[google boggled]

From the BBC: "'Human error' hits Google search

Google's search service has been hit by technical problems, with users unable to access search results.

For a period on Saturday, all search results were flagged as potentially harmful, with users warned that the site "may harm your computer.

Users who clicked on their preferred search result were advised to pick another one.

Google attributed the fault to human error and said most users were affected for about 40 minutes.

"What happened? Very simply, human error," wrote Marissa Mayer, vice president, search products and user experience, on the Official Google Blog.

The internet search engine works with stopbadware.org to ascertain which sites install malicious software on people's computers and merit a warning.

Stopbadware.org investigates consumer complaints to decide which sites are dangerous.

The list of malevolent sites is regularly updated and handed to Google.

When Google updated the list on Saturday, it mistakenly flagged all sites as potentially dangerous.

"We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again," Ms Mayer wrote."


After the BBC story google updated theirs (they noted that changes are marked in blue):

"If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list."

[elements of digital storytelling]

Check out this amazing project over at the University of Minnesota. The School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Institute for New Media Studies and The Media Center - Nora Paul and Christina Fiebich - address questions like:

What is unique about the digitial environment? How do users respond to it? How
can its potential be maximized? The Institute for New Media Studies and New
Directions for News are investigating these questions.

The Elements of Digital Storytelling site provides a:

• Taxonomy of digital storytelling


• Analysis of current practices


• Clearinghouse of effects research


• Showcase of innovative story forms


• Forum for discussion

[infusing semantic web into operational data systems]

Patrick West, Peter Fox, Deborah McGuiness and Stephan Zednik from the High Altitude Observatory present their project on integrating data and the semantic web.

From their
"As part of our semantic data framework activities across disciplines from solid-earth, lower, middle and upper terrestrial atmosphere and solar atmosphere to integrative subjects such as climate response and space weather, we have collected a set of experiences: technical, collaboration and social that relate to how easy or hard the infusion process has been. We cover both the semantic web and knowledge infusion as well as underlying service infusion such as catalogs and OPeNDAP data servers."



Interesting points:

• It's easy to identify experts in each field and goo idea to get groups together to provide community support and external buy-in

• Tricky to conduct face-to-face meetings which are imperative to share expert knowledge between disciplines/fields
• Require a general ontology too cross data from one "data catalogue" to another
• tricky to gain access to data holdings etc...which are external to group
  

[google earth and beyond]

At the AGU conference this evening Michael Jones (Google) is talking about "The Spread of Scientific Knowledge From the Royal Society to Google Earth and Beyond."

Some notes (live blogged)

• implicit role of communication within technologies (telephone, television etc...)
• Roger Bacon
• Knowledge was lost with the Greek and Egyptan civilizations, kept alive by Syrians, Moors, Jews and other then advance and diffused by Arabic-speakng peoples

• spreading of scientific knowledge "by people on camels" is why we know what we know
• the rise of the university - efficacy of printing, the compuass as aid to navigation, the royal society (1645, England, Newton, shared knowledge in a very collegial way)
• This conference is like the Royal Society but only for a week, the next step in knowledge sharing is regular, informal meetings, R.S was more like a chat room rather than like a structured oratory
  
• it's not just about getting data together but organising it
• three great means for spreading knowledge: printing, the compass as aid to navigation, the royal society - says Joseph Glanvil (1630-1680). A Defence of the Royal Society, 1678
• radio was a wasted opportunity, could have been used to reach people who weren't able to go to schools etc...
• with computers you can do 100 times more than what newton did in the pub!
  
