precise mathematical
terms,that real networks are far from random. Complex networks
finally started to speak to us in language that scientists trained
in self organization and complexity could finally understand."
Barabarasi (2002 page72 )
"Nature normally hates power laws.In ordinary systems all quatities
follow bell curves,and correlations decay rapidly, obeying
exponential laws. But all that changes if the system is forced to
undergo a phase transition.Then power laws emerge-natures
unmistakable sign that chaos is departing in favour of order"
Barabarasi (2002, page 77)
Using a power law we know that as the number of nodes (websites) on
the network (WWW) rise, the curve becomes more extreme. This would
seem to be contrary to what one would expect, but none the less
increasing the size of the system increases the gap between the top
spots (hubs) and the median spots of the nodes. Secondly the
majority of the nodes(websites)have below average links or
connectivity because the curve is weighted towards the hubs on the
network.
"Scale-free networks" " refers to the connectivity "embodied by the
average node and fixed by the peak of the degree distribution.
A "scale-free" network can in graph form many weakly-connected nodes
at one end, and a few highly-connected nodes at the other and has no
intrinsic scale. What Linked shows here is the notion that these are
universal properties of networks of all kinds and are both their
source of power and their source of vulnerability. A contagion
spreads quickly through a human network -- aided by well-connected
nodes. The distribution of links in the network is key to how
rapidly a contagion, be it an idea or a software virus, spreads.
Some contagions are good, such as new ideas, others are bad.
References
Barbarasi A (2001) "The Physics of the Web", Physics World, July
2001.
Accessed 10/10/2002,available as of 17/2/2003:
http://www.physicsweb.org/article/world/14/7/09
Babarasi A.L. (2002) "Linked " , Perseus Publishing, Cambridge Mass.
Ball P. (2000) "Missing Links", Nature, March 2001.
Accessed 7/8/2002,available as of 17/2/2003:
http://www.nature.com/nsu/000727/000727-9.html
Boyle A. (2003) " Internet Navigator Think Small"
Accessed 9/1/2003, available as of 17/2/2003:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/750507.asp?cp1=1#BODY
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User Profile http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/INSNA/hot_topics_inf.html
Links to Hot Topics in Network Research
Social Capital
Scale-free / Power Law and Small-world networks
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User Profile So what is the new economy?
http://hotwired.wired.com/special/ene/index.html?nav=part_two&word=intro_one
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User Profile Scale-Free / Power Law Networks
Classification of Scale Free Networks (pdf)
Mean-field Theory for Scale-Free Random Networks Barabási, A; Albert, R; Jeong, H. 1999
31 Papers by Réka Albert, Albert-László Barabási, Ginestra Bianconi, Hawoong Jeong, et al.
Zipf, Power-laws, and Pareto - a ranking tutorial
Search in Power-Law Networks (pdf)
Local Search in Unstructured Networks
Epidemic Spreading in Scale-Free Networks
Epidemic Threshold in Structured Scale-Free Networks (pdf)
Epidemics And Immunization In Scale-Free Networks (pdf)
Halting viruses in scale-free networks
Wealth Distribution in Scale-Free Networks
Scale-Free Networks - Computerworld
Highly clustered scale-free networks
Power law distributions in blogspace
Power Law Distributions in Real and Virtual Worlds (pdf) and (Phys Rev E)
Generic Emergence of Power Law Distributions (pdf)
Winners don't take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web (pdf)
Complexity and Self-organization in Pilgrimage Systems
Clustering and Preferential Attachment in Growing Networks (pdf)
Sex findings may alter STD treatment strategies
Self-generated power-law tails in probability distributions (more)
An Exploration of Power-Law Networks
Microcanonical Foundation for Systems with Power-Law Distributions
Justification of Power-Law Canonical Distributions
Statistical Mechanics of Complex Networks
Scale-free characteristics of random networks
How Structure Affects Power-Law Behavior (pdf)
Efficiency of Scale-Free Networks: Error and Attack Tolerance (pdf)
Local Search in Unstructured Networks (pdf)
Accelerated Growth Of Networks (pdf)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Small World Networks
Dynamics Of Rumor Propagation On Small-World Networks (pdf)
Complex Structures In Generalized Small Worlds (pdf)
Small world theory of why random links matter
Random graphs as models of networks (pdf)
Harmony In The Small-World
Intentional Walks On Scale Free Small Worlds (pdf)
Simple Models Of Small World Networks With Directed Links (pdf)
Classes of small-world networks (pdf)
Collective dynamics of `small-world' networks (pdf)
Multiagent Systems using Small World Networks (pdf)
Deterministic Small-World Communication Networks (pdf)
Scaling of random spreading in small world networks (pdf)
An Epidemic Model on Small-world Networks and Ring Vaccination
Coordination & Cooperation in Local, Random & Small World Networks: Expmt. Evidence (pdf)
Small-World Networks of Mobile Robots (pdf)
The Continuing Appeal of Small-world Networks (SIAM News)
Mathematicians Prove That It's a Small World (New York Times article)
Kevin Bacon shows the way to a much smaller world than we thought (Cornell U press release)
Small World Networks, Inc. Privacy Policy (Hmmmmm....)
The above found here
http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/INSNA/Hot/scale_free.htm
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User Profile International Network for Social Network Analysis
http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/
Posts: 790
Joined: 2003-05-21
Location: Melbourne Victoria Australia
User Profile The ACM
http://www.acm.org
"The New Science of Networks"
Business Communications Review (06/03) Vol. 33, No. 6, P. 22; Herman, Jim
The fundamental component of many networks, including social networks, is the "small-world" network, in which each node is no more than six degrees of separation away from any other node, writes consultant Jim Herman. Herman says this is because real-world networks are usually compact clusters with a small number of connections to other clusters. Furthermore, Notre Dame University researcher Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's effort to map out the World Wide Web revealed that the Web follows a scale-free network distribution pattern characterized by both a small number of sites (nodes) with many site links and a large number of sites with only a few links. The small-world architecture supports short routes through large-scale networks, which is why computer viruses and other disruptions spread so rapidly over the Internet. This phenomenon also accounts for the accelerated distribution of pirated content and networks' vulnerability to cascading failures. The flipside is that networks are very resilient against random failures. On the other hand, the existence of short paths is not a guarantee that such paths can be tapped, as evidenced by the difficulty users encounter with carrying out directed searches on a corporate network. Herman writes that this "New Science of Networks" offers "a new way of looking at networks, and borrows from cutting-edge approaches to chaos theory and advanced non-linear mathematics."
Volume 5, Issue 515: Wednesday, July 2, 2003 ACM Technews (source)
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User Profile Study reveals Net's parts
July 2/9, 2003
By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2003/070203/Study_reveals_Net%27s_parts_070203.html
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User Profile D-Lib Magazine
April 2003
Volume 9 Number 4
ISSN 1082-9873
Trends in the Evolution of the Public Web
1998 - 2002
Edward T. O'Neill,
Brian F. Lavoie,
Rick Bennett,
OCLC Office of Research
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april03/lavoie/04lavoie.html
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User Profile "Big sites hoard links
July 2/9, 2003
The Internet is scale-free, meaning it is made up of a few nodes, or servers, that have many links, and many nodes with only a few links. It is also a small-world network -- you can get to any node via only a few links among adjoining nodes.
University of London researchers have uncovered another clue about the Internet's structure -- the rich-club phenomenon. Large, well-connected nodes have more links to each other than to smaller nodes, and smaller nodes have more links to the larger nodes than to each other.
The researchers found that 27 percent of connections are among the largest five percent of nodes, 60 percent connect the remaining 95 percent to the largest five percent, and only 13 percent of connections are between nodes not in the top five percent.
The findings suggest that the Internet is more dependent on the larger nodes than previously thought, which makes it more vulnerable to a targeted attack, according to the researchers.
The findings could contribute to better strategies for optimizing network traffic flow, network reliability and security, and building network topology simulators; it could be applied to practical systems into three years, according to the researchers."
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2003/070203/Big_sites_hoard_links_Brief_070203.html
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User Profile Study reveals Net's parts
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2003/070203/Study_reveals_Net%27s_parts_070203.html
Here is the PDF of the study
Modularity and Extreme Edges of the Internet
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cond-mat/pdf/0212/0212001.pdf
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User Profile Scale free/small world and self organising networks
Self organising networks
“There is a revolution in the making when it comes to understanding the complex, interconnected world around us. For decades we have been taught to look for the source of all behaviour in the properties of the system's constituents. This view is rapidly changing as we come to understand the architecture of complexity, the networks around us.
Our research, directed by Professor Barabasi, has a simple objective: think networks. It is about how networks emerge, what they look like, and how they evolve; and how networks impact on understanding of complex systems. To understand networks, our research has taken us to rather unexpected areas. We have studied the topology of the www- showing that webpages are on average 19 clicks form each other.”
http://www.nd.edu/~networks/
From Linked by Prof Barabasi
From page 221 of Linked:
"Today we know that, though real networks are not as random as Erdos and Renyi envisioned, chance and randomness do play an important role in their construction. Real networks are not static, as all graph theoretical models were until recently. Instead, growth plays a key role in shaping their topology. They are not as centralized as a star network is. Rather, there is a hierarchy of hubs that keep these networks together, a heavily connected node closely followed by several less connected ones, trailed by dozens of even smaller nodes. No central node sits in the middle of the spider web, controlling and monitoring every link and node. There is no single node whose removal could break the web. A scale-free network is a web without a spider."
Duncan Watts
http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu
A very cool article: (from the Arts Section of the NYTimes) Connect, They Say, Only Connect By EMILY EAKIN The whiteboard in Duncan J. Watts's office at Columbia University was a thicket of squiggly blue lines, circles and calculus equations. Mr. Watts, an associate professor of sociology, had just begun a passionate disquisition on the virtues and liabilities of scale-free networks when the telephone rang. It was Alfred Berkeley, the vice chairman of Nasdaq, hoping to chat about the exchange's design. Mr. Watts, 31, is a network theorist. And these days that means fielding frequent calls from powerful admirers like Mr. Berkeley — Wall Street moguls and government officials eager to tap into a nascent academic science that few understand but that many think may hold the key to everything from predicting fashion trends to preventing terrorism, stock market meltdowns and the spread of HIV. Never mind that Mr. Watts's new book on the subject, "Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age," which will be published by W. W. Norton next month, is littered with the arcana of theoretical physics as well as charts and graphs that appear to require an advanced degree in math in order to decipher. Network theory is hot. Two other recent books on networks, "Linked: The New Science of Networks" (Perseus, 2002) by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and "Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks" (W. W. Norton) by Mark Buchanan, have already sold tens of thousands of copies. And that's not counting sales in the burgeoning genre of consumer studies, where network science terms and concepts are invoked with near religious fervor. From Malcolm Gladwell's three-year-old best seller, "The Tipping Point," to just-published analyses like "The Influentials" and "Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers," the shelves at Barnes & Noble are laden with books alternately applauding and deploring the importance of things like hubs, connectors, mavens and influencer teens for creating fads, cementing brand loyalty and swelling profits. "Network theory has become a bit of a fad," Mr. Watts conceded after hanging up the phone. "I spend half my time telling people I think it's relevant to a lot of problems people care about and half my time trying to tone down the hype." Network scientists study networks: collections of people or objects connected to each other in some way. Think of the 1.5 million Manhattan residents or the 30,000 genes inside a human cell. Such networks, scientists argue, behave in ways that can't be understood solely in terms of their component parts. Without knowing what every single person or object within the network is doing, they say, it's nevertheless possible to know something about how the network as a whole behaves. Stated that way it sounds simple. But as an intellectual approach, network theory is the latest symptom of a fundamental shift in scientific thinking, away from a focus on individual components — particles and subparticles — and toward a novel conception of the group. As Mr. Barabasi, a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, put it: "In biology, we've had great success stories — the human genome, the mouse genome. But what is not talked about is that we have the pieces but don't have a clue as to how the system works. Increasingly, we think the answer is in networks." Not that network theory is an entirely contemporary creation. Its roots stretch back nearly 300 years, to Leonhard Euler, a brilliant 18th-century Swiss mathematician who dabbled in nearly every branch of modern science, from algebra to astrophysics. In 1736, Euler took up a brain teaser that had preoccupied the residents of Königsberg, a Prussian town on the Pregel River not far from where he lived: how to cross all seven bridges in town without crossing the same bridge twice. No one had been able to pull off the feat, but Euler provided the mathematical proof that it could not be done. To do so, he turned the problem into a network, depicting the bridges as lines and the landmasses they connected as nodes. After Euler, mathematicians continued to analyze networks, then called graphs, enumerating the properties of orderly and static structures like ice crystals and beehives. No one thought to tackle networks of people or objects that were, as Mr. Watts puts it in his book, "actually doing something — generating power, sending data or even making decisions." Such complex real-world networks were assumed to be random: nodes and links connected in an arbitrary, disorderly fashion. But clearly this is not always the case. "Imagine that you really did pick your friends at random from the global population of over six billion," Mr. Watts writes. "You would be much more likely to be friends with someone on another continent than someone from your hometown, workplace or school. Even in a world of global travel and electronic communications, this is an absurd notion." Of course, studying a network of six billion people is an unfathomable proposition. It wasn't until the mid-1990's and the advent of powerful computers that network scientists were able to analyze real-life networks of significant size and complexity. And in doing so, Mr. Watts and his colleagues made some tantalizing discoveries. By 1998, they had found that networks as diverse as actors, power grids, the World Wide Web, the proteins in a human cell and the neurons of a wormlike organism called C. elegans aren't random at all but obey the same simple, powerful rules. For example, whether the network has nearly a billion nodes (the estimated number of Web pages) or just half a million (roughly the number of actors in the Internet Movie Database), the paths between any two nodes tend to be extremely short — such that, for example, any two movie actors can be connected by an average of less than four links. That may not seem like news to anyone who has played the Kevin Bacon Game — in which film actors invariably turn out to have starred in a movie with Mr. Bacon or else with another actor who has — or seen John Guare's play "Six Degrees of Separation." (The play was inspired by the famous 1967 experiment in which the Harvard social psychologist Stanley Milgram tried to prove that anyone in America could reach anyone else through a chain of fewer than six people.) But it was not entirely clear why these should all be "small-world" networks. As Mr. Watts points out, "There is nothing similar at all about the detailed way in which movie actors choose projects and engineers build transmission lines." Eerier still, in 1999, Mr. Barabasi and a student at Notre Dame found that many of these small-world networks are also what scientists call scale-free. Many natural phenomena, including traits like height and I.Q., tend to cluster around an average (producing the familiar bell curve distribution). By contrast, scale-free networks go in for extremes: a few hubs — nodes with lots of links — and many more nodes with hardly any links at all. (Think of Google, the search engine, as a hub, and your personal homepage — which probably has just a few links — as an ordinary node.) Mr. Barabasi's discovery startled scientists. "People always knew there were networks but thought they were random," he said. "To know they were nodes linked by hubs was very unexpected." It also provoked a frenzy of research. For as Mr. Barabasi and his collaborator were able to show, the structure of scale-free networks has important practical implications. If you remove a few nodes at random, the network can still function normally. But if you remove one of the hubs, the results can be catastrophic. Inspired by this insight, cancer researchers are now homing in on the cell's hub proteins in order to learn how to defend them from devastating attacks. Epidemiologists studying sexually transmitted diseases are arguing that it makes more sense to identify and treat the hubs in the transmission network than to give drugs to everyone. "The Bush administration's policy to give drugs to mothers with children is completely irrelevant to stopping AIDS in Africa," Mr. Barabasi said. "It's much better to go and target the hubs." Even the United States military has begun recruiting network theorists to conduct counterterrorism research, with the goal of learning how to protect information and economic networks at home and destabilize terrorist networks abroad. Yet just which network model describes human society remains a subject of fierce debate. Mr. Barabasi believes the human social network is scale-free with the expected smattering of richly connected hubs. Mr. Watts disagrees. "If you asked people to list the number of people they recognize, that could be scale-free, everyone recognizes Michael Jordan," he said. "But if you said, `Who would you trust to look after your kids?' That's not scale-free. As you start to ratchet up the requirements for what it means to know someone, connections diminish." Is society a small-world network of the sort Milgram was interested in? Mr. Watts spent the past year trying to test that idea, using the Internet as a proxy for the world population. Whatever the results, he says, it's clear that human psychology has not yet adapted to the implications of a connected world. "We like to think of our world as full of atomized individuals," he said. "But decisions people make and the actions they take are so hopelessly entwined with the behaviors of everyone else that it's difficult to draw the boundaries around the individual." When it comes to choosing a CD or explaining the success of Harry Potter, your preference may matter less than the network's. But some scholars dismiss the network hypothesis altogether. Judith S. Kleinfeld, a psychologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, prompted a flurry of media attention last year when she published an article questioning the validity of Milgram's small-world findings. Given the prevalence of networks — from power grids to airports to the Internet — it's tempting to assume that human society is a network as well, she says. But ultimately, that is impossible to prove. "Duncan assumes the world is a matrix," Ms. Kleinfeld said in a telephone interview. "He wants to know how you get from one point on it to another. But what if the world isn't a matrix? What if people aren't all connected? What if they're islands in space?" Mr. Watts admits that he faces daunting empirical challenges — and that overzealous scientists are a concern. "You can turn almost anything into a network," he said, holding up two papers he had received on the "small world of human language" and shaking his head. "So what?" "When I'm brutally honest with myself, I think that if we can figure this out, we can answer some important questions. Other times, I think it's just too hard." This article reprinted in full without permission for the purposes of discussion and review, as permitted by Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.
COULD IT BE A BIG WORLD AFTER ALL? THE "SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION" MYTH “Thanks to Thomas Blass, a scholar of Stanley Milgram, for his helpful comments and to Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz, whose mathematical inventions have created a renaissance of interest in the small world problem. I very much appreciate the suggestions of Peter Suedfeld, David Lubinski, Rob McCoun, Robert Sternberg, and anonymous reviewers on earlier versions of this paper. Abstract The idea that people are connected through just "six degrees of separation," based on Stanley Milgram's "small world study," has become part of the intellectual furniture of educated people. New evidence discovered in the Milgram papers in the Yale archives, together with a review of the literature on the "small world problem," reveals that this widely-accepted idea rests on scanty evidence. Indeed, the empirical evidence suggests that we actually live in a world deeply divided by social barriers such as race and class. An explosion of interest is occurring in the small world problem because mathematicians have developed computer models of how the small world phenomenon could logically work. But mathematical modeling is not a substitute for empirical evidence. At the core of the small world problem are fascinating psychological mysteries.”
http://www.uaf.edu/northern/big_world.html
Email traffic patterns can reveal ringleaders
19:00 26 March 03
Special Report from New Scientist Print Edition
By looking for patterns in email traffic, a new technique can quickly
identify online communities and the key people in them. The approach could mean terrorists or criminal gangs give themselves away, even if they are communicating in code or only discussing the weather.
"If the CIA or another intelligence agency has a lot of intercepted email
from people suspected of being part of a criminal network, they could use the technique to figure out who the leaders of the network might be," says Joshua Tyler of Hewlett-Packard's labs in Palo Alto, California. At the very least, it would help them prioritise investigations, he says.
Tyler and his colleagues Dennis Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman, study
email communication patterns and communities among networks of people. The trio wondered if they could identify distinct communities within Hewlett-Packard's research lab simply by analysing the IT manager's log of nearly 200,000 internal emails sent by 485 employees over a couple of months.
Full text
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993550
An Exploration of Power-Law Networks
http://backspaces.net/PLaw/
Duncan Watts, Peter Dodds, and Mark Newman have a paper called "Identity and Search in Social Networks"
http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0205383/
Six Degrees of Interconnection RELATIONSHIP SPACE: Meet Your Network Neighbors http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/relation_spc.html
Net Scan Finds Like-Minded Users Technology Research News April 25, 2003 "When you search for information on the Web, chances are you aren't alone—there are like-minded groups of users across the Web searching for the same sorts of things. Researchers from the University of Chicago have shown that is possible to identify these groups by analyzing browsing patterns, even in networks as far-flung as the Web." http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/rnb_042503.asp
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User Profile A social network caught in the Web
Lada A. Adamic1, Orkut Buyukkokten2 and Eytan Adar1
1 Information Dynamics Lab
HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA 2 Google
Mountain View, CA
http://www.hpl.hp.com/shl/papers/social/index.html
Scheduled for this firstmonday
Volume 8, Number 6 — June 2nd 2003
A social network caught in the Web by Lada A. Adamic, Orkut Buyukkokten, and Eytan Adar
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User Profile History Channel
Internet- Behind the Web 15/4/2002
http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~smil/
Scroll down to page bottom and you can watch the show from the History channel via streaming media
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User Profile Culture and Scale-Free Networks
Michael:
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/000702.html
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User Profile The Topology of Cellular Networks:
http://www.biocomplexity.indiana.edu/bionet/bionet04.php#5iia
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User Profile J. Kleinberg, S. Lawrence. The Structure of the Web. Science 294(2001), 1849
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/sci01.pdf
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User Profile InFlow 3.0 network mapping and measuring software: organizational network analysis [more...]
Data-mining Email to discover Social Networks and Communities of Practice [more...]
Contact tracing maps the diffusion of a virus through a human network [more...]
Examine what emergent purchasing patterns on the WWW may reveal [more...]
Post-Merger Integration: effectively combine merging organizations [more...]
How effective is your professional network? Examine a famous one [more...]
Build resilient computer networks using network analysis [more...] [PDF]
Explore the complex structure of the Internet Industry [more...]
Social Network Analysis of the 9-11 terrorist network [more...]
Who influences decision-making in your organization? [more...]
White Paper: Managing the Connected Organization [more...]
White Paper: Knowledge Creation and Re-Use [more...]
Best Practice: Organizational Network Mapping [PDF]
Introduction to Social Network Analysis [more...]
Copyright © 2003, Valdis Krebs
http://www.orgnet.com/
Interview with social network researcher Valdis Krebs. Posted on 06/27/2002.
Valdis Krebs is the proprietor of Orgnet.com, a site devoted to issues of social networks and organizational dynamics, and the creator of InFlow, a software tool designed to depict social networks. I first became aware of Valdis through his depiction of the knotted hairball of internet industry partnerships, and have checked into his work on occasion ever since. As part of my visualization research, I poked around the world of Social Network Analysis, and chatted with Valdis. He was kind enough to let me post the interview.
"peterme: What is the *purpose* of Social Network Analysis?
Valdis: To write papers. To discover nifty new equations. (Laughing)
It's basically to see how complex human systems really work. It can be a project team in an organization, or a terrorist team, or it could be a community where a virus is spreading, and figuring out how and why it's spreading a particular way. It allows us to look at and map what are normally invisible dynamics inside a community. Once you know about it and start thinking about it, you start to realize there's a lot of relational data out there. If you start putting it together piece by piece, you put together an interesting picture, more than any of the pieces by itself.
http://peterme.com/archives/00000234.html
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User Profile Granovetter, M. (1973). Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology,
vol. 78, 1973, 1360--1380.
PDF file to download
http://ldb.wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de/articlesearch.php?action=Search&content2=Granovetter,%20Mark
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User Profile santafe
http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications/working-papers.html
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User Profile Behind the six degrees of SARS
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,58985,00.html
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User Profile Links on the practice and theory of collective intelligence, by Pierre Lévy
http://www.mikro.org/Events/OS/wos2/Levy-pp/liensIC.html
This is a huge list of links of all sorts, covering great thinkers,
community design, collective intelligence, and more.
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User Profile Free and open to the world are MIT course materials
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/all-courses.htm
MIT OpenCourseWare
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User Profile Article in the Washingtonpost called
caught in the web
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40660-2003Jul10.html
Tip
op ups abound on this sitePost Magazine: Caught in the Web
Q and A session with authour of the article
http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/03/r_magazine_cha071403.htm
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User Profile The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond is a seminal article on the open source movement and a whole lot more as well
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3/raymond/
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User Profile Computer history museum
http://www.computerhistory.org/index.page
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User Profile Researchers at U.C. Berkeley's School of Information Management has published a study that attempts to measure how much information is produced annually worldwide. In their executive summary they have this to say about the web.
"In 2000 the World Wide Web consisted of about 21 terabytes of static HTML pages, and is growing at a rate of 100% per year. Many Web pages are generated on-the-fly from data in databases, so the total size of the "deep Web" is considerably larger.Although the social impact of the Web has been phenomenal, about 500 times as much email is being produced per year as the stock of Web pages. It appears that about 610 billion emails are sent per year, compared to 2.1 billion static Web pages. Even the yearly flow of Usenet news is more than 3 times the stock of Web pages. As Odlyzko (2000) puts it, "communication, not content, is the killer app."
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/
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User Profile "Dr. Reinhold Grether
Research Essays about the Net 7
Welcome to the very heart of the netzwissenschaft project. Most research essays listed here are from 2003 down to 1999. It's a personal linklog of, in my view, persuasive contributions to the emerging field of Internet Studies and Network Research. Please find the latest entries on top. Updates at least twice a month."
http://www.netzwissenschaft.de/sem/pool.htm
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User Profile Content is not king
by A. M. Odlyzko. First Monday 6(2) (February 2001), http://firstmonday.org/.
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko/
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User Profile Review of this great book.Thought the group might find it useful
"Communities in Cyberspace
Editor: Marc Smith, Peter Kollock
Publisher: London & New York: Routledge, 1999
Review Published: September 2003
REVIEW 1: Janet Armentor
Marc Smith and Peter Kollock, in their edited book Communities in Cyberspace, provide readers with a series of sociological studies that address the question, "what kinds of social spaces do people create with networks?" (4). The content includes a series of studies on cyberculture that ranges from the investigation of persistent categories of inequality such as race, class, and gender to an analysis of community formations in cyber spaces. The authors emphasize media as a group endeavor rather than simply a communication tool. The book is divided into five parts beginning with Part I and chapter one as an introductory section outlining the topics throughout the book including types of communication media, identities in cyberspace, issues of honesty and deception, persistence of race, social control dynamics, community structures, and collective action processes. Furthermore, a common thread running through the chapters is an "understanding that the kinds of interactions and institutions emerging in cyberspace are more complicated than can be captured in one-sided utopian or dystopian terms" (4). Other concerns involve thinking of the Internet as a research site and understanding how interactions in these online spaces change social action as well as create consequences.
Part II deals with the topic of identity. In chapter two, "Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community," Judith Donath explores Usenet culture by creating an understanding of "how identity is established in an online community" by examining "the effects of identity deception and the conditions that give rise to it" (29). Donath begins this exploration by asking questions about the relationship between the self and the body. She explains the essentialness of identity as a fundamental part of a community. While this is an interesting perspective, a postmodern understanding might suggest a different approach to a notion of identity. A postmodern reading, through examining the consequences of a postmodern society, may understand identity formation and process as fluid and multiple, as well as fragmented and disjointed. Donath ends chapter two with two important questions for researchers of identity and cybercultures: how can online communities be structured to encourage types of communication and interaction that reveal identity cues? And to what extent are coherent, stable identities a necessity for online communities (55-56).
In chapter three, "Reading Race Online," Burkhalter discusses the construction of race in newsgroups such as ‘soc.culture,’ ‘soc.culture.african.american,’ and ‘soc.culture.jewish’ (61). The author explores the process of race identification occurring in spaces that challenge traditional methods of the construction and identification of race by affecting the "achievement, maintenance, and use of racial identity" with the removal of the body from the social frame. The author suggests that without the presence of physical cues (skin color), participants read race through "the perspectives on racial issues offered in authors’ messages" (62). Overall, findings suggest that race is no less relevant in online interaction than it is face-to-face interaction and may be more relevant on these Usenet newsgroups. Burkhalter closes by acknowledging the opening of dialogue that can exist in network settings and the importance of participation, leaving the reader with a sense of questions to ask about persistent categories of inequality such as race and its construction in cybercultures.
In chapter four, "Writing in the Body: Gender (Re)production in Online Interaction," O’Brien contemplates theoretical questions about gender and online communication. She asks the question "how likely is it that online communication will be a site/occasion for ‘complicating’ the customary gender dichotomy?" (79). Similar to Burkhalter, O’Brien questions the relationship between the body and self, but focuses more specifically on the "relationship between technology and culture in the (re)constitution of presentations of self when the body is not available as a source of information to others" (80). She cites Sandy Stone and follows her line of thinking on the new formations arising "in the boundaries between technology, society, and ‘nature’ in the architectures of multiple embodiments and multiple selves" (Stone 1995: 44). O’Brien suggests that along with possible challenging of gendered identities, online communication also operates by further inscribing harmful gender dichotomies. She suggests that because the body and its consequential gender constructions have come to be the central way of organizing our interactions, disembodiment does little to challenge gender constructs since the reliance on the body as foundation continues to be reinforced in participants’ text and interactions.
Part III emphasizes the topics of social order and control. In chapter five, "Hierarchy and Power: Social Control in Cyberspace," Elizabeth Reid examines the dynamics of power and methods of social control in two kinds of MUDs, and finds that disinhibition encourages a wide range of behaviors and therefore creates a crisis that instigates social control processes such as software rewriting or individual sanctions toward unacceptable behavior. In Chapter six, "Problems of Conflict Management in Virtual Communities," Anna DuVal Smith discusses conflict mediation as a method of social control in online communities. Similar to Burkhalter, Smith emphasizes the "open boundaries, the relative anonymity of computer-mediated interaction, and the possibility of great social diversity" and also directs the discussion to the types and mechanisms of social control used to monitor such environments. Findings suggest that online interaction has "double-edged effects" on the conflict resolution process but is nonetheless "more important and more of a challenge than in many face-to-face settings" (14).
Part IV shifts to a discussion of community structure and dynamics. In chapter seven, Wellman and Gulia in "Virtual Communities as Communities" outline a detailed comparison of online and ‘real-life’ communities and suggest that online communities are actual communities that are not simply a substitute for our traditional understanding of ‘community’ and they demonstrate the "many distinguishing features of online communities that change the economics of social action and organization in important ways" (17). The authors frame their discussion around several key questions of interest to researchers of the Internet, including: are online relationships narrowly specialized or broadly supportive?; in what ways are the many weak ties on the Net useful?; is their reciprocity online and attachment to virtual communities?; are strong, intimate ties possible online?; how does virtual community affect ‘real-life’ community?; does the Net increase community diversity?; and are virtual communities ‘real’ communities?
In chapter eight, entitled "Invisible Crowds in Cyberspace: Mapping the Social Structure of the Usenet," co-editor Smith offers some useful survey data on participants of Usenet groups and also suggests the unique opportunities for studying group interactions with the "electronic tracks that can provide detailed data about what vast numbers of groups of people do online" (196). This study offers a useful typology or map of the "emergent social structure" growing from a vast networking system. Smith emphasizes the importance of conducting long-term historical studies of large scale networks and offers some implications for researchers interested in studying archived online interactions. Co-editor Kollock’s chapter, "The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace," argues that instead of focusing on the hostility and ‘flaming’ that occurs in online communities, we should ask "how it is that there is any significant cooperation at all" (18). He maps out processes by which participants have shifted from gift giving to the production and use of public goods as a form of cooperation. His work has implications for researchers interested in the incentive structures involved in online communities.
Part Five deals with collective action in online communities. In chapter ten, entitled "The Promise and the Peril of Social Action in Cyberspace," Laura Gurak uses a case study and rhetorical analysis of texts and communication associated with protests occurring in online communities. As with other chapters in this volume, Gurak emphasizes the double-edged quality that online interactions have on the rhetorical activity of forms of collective action. In "Electronic Homesteading on the Rural Frontier," AUTHOR NAME provides a case study of a rural community in Montana and discusses its use of technology to create a community network called ‘Big Sky Telegraph’ designed to address the needs of a sparsely populated state for communication channels between isolated teachers. The author concludes that this simple text based networking system proved to be useful for ‘real’ communities. Finally in chapter twelve, "Cyberspace and Disadvantaged Communities: The Internet as a Tool for Collective Action," Mele offers a case study of a low-income housing development in Wilmington, North Carolina and their implication and use of the Internet to rebuild their housing community by gaining information and knowledge from a wide range of sources including urban planners and architects in a relatively cost free manner.
While the book follows several sociological perspectives, it offers an excellent survey of current topics surrounding the structures and processes involved in new online communities. Social scientists should find this useful for teaching a course on cyberculture or for background literature for other cyber-community studies. It problematizes and avoids the extremes of utopian and dystopian understandings of the Internet and its communities and, instead, focuses on the often contradictory processes occurring in online communities.
Janet Armentor:
Janet Armentor is a doctoral student in sociology at Syracuse University. She is also an instructor there teaching Introduction to Sociology, Sex and Gender, and Sociological Theory. Her dissertation research involves a discourse analysis of a regional web chat community. The project explores how participants construct and maintain persistent categories such as gender, race, and sexuality and the strategies they use to resist them. Her research interests include contemporary social theory, science and technology, sex and gender, sexuality, power and bodies, and cybercommunities."
http://www.com.washington.edu/rccs/bookinfo.asp?ReviewID=242&BookID=204
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User Profile From the Scout report
"Small World Project at Columbia University
http://smallworld.columbia.edu/index.html
In 1967, social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an important experiment to test the hypothesis that members of any large social network would be inevitably connected to each other through short chains of intermediate acquaintances. His results, now a part of popular culture and common parlance, was that the average lengths of the resulting acquaintance chains was approximately six. This "six degrees of separation" hypothesis is now being tested (using email) by Professor Duncan J. Watts and his colleagues at Columbia University. Professor Watts and his team hope "to test not only average properties of lengths of acquaintance chains, but also the distribution of lengths, along with the effect of race, class, nationality, occupation, and education." From the project Web site, visitors can read about the details of the project, examine papers published based on their current research, and learn more about each member of the research team."
Article from New Scientist on the project
"Email experiment confirms six degrees of separation
19:00 07 August 03
Despite enabling almost instantaneous global communication, email appears not to have made the world a more close-knit community.Duncan Watts and colleagues at Columbia University in New York conducted a massive email experiment to test the theory of "six degrees of separation", i.e. that everyone in the world can be linked through just six social ties.
More than 60,000 people from 166 different countries took part in the experiment. Participants were assigned one of 18 target people. They were asked to contact that person by sending email to people they already knew and considered potentially "closer" to the target. The targets were chosen at random and included a professor from America, an Australian policeman and a veterinarian from Norway.The researchers found that it in most cases it took between five and seven emails to contact the target. Watts says this shows that email has not fundamentally changed the way social ties are created."In this experiment, the internet is simply the tool we use to transmit messages," Watts told New Scientist, in an email. "Compared with offline interactions like work, school, family, and community, I don't see email as being a particularly compelling medium for generating social ties."
The concept of six degrees of separation emerged from a similar postal experiment conducted by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1967. Milgram asked volunteers to send a package by mail to one of a hundred people chosen at random.
Virtual friends
In the email study, participants were also asked to send a message to the researchers to explain who they chose to forward their message, and why. This revealed which types of social bond were most likely to help a message reach its target.The researchers did see some internet-only relationships in the experiment, but these accounted for only six per cent overall. By far the most successful bonds were found to be work-related ones. And messages were also more likely to reach their target if they were forwarded to someone of the same sex.
The researchers were surprised to discover that message chains did not rely on a few highly connected individuals, so-called "hubs". Previous research by Watts and fellow Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz had suggested that such "hubs" were important to all social chains.
Understanding the nature of social networks can have important implications. For example, it can help scientists model the rapid spread of infectious diseases.
Journal reference: Science (vol 301, p 827)
http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99994037
Will Knight
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User Profile "A Large-Scale Study of the Evolution of Web Pages [pdf]
http://www.research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/labs/siliconvalley/pubs/p97-fetterly/p97-fetterly.pdf
Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard researchers collaborated to write this paper for the Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference in May 2003. The paper looks at the Web as a dynamic entity, constantly changing, and considers how this behavior affects its usability. In particular, search engines are noted as being especially susceptible since they cannot possibly have records of the most current version of every Web page. To measure the rate and amount of change, the researchers "collected 151 million web pages eleven times over, retaining salient information including a feature vector of each page." Their results show which Web page parameters are strong indicators of future change."
from the Scout report
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User Profile "Putting it all together with Robert Kahn
The co-founder of the Internet recalls the non-commercial early days and looks at today's issues of fair use, privacy and the need for security."
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/r_kahn_1.html
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User Profile "Technology and Human Vulnerability"
Harvard Business Review (09/03) Vol. 81, No. 9, P. 43; Coutu, Diane L.