• in the last 10 years, 1.4 billion people went online
• there are 1.530,000,000 google searches daily... "and probably 100 other kinds"
• 400,000,000 google earth activations, everyone has to find grandma's house
• says communication online via social networks is very important, so are e-mails and IM's
• 10 billion YouTube videos streamed monthing in the USA, closest things used to be grandparents showing home videos so YouTube is changing how we communicate
• the point of google earth is allowing people to access information about their own world
• you have to care about knowledge in order for it to really make a logical understandng
• google earth is the equivalent of the blank web page or static on the radio, google earth is the empty graph paper for you to plot your graph - that's like the academics when they used to meet in the bar
  
  
  
  


• context brings knowledge to life
• Google Earth is most popular in countries where knowledge is restricted
• jones says he won't have a slide on this, talks of Obama and says how he has a preference to put money into technical advice
  
• Jones says academic research is about always needing more money to find out more, publish cursory results then ask for more money. instead, find rocks, glaciers etc... then publish the data, on your website etc. so other researchers can see it. then you can play a game of how smart you are, who can interpret the data and how, bring your notebook to the bar
• who is going to start doing this, scientists - the tone of increased funding should come with increased visability
• transparency of communication avaiable on the internet - don't apply for a grant to put your information on google earth, if things are intrically productive you would just do it, you wouldn't need funding for it
  

[collective indigenous memory and digital archiving]

Gail Maurice says "Every step I take is with my ancestors; my memory in my bones..."

With this quote echoing in my head I'm wondering how this kind of cultural valuing of memory appears in a world where technology can ensure a kind of *archiving* of memory. Is taking a step with ancestors the same or even possible if new generations have access to digital memories? How does the passing on of stories, ideas, warnings, histories change if elders can include recourse to multimodal or hyperlinked creations?

This musing led me to "Designing digital knowledge management tools with Aboriginal Australians" by Helen Verran, Michael Christie, Bryce Anbins-King, Trevor van Weeren and Wulumdhuna Yunupingu. The article can be found in Digital Creativity, 2007, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 129–142.

In the article, the authors explain that "A significant number of indigenous and non-indigenous people respond with horror to the idea of using digital technologies to do collective memory in indigenous communities." This "horror" seems to stem from a belief that computers are anathema to a collective memory that is created together, in person, alongside nature/land. "Computers are actually more harm than good." There is a worry (understandably) that technology (or at least the way it is used) can help inculcate notions that indigenous knowledge is a commodity.

Verran et al call on feminist discourse to help negotiate the role of technology; there is an emphasis on the always-already provisional and partial view of knowledge (via mechanical means or otherwise): "Located accountability is built on what Haraway (1991, p.191) terms “partial, locatable critical knowledges”. As she makes clear, the fact that our knowing is relative to and limited by our locations does not in any sense relieve us of responsibility for it. On the contrary, it is precisely the fact that our vision of the world is a vision from somewhere, that it is inextricably based in an embodied and therefore partial perspective, which makes us personally responsible for it. The only possible route to objectivity on this view is through collective knowledge of the specific locations of our respective visions." (Suchman 2002, p. 96)

The article goes on to flesh out some ways of combining technology with the need to archive cultural memories. There are some interesting projects which, I think, can be quite appealing to students - especially aboriginal. Take for instance the TAMI database: "a fluid file management and database system which carries no Western assumptions about knowledge, and which maximises the possibility for the user to creatively relate and annotate assemblages of resources for their own purposes." This means that there are no hiearchies built into the system, no author, then subject etc... but rather: "The only a priori ontological distinction at work in the database is the distinction between texts, audios, movies and images. Apart from that there are no pre-existing categories (as there are in other database where metadata are sequestered into fields such as ‘author, ‘title’, ‘subject’). This provides a certain ontological flatness so indigenous knowledge traditions are not pre-empted by Western assumptions." Image cited in journal article. A project in a classroom might include students using google pages or delicious (though the latter might seem more "western" with the emphasis on text) to craft their own database of memories or experiences - perhaps focused on an emotion, story or single memory and from their build a multimodal archive. Also, rather than searching TAMI with a text string, as we do in google and delicious, users can scan thumbnails of each resource. Sounds a bit like some visual search engines. What the authors note at the end of the article is the ever-necessary importance of "digitally-canny outsiders" who know how to use the technology and are culturally sensitive.

See a map of UK memories here: http://www.nationsmemorybank.com/memorymap/


The image at the top of this post is of Cliff Island, Institute for Northern Studies fonds, University of Saskatchewan Archives, Institute for Northern Studies (INS) fonds – F2100. Binder 10. II. Slides – 4501 to 5000. Database ID: 20263.