Virtual realities supported by rapidly advancing technologies are starting to impinge on people's real-world perceptions. The way human-technology interaction is reshaping human identity and society is of central interest to Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Turkle argues that people are not ready for the psychological changes being wrought by technology because the evocative power of such technology is undeniable, yet this power goes unacknowledged by many who regard technology as merely a tool. For example, machines physically modeled after humans come with a built-in psychological attachment that allows children to embed emotions and sentience within them; Turkle says even older people feel a certain sense of moral responsibility toward intelligent machines, especially when they have a hand in their creation. The MIT professor sees a growing appeal for interacting with machines that are nonjudgmental, even though computer programs are no nearer to true empathy and comprehension of human problems than they were four decades ago. Turkle regards the Internet and computers as very useful tools for self-reflection and advises against attaching an "addictive" stigma to them. She concludes that, "When contemplating a person's computer habits, it is more constructive to think of the Internet as a Rorschach than as a narcotic." Technology, Turkle finds, is changing how people perceive themselves. Robots that simulate emotions reduce the feelings people have toward emotions as the chief machine-human differentiator and force them to define themselves in biological terms; this comes with its own set of problems, what with technology being implanted in humans and fabricated from organic materials. Turkle is adamant that robots should not be programmed to say things that are impossible for them to truly mean, such as expressing love for a user, even in response to user declarations of same. The MIT professor contends that "We need to establish the boundaries at which our machines begin to have those competencies that allow them to tug at our emotions."
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html#item18
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User Profile Andrew M. Odlyzko, Internet Traffic Growth: Sources and Implications
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/itcom.internet.growth.pdf
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User Profile Amanda Lenhart et al., The Ever-Shifting Internet Population: A New Look at Internet Access and the Digital Divide (Pew Internet Report 88)
http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=88
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User Profile From Technews at acm.org
"Passwords Multiply as Users' Rage Rises"
Baltimore Sun (09/07/03) P. 1A; Dang, Dan Thanh
As more online services and digital products require passwords for security, users are beginning to balk. Password policies often stipulate the complexity of a password--a minimum number of characters interspersed with numbers and special symbols, and no dictionary words. For example, passwords composed of six, single-case letters have 308 million possible combinations, while eight-character passwords that can have both upper and lower case letters and one special character or punctuation mark have 6,095 trillion possible combinations. But with an increasing number of such passwords, many people have actually compromised security by writing down their passwords or reusing their passwords for different logins. Princeton enterprise infrastructure services director Dan Oberst decided to replace users' multiple system passwords with a single password that adheres to strict rules increasing its complexity. He says the method has lessened the number of help desk calls. University of California at Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory director James L. McGaugh says the problem with numerous computer passwords is not human memory capacity, which he says is virtually unlimited, but rather interference that confuses people's memory and causes them to forget. Password Crackers President Bob Weiss hires his company's services to people who have either forgotten or otherwise cannot find passwords to files belonging to them, and he says many passwords are guessable. Software programs hack simpler passwords in just seconds, while new biometric security technology promises to make access security both more rigorous and simple for users."
http://www.sunspot.net/technology/bal-te.bz.passwords07sep07,0,3605895.story
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User Profile This report from Childnet International's website,an
experts meeting in Japan
http://www.childnet-int.org/downloads/tokyo%20conference%20proceedings.pdf
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User Profile "BORN DIGITAL
A WIRED SPECIAL REPORT
Born Digital
Children of the Revolution
BORN DIGITAL
Born Digital
In Vitro We Trust
Dental Gloss
Heavy Petting
The End of Puberty
Faking It
The Mod Squad
Cam Culture: The Please Gimme Economy
Now a Word From His Sponsor
What Makes a Nerd
Game Time at Bishop High
PC-Free Zone
Today's Top HitClips
Trading Places
go 2 prom w me?
Instant Messengers
We learned to crawl alongside the PC. We came of age with the Internet. Early-adopting, hyperconnected, always on: Call us Children of the Revolution, the first teens and tweens to grow up with the network. It takes a generation to unlock the potential of a transformative technology – we are that generation. From IM to MP3 to P2P, we lab-test tomorrow’s culture. While others marvel at the digital future, we take it for granted. Think of it as the difference between a second language and a first. And imagine the impact when full fluency hits the workplace, the shopping mall, the living room. In the past, you put away childish things when you grew up. But our tools are taking over the adult world. Check it out: The technology is trickling up."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/borndigital.html
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User Profile "Online Meet Market
Teen Fans of Independent Music Flock to Hot Web Site
By Andy Jordan, Tech Live
Sept. 18— "Mace" and "Pez" are two Oakland, Calif., teens who take their Internet time seriously. After all, their screen names have stuck so well they don't even use real ones.They met online at a Web site called Makeoutclub (MOC), which the two call "an underground community for any type of music." The site doesn't emphasize dating, or making out for that matter — just hooking up and making friends.As with dating sites such as Match.com, users of MOC post pictures and brief bios. But unlike dating sites, you don't need to pay to get users' contact information. At MOC, the music is the commonality around which all hookups take place.MOC is one of a few Web sites connecting young indie rockers who, it turns out, have a clique system all their own. That's a bit ironic, since these alternative-music-loving kids are known for shunning the jock and preppie scenes that fill any high school or college...."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/Relationships/techtv_makeoutclub030918.html
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User Profile Teens now spend more time online than watching T.V
New Study Details Media Usage Patterns of First Internet Generation
http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=38392
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User Profile Net 'worth little to many Brits'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3121950.stm
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User Profile Special report:network security
"Want to Sue over Buggy Code?
Forget it. Microsoft and other software makers shield themselves with the "End User Agreement." What if no one agreed?"
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2003/tc20030922_0232_tc129.htm
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User Profile "MSN shuts down its chatrooms
One in five children regularly use chatrooms, reports suggest
Microsoft's internet service MSN has taken a major step in net safety which could sound the death knell for unsupervised chatrooms.
MSN are closing all their chatrooms in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and most of Asia from 14 October, and changing how others are operated globally.
"As a responsible leader we feel it necessary to make these changes because online chat services are increasingly being misused," they said...."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3133192.stm
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User Profile "Articles, Books, Papers and Presentations addressing the use of Social Scientific Research Methodology in Cyberspace."
http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/researchmethodology.html
Department of Sociology
Lancaster University
On-Line Papers
by Topic
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/restopic.html
University of Oxford
Department of Sociology
Sociology Working Papers
http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/swp.html
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User Profile Women-Related Web Sites in Science/Technology
http://research.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/links_sci.html
And an interesting blog
Tracy Kennedy is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Toronto,and has created this blog
http://netwomen.ca/Blog/
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User Profile Computers and human Behaviour journal
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/07475632
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User Profile Red Rock Eater Digest
"The RRE News Service is a mailing list organized by Phil Agre. Topics usually concern the social and political aspects of computing and networking."
http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/
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User Profile A brilliant collection of links to audio materials - more than 80 recordings - from various BBC sources, related to user experience, design, ethnography.
http://www.usabilityviews.com/r4_by_date.html
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Location: Ottawa. Ontario, Canada
User Profile I am reading Roger E. Clancy's A Nation Online ZA 4201 C53 2002. It is straight Internet demographics. There are numerous typos in the book. I find one thing from a statistics perspective wrong here. My buddy has high speed Internet but he has gone from high speed sharing with a room mate for a couple for months in 2001 to no Internet at all for a year. To dial up internet for a few months. To now using high speed for about ten months. The point is Internet using households or individuals may not continue to use the Internet in continuous fashion. The term *Connected to the Internet* is actually very complex as is *Using the Internet* both may be more discontinuous than this book and the census agencies claim.
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User Profile Hi Piereanoid,
those are very good points you make.I guess connectivity is a bit like getting a hand dealt to you in a poker game.You are in the game but there is still a lot to do before a payoff.Thanks for your comments
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User Profile What's Your Google Number?
By Valdis Krebs
http://www.hr.com/hrcom/general/pf.cfm?oID=5635CFB8-953A-4776-AAD8B1E1404DC46F
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User Profile Degrees of Separation Are Likely More Than 6, Especially in E-Mail Age (NYT)
By KENNETH CHANG
Socially, it may be a small world, but it's hard to get from here to there.
In the current issue of the journal Science, researchers at Columbia
University report the first large-scale experiment that supports the notion
of "six degrees of separation," that a short chain of acquaintances can be
found between almost any two people in the world. But the same study finds
that trying to contact a distant stranger via acquaintances is likely to
fail.
The "six degrees of separation" notion came from an experiment in 1967 by
Dr. Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist, where a few hundred people tried
to forward a letter to a particular person in Boston by sending it through
people they knew personally. About a third of the letters reached their
destination, after an average of six mailings.
Dr. Milgram's experiment inspired a notion that the billions of people in
the world, widely separated by geography and culture, actually form a
close-knit network of social acquaintances, that you are a friend of a
friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of anyone anywhere.
Until now, few scientists have tried to confirm Dr. Milgram's findings,
which some scientists find unconvincing because of the small number of
participants and other shortcomings of the experiment.
The advent of the Internet enabled the researchers to more carefully explore
the problem, which is part mathematical — the structure of the network — and
part psychological — what motivates people to participate or not, and how do
people decide whom to send the message to? The answers are of interest both
to computer scientists studying the ebb and flow of information on the
Internet and sociologists studying the spread of gossip and cultural trends.
In this global study, more than 60,000 people tried to get in touch with one
of 18 people in 13 countries. The targets included a professor at Cornell
University, a veterinarian in the Norwegian army and a police officer in
Australia. Despite the ease of sending e-mail, the failure rate turned out
much higher than what Dr. Milgram had found, possibly because many of the
recipients ignored the messages as drips in a daily deluge of spam.
Of the 24,613 e-mail chains that were started, a mere 384, or fewer than 2
percent, reached their targets. The successful chains arrived quickly,
requiring only four steps to get there. The rest foundered when someone in
the middle did not forward the e-mail.
As in most social networks, it is not just a question of who knows whom, but
who is willing to help.
"Just because President Bush is six degrees from me doesn't mean I'm going
to be invited for dinner at the White House," said Dr. Duncan J. Watts, a
professor of sociology at Columbia and senior author of the Science paper.
"You can ask a friend of a friend for a favor, but that's about it."
Of the people who received an unsolicited e-mail message in the experiment,
37 percent sent it on, a relatively high participation rate. But with nearly
two-thirds of the recipients not forwarding the message at all, the number
of continuing e-mail chains dwindled quickly with each successive step.
When the researchers asked people why they did not participate, less than 1
percent replied that they could not think of anyone to send the e-mail
message to, suggesting that most simply did not want to be bothered.
Thus, the researchers assumed that many more of the e-mail chains could have
been completed. They calculated that half of them would have been finished
in five steps or less if the first sender and the target lived in the same
country, and seven steps otherwise.
"That sounds like we're pretty connected," Dr. Watts said. But the 98
percent attrition rate "would suggest we're really not connected," Dr. Watts
said. "It all depends on what this attrition rate is."
Dr. Mark Granovetter, a professor of sociology at Stanford who wrote an
accompanying commentary in Science, said the similar findings of Dr. Watts
and Dr. Milgram suggest the phenomenon of close links in social networks is
"pretty robust."
Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld, a professor of psychology at the University of
Alaska who has described "six degrees of separation" as an "academic
equivalent of an urban myth," said the conclusion was not warranted.
"Instead of showing we live in a small world, it really shows the opposite,"
she said. "Ninety-eight percent of people can't reach anybody. What do they
conclude? `Hey, we're all connected.' What? All I'm saying is his study
didn't prove it."
The study cannot tell how many chains would have meandered indefinitely
without reaching the target.
Of the 384 successful chains, nearly half, 169, went to the Cornell
professor, which surprised Dr. Watts, who did not consider the professor the
most socially connected of the 18 targets. "He's just a normal guy," Dr.
Watts said. "Why is he 10 times better connected than someone else? He's
not."
Instead, that success rate might reflect more about the participants.
Eighty-five percent of them had a college education and more than half were
American.
Compared with the unsuccessful chains, the successful chains also contained
more "weak" links, where someone forwarded the message to someone he knew
"casually." Dr. Granovetter, who proposed the idea that weak links are
important in social interactions, said: "They're more your windows on the
world. If you need information that comes from outside your circle, that's
where you go."
The social networks did not exhibit the hub-and-spoke structure of airline
routes. When asked how they selected whom to send the messages to,
participants reported that they looked for someone who lived in the same
geographical area as the target or who worked in the same field, not to
someone who knew lots of people.
For example, Eric Albert of Newton, Mass., received a message from his
cousin that was aimed for a reporter at Bloomberg News in New York. He
forwarded it to Will Shortz, the crossword puzzle editor of The New York
Times, a fellow member of the National Puzzlers' League.
"I figured Will Shortz since he works in New York and he works at The New
York Times and knows lots of people so he probably knows somebody who works
at Bloomberg News or at least knows someone who knows someone who works at
Bloomberg News," Mr. Albert said.
Dr. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a professor of physics at the University of
Notre Dame who has advocated the idea of well-connected people who act as
major social hubs, said the Columbia study did not argue against the
existence of hubs.
Rather, he said, people use different channels of communication for
different purposes. People might call on a busy, important acquaintance in
an emergency, like seeking a organ donor, but not for trivial matters. "What
it nicely shows is that for the purpose of this particular experiment, they
tend to avoid the hubs, or the hubs drop the message," he said.
The Columbia researchers have begun an improved experiment that will delve
more deeply into how people decide whom to message. For the first time,
participants will also be able to contact more than one acquaintance.
The follow-up experiment is at http://smallworld.columbia.edu.
August 12, 2003
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/12/science/12MAIL.html
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User Profile The Association of Internet Researchers is an academic association dedicated to the advancement of the cross-disciplinary field of Internet studies. It is a resource and support network promoting critical and scholarly Internet research independent from traditional disciplines and existing cross academic borders. The association is international in scope.
To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the Air-l Archives.
http://www.aoir.org/pipermail/air-l/
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User Profile OXFORD INTERNET SURVEY (OxIS)
The first Oxford Internet Survey covered 2,030 Britons age 14 and upwards. This representative random sample was interviewed face to face between 23 May and 28 June 2003.
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~oxis/index.html
FEATURES - TECHNOLOGY: Oxford tries to work out what IT all means
By David Bowen
Financial Times; Oct 08, 2003
http://search.ft.com/search/article.html?id=031008000791
From ACM
"The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) was established in 2001 as an independent center of excellence to study the societal implications of the Internet, with American academic William Dutton serving as its first director. Dutton says one of the chief goals of OII's mission is to debunk some of the false assumptions about information technology's social effects, and notes that the skepticism typical of English people makes the United Kingdom an ideal place to set up shop. One such myth, Dutton insists, is the myth that we are living in an information society where data has become as vital a resource as fossil fuel; another misleading view he wishes to de-mythologize is the idea that electronic communication is inherently virtuous. Dutton, who in 1993 was invited to England to serve as director of the Program on Information and Communication Technology (PICT), claims that the OII differs from other Oxford institutes that study ICT in that it focuses on ICT's sociological ramifications. The center's area of concentration is expected to include medicine, law, politics, international relations, computing, economics, and sociology. The proposal for the OII was put together by economist Andrew Graham and Sir Peter Williams of St. Catherine's College, while 10 million pounds in initial funding was put up by Xansa founder Dame Stephanie Shirley and an additional 5 million pounds donated by the Higher Education Funding Council for England. More impressive than the funding was the fact that it was raised after the dot-com meltdown. The OII recently appointed Stephen Coleman as the Cisco visiting professor of e-democracy, though Dutton says Cisco's patronage will not hurt the institute's independence."
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html#item5
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User Profile "Equal Numbers, Different Interests
A recent Jupiter Research article included the claim that "blogging is split evenly among the genders".
We were curious to see if this result would hold for Blog Census data. On August 5, we hand-checked a random sample of 776 out of a pool of 490,000 English-language weblogs. We looked for unambiguous evidence of the blogger's sex (such as photos or gendered pronouns in reported speech), and marked sex as unknown when such evidence was unavailable.
Our results for anglophone bloggers supported the Jupiter data:"
http://www.blogcensus.net/weblog/
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User Profile A site that gives the skinny on Social Network Analysis
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000006.php
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User Profile Digging for Googleholes
Google may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent.
By Steven Johnson
http://slate.msn.com/id/2085668/
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User Profile The First Email
Before the first message could be sent Tomlinson needed to come up with an address; little did he know that he would be coming up with the standard for e-mail addresses to come. "He chose the @ symbol to distinguish addresses to mailboxes in the local machine and messages that were headed out onto the network." (Campbell, 1998) Tomlinson stated that he chose that symbol for a reason, that reason being that it wasn't in anybodies name and for it's symbolic meaning, at; someone@someplace. Seems kind of catchy, right. Obviously.
The first two machines to communicate via e-mail were actually sitting right next to each other. Starting small that is the way to go. The big part, for those times, was that the computers communicated through a separate computer on ARPANET's network. This was where the transfer of "QWERTYUIOP" took place. I, as well as many, believe that if Tomlinson really grasped what he was accomplishing he would have spent more time on the message that he was sending. I mean "QWERTYUIOP", come on. I was thinking more on the lines of "Hey big guy; we did it!!" or at least a real word or phrase. Now knowing that he embarked on something great he is probably kicking himself in the butt. The crazy thing is that he really didn't think that he was creating something great.
http://www.rit.edu/~kac4253/imm/project1/project1.html
The First Smiley :-)
The smiley :-) and its many variants are an important (and fun!) part of the worldwide online social culture -- allowing emotions to be conveyed in
plain text. It has been in widespread use since the early '80s, when it was first proposed. Yet the original message in which the smiley was invented
had been lost -- until now. :-) After a significant effort to locate it, on September 10, 2002 the original post made by Scott Fahlman on CMU CS
general bboard was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x). Here is Scott's original post:
http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Smiley/Smiley.html
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User Profile They Rule
is a website that allows you to create maps of the interlocking directories of the top 100 companies in the US in 2001. http://www.theyrule.net
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User Profile A year ago an issue entitled "Jóvenes y los teléfonos móviles"
(Youth and the Mobile Phone) was published as an issue (number 57) of the
"Revista de la Juventud" (Youth Journal).An English edition has been posted in the internet.
http://www.mtas.es/injuve/biblio/revistas/Pdfs/numero57ingles.pdf
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User Profile "Odd mishaps cause computer grief
A man so angry with his laptop that he shot it has topped an annual league table of the oddest computer mishaps.Data recovery experts say although machine failure is blamed for the majority of lost files, humans are getting more careless too....."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3193366.stm
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User Profile Web Survey Methodology
http://www.websm.org/
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User Profile SocioSite
http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/sociosite/
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User Profile "The Board of Scientific Affairs (BSA) established an Advisory Group on Conducting Research on the Internet in 2001. The charge of the Advisory Group was to explore emerging ethical and scientific issues related to the conduct of research over the Internet. The Advisory Group met during 2002 and subsequently issued a report that looks at the opportunities and challenges of conducting research on the Internet and that provides a set of suggestions for researchers and for Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) that oversee this type of research."
http://www.apa.org/science/bsaweb-agcri.html
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User Profile ethnographies of the internet:
grounding regulation in lived experience
http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/Ethnographies/
And the man who did the summing up is
Christian Sandvig
an Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu/users/csandvig/research/cr/
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User Profile OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2001
http://www1.oecd.org/publications/e-book/92-2001-04-1-2987/
from highlights link
"Information and communications technologies are diffusing rapidly
The knowledge-based economy is accompanied by the rapid diffusion of ICT, especially the Internet.
The diffusion of information and communications technology is a key enabler of the knowledge-based economy. Access to ICT has grown rapidly over the past years. At the end of 1999, OECD countries had more than one network access channel for every two inhabitants and several countries had more than one access channel per inhabitant. The Nordic countries maintain a clear lead over the rest of the OECD area when connectivity provided by wireless networks is taken into account. Internet technologies are diffusing very rapidly. At the end of 1999, there were nearly 50 million Internet subscribers in the United States, close to 11 million in Japan and in Korea, 9 million in Germany, 7.4 million in the United Kingdom and 6.2 million in Canada. A ranking of countries in terms of Internet subscribers per 100 population shows high levels of take-up in Korea, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, the United States, Netherlands, Iceland and Norway.
Access to the Internet is soaring in most countries…
Personal computers are still the main device used by households to access the Internet. In most countries for which data are available, more than half of all households now have computers. In 2000, there was a noticeable gap between northern European countries such as the Netherlands (69%), Denmark (65%) and Sweden (60%) and southern European countries such as Italy (28%), France (27%) and Turkey (12%). Internet access in households is soaring everywhere, especially in Italy where the access rate grew by 144% between 1999 and 2000, as well as in the United Kingdom (75%), Japan (74%) and France (73%).
… as is its use, but Internet transactions remain limited.
The share of adults using the Internet from any location is also increasing rapidly. More than half of the adult population now uses the Internet in Sweden (68%), Denmark (62%), Finland (54%) and Canada (53%). The Internet is still mostly used to search for information, and the propensity to carry out transactions over the Internet varies widely. In Sweden, 43% of Internet users purchase over the Internet, followed by the United Kingdom (33%), the United States (30%) and Denmark (29%). Business use of the Internet is increasing very rapidly. Internet penetration in businesses with ten or more employees has reached 80-90% in the Nordic countries, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. In the Nordic countries, over 40% of employees use the Internet in their daily work. The use of the Internet to conduct transactions, although rising fast, is limited. The value of Internet sales in 2000 ranged between 0.4% and 2% of total sales, while electronic sales (including those over all computer-mediated networks) reached almost 6% in the United Kingdom.
The rate of diffusion differs between users and across countries…
Internet penetration in households is strongly affected by household income. The difference between Internet access in households belonging to the lowest and highest income quartiles is highest in the United States and lowest in Denmark. Internet usage rates are much higher in large than in small enterprises and vary in different economic sectors. The most intensive business users are generally firms in finance and insurance, business services and wholesale trade.
… partly owing to differences in access costs.
A key determinant of cross-country differences in the diffusion of the Internet and electronic commerce is access cost. There are large differences in prices of leased lines, which provide the infrastructure for business-to-business electronic commerce. The Nordic countries have the lowest charges, at about one-fifth the OECD average. Differences in Internet access cost for consumers are even more marked. At peak times, countries which traditionally have had unmetered local calls – Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, the United States – are among the least expensive."
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User Profile Beyond Bowling Together: SocioTechnical Capital
Paul Resnick.
A slightly edited version appears as Chapter 29 in "HCI in the New Millenium", edited by John M. Carroll. Addison-Wesley. 2002, pages 247-272.
Paper in MS Word format (PDF format)
PowerPoint Presentation to MOCHI, July 12, 2000
Abstract
Social resources like trust and shared identity make it easier for people to work and play together. Such social resources are sometimes referred to as social capital. Thirty years ago, Americans built social capital as a side effect of participation in civic organizations and social activities, including bowling leagues. Today, they do so far less frequently (Putnam 2000) . HCI researchers and practitioners need to find new ways for people to interact that will generate even more social capital than bowling together does. A new theoretical construct, SocioTechnical Capital, provides a framework for generating and evaluating technology-mediated social relations.
http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/stk/index.html
and
http://www.bowlingalone.com/
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User Profile nettime list
http://www.nettime.org/pipermail/nettime-ann/
Posts: 790
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Location: Melbourne Victoria Australia
User Profile The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism
Barry Wellman, Anabel Quan-Haase, Jeffrey Boase, Wenhong Chen
University of Toronto
Keith Hampton
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Isabel Isla de Diaz
Open University of Catalonia
Kakuko Miyata
University of Tokyo
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol8/issue3/wellman.html
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User Profile "misbehaving.net is a weblog about women and technology. It's a celebration of women's contributions to computing; a place to spotlight women's contributions as well point out new opportunities and challenges for women in the computing field."
http://www.misbehaving.net/
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User Profile The Internet, Act II: A clash between titans
Steve Lohr NYT Tuesday, October 28, 2003
http://www.iht.com/articles/115300.html
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User Profile Tips for Searching Google
by Gary Price
http://www.virtualchase.com/howto/gg_tips.html
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User Profile Information production on rise: Study
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20031029.gtdocskapoct29/BNStory/Technology/
would this be a shock for anyone?
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Location: Melbourne Victoria Australia
User Profile MOBILE PHONES, JAPANESE YOUTH,
AND THE RE-PLACEMENT OF SOCIAL CONTACT
Mizuko Ito
Keio University
Okabe Daisuke
Yokohama National University
http://itofisher.com/PEOPLE/mito/mobileyouth.pdf
Mobiles and the appropriation of place
Mizuko Ito
http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/08/articles/index07.html
Posts: 11
Joined: 2003-11-04
Location: Bowling Green, KY
User Profile I do not know if this is where I put this, but I am doing a report about Barney, and I need some info. I have the bad, is there anything good about him? All I have been able to find is bad stuff. So if anyone could help me find out some info about the big Pruple dude, that would be great.
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User Profile general discussion is the place for your post
Posts: 790
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User Profile Computer viruses now 20 years old
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3257165.stm
and
Security & Human Factors
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001126.html
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User Profile A two-year study of Internet use and its impact in China
http://www.markle.org/
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Location: Melbourne Victoria Australia
User Profile a history of moblogging
http://www.moblogging.org/history.asp
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User Profile The International Telecommunication Union(ITU) has published Digital Access Index: World’s First Global ICT Ranking.This forms part of the ITU's upcoming 2003 edition of the World Telecommunication Development Report (WTDR)to be published to coincide with the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).Michael Minges of the Market, Economics and Finance Unit at ITU said "Until now, limited infrastructure has often been regarded as the main barrier to bridging the digital divide.Our research, however, suggests that affordability and education are equally important factors."
http://www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2003/30.html
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User Profile "the effects of mobile telephones on social and individual life" by Dr. Sadie Plant.
http://www.motorola.com/mot/doc/0/234_MotDoc.pdf
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User Profile The Multilingual Internet:
Language, Culture and Communication in Instant Messaging, E-mail and Chat
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol9/issue1/
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User Profile Professor Michael Buckland
History of Information Management
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~buckland/history.html
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User Profile Canadian arrest highlights the dangers of Wi-Fi
By Richard Shim
http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020415,39118205,00.htm
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User Profile Igeneration from the BBC
How technology is changing people's lives across the world
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2003/the_igeneration/default.stm
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User Profile Nicola Döring's list of women researching Internet-related topics
http://www.nicola-doering.de/women.htm
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User Profile Sociological Rob:
How Rob Kling Brought Computing and Sociology Together
Barry Wellman, University of Toronto
Starr Roxanne Hiltz, New Jersey Institute of Technology
December 7, 2003
Forthcoming in The Information Society, 2004
(special memorial issue for the journal’s founding editor)
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/
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User Profile Danah Boyd at
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/
has an interesting post on "tracking conversation threads"
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=de3f5c09-7fa6-4ec6-817f-25901af7db32
"Gina Venolia (brilliant & awesome designer) is working on people-centric threading for conversations in mail. I can't wait to see what this looks like"
and this paper which I have yet to read
Understanding Sequence and Reply Relationships within Email Conversations: A Mixed-Model Visualization
Gina D. Venolia; Carman Neustaedter
http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?msr_tr_id=MSR-TR-2002-102
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User Profile This article in Wired suggests 101 ways the internet can be saved.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/internet.html?tw=wn_tophead_2
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User Profile "description
From sexual networks to filesharing, genetics to leaders of business organizations, researchers have started to recognize a pervasive characteristic of networks across a variety of disciplines. The term "power law" has come to describe the organizing principle that very few nodes will maintain a large percentage of the links in a network. The ubiquity of power laws has been interpreted as a revelation that touches almost all fields; as a result a large number of papers have been written on this topic in a short period of time. This class aims to review the literature central to the study of power laws and give attention to the question of whether this theory is here to stay."
Cameron Marlow at M.I.T
http://powerlaws.media.mit.edu/
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User Profile January 06, 2004
This article reports that "In 1992, only one in 237 people worldwide used a mobile phone, and one in 778 used the Internet; by 2002, the numbers had soared to one in 5 and one in 10, respectively".It goes on to state that "By linking rural farmers to market information, craft workers to customers, patients to doctors, and students to teachers, the internet can aid economic development."It has a table showing the growth of cellular phone subscribers and Internet host computers worldwide(1985-2002) sourced to the International telecommunications Union(ITU),Internet software consortium and Network Wizards.
Cellular phones close the telephonic divide
Posted by Jim_Downing at 02:27 PM
http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/002370.html
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User Profile January 07, 2004
Pollard on blogs in 2003 (posted by Clay Shirky)
from
http://www.corante.com/many/
BLOGS & BLOGGING -- THE TEN MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS OF 2003
By Dave Pollard
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/01/05.html#a577
"During the year, the blogosphere doubled in size, and began to mature into a true alternative medium for information and connection. My nominations for the most important ideas of the year* in blogs & blogging are:
The Internet is a World of Ends - Doc Searls and David Weinberger finally explained to bloggers and to e-business what the Internet is and how it works. As a result, bloggers (and blogging tool developers) now realize that there will never be 'standards' for blogs, blog censorship, clear rules on what is and isn't appropriate in citing others' work on your blog, standard blog taxonomy and categories, an official definition or list of blogs, unarguable or untamperable rankings of blog popularity, or controls of any kind. It's a jungle out here. There are no rules. The blogosphere, like the Internet, is owned by no one, open to everyone, and made better by each of us. A cornucopia of unrestricted and open innovation. Its value flowers at the ends, and, fellow bloggers, we are the ends.
Blog popularity is subject to Shirky's Power Law - "In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will always get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), by the very act of choosing". It's the old 80/20 rule. The later you are starting to blog, the harder it becomes to find an audience. Not impossible, just harder. There are anomalies: new blogging communities and new 'hot topics' can allow savvy bloggers to quickly galvanize a readership. But if you want to be popular in the blogosphere, it's more important to be first than best.
Blogs have Tipping Points and manifest the Strength of Weak Ties - Ever noticed how hard it is to get your family and close friends ('strong ties') to read your blog? That's because they see no incremental value in doing so. But friends of friends, people two or three degrees removed from your network, do. Weak ties probably got you your job, found your life partner, provoked your most innovative ideas, and sourced most of your blog's readership. And you can exploit these weak ties to push a new idea, find new readers, perhaps even save the world. It's easy: Just Test the credibility of and degree of interest in what you're saying by sending messages to selected mavens (bloggers who incubate new ideas and stick with them until they catch), A-listers (bloggers who already have a huge audience), and connectors (bloggers, like me, who have an audience that crosses diverse communities of interest); focus on a few subjects and address them profoundly and creatively, instead of talking a bit about everything under the sun; and believe: persevere until your message finds its audience.
Blog functionality is a critical component of Social Networking, and Social Networking will transform blogging (and also transform the Internet, the media, the way we communicate, and even the evolution of business) - Social Networking Applications (recently voted Technology of the Year by Business 2.0 magazine) will go beyond just allowing you to publish what's on your mind and browse what's on other people's. They will allow you to map and manage your networks, the communities to which you belong, your strong and weak ties. They will evolve blogging from clumsy, mostly one-way communication to a rich, two-way seamless multi-media communications medium that will allow you to identify and connect simply and powerfully with people you want to know better (for personal, practical or business reasons). Build deep relationships. Collaborate on awesome projects. Find the next president.
Blogs could be the platform for a proxy for each of us as individuals, our electronic filing cabinet and electronic identity - A blog consists of information about you, and knowledge you've accumulated. What if you expanded it to be a repository for all the information about you and all the knowledge you've accumulated, your 'locked' filing cabinet. You control it, you decide what does and doesn't go into it, and who can have a temporary key to what parts of it. Then at work, it could be your proxy, the repository of knowledge that shows your value to your employer and the value you've added to the company. And it could be your resume. At home it could be your medical patient record. Your bookshelf catalogue and refrigerator/pantry inventory and recipe book. Your bio for the dating service. Imagine the applications that could be built on this knowledge. Your intellectual property, under your control. Amazing. Scary.
The abandonment of 80-90% of blogs is a positive phenomenon - Media who just don't 'get it' have pointed to the abandonment of most blogs as an indication they're too technologically complex, or have no broad appeal, no staying power. What this abandonment really represents is a large number of people deciding that writing really isn't that important to them. The focus should instead be on the 10-20% who are still blogging. That's millions, potentially hundreds of millions of people regularly honing their writing skills, getting valuable commentary from readers on their writing and their ideas. Instead of a wasteland of abandoned effort, the blogosphere (along with perhaps IM) could actually be the most important development in written language since the printing press. As newspaper readership plummets and the next generation opts for oral communications over written, the timing of this phenomenon could not be more significant.
Blogging is increasingly a platform for achieving mainstream recognition - Just as the main readers of most business websites are competitors, not customers, the mainstream media are perusing blogs for new ideas and trends. So far they haven't really caught on to how the blogosphere works, so the process is serendipitous, creating brief fame mainly for A-listers who provide alternative viewpoints to stories of the day where no mainstream media pundits are at hand. But the mainstream media and bloggers are both learning how to use each other. Some bloggers have launched books based on their blogs, and some blogging self-promoters now have columns or spots in regular media. Those who think there's no money and fame in blogging are too quick to judge blogs' importance in the information society.
The culture of blogging is evolving faster than the technology - The frustration of bloggers with the tools available to them is palpable. That's not the tool designers' fault: They operate on a shoestring and their 'customers' all want something different. They'll eventually build tools that are both simple and flexible, as both the technology, and the understanding of its use, mature. In the meantime, impatient bloggers are working around the impediments, learning about HTML and CSS themselves. This is World of Ends innovation at work, producing a proliferation of new blog 'products' and hybrids. Group blogs are one example of a blog phenomenon that will only last until more dynamic mechanisms for cross-posting and guest privileging are developed in next generation blogs. The key is to go with the flow. Be part of the evolution or be left behind.
Blogs, like diaries, are a substitute for intimacy - Bloggers (and perhaps all writers) are a million voices howling in the dark. There is an inherent loneliness in writing, and the blogosphere provides an opportunity to make new connections with little risk. You don't need to reveal your identity. You can throw ideas out there that you might not dare voice face-to-face, for fear of being laughed at, or carted away. You can reveal things to 'strangers' that you might not be willing to tell those close to you. You can think out loud. You can test the waters, safely. The only consequence is that when you meet a fellow blogger or reader face-to-face, or even voice-to-voice, it can be psychologically jarring. It's almost as if you've broken the rules.
RSS is blurring the distinction between blogs and other media - RSS, the ability to syndicate your posts and let people subscribe to them, transforms the metaphor of a blog from a diary to a publication. That crosses the main divide that separates it from mainstream media. Although the future of any medium is impossible to predict, I believe RSS has played a pivotal role in forestalling, and perhaps completely subverting, the plan of many of the major print media to start charging money for their on-line editions. I know for a fact that was in the cards as recently as a year ago...."
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User Profile "The Click Heard Round The World
It was December 1968. An obscure scientist from Stanford Research Institute stood before a hushed San Francisco crowd and blew every mind in the room. His 90-minute demo rolled out virtually all that would come to define modern computing: videoconferencing, hyperlinks, networked collaboration, digital text editing, and something called a "mouse." Doug Engelbart tells writer Ken Jordan what it felt like to launch the point-and-click revolution 15 years before the Mac......"
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/mouse.html
For more great reading
"Chapter Nine:
The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker
Harry Truman was President and Sputnik was a word that only Russian language experts knew when Doug Engelbart first thought about displaying words and images on radar screens, storing them in computers, and manipulating them with levers and buttons and keyboards. For over thirty years, Engelbart has been trying to hasten what he believes will be the biggest step in cultural evolution since the invention of the printing press. To hear him tell it today, both the computer establishment and the computer revolutionaries still fail to understand that the art and power of using a computer as a mind amplifier are not in how the amplifier works but in what the amplified minds are able to accomplish.
At the end of the summer of 1945, just after the surrender of Japan, Engelbart was a twenty-year-old American naval radar technician, waiting for his ship home from the Philippines. One muggy day, he wandered into a Red Cross library that was built up on stilts, like a native hut.
Vannevar Bush
"It was quiet and cool and airy inside, with lots of polished bamboo and books. That was where I ran across that article by Vannevar Bush," Engelbart recalls......."
http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/9.html
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User Profile Alternative Mobility Futures
CeMoRe
Centre for Mobilities Research
Lancaster University
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/CeMoRe/conference.htm
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User Profile The Birth of the Internet:An Architectural Conception for Solving the Multiple Network Problem
by Ronda Hauben
http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/birth_internet.txt
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User Profile Inhabiting the virtual city:
The design of social environments for electronic communities
By Judith Stefania Donath
Abstract
The goal of this work is to develop an approach to the design of on-line social environments. My thesis is that, in order to foster the development of vibrant and viable online communities, the environment - i.e. the technical infrastructure and user interface - must provide the means to communicate social cues and information: the participants must be able to perceive the social patterns of activity and affiliation and the community must be able to evolve a fluid and subtle cultural vocabulary.
The theoretical foundation for the research is drawn from traditional studies of society and culture and from observations of contemporary on-line systems. Starting with an analysis of the fundamental differences between real and virtual societies - most notably, the presence and absence of the body - the first section examines the ways social cues are communicated in the real world, discusses the limits imposed on on-line communities due to their mediated and bodiless nature, and explores directions that virtual societies can take that are impossible for physical ones.
These ideas form the basis for the main part of the thesis, a design platform for creating sociable virtual environments. The focus of the discussion is on the analysis of a set of implemented design experiments that explore three areas of the platform: the visual representations of social phenomena, the role of information spaces as contexts for communication, and the presentation of self in the virtual world.
http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Thesis/
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User Profile MIT Media Laboratory: Momentum
with writing by:
Dan Ariely
Walter Bender
Steve Benton
Bruce Blumberg
V. Michael Bove, Jr.
Cynthia Breazeal
Ike Chuang
Chris Csikszentmihályi
Glorianna Davenport
Judith Donath
Neil Gershenfeld
Hiroshi Ishii
Joe Jacobson
Andy Lippman
Tod Machover
John Maeda
Scott Manalis
Marvin Minsky
William J. Mitchell
Seymour Papert
Joe Paradiso
Sandy Pentland
Rosalind Picard
Mitchel Resnick
Deb Roy
Chris Schmandt
Ted Selker
Barry Vercoe
http://momentum.media.mit.edu/index.html
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User Profile "A real-life debate on free speech in a cyberspace city
By Amy Harmon NYT
Peter Ludlow said he was only trying to expose the truth that Alphaville's authorities were all too happy to ignore. In his online newspaper, The Alphaville Herald, he reported on thieves and their scams. He documented what he said was a teenage prostitution ring. He criticized the city's leaders for not intervening to make it a better place.In response to his investigative reporting, Ludlow says, he was banished from Alphaville. He was kicked out of his home; his other property was confiscated. Even his two cats were taken away.Alphaville is not a real town but a virtual city in an Internet game called The Sims Online, where thousands of paying subscribers log on each day to assume fictional identities and mingle in cyberspace.None of Ludlow's possessions existed outside the game. But the recent decision by the game's owner, Electronic Arts, to terminate Ludlow's account - forever erasing his simulated Sims persona - has set off a debate over free expression and ethical behavior in online worlds that is reverberating in the real one.
"To me, it was clearly censorship," Ludlow said.
A Yale Law School student, writing on the school's Web log, condemned Electronic Arts as "a classic despot" that is "using its powers to single out individual critics for the dungeons and the firing squads."The issues are actually not that clear-cut. But the episode has called attention to the little-known netherworlds of a popular computer game genre known as "massively multiplayer online role-playing games," which now regularly attract millions around the world.
In Sims Online, Everquest and others where the border between fantasy and reality is increasingly blurry, the games have become more than simply a source of entertainment. They are also a gateway to a complex social network that takes on a life of its own...."
http://www.iht.com/articles/125869.html
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User Profile Interesting social history.
"Suing Your Customers: A Winning Business Strategy?
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/articles.cfm?catid=7&articleid=863
"...But the U.S. Patent Office had issued the Selden Patent and a group of powerful incumbents had purchased it and formed an association to enforce it. Litigation, then as now, was very expensive – especially for start-up companies with limited working capital. Nearly every car company fell into line to pay royalties to the Association for the privilege of making and selling cars.
Except Henry Ford. The association did not want another competitor in Detroit and it did not like his idea of driving prices down to where average people could afford a car. So it refused to license him. For Ford, it was either exit the industry or fight the Selden Patent in court. He decided to raise a legal war chest and fight the incumbents. The litigation lasted from 1903 until 1911 and along the way, the association launched hundreds of lawsuits against Ford’s customers to scare them away from his showrooms for buying “unlicensed vehicles.”
Most ordinary people of Ford’s era had been content to stand by and watch the automobile makers slug it out over the Selden Patent. It was just an industry cat fight. But when the big “money men” started suing ordinary people who were just trying to buy a cheap car, public sympathy shifted against the incumbents. People rallied to Ford’s side against the bullies. Editorials weighed in against the industry’s heavy-handed lawsuits, and Ford helped his own case by purchasing litigation insurance for his customers. By the time the patent litigation was over – Ford won on appeal in 1911 when the court ruled that the Selden Patent covered only cars made with a special type of engine nobody was using anymore – Ford was a hero, and the largest car manufacturer in America.
What can the Recording Industry Association of America take from Henry Ford’s story? First, you will never win your market by suing your customers....."
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User Profile SSRC newsletter Items and Issues
http://www.ssrc.org/publications/items/current.page
Network Creativity and Digital Culture:
"The Past and the Internet"
Geoffrey C. Bowker
"Technologies of the Childhood Imagination"
Mizuko Ito
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User Profile "Internet hits 35th birthday mark
First message sent from UCLA grad student; web still faces problems
By Harold Lee
The Internet, the small network of computers that became a World Wide Web, celebrates its 35th birthday this year.UCLA, in conjunction with Stanford University, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah, began constructing the Internet's first incarnation for the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1969.Computers, called Interface Message Processors, were distributed to the four universities and connected by telephone lines.Soon after, more computers at various universities were added to the network, intended to facilitate academic research. What began as a mere experiment to see if computers could talk to one another started to grow."We were just having fun, actually," said Charley Kline, a UCLA graduate student who sent out the first Internet message to Stanford in October of 1969."We didn't realize this was going to be a gigantic, big phenomenon."UCLA computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock, who is often credited as being one of the founders of the Internet, developed the idea of packet switching as a way to transfer files from one computer to another.Packet switching involves dividing files into packets before transmission. When the packets arrive at their destination, the receiving computer recompiles the file into its original form.Now that the Internet is in its 35th year, Kleinrock notes the concerns that threaten the Internet, as well as ways to encourage its growth.Some major problems plaguing the Internet, Kleinrock said, include invasion of privacy and spam."One issue is to undo legislation that invades (user) privacy, and the other is to enact legislation that provides protection against privacy abuses," Kleinrock said.Spam, junk e-mail that floods mailboxes and Internet forums, is one problem that legislation may find difficult to battle, he said."(The solution to spam) has to be more proactive. If you send a million e-mails, you're going to get a hefty fee," Kleinrock said. "No normal person sends out a million e-mails."In the beginning, it was generally assumed the Internet would be used responsibly. For a long time, people played by the rules, Kleinrock explained.The spam phenomenon is a recent development.In 1994, two Arizona lawyers flooded Usenet groups, a type of Internet forum, with offers of easy access to green cards.The Internet, though drastically changed from its first form, maintains the founding principles that facilitate the traffic of information."That (free exchange of ideas) resulted in a process of developing things in an open manner, which has continued to this day and has resulted in a better design for the network," Kline said.
In order to combat problems such as spam and hacker attacks, the problems need to be sharply targeted without adversely affecting the Internet's growth, Kleinrock said."The thing that gives the Internet its power has been the ability for people to communicate and interact," he said. "(In) no way would I want to inhibit that."The spread of the Internet has allowed even people with modest resources to publish to the whole world, said UCLA communication studies Professor Francis Steen."The big picture is a massive drop in the cost of information," Steen said."Now you can have your own Web page ... a way of almost instant self-publication."
Through its broad expanse, the Internet has revolutionized the way people communicate."Before, when people wrote letters, you would sit down and make it a special occasion," Steen said."The type of attention people gave to letters (is not given) to e-mails, so we have a very informal genre."
In order for the Internet to grow even further, limited resources should be overcome to make it available to everyone, Kleinrock said."Spreading to underdeveloped countries, the poor and the underprivileged is important."
Within the lifetime of its creators, a small band of computers linked for academic research became a network that spread around the world.According to the Nua Internet Survey, 605.60 million people were online as of September 2002."
http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/articles.asp?id=27055
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User Profile The Harvard Business school
Cyberposium conference
RFID: The Promise (and Danger) of Smart Barcodes
Lessons in Eduction and Technology
Is iTunes the answer to Music Piracy?
VoIP Calling:Ready to Take off
and more
http://hbsworkingknowledge.hbs.edu/specialReport.jhtml?id=3878&t=special_reports_cyber2004
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User Profile an Online dictionary of the social sciences
"This dictionary is an electronic (database) version of a 900+ item dictionary authored by by Gary Parkinson, Ph.D. and Robert Drislane, Ph.D. The electronic version is fully searchable (both terms and definition text).Conversion was undertaken by ICAAP for Athabasca University. Conversion to electronic format took less than a day.This dictionary is being offered free of charge to students, instructors, and anyone else interested in learning more about the social sciences."
http://bitbucket.icaap.org/dict.pl
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User Profile "The Panels overarching finding is that a new age has dawned in scientific and engineering research, pushed by continuing progress in computing, information, and communication technology, and pulled by the expanding complexity, scope, and scale of today's challenges. The capacity of this technology has crossed thresholds that now make possible a comprehensive “cyberinfrastructure” on which to build new types of scientific and engineering knowledge environments and organizations and to pursue research in new ways and with increased efficacy. Such environments and organizations, enabled by cyberinfrastructure, are increasingly required to address national and global priorities, such as understanding global climate change, protecting our natural environment, applying genomics-proteomics to human health, maintaining national security, mastering the world of nanotechnology, and predicting and protecting against natural and human disasters, as well as to address some of our most fundamental intellectual questions such as the formation of the universe and the fundamental character of matter...."
from the executive summary
Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure
http://www.cise.nsf.gov/sci/reports/toc.cfm
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User Profile Welcome to the British Sociological Association's Website!
http://www.britsoc.org.uk/
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Location: Melbourne Victoria Australia
User Profile I am learning as much as I can fron edtech without being there
http://wiki.oreillynet.com/etech/hosted.conf?SessionNotes
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Location: Melbourne Victoria Australia
User Profile "People lie more on the phone than by email
Communications technologies are far from equal when it comes to conveying the truth. The first study to compare honesty across a range of communications media has found that people are twice as likely to tell lies in phone conversations as they are in emails.The fact that emails are automatically recorded - and can come back to haunt you - appears to be the key to the finding....
His results, to be presented at the conference on human-computer interaction in Vienna, Austria, in April have surprised psychologists. Some expected emailers to be the biggest liars, reasoning that because deception makes people uncomfortable, the detachment of emailing would make it easier to lie.
Real time
Others expected people to lie more in face-to-face exchanges because we are most practised at that form of communication. But Hancock says it is also crucial whether a conversation is being recorded and could be re-read, and whether it occurs in real time....."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994663
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User Profile From the International Telecommunication Union(ITU)
"Shaping the future mobile information society
In recent years, the world has seen an explosion in the growth of information and communication technologies, and particularly mobile communications. 2002 marked a turning point in the history of telecommunications in that the number of mobile subscribers overtook the number of fixed-line subscribers on a global scale, and mobile became the dominant technology for voice communications. Indeed, the mobile phone has moved beyond being a mere technological object to become a key "social object" present in every aspect of our daily lives.
The combination of mobile with Internet and IP-based technologies, and the integration of fixed and mobile technologies, raises a host of possibilities for innovative applications and new modes of interaction. Wireless applications of pervasive or ubiquitous technologies conjure up images of intelligent homes and always-on human monitoring. Already, location-based technologies can help police and parents protect children from abductions or other forms of crimes. Combined with customized advertising, such location technologies can be a boon to retailers wishing to promote their products to potential buyers passing by. Multimedia messaging services (MMS) and streaming mobile video are opening up more exciting person-to-person services and customized entertainment. Although predicting the future is a risky business in the telecommunication industry, an understanding of the key technologies for "everywhere, anytime" mobile that are being developed can allow us to have some grasp on the shape and direction of the future mobile information society.
The question that is raised is whether we are well-equipped as a society, and as individuals, to live in a world of technological ubiquity, a world in which an intelligent microwave warms up your dinner before you get home, or your mobile phone tells you that your husband is still at the supermarket. Consider the use of tiny Radio Frequency ID tags imbedded into clothing to help retail businesses track inventory. Will these remain active once the item has been purchased and what kind of information will be collected? The new generation of always-on, anytime, anyplace technologies may allow for levels of convenience, but also of surveillance, unknown and unimagined by earlier generations. At the dawn of this new age, it is important to consider what effect these technologies are having on the way we grow, interact, socialize and learn."
ITU Background Paper on " Social and Human Considerations for a More Mobile World" (February 2004)
http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/ni/futuremobile/
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User Profile World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else,
by
Doc Searls and
David Weinberger
1. The Internet isn't complicated
2. The Internet isn't a thing. It's an agreement.
3. The Internet is stupid.
4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
5. All the Internet's value grows on its edges.
6. Money moves to the suburbs.
7. The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends.
8. The Internet's three virtues:
a. No one owns it
b. Everyone can use it
c. Anyone can improve it
9. If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been
so boneheaded about it?
10. Some mistakes we can stop making already
http://www.worldofends.com/
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Location: Melbourne Victoria Australia
User Profile Rural Americans’ Internet use has grown, but they continue to lag behind others
".....In addition, rural Internet users are distinctive in some ways for what they do and don’t do online. They are more likely than others accessed religious or spiritual content. In addition, they are more likely to have used instant messaging. On the other hand, they are less likely than others to have engaged in transaction activities such as online banking and online purchases. “Rural Internet users aren’t entirely a breed apart from other online Americans,” said Peter Bell, Research Associate at the Pew Internet Project and principal author of the new report. “When it comes to using email, employing search engines, visiting government Web sites, and pursuing hobbies, they are just as likely as everyone else to perform some of the most popular activities online. Many of their differences can be explained by the fact that the Internet hasn’t diffused into everyday life in rural areas at quite the same clip as it has in others locales....” The report, titled “Rural Areas and the Internet,” is based on primarily on survey data collected between March and August 2003.
http://www.pewinternet.org/releases/release.asp?id=73
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User Profile "Accurately modeling the Internet topology
Authors: Shi Zhou, Raul J. Mondragon
Comments: 4 pages, 9 figures
Subj-class: Networking and Internet Architecture
ACM-class: C.2.1 and C.2.5
Abstract
To model the behavior of a network it is crucial to obtain a good description of its topology because structure affects function. When studying the topological properties of the Internet, we found out that there are two mechanisms which are necessary for the correct modeling of the Internet: a nonlinear preferential growth, where the growth is described by a positive-feedback mechanism, and the appearance of new links between already existing nodes. We show that the Positive-Feedback Preference (PFP) model, which is based on the above mechanisms, reproduces topological properties of the Internet such as: degree distribution, tier structure (rich-club connectivity), shortest path length, neighbor clustering, network redundancy (triangle and rectangle coefficient), disassortative mixing (nearest-neighbors average degree) and information flow pattern (betweenness centrality). We believe that these growth mechanisms need further study because they provide a novel insight into the evolutionary dynamics of real complex networks."
http://aps.arxiv.org/abs/cs/0402011
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User Profile "RSS explained
New Web Technology Keeps Users Informed Automatically
Web site operators and savvy online users are beginning to manage the flood of information in cyberspace using a technology called RSS. Here are some answers to commonly asked questions.
What Is RSS?
Depending on who you ask, RSS stands for either "Rich Site Summary" or "Really Simple Syndication." But no matter what it's called, RSS is a new way to publish information online.At the heart of the technology is special Web coding, called XML, that has been widely developed by the global online community over the past few years.The XML code for RSS describes a new type of Web information called a "news feed." Essentially, the feeds can contain a summary and links of the new content on a Web site or anything else a creator desires to share. A company may publish an RSS feed that contains news of its latest products, for example.Any one — an online surfer or another Web site — can pick up the RSS codes and with the appropriate Web software display the information automatically.
The concept is similar to how a newswire service operates: Information published by one news organization can be "syndicated" — picked up and displayed — by any other news organization.
What Does RSS Mean for Web Site Publishers?
Through syndication, online content creators have a much easier way to get their information published and seen. For instance, a Web surfer who sees an RSS feed — say a ticker of top news stories — on one site might click on the content, which in turn drives more traffic back to the original Web site.RSS can also be a way for Web sites to retain "loyalty" among visitors. By supplying the RSS code on the Web site, visitors can "subscribe" to the feed and automatically receive updates on their personal computers of new content on the site.Such an RSS feed will free content creators from creating and sending e-mail reminders — many of which may be stopped by anti-spam filters.
Why Would Ordinary Web Users Like RSS?
For Web surfers, the advantages of RSS are quite simple: They save time and bandwidth.Instead of remembering to visit a favorite Web site, the news comes directly into your computer daily or at whatever interval you want.What's more, most RSS feeds contain just links, headlines, or brief synopsis of new information only. That means the small amount of Web data can be sent to any XML-compatible device — a cell phone, pager, or handheld computer — without a lengthy download process.More importantly, RSS gives you control over receiving information you want without revealing information about yourself. Unlike subscribing to an e-mail newsletter, you never have to give out your e-mail address with an RSS feed. That avoids the possibility of receiving spam or unwanted junk e-mail from the Web site......"
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/SciTech/FAQ_RSS_ABCNEWS_headlines.html
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User Profile "Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength
Summary:
E-newsletters that are informative, convenient, and timely are often preferred over other media. However, a new study found that only 11% of newsletters were read thoroughly, so layout and content scannability is paramount.Email newsletters continue to be one of the most important ways to communicate with customers on the Internet. Newsletters build relationships with users, and also offer users an added social benefit in that they can forward relevant newsletters to friends and colleagues. Still, users are highly critical of newsletters that waste their time, and often ignore or delete newsletters that have insufficient usability....."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040217.html
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User Profile Anonymous Communications
on the Internet
A project of the AAAS Directorate for Science and Policy Programs to explore online anonymity and pseudonymity.
http://www.aaas.org/spp/anon/
Via Joi Ito
http://joi.ito.com/
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User Profile interesting piece from NYT about google power.
"January 22, 2004
Engineering Google Results to Make a Point
By TOM McNICHOL
TIME was - say, two months ago - when typing the phrase "miserable failure" into the Google search box produced an unexpected result: the White House's official biography of President George W. Bush.
But now the president has a fight on his hands for the top ranking - from former President Jimmy Carter, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and the author-filmmaker Michael Moore.The unlikely electoral battle is being waged through "Google bombing," or manipulating the Web's search engines to produce, in this case, political commentary. Unlike Web politicking by other means, like hacking into sites to deface or alter their message, Google bombing is a group sport, taking advantage of the Web-indexing innovation that led Google to search-engine supremacy.
The perpetrators succeed by recruiting a small group of accomplices to link from their Web sites to a target site using specific anchor text (the clickable words in a link). The more high-traffic sites that link a Web page to a particular phrase, the more Google tends to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of the president's official biography, the term does not occur on the destination site."I'm actually surprised how easy it was to do," said the mastermind of the Bush effort, George Johnston, 46, a computer programmer in Bellevue, Wash., who writes a liberal-leaning Web log called Old Fashioned Patriot (oldfashionedpatriot.blogspot.com). "It took about six weeks to get Bush's biography as the No. 1 result. I had no idea when I started that I'd get people all over the world involved."
Google bombing has quickly become an armchair sport among those who have a message to broadcast and perhaps a bit too much time on their hands. For nearly a year, the No. 1 search result on Google for the term "weapons of mass destruction" has been a satirical Web page made to resemble an error message that reads, "These Weapons of Mass Destruction Cannot Be Displayed."
The Liberty Round Table, a libertarian group, started a Google bomb that linked the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition advocacy group, with the term "food Nazis." (As a follow-up, the group is trying to make the Internal Revenue Service site the No. 1 Google result for the term "organized crime.") Other recent Google bombs have sought to associate President Bush, Senator Clinton and Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, with various unprintable phrases.
Google plays down the significance of Google bombing, saying the search results merely reflect what is actually happening on the Web.
"We're only seeing it with obscure queries where there's really not that much action on the Web about them," said Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology. "I don't think it's possible to do this sort of thing on queries with well-defined results like ' I.B.M.' So given that it only affects one query out of the more than 200 million a day we handle, it's hard to see it becoming much of a problem."
But some in the industry say Google may be more worried than it lets on. The company's success, to a large extent, has been built on its search algorithm's ability to return relevant Web pages and weed out irrelevant or outright bogus results. The growing popularity of Google bombing can't be a welcome development for a company that is expected to begin selling stock to the public in a few months.
"Google says they're just reflecting what's on the Web, but they're actually reflecting a very small number of people who are trying to manipulate the system," said Danny Sullivan, who edits Search Engine Watch (www.searchenginewatch.com). "Google bombing will never go away, but Google has got to make it less rewarding for people to spend time doing this."
Google certainly isn't the only search engine whose results can be gamed by users acting in concert. President Bush's biography is also the No. 1 search result for "miserable failure" on Yahoo, which draws on Google's technology and that of HotBot; it's the No. 2 result on MSN Search. All search engines, to varying degrees, analyze links in calculating the relevancy of a page for a particular query. Seed the Web with enough links pointing to the same site using the same anchor text, and you alter the search results. The effect is magnified with less popular search phrases, since there are far fewer competing links.
Some Google bombs may have been accomplished with as few as 20 links. What is important is not the number of links, but rather the popularity of the sites doing the linking and the relative obscurity of the search term.
Bombers aim at Google for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks - that's where the payoff is. Google handles more than 200 million requests a day and has a 34.9 percent share of online searches in the United States. The nearest rival is Yahoo, with 27.7 percent, according to comScore Networks, which tracks consumer behavior.
People have tried to manipulate results ever since search engines appeared on the Web in 1995. An industry of "search engine optimizers" has grown up around the practice of tweaking a company's Web site so that it ranks high for certain keywords. Less ethical optimizers create shadow domains that funnel users to a site through misleading redirects or set up bogus doorway pages festooned with nothing but keywords.
Search engines forbid this kind of blatant gaming for commercial purposes, and Google regularly banishes sites from its search engine for such practices. But search engines cannot do much to deter groups of legitimate sites and blogs from working in concert to alter search results, as is happening with the Google bombs.
The first Google bomb exploded in the fall of 1999, when a search for the term "more evil than Satan himself" returned Microsoft's home page as the first result. At the time, Google denied that its search algorithm had been a victim of a prank. Rather, the company insisted, the ranking was an accurate reflection of the Web's many Microsoft critics referring to the company, independently of one another, as being more evil than Satan himself. But subsequent bombs made it clear that the Microsoft result was probably no accident.Adam Mathes, a blogger and computer science major at Stanford, is generally credited with having coined the term "Google bombing" almost three years ago to describe the practice of manipulating Google results through seeding the Web with links. Mr. Mathes started a Google bomb as a joke at the expense of a friend and graphic artist, Andy Pressman, managing to get Mr. Pressman's blog listed as the first result for the phrase "talentless hack." Mr. Mathes later interviewed for a job at Google and felt compelled to confess his campaign.
"It was definitely a big thing for them," Mr. Mathes said. "They told me, 'Yes, we've had many meetings about Google bombing.' I don't think that's why I didn't get the job, but it probably wasn't the best career move."
Lately, Google bombs have taken a political turn. As coalition forces were poised to invade Iraq in March, Steve Lerner, a 22-year-old blogger and student at York University in Toronto, created a parody page of a Google search for "French military victories," which stated that no documents were found and suggested as an alternative search, "Did you mean: French military defeats?"Mr. Lerner did not set out to game Google; his exploit turned out to be a kind of accidental bombing. Mr. Lerner simply posted the parody page on his blog (www .albinoblacksheep.com), where other bloggers began linking to it. Before long, the expanding lattice of links propelled the page to No. 1 with a bullet. The parody page still enjoys the top Google slot."I was just one small factor in the whole thing," Mr. Lerner said. "I put some links to the page and then some other people put links to it, and it just spread."
In late October, Mr. Johnston, a self-described "lefty,'' started a Google bomb to tie Mr. Bush's biography to the phrase "miserable failure," watchwords used by the presidential campaign of Representative Richard A. Gephardt, Democrat of Missouri, to describe Mr. Bush's tenure.Success came just six weeks into the campaign. Mr. Johnston says he is not sure how many links it took to capture the No. 1 spot, but a handful of blogs played a major role, including TalkLeft (www.talkleft.com) and Media Whores Online (www .mediawhoresonline.com)."The reason it worked is that there were enough like-minded people who thought it was funny and spread it around," Mr. Johnston said. "It has to be something that makes people laugh or captures their imagination."
Of course, not everyone was laughing. When as the president's biography went to No. 1 for "miserable failure," some conservatives were convinced that so-called liberal control of the media had now been extended to search engines. A visitor to the comments page of freerepublic.com, a conservative news forum, suggested a boycott of Google and lamented: "How much longer are we going to have to put up with liberal bias in the media! It's bad enough that they have NPR but Google???"A few tech-savvy posters later explained how Google bombs work, and now forum members are supporting a counterbomb to tie "miserable failure" to Michael Moore. (Mr. Moore is already the No. 1 listing for the term on AOL search.)Google maintains that such activity still is not hurting the overall quality of its service. The company says it expects Google bombing will soon go the way of most Web fads.
"It's the kind of thing people enjoy doing once because it's fun to be able to put up a page that can have a powerful effect," Mr. Silverstein said. "But it's not something people are going to want to spend their lives doing." Clearly, anyone who goes through life trying to manipulate search engine results would have to be called a miserable failure. And how many of them can there be?"
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User Profile "How can we think the complex?
Authors: Carlos Gershenson, Francis Heylighen (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Comments: 7 pages. Prepared for the book "Managing the Complex Volume One: Philosophy, Theory and Application" Richardson, Kurt (ed.)
Subj-class: Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
Abstract
In this chapter we want to provide philosophical tools for understanding and reasoning about complex systems. Classical thinking, which is taught at most schools and universities, has several problems for coping with complexity. We review classical thinking and its drawbacks when dealing with complexity, for then presenting ways of thinking which allow the better understanding of complex systems. Examples illustrate the ideas presented. This chapter does not deal with specific tools and techniques for managing complex systems, but we try to bring forth ideas that facilitate the thinking and speaking about complex systems."
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/nlin.AO/0402023
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User Profile Content Creation Online: 44% of U.S. Internet users have contributed their thoughts and their files to the online world
February 29, 2004
From the summary of findings
"44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files.
In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online. Some 44% of the nation’s adult Internet users (those 18 and over) have done at least one of the following:......"
http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=113
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User Profile "Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious"
Wired News (03/05/04); Asaravala, Amit
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs used Intelliseek's BlogPulse Web crawler to mine numerous Weblogs, after which they mapped out the connections and topics shared among a large number of sites. Analysis showed that topics would often appear on a small number of relatively obscure blogs a few days before showing up on more popular sites. "There is a lot of speculation that really important people are highly connected, but really, we wonder if the highly connected people just listen to the important people," explains HP Labs researcher Lada Adamic. The team learned that when an idea "infected" at least 10 blogs, 70 percent of those blogs failed to supply links back to another blog that previously mentioned the idea, so the researchers devised methods to deduce the point of origin of information by noting textual, link, and infection rate similarities. "What we're finding is that the important people on the Web are not necessarily the people with the most explicit links [back to their sites], but the people who cause epidemics in blog networks," says HP researcher Eytan Adar. The scientists have encapsulated their techniques into the iRank search algorithm, which ranks sites according to how well they inject ideas into the mainstream. Future plans include making iRank resistant to Google-bomb-type attacks, while some of the team's research is accessible online via the Blog Epidemic Analyzer program. The HP Labs research could help sociologists chart the course of knowledge epidemics, which marketers could also exploit to sell their products directly to the most influential members of a group."
via ACM technews
Wired article referred to
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,62537,00.html
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User Profile Spam was 10 years old on March 5th
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/36062.html
This was the first spam sent
http://web.archive.org/web/20011214024742/math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/BL/CS941211.txt
Sophos outs 'dirty dozen' spam producing countries
Anti-spam specialist maps the spam world
Sophos, a world leader in protecting businesses against spam and viruses, has published a report into the countries from which spam messages originate. Researchers scanned all spam messages received over two days last week and have revealed a 'dirty dozen' of offending countries with the United States topping the chart.The 'dirty dozen' are as follows:
United States
Canada
China (& Hong Kong)
South Korea
Netherlands
Brazil
Germany
France
United Kingdom
Australia
Mexico
Spain
http://www.sophos.co.uk/spaminfo/articles/dirtydozen.html
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User Profile The Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 23% of adult U.S. Internet users have gone online from a place other than home or work which is close to 30 million Americans."Among these away-from-home, away-from-work users, the top “other” locations for Internet access are school (27%), friend/neighbor’s house (26%), at a library (26%), and a relative’s house (9%). In addition, 4% have logged on from some place while traveling, 3% have logged on at hotels, 2% have logged on at cyber cafés, and small fractions have logged on at community centers and houses of worship",the report says.Some are lower-income Americans who browse in schools or libraries,but many are younger adults who are moving toward any time, anywhere access.
http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=115
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User Profile For Most Africans, Internet Access Is Little More Than a Pipe Dream
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1079109268.php
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Location: Melbourne Victoria Australia
User Profile Via http://www.spaceandculture.org
"THE USE OF SPACE IN THE INFORMATION/COMMUNICATION AGE - PROCESSING THE UNPLANNABLE
Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Frans Vogelaar
he emerging space of digital information/communication flows is modifying traditional analog urban networks. These "virtual" spaces (Internet, telephone, television) are influencing and interacting with "real" urban places. This interaction process between information/communication networks and the urban environments is a complex and dynamic one.
By negating distance, information/communication technology is reducing the importance of spatial proximity for the location of functions. At the same time, the "spaces of flows" of information/communication networks are attracted to existing urban structures, supporting given centralities and enhancing urban differentiations.The spaces of information/communication networks are absorbing functions (for example, teleworking, teleshopping) and power (for example, economic transactions, politics) away from urban organisms. However, the relation between the urban realm and ICT networks is not just one of simple competition.The anticipation (and fear) of the replacement of urban organisms by the "soft" cities of tomorrow is proving to be too simplistic. ICT will not absorb all the functions of urban organisms by withdrawing them from the urban and transferring them to telecommunication networks. The city will not disappear, but it will change in character, in that its very specific qualities as an environment for direct physical encounter and experience, as a generator of (intuitive) trust needed for social cohesion, will become more pronounced."
http://www.infodrome.nl/publicaties/domeinen/07_rui_vog_essay.html
"The Meaning of Place
New technologies are reconfiguring our relationship to the places we inhabit. With the near ubiquitous presence of cell phones in many cities, the rise of wireless networks, hybrid games, the use of geographical information systems, and the emergence of an embedded computing research agenda in many labs, physical location has re-emerged as an important construct in the imagination of and creation of new technologies.
But humans think of place quite differently than our technologies might demand. We inhabit places, not physical coordinates or zones of reception. Places are imbued with meaning through cultural practice; places are bounded and denoted in ways that may or may not match physical or technological means. This forum is intended to understand how the human construction of place both affects and is affected by new technologies...."
http://www.intel.com/research/exploratory/papr/meaning_of_place-forum.htm
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User Profile "Australians prefer snailmail
March 18, 2004
AUSTRALIANS have a reputation for embracing new technology more readily than most.Mobile phone ownership, for instance, is among the highest in the world, as is Australian internet usage.But a recent survey suggests that when it comes to written communication, Aussies prefer it to be delivered by the postman.Research conducted by Australia Post shows that less than one in 10 Australians wants official contact to be by email or SMS....."
http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,9002941%255E15318,00.html
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User Profile The International Telecommunication Union(ITU) held a workshop entitled "Shaping the Future Mobile Information Society" in Seoul, Republic of Korea, from the 4th to the 5th of March 2004.In opening the workshop Mr Roberto Blois, Deputy Secretary-General of ITU, said ""Mobile phones are everywhere. The typical user carries one with them wherever they go, and would be hard-pressed to part with it. In this respect, the mobile phone has moved beyond being a mere technological object to become a key "social object", present in every aspect of our daily lives."The question that is raised is how well equipped we are as a society, and as individuals, to live in a world of technological ubiquity? As we move towards a future in which the mobile phone may become the personal ICT device of choice, are the appropriate safeguards in place?"Background papers were prepared for discussion at the workshop.They were "Broadband mobile communications towards a converged world" and "Social and human considerations for a more mobile world". In addition, a number of case studies were prepared covering country experiences in Japan, the Republic of Korea, Morocco and Norway. All meeting documents including case studies and presentations are available.
http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/ni/futuremobile/workshop.html
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User Profile "Students have 'away' with words
By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY
It began simply, with no-nonsense notes like "in the shower" or "at dinner."But gradually, George Washington University freshman Brian Cheung's messages about his whereabouts have grown more elaborate. Sometimes when he's not online, he posts jokes. Other times, he rants. "Who throws a party on a Monday night in the middle of midterms?? I mean really," Cheung once harrumphed, adding, "down in 609 studying."
The subject here is "away messages," the aptly, albeit clunkily named instant-messaging innovation that has captured the fancy not only of Cheung but also of tech-savvy college students everywhere.An away message, for those not up on online culture, is the instant-messaging (IM) equivalent of the telephone answering machine — it pops up when somebody sends you an IM and you're not available to reply.Among college students, the practice of posting personalized away messages has become such an obsession that some undergrads have based research projects on them. The subject has landed on syllabi in psychology and anthropology courses. They're mentioned breezily in campus newspapers. And in perhaps the ultimate proof that away messages have achieved a certain stature on campus, Web pages are devoted to them.
'A need to feel connected'
"Ask any college student," says Cheung, 19, a criminal justice and Spanish major. "We read our away messages like it's a hobby."
Anybody who sends IMs could get similarly hooked. But away messages have taken off on campus for two reasons, experts say.First, just as teens in an earlier era spent hours on the phone with friends, away messages satisfy "a need to feel connected," says David Jacobson, an anthropology professor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. He is examining the phenomenon in a class called "Virtual Communities."
The other reason is availability. While many households still have slow dial-up connections to the Internet through telephone lines, most campuses today offer high-speed Internet access 24/7."We live within a 12-foot circle of our laptops," says business major Nick Gray, 22, a senior at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. "That's why it's showing up" on campuses.Plus, the cost of AOL's Instant Messenger (AIM) software, the student favorite, can't be beat. It's free. Available since 1997, it features a Buddy List, which lets users exchange messages in real time with as many as 200 people. AIM offers a default "I am away from my computer right now," but users can personalize and update their messages.
That's where the fun starts......"
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-03-28-away-messages-usat_x.htm
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User Profile Nielsen/Netratings says that global internet use was down substantially from January to February.Internet use was examined by sessions/visits per person per month, PC time spent per month, domains visited per person per month, and web pages per person per month.
http://www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=8640&cid=3&cname=Technology
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User Profile "Look, Listen, Walk
"Augmented reality" researchers are using location-aware handhelds to change the way we experience the world around us.
By Henry Jenkins
Digital Renaissance
April 2, 2004
You've seen them. Maybe you're one of them. They're the zombies of the New Media Era: the unthinking, the unseeing, the undead. They are all around us.
The man who sits on the subway, his headphones obscuring his hearing, so closed off from the people next to him that he starts singing out loud.
The woman talking on her cell phone walking down the street, her eyes half shut, her thoughts miles away, until she sinks up to her ankles in a puddle of melting snow.
The man in the coffee shop who has his laptop screen up more to shield himself from having to engage in conversation with amiable strangers than to get any work done.
The person driving home from work who gets so wrapped up in the chatter of talk radio that he doesn't notice when he drives past his exit.
These people are using mobile technology to cut themselves off from the world.
What if we could use these same technologies to engage with the world more fully? That's a goal of research and experimentation in "augmented reality."People have been talking about virtual reality for decades now—the idea that we can create imaginary environments that engage all of our senses and that we can move through as if they were real environments. Augmented reality turns that premise on its head—heightening our awareness of the real world by annotating it with information conveyed by mobile technologies. Augmented reality has powerful new applications for education, tourism, and storytelling....."
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_jenkins040204.asp
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User Profile Why Machines Should Fear
Once a curmudgeonly champion of "usable" design, cognitive scientist Donald A. Norman argues that future machines will need emotions to be truly dependable
By W. Wayt Gibbs
"......Norman concludes that "emotion, or 'affect,' is an information processing system, similar to but distinct from cognition. With cognition we understand and interpret the world--which takes time," he says. "Emotion works much more quickly, and its role is to make judgments--this is good, that is bad, this is safe."The two systems are intertwined at a biological level, Norman points out. "The affective system pumps neurotransmitters into the brain, changing how the brain works. You actually think differently when you are anxious than when you are happy. Anxiety causes you to focus in on problems; if something doesn't work, you try it again, harder. But when you're happy, you tend to be more creative and interruptible." So if only for purely utilitarian reasons, devices and software should be designed to influence the mood of the user; they will be more effective because they are more affective.The idea is more controversial than it may seem. Even Jakob Nielsen, a former user-interface expert at Sun Microsystems who joined with Norman to form a consulting firm five years ago, notes that "there is always a risk that designers will misinterpret this kind of analysis," taking it as carte blanche to elevate form above function....."
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00007A46-F8C5-1FD3-B58083414B7F0000&chanID=sa008
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User Profile "ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines the development of digital network infrastructure in the world’s great cities at the turn of the 20th century. Drawing upon the concept of cities as information systems and techniques of communications geography, it analyzes how the physical components of digital networks were deployed in major urban areas during
the 1990s. It finds that historical processes and pre-existing differences between places shaped the evolution of this infrastructure at multiple spatial scales; global, metropolitan,and neighborhood. As a result, rather than bringing about the “death of distance”, digital network infrastructure actually reinforced many of the pre-existing differences between connected and disconnected places. With the telecom bust of 2000-2002, these differences were likely to persist for a decade or more.
Yet just as the development of wired digital network infrastructure slowed,
wireless technologies emerged as a more flexible, intuitive, and efficient form of connecting users to networks in everyday urban settings. As a result, an untethered model for digital networks emerged which combining the capacity and security of wired networks over long distances with the flexibility and mobility of wireless networks over short distances. This new hybrid infrastructure provided the technology needed to begin
widespread experimentation with the creation of digitally mediated spaces, such as New York City’s Bryant Park Wireless Network."
Thesis supervisor: William J. Mitchell
Title: Dean, School of Architecture and Planning
Wired/Unwired (2003)
Townsend A M. 2003. "Wired/Unwired: The Urban Geography of Digital Networks" Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://urban.blogs.com/research/dissertation/index.html
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User Profile "UK firms must monitor staff IMs
By John Leyden
Published Tuesday 6th April 2004 12:59 GMT
UK firms could be falling foul of corporate accountability regulations by failing to track and archive instant messaging (IM) conversations among workers.Only 22 per cent of medium-to-large UK organisations monitor IM and just nine per cent say they archive IM data, according to a survey of European IT directors commissioned by storage vendor Hitachi Data Systems.IM was originally intended as a consumer tool but it has also caught on big time in the workplace.Many employees are using IM - whether or not their bosses are aware of it. Analyst firm Gartner expects IM to surpass email in worldwide traffic by 2006.Growing use of IM - combined with low levels of monitoring - means that firms could fall foul of US regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which requires auditing of all electronic communications, HDS warns......."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/06/im_monitoring/
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User Profile Teaching Online Journalism: How to Build the First College-Level Course
Educators confront tough decisions on how much scarce time in a semester should be spent on teaching software tools vs. teaching reporting and writing. But first, one has to define what online journalism is -- and what makes it unique.
Mindy McAdams
Posted: 2004-04-12
http://ojr.org/ojr/education/1081490316.php
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Location: Melbourne Victoria Australia
User Profile "New technology is aiming to quiet ringing cell phones
By Sam Lubell
It could happen on a train, in a restaurant or during an awe-inspiring aria at a performance of ``Carmen'': a neighbor's cell phone starts bleating the theme song from ``Friends,'' disrupting the mood and setting nerves on edge. Wouldn't it be great, you think to yourself, if this couldn't happen?Others are thinking likewise, including companies and researchers developing or already selling devices that render cell phones inoperable in certain locations. Methods include jammers that interfere with cell phone frequencies, routing systems that mute phones' ringers in specific places, sensors that detect active cell phones and building materials that block cell phone waves....."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/technology/personal_technology/8412265.htm
"Why Mobile Phones are Annoying
Summary:
Bystanders rated mobile-phone conversations as dramatically more noticeable, intrusive, and annoying than conversations conducted face-to-face. While volume was an issue, hearing only half a discussion also seemed to up the irritation factor.Andrew Monk and colleagues from the University of York have performed a wonderful study to assess why it's so annoying when other people have cellphone conversations in public.The researchers staged one-minute conversations in front of unsuspecting commuters who were either riding a train or waiting for a bus. In half the cases, two actors conversed face-to-face while seated next to a potential test participant. In the other half, a single actor talked on a mobile phone while seated next to a potential participant.Furthermore, the actors conducted half of the conversations at a normal loudness level, whereas the other half were exaggeratedly loud (as measured on a volume meter). The actual content and duration of the conversations were the same in all conditions.After each test conversation, researchers approached the bystanders and asked them to complete a small survey about the conversation. In other words, while the conversation was taking place, the participants didn't know that they were part of an experiment, but rather assumed that the conversation was the normal behavior of one or two other commuters......."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040412.html
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Location: Melbourne Victoria Australia
User Profile Towards a Sociological Theory of the Mobile Phone
By Hans Geser
University of Zürich
September 2003 (Release 2.1)
http://socio.ch/mobile/t_geser1.htm
and many more papers here
http://socio.ch/mobile/index_mobile.htm
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User Profile "The News, One Entry at a Time
By Mark Baard
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- Blogs are giving a voice to many people, including former journalists, who have been shut out by the mainstream media, said bloggers meeting last weekend at Harvard University...... "
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63120,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2
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User Profile "'Hate' website report released
Correspondents in New York
APRIL 20, 2004
ONLINE hate games that attract children to gun down illegal immigrants at the border, hunt Jews and shoot blacks are among the thousands of extremist websites described in a report released by an international human rights organisation.The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has been tracking hate websites for nine years, describes more than 200 of about 4,000 online hate sites it monitors.The group said it has seen a surge this year in the number of sites that promote terrorist recruitment, urging young people to join "holy wars" and become suicide bombers.The report includes sites that deny the Holocaust, theorise September 11 conspiracies and glorify al-Qaida. The hate sites leave nothing out — racism, anti-Semitism and gay bashing are among the more common....."
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,9334616%5E15318%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html
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User Profile "Algorithms That Changed the World"
E-Commerce Times (04/21/04); Diana, Alison
Algorithms describe the way in which our technology works and are the basis for many of today's most important applications, including the Internet, the Web, secure e-commerce, digital music, Web search, and even clocks synchronized via the Internet. MIT computer scientist David Clark says many little known algorithms, such as the Internet synchronized clock algorithm devised by the University of Delaware's Dave Mills, nonetheless have a tremendous impact. One of the most important aspects to an algorithm's influence is its pervasiveness: The RSA security protocol developed by MIT researchers in 1977 was nearly squelched by the National Security Administration, which sent a cease-and-desist request to the researchers after they published information about it in Scientific American magazine; after finding there were no legal issues to stop them from distributing the information further, the researchers published the report in its entirety in the Communications of the ACM in 1978. RSA, which secures online transactions, was actually preceded by a similar British protocol five years earlier, but that algorithm had been classified. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) was developed more as an academic exercise in 1974 for the ARPANET network; at that time, packet switching was an untested concept many people thought would not work because of problems in queuing behavior, according to MIT's Clark. In 1983, the protocol was mandated for all computers connected to ARPANET. The MP3 audio compression format is another important algorithm because of its impact on the consumer music industry, Internet, and consumer electronics. Clark says that as the demand for multimedia information transmission increases, compression algorithms will become even more important."
From ACM technews
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/ebiz/33488.html
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User Profile "Scholars Discover Weblogs Pass Test as Mode of Communication
"Blogologists" assemble at our virtual roundtable to discuss how blogs are changing academia, politics and traditional journalism. They see them as being important, but school is still out on whether they are journalism.
Mark Glaser
Posted: 2004-05-11
Are Weblogs a passing fad or a revolutionary new form of communication and publishing? That's still an open question, but the presence of blogs in the academic environment makes it more likely that they'll survive and thrive in the long term....."
http://ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1084325287.php
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User Profile The Mobile-izing Japanese:
Connecting to the Internet by PC and Webphone in Yamanashi[1]
Kakuko Miyata, Jeffrey Boase, Barry Wellman and Ken’ichi Ikeda
April 28, 2004
Forthcoming in Personal, Intimate: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life
Edited by Mizuko Ito, Misa Matsuda and Daisuke Okabe
Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004.
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/webphone/webphone04APR28.html
Context and Intent in Call Processing
Tom GRAY1, Ramiro LISCANO2, Barry WELLMAN3,
Anabel QUAN-HAASE3, T. RADHAKRISHNAN4, Yongseok CHOI4
1 Pinetel, Ottawa, Canada
2 Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
3 University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
4 Concordia University, Montréal, Canada
Pp. 177-84 in Feature Interactions in Telecommunications and Software Systems VII, edited by Daniel Amyot and Luigi Logrippo.
Amsterdam: IOS Press: 2003.
Abstract. A new feature set suited for IP telephony is described. The user value of this feature set is discussed in terms of social science results. This feature set supports natural human collaboration within a human environment. The use by humans of casual awareness to support collaboration is discussed and models taken from architectural research are used to show how casual awareness may be facilitated within the physical and communication environments. A tripartite policy-based architecture which can support this new feature set is described.
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/callprocessing/context&intent.htm
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User Profile Topic Blogging
some links
http://www.weblogkitchen.com/
Academic papers on blogs
http://www.klastrup.dk/archive/2004_02_01_archive.html#107634409840894819
Blog research
http://del.icio.us/mathemagenic/blogResearch
Blog theorising
http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/archives/cat_blog_theorising.html
Blogging @ MEA
http://wrt-brooke.syr.edu/cgbvb/archives/000294.html#more
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User Profile The U.S Federal Communications Commission has a history of the internet
http://www.fcc.gov/omd/history
Joined: 2004-06-13
Location: UK
User Profile Originally written by jimdowning on 2004-06-17 1:18 AM
The U.S Federal Communications Commission has a history of the internet
http://www.fcc.gov/omd/history
The U.S Federal Communications Commission has a history of the internet
http://www.fcc.gov/omd/history
Wow, suprisingly readable. Should Internet history be part of history lessons today? I mean children who grew up with the internet are bound to take it for granted... but it wasn't always there
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User Profile Glad you liked the FCC's history
"Welcome to Vodafone's receiver magazine! This is a neutral space where pioneer thinkers challenge you to discuss exciting and future-oriented aspects of communications technologies. Started three years ago, receiver is now established as one of the industry's key idea generators.The slogan of the "Information Society" was born in the nineties, when Internet technology finally acquired mass appeal. There was more information available than ever before, and all in real time – the sheer mass of it overwhelmed us. Now, as we have cut the wires, the concept of the Information Society has to be mobilized....."
Derrick de Kerckhove:The body electric inside out
Peter Cochrane, ConceptLabs:Information – the ultimate meta-industry
Gerfried Stocker/Andreas Hirsch, Ars Electronica
igital communities on the move Anne Galloway:Mobility as world-building/technologies at play
Ben Russell: Locative media and social code
Teri Rueb:Syncopated space – wireless media shaping human movement and social interaction
Eric Paulos, Intel Research
ur emerging urban computing landscape – Familiar Strangers Luc Soete: The economics of the mobilized information society – a blind spot?
Mark Frauenfelder:How to hide from your boss
Carol Strohecker, Media Lab Europe: Evolving literacy – crafting messages for senses, sensibilities, and sense-making
http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/10/index.html
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User Profile COMMUNICATION & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES
a Section of the American Sociological Association
http://citasa.org/
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User Profile Dot.Com celebrates its 21st Birthday
http://www.nominum.com/popupPressRelease.php?id=314
"Net pioneer predicts web future
By Jo Twist
BBC News Online science and technology staff
Dr Mockapetris invented the DNS addressing system
The net is only in the Bronze Age of evolution, according to the pioneer who invented the Domain Name System (DNS).In 1983, Dr Paul Mockapetris created the now familiar system which gives net pages names such as ".com" and ".co".Celebrating DNS's 21st birthday he says: "Ten years from now, we will look back at the net and think how could we have been so primitive."
All communication will be over the net, he predicts, and we will no longer need phone numbers, just web addresses."Ten years from now, we will wonder how it was so hard to find things on the network too," he told BBC News Online."At best we are at the Bronze Age, we are not even at the Iron Age stage in the network."
'Laboratory curiosity'
Dr Mockapetris came up with the DNS system 21 years ago while he was a scientist on the Arpanet project, part of Darpa (US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency), which provided the basis of the net......"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3832527.stm
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User Profile The Past and the Internet
By Geoffrey C. Bowker
http://www.ssrc.org/programs/publications_editors/publications/items/online4-4/bowker-past.pdf
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User Profile This is an article about online identities that represent people who have died.
Ghosts in the Machine
http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=8182
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User Profile "Art Mobs
Can an online crowd create a poem, a novel, or a painting?
By Clive Thompson
Posted Wednesday, July 21, 2004, at 8:07 AM PT
Mobs have been getting unusually good press these days. In his excellent new book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki (a former Slate contributor) argues that groups of people are smarter than any individual member. In Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold showed how a massive gang of citizens connected by mobile phones toppled the president of the Philippines. And every day the unruly stock market, with its zillions of buy-and-sell orders, identifies a hot or cold company long before any individual analyst can spot it. Crowds, it seems, have a truly superhuman intelligence.
Now there's evidence they may even be creative. A few weeks ago, Wikipedia—an "open content" encyclopedia where anybody can write or edit an entry—produced its 300,000th article. At 90.1 million words, Wikipedia is larger than any other English-language encyclopedia, including the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has only 85,000 articles and 55 million words. This is all the more impressive when you realize that Wikipedia came into existence a little more than three years ago, and not a single contributor has been paid. Every word was written by volunteers, an enormous army digging out a massive anthill, grain by grain....."
http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2104087
"Excerpt from The Wisdom of Crowds
"...As it happens, the possibilities of group intelligence, at least when it came to judging questions of fact, were demonstrated by a host of experiments conducted by American sociologists and psychologists between 1920 and the mid-1950s, the heyday of research into group dynamics. Although in general, as we'll see, the bigger the crowd the better, the groups in most of these early experiments—which for some reason remained relatively unknown outside of academia—were relatively small. Yet they nonetheless performed very well. The Columbia sociologist Hazel Knight kicked things off with a series of studies in the early 1920s, the first of which had the virtue of simplicity. In that study Knight asked the students in her class to estimate the room's temperature, and then took a simple average of the estimates. The group guessed 72.4 degrees, while the actual temperature was 72 degrees. This was not, to be sure, the most auspicious beginning, since classroom temperatures are so stable that it's hard to imagine a class's estimate being too far off base. But in the years that followed, far more convincing evidence emerged, as students and soldiers across America were subjected to a barrage of puzzles, intelligence tests, and word games. The sociologist Kate H. Gordon asked two hundred students to rank items by weight, and found that the group's "estimate" was 94 percent accurate, which was better than all but five of the individual guesses. In another experiment students were asked to look at ten piles of buckshot—each a slightly different size than the rest—that had been glued to a piece of white cardboard, and rank them by size. This time, the group's guess was 94.5 percent accurate. A classic demonstration of group intelligence is the jelly-beans-in-the-jar experiment, in which invariably the group's estimate is superior to the vast majority of the individual guesses. When finance professor Jack Treynor ran the experiment in his class with a jar that held 850 beans, the group estimate was 871. Only one of the fifty-six people in the class made a better guess.
There are two lessons to draw from these experiments. First, in most of them the members of the group were not talking to each other or working on a problem together. They were making individual guesses, which were aggregated and then averaged. This is exactly what Galton did, and it is likely to produce excellent results. (In a later chapter, we'll see how having members interact changes things, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.) Second, the group's guess will not be better than that of every single person in the group each time. In many (perhaps most) cases, there will be a few people who do better than the group. This is, in some sense, a good thing, since especially in situations where there is an incentive for doing well (like, say, the stock market) it gives people reason to keep participating. But there is no evidence in these studies that certain people consistently outperform the group. In other words, if you run ten different jelly-bean-counting experiments, it's likely that each time one or two students will outperform the group. But they will not be the same students each time. Over the ten experiments, the group's performance will almost certainly be the best possible. The simplest way to get reliably good answers is just to ask the group each time..."
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/wisdomofcrowds/excerpt.html
from Q&A with the author
"Under what circumstances is the crowd smarter?
There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd's answer. It needs a way of summarizing people's opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.
And what circumstances can lead the crowd to make less-than-stellar decisions?
Essentially, any time most of the people in a group are biased in the same direction, it's probably not going to make good decisions. So when diverse opinions are either frozen out or squelched when they're voiced, groups tend to be dumb. And when people start paying too much attention to what others in the group think, that usually spells disaster, too. For instance, that's how we get stock-market bubbles, which are a classic example of group stupidity: instead of worrying about how much a company is really worth, investors start worrying about how much other people will think the company is worth. The paradox of the wisdom of crowds is that the best group decisions come from lots of independent individual decisions.
What kind of problems are crowds good at solving and what kind are they not good at solving?
Crowds are best when there's a right answer to a problem or a question. (I call these "cognition" problems.) If you have, for instance, a factual question, the best way to get a consistently good answer is to ask a group. They're also surprisingly good, though, at solving other kinds of problems. For instance, in smart crowds, people cooperate and work together even when it's more rational for them to let others do the work. And in smart crowds, people are also able to coordinate their behavior—for instance, buyers and sellers are able to find each other and trade at a reasonable price—without anyone being in charge. Groups aren't good at what you might call problems of skill—for instance, don't ask a group to perform surgery or fly a plane....."
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User Profile "How do you measure the popularity of items available for download or sale on the Internet?
By Eric Smalley and Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News
Researchers from Cornell University and the Internet Archive have devised a way to measure users' reactions to an item description: a batting average of the number of users who go on to download the item divided by the number of users who read the description. This mirrors the traditional baseball batting average of the ratio of a player's hits to at bats.The item description batting average is different from just tracking the output of a hit counter, which measures the raw number of item visits or downloads, said Jon Kleinberg, an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University. "The batting average addresses the more subtle notion of users' reactions to the item description as it appears in the fraction of users who go on to download the item."A users' batting average reveals something about the nature of on-line popularity, can make users explicitly aware of shifts in popularity, and allows administrators of large sites to quickly identify sudden and potentially significant effects on the popularity of particular items and prepare accordingly.The researchers found that on the Web, popularity often changes abruptly rather than gradually. "For example, an item would be getting downloaded at a rate of roughly 38 percent, and then at exactly 8: 35 a.m. on February 20, it would drop to about 24 percent and stay there for the next several days," said Kleinberg.Although the abrupt shifts were initially surprising, "the underlying reason is intuitive," said Kleinberg. "Your popularity on the Web is affected by having a high-traffic site decide to link to you or mention you in some way and this link or mention is added at a precise moment in time," he said....."
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2004/072804/Online_popularity_tracked_072804.html
Paper
Colloquium
Traffic-based feedback on the web
Jonathan Aizen*†, Daniel Huttenlocher*, Jon Kleinberg*‡, and Antal Novak*
*Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, 4130 Upson Hall, Ithaca, NY 14850; and †Internet Archive, Presidio, San Francisco, CA 94129
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0307539100v1.pdf
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User Profile Review on Trust in Information Technology
Cristiano Castelfranchi and Roberto Pedone
Unit of "AI, Cognitive Modelling and Interaction"
National Research Council - Institute of Psychology
http://alfebiite.ee.ic.ac.uk/docs/papers/D1/ab-d1-cas+ped-trust.pdf
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User Profile List of Women Internet Researchers
http://www.nicola-doering.de/women.htm
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User Profile "Ethnobase is a web resource for ethnographic approaches to studying Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The site is based at the London School of Economics, Department of Sociology, and aims to network the growing ranks of ICT ethnographers, increasing communication and awareness of our work.
The site includes:
A searchable database of researchers and research projects
A searchable bibliography
Facilities for announcements
Links to web resources
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/ethnobase/
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User Profile The Global and the Local in Mobile Communication:
Places, Images, People, and Connections.
Budapest
June 10-11, 2004
Exploring the implications for social identity of the new sociology of the
mobile phone.Submitted for section 4: Mobile Communication and the New Intimacy.
Anna Truch
Research Fellow
Professor Michael Hulme
Director
Centre for the Study of Mobile, Technology, and Culture (UK)
Abstract
‘… the cellular telephone, merely the first wave of an imminent invasion of portable digital communications tools to come, will undoubtedly lead to fundamental transformations in individuals’ perceptions of self and the world,and consequently the way they collectively construct that world.’ (Townsend,2000)Traditionally an individual’s social identity has been interlinked with their location within physical space. The revolution in mobile communication has partially replaced the old location-based paradigm with the new social network-based paradigm. This paper explores the impact of this new paradigm and its introduction of a ‘second space’in which individuals are placed while they are engaged with their mobile phones on the creation and presentation of social identity. The stresses that are placed upon the individual and those around them resulting from the incongruity of the two spaces are
discussed."
http://www.csmtc.co.uk/pieces/Mobile.pdf
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User Profile Professor of Information Systems Department
University of Maryland Baltimore County
Jennifer J. Preece, Ph.D
http://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/fullcv.htm#Books
Book Chapters
Abras, C., Maloney-Krichmar, D., Preece, J. (2004) User-Centered Design. In Bainbridge, W. Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. (in press)
Preece, J., Maloney-Krichmar, D. and Abras, C. (2003) History of Online Communities. In Karen Christensen & David Levinson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Community: From Village to Virtual World. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1023-1027.
Nonnecke, B. & Preece, J. (2003) Silent Participants: Getting to Know Lurkers Better. In C. Leug & D. Fisher (Eds.) From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces. Springer-Verlag: Amsterdam, Holland, 110-132.
Lazar, J. and Preece, J. (2002) Online Communities: Usability, Sociability and Users’ Requirements. In H. van Oostendorp, Cognition in the Digital World. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Publishers. Mahwah: NJ. 127-151
De Souza, C., S., Preece, J. (2004) A framework for analyzing and understanding online communities. Interacting with Computers, The Interdisciplinary Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. (accepted, in press)
Feng, J., Lazar, J., Preece, J. (2004) Empathic and predictable communication influences online interpersonal trust. Behavior and Information Technology (accepted, in press)
McGrow, K., Horsman Brennan, A., Preece, J. (2004) Development of a tool for heuristic evaluation of healthcare information systems. Computers, Informatics, Nursing, Journal of Hospice & Palliative Nursing. (accepted, in press)
Preece, J. (2004) Etiquette Online: From nice to necessary. Communications of the ACM (accepted, in press)
Preece, J. (2004) Etiquette and trust drive online communities of practice. Journal of Universal Computer Science. (accepted, in press)
Preece, J., Abras, C., Maloney-Krichmar, D. (2004) Designing and Evaluating Online Communities: Research Speaks to Emerging Practice. International Journal of Web-based Communities (accepted, in press).
Preece, J., Nonnecke, B., Andrews, D. (2004) The top 5 reasons for lurking: Improving community experiences for everyone. Computers in Human Behavior, 2, 1 (in press)
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User Profile ITU report 2004
The Portable Internet
The emergence of high-speed wireless Internet access together with the proliferation of portable devices
http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/publications/portableinternet/
Interview with Markus Kummer (Switzerland)
Head, Secretariat of the United Nations Working Group on Internet Governance
http://www.itu.int/itunews/manager/display.asp?lang=en&year=2004&issue=06&ipage=governance&ext=html
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User Profile "Hyperbole over Cyberspace: Self-presentation & Social Boundaries in Internet Home Pages and Discourse
13(4): 297-328.
Eleanor Wynn
Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology
Portland, Oregon, USA
James E. Katz
Bellcore
Morristown New Jersey USA
Abstract
Futurist sensationalism, journalistic attention, constructivist theory, and appeal to technical determinism, all make the genre of literature on cyberspace, described as postmodern, visible and possibly influential. This paper takes issue with assertions in this literature that Internet communication alters cultural processes by changing the basis of social identity, and that it provides alternate realities that displace the socially grounded ones of everyday synchronous discourse. A main theme of the postmodern perspective on cyberspace is that Internet technology liberates the individual from the body, and allows the separate existence of multiple aspects of self which otherwise would not be expressed and which can remain discrete rather than having to be resolved or integrated as in ordinary social participation. The concepts under review presume a prior definition of self as a psychological unity, when the term is open to many definitions including the one that the self is a product of varying social contexts and is normally managed to accommodate them. Arguments from phenomenological hermeneutics are available to counter the plausibility of programming multiple selves, as the postmodern literature on cyberspace suggests can be done. The notion of fragmentation contradicts a substantial body of theory in social interaction based in the premise of coconstruction. Evidence of the socially grounded nature of interaction exists everywhere in cyberspace. Empirical examples include: list discourse that illustrates the situated significance of authentic identity in Internet professional groups; secondary research suggesting electronic communication is most successful as one genre in a communication repertoire; cases of home page self-presentation mediated through socially defined links; and evidence that the "virtualness" and alleged anonymity of Internet are illusory and therefore could not over time support a plausibly disembodied, depoliticized, fragmented "self"."
http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/social/papers/wynn.htm
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User Profile One Day Workshop to be held at UbiComp 2004
7th September 2004
Nottingham, England
Full UbiComp in the Urban Frontier Proceedings (PDF)
Participants and Papers
Attendee Paper Title
Aharon Kellerman: Wirelessness and urban spatial organization
Yoshito Tobe: Converting Crowds of People to Advantage: Application to a Lost and Found System
Yasmine Abbas: Birth of a New Species
Paul Dourish:
Genevieve Bell Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space
Derek Reilly Not in Karlsplatz anyomore: Navigating Cities Together
Andrew Wilson What Will Happen When My Mobile Phone Has a Sense of Smell?
Constance Fleuriot Children at the Urban Frontier
Henrik Jernstrom Placing Ubicomp
John Geraci Community and Boundary in the Age of Mobile Computing
Katrina Jungnickel Ordinary Technology: A Methodological Study of Urban Mobility through a London Routmaster Bus
Sarah Kaufman A Sense of Place: Urban Tourism and Wireless Technology
Timo Arnall Spatial Memory: Marking in Urban Public Space
Chris Beckmann transcate:Navigating Idiosyncratic Urban Transit Practices
Jens Pedersen
Anna Vallgårda Viability of Urban Social Technologies
Katherine Moriwaki
Jonah Brucker-Cohen Coincidence and Intersection: Networks and the Crowd
Barry Brown The City Streets
Dan Melinger Privacy's Role in Mobile Social Software for the Urban Community
Aninta Wilhelm Zooke: The Camera Phone Game
Michelle Kasprzak The Point and the Path - a Relationship Between Space and Time
Laura Forlano The Myths of Micro-coordination?
Yanna Vogiazou
Bas Raijmakers Urban space as a playground for large scale group interaction: experiences with CitiTag
http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/UbiComp2004/
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User Profile Mapping the Blogosphere in America.
Jia Lin & Alexander Halavais
SUNY at Buffalo
School of Informatics
359 Baldy Hall
Buffalo, New York
http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/www2004linhalavais.pdf
The Blogosphere Map.
Gernot Tscherteu and Christian Langreiter
http://www.realitylab.at/blogospheremap/blogospheremap_eng.PDF
Bloggers and Their Blogs: A Depiction of the Users and Usage of Weblogs on the World Wide Web
By Christine R. Carl, A.B.
Washington, DC
April 16, 2003
http://cct.georgetown.edu/thesis/ChristineCarl.pdf
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User Profile Also Miller, H. and J. Arnold (2001) "Self in Web Home Pages: Gender, Identity and Power in Cyberspace" in Towards Cyberpsychology: Mind, Cognitions and Society in the Internet Age, (Riva, G. and C. Galimberti eds) IOS Press, Amsterdam. http://www.vepsy.com/communication/book2/2SECTIO_05.PDF
Miller, H. (1995) "The Presentation of Self in Electronic Life: Goffman on the Internet". in Embodied Knowledge and Virtual Space, Goldsmiths' College, University of London, http://ess.ntu.ac.uk/miller/cyberpsych/goffman.htm and
Walker, K. (2000) ""It’S Difficult to Hide It": The Presentation of Self on Internet Home Pages", Qualitative Sociology, 23 (1), pp. 99-120. http://www.swetswise.com/link/access_db?issn=0162-0436
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User Profile "U.S. Funds Chat-Room Surveillance Study
By Michael Hill, Associated Press Writer
October 11, 2004
TROY, N.Y. (AP)—Amid the torrent of jabber in Internet chat rooms—flirting by QTpie and BoogieBoy, arguments about politics and horror flicks—are terrorists plotting their next move?The government certainly isn't discounting the possibility. It's taking the idea seriously enough to fund a yearlong study on chat room surveillance under an anti-terrorism program...."
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1674261,00.asp
Joined: 2004-06-13
Location: UK
User Profile Elsewhere: Netscape turned 10 years old... and still not quite dead
http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-22_11-5406781.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=tr
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User Profile This should help a lot of people
http://scholar.google.com
Joined: 2004-06-13
Location: UK
User Profile Originally written by jimdowning on 2004-11-21 6:37 AM
This should help a lot of people
http://scholar.google.com
This should help a lot of people
http://scholar.google.com
I reckon this is still pretty hot from the press for most. I haven't taken the time to check the quality of the results (for example as opposed to http://www.scirus.com), but at first glance it seems quite useful.
The problem I see with Scholar.google is that it may expand what I call the Google-effect into academia. By that I mean that people consider what's not in Google (or not on the first two or three pages of results) as non existing...
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User Profile good article in Nature explaining google scholar
Scientists get their own Google
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041115/full/041115-13.html
"On the links
The tool is based on principles similar to those of Google's web search. The original search manages to make the most useful references appear at the top of the page using algorithms that exploit the structure of the links between web pages. Pages with many links pointing to them are considered 'authorities', and ranked highest in search returns.
The ranking is refined by taking into account the importance of the origins of links to a paper. "We don't just look at the number of links," says Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google. "A link from the Nature home page will be given more weight than a link from my home page," he explains.
Google Scholar works in much the same way, using the citations at the end of each paper, rather than web links. It automatically identifies the format and content of scientific texts from around the web, extracts the references and builds automatic citation analyses for all the papers indexed.This approach has been pioneered in computer science by ResearchIndex, software produced by the information technology company NEC.
Search for success
Much of the peer-reviewed material has been made available to Google by publishers, including Nature Publishing Group, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, through a pilot cross-publisher search engine called CrossRef Search.
Publishers have arranged for Google robots to scan the full texts of their articles. Users clicking on a hit returned by Google Scholar are directed to the article on the publisher's site, where subscribers can access full text and non-subscribers get an abstract or information on how to buy an article.
Google Scholar has a subversive feature, however. Each hit also links to all the free versions of the article it has found saved on other sites, for example on personal home pages, elsewhere on the Internet."
Below can be found Google's Page Rank works
A Survey of Google's PageRank
http://pr.efactory.de/
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User Profile Has anyone tried it yet? I found it a little patchy (i.e. they need more articles and sources), but hey, it's still a beta.
Also, the better it gets, the larger the danger that (lazy) scientists regard what's not in Google as non-existing... dangerous....
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User Profile Ten academic articles on Internet Trends
http://theory.isthereason.com/index.php?p=64
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User Profile The Digitization Of Word-of-Mouth
http://ebusiness.mit.edu/research/papers/173_Dellarocas_Word_of_Mouth.pdf
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User Profile "ManiaTV starts a frenzy
By Catherine Tsai, The Associated Press
DENVER — Venture capitalists told Drew Massey, founder of the 1990s young men's magazine P.O.V., that old media was dead and he believed them. Five years after he sold P.O.V., Massey jumped into the battle for the entertainment dollar with an Internet company aimed at college students and twentysomethings that serves up film clips, music videos and chatter 24 hours a day.Think early MTV, only this time it's "broadcast" live online for worldwide audiences."The whole mission is to do with Internet TV what Ted Turner did with cable," said Massey, 35.In August, ManiaTV went live from a 15,000 square foot warehouse in Denver with a roster of green "cyberjockeys" or CJs, recruited mostly through craigslist.org and hired more on personality and looks than experience. The production booth was put in an old school bus."It's like any new technology. You don't know what's going to work until you flip the switch," said Gregg Champion, vice president of programming. "We flipped the switch and the damn thing worked. That was scary."Viewers can watch a somewhat grainy, halting feed from ManiaTV's Web site, or pull up a smaller pop-up window to keep on their screens as they surf the Web, chat live with CJs, who will rearrange their playlists to fit in instant requests, and ask for videos from a vault.Massey envisions office workers and students watching while looking like they're working on their computers. An on-demand channel launches in May....."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/corporatenews/2005-04-25-maniatv_x.htm
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User Profile Social Bookmarking Tools (I)
A General Review
Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott
Nature Publishing Group
{t.hammond, t.hannay, b.lund, j.scott}@nature.com
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html
"Introduction
Because, to paraphrase a pop music lyric from a certain rock and roll band of yesterday, "the Web is old, the Web is new, the Web is all, the Web is you", it seems like we might have to face up to some of these stark realities [n1]. With the introduction of new social software applications such as blogs, wikis, newsfeeds, social networks, and bookmarking tools (the subject of this paper), the claim that Shelley Powers makes in a Burningbird blog entry [1] seems apposite: "This is the user's web now, which means it's my web and I can make the rules." Reinvention is revolution – it brings us always back to beginnings......"
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User Profile The future of the U.S. news industry is threatened by the move by young people away from traditional sources of news.
http://www.carnegie.org/pdf/AbandoningTheNews.ppt
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User Profile Wiki research paper
http://container.zkm.de/ijie/ijie/no002/ijie_002_09_ebersbach.pdf
and
Public displays of connection
Judith Donath , Dana Boyd
http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Donath/PublicDisplays.pdf
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User Profile Social networks: All around the Net, but underused by news sites
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050310ohanluain/
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User Profile CNN has this report on the "online evolution"
http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2005/online.evolution/
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User Profile From photo- and calendar-sharing services to online games,desktop movies,"citizen journalist" sites and free encyclopedias,the Internet is transforming yet again, awash in a remarkable array of peer-to-peer software systems that make it easy to share anything digital instantly",this IHT article says."Inexpensive to create and global in reach,the new Internet services are having an impact far beyond the file sharing that was at issue in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on Monday,which focused on inducements to copyright violations.Many Internet executives say that the abundance of user-generated content is reshaping the debate over file sharing and that it poses a new kind of threat to Hollywood,the recording industry and all purveyors of proprietary content:not piracy of their work but the presentation of a compelling alternative."Sharing will be everywhere,"said Jeff Weiner,a senior vice president of Yahoo in charge of the company's search services."It's the next chapter of the World Wide Web."
People power drives new Web services
http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2005/06/29/the_next_chapte.html
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User Profile God's Little Toys
Confessions of a cut & paste artist.
By William Gibson
".....We seldom legislate new technologies into being. They emerge, and we plunge with them into whatever vortices of change they generate. We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us - as surely and perhaps as terribly as we've been redefined by broadcast television."Who owns the words?" asked a disembodied but very persistent voice throughout much of Burroughs' work. Who does own them now? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us.Though not all of us know it - yet."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html?tw=wn_tophead_7
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User Profile PowerPoint Presentation - Social Identity in a Mobile World
Amy Jo Kim
http://socialdesigner.net/mobilemonday/
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User Profile Understanding the Motivation of Contribution in Online Communities An Empirical Investigation of an Online Travel Community
..This study intends to contribute to the understanding of online community by empirically answering the question of why community members are willing to making active contributions to their community.."
http://www.ttra.com/pub/uploads/011.pdf
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User Profile Tracy Kennedy and Barry Wellman
Technology and Society 2004-2005. The syllabus is at:
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/courses/soc356-04.html
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User Profile The Global and the Local in Mobile Communication
http://www.fil.hu/mobil/2004/
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User Profile Annenberg Wireless workshop
http://annenberg.usc.edu/international_communication/WirelessWorkshop/
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User Profile "Phone technology aids UAE dating
As part of a series on young people in the Middle East, the BBC News website discovers how technology is aiding the secret liaisons of young men and women in the conservative culture of the United Arab Emirates.It happens in malls, cinemas and cafes - in Dubai's notorious traffic jams, and now by mobile phone.Many of the city's black-shrouded UAE girls say they cannot check out the latest fashions in Zara or sip a smoothie in a cafe without being bombarded with the phone numbers of hopeful admirers..."
"...Wireless advances
One technology is proving particularly useful.
Bluetooth is a feature built into some mobile phones which enables the user to transfer data to another wireless device nearby.But crucially, it also enables one person to contact another within a 10 metre radius without knowing their phone number.Ahmed Bin Desmal's friends joke that he is a "Bluetooth king". The 20-year-old says he has used the technology to send notes to girls he sees in public places. ....."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4718697.stm
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User Profile Six degrees of wikipedia
http://kohl.wikimedia.org/~kate/cgi-bin/six_degrees
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User Profile This whitepaper for the Korean IT sector has just been released by the Korea Information Strategy Development Institute (KISDI) and sponsored by MIC (Ministry of Information and Communication,Republic of Korea).The Minister,Daeje Chin,in introducing the report says "the contribution of IT in the Korean economy's growth is tremendous:in fact,the IT sector has emerged as the single most important engine of economic growth,representing 29.4% of the nation's total exports in 2004".This is from the general overview section of the report."As we enter the 21st century, the limits of time and space that have restricted our daily lives are disappearing with the development of semi-conductors,computers,the Internet, and other types of information technology.At the same time, the global social paradigm is rapidly shifting from an industrial society to an information society,and from a knowledge-based society to a ubiquitous society.It seems that Korea will be able to realize the ubiquitous society that aims to achieve limitless communications between person to person,person to object,and object to object,in the not-too-distant future with the integration and convergence of digital technologies and government policy efforts".
http://www.kisdi.re.kr/download/request/WHITEPAPER2004.pdf
The link will be valid only for one week,due to the storage limit on it's site.
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