[new media, romance and evidence]

"Mobile phones, BlackBerrys, emails, social networking... Never before has it been so easy to cheat on a partner. But has technology made it simply too difficult for philanderers to cover their tracks?

*****

In today's world, to function as an effective member of 21st-century society, we have to engage with a bewildering array of electronic gadgets, few of which we fully understand. We stomp digital footprints all over the place, and the unforeseen result of engaging in the information age is that it is becoming harder to have secrets – and, as a result, it is harder to cheat on each other.

Day-to-day actions, such as taking the bus to work and buying a magazine on the way, used to be ephemeral. But today, every journey, every communication, every penny spent, is logged and stored. As we move through life, we leave millions of specks of electronic evidence. Stored on hard drives and mainframes, this data acts like specks of DNA sprayed across the bedsheet of cyberspace. It's all there waiting to incriminate us."

Read the whole article at the Independent.

[rae & metrics 2.0]

The other day I posted about Stevan Harnad's "Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise" and today I've seen the "New-Media Scholars' Place in 'the Pool' Could Lead to Tenure" artile in the Chronical of Higher Ed. In the article Andrea Foster tells us about "Re:Poste, a Web application that encourages academics to pick apart online articles from the mass media." To those in the know Re:Poste is "the Pool," and might well help new media scholars and practitioners "measure" their imput levels. Gerry McKiernan at Scholarship 2.0 says "No college is yet using the site as a way to evaluate professors" but "once open to the public, could be a good barometer of a scholar's influence."

A bit about Pool:

"Titles of new-media projects are plotted on a two-dimensional graph. People log in and post the reviews of projects, rating their appearance, function, and concept on a scale from 1 to 10. As works garner more reviews, they move from left to right on the graph. If reviews become more positive, the works move toward the top.

Accordingly, the most highly regarded and widely reviewed works migrate to the upper right corner of the graph.

The program calculates the ratings and takes into account the credibility of the reviewers. If a reviewer receives a low appearance rating for his own projects, then his assessment of how others' projects look will not be given much weight.

The Pool also allows visitors to bore deep into a project via hyperlinks, in many cases viewing its evolution from conception to finish. They can see its creator or creators and read how others rated the project. They can see the works that inspired it and the works it inspired. Basic information about a project is posted by the developers."

There's more at the Chronicle on how tagging works in Pool and check out Scholarship 2.0 for an idea of future instantiations including maps of how articles fit into the larger landscape.

[rae, metrics & open source]

Maintaining an academic career means paying close attention to your publishing record and its effect on the RAE. I'm not up on the metrics and specific weighting of kinds of publications and how that might differ across disciplines but I've just come across this interesting paper: "Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise" by Stevan Harnad. In this article Harnad gives us an idea of how metrics and open source might work as an alternative to the usual "academic bean-counting of publications for performance evaluation and funding."


"Open Access. Until now, the reference metadata and cited references of the top 25% of the c. 24,000 peerreviewed journals published worldwide, across disciplines and languages, have been systematically fed (by the journal publishers) to the Institutite for Scientific Information (ISI), to be extracted and stored. But soon this is will change. It has been discovered (belatedly) that the Web makes it possible to make the full-text (not just the reference metadata and cited reference) of every single one of the 2.5 million articles published annually in those 24,000 journals (not just the top 25%) freely accessible online to all users (not just those that can afford
paid access to the journals and the ISI dtabase).

[...]

Lawrence (one of the co-inventors of Citeseer) published a study in Nature
in 2001, showing that articles that were made freely available on the Web were cited more than twice as much as those that were not ; yet most researchers still did not rush to self-archive. The finding of an OA citation impact advantage was soon extended beyond computer science, first to physics (Harnad & Brody 2004), and then also to all 10 of the biological, social science, and humanities disciplines so far tested (Hajjem et al 2005) ; yet the worldwide spontaneous self-archiving rate continued to hover around 15%.
If researchers themselves were not very heedful of the benefits of OA, however, their institutions and research funders – co-beneficiaries of their research impact – were: To my knowledge, the department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at University of Southampton was the first to mandate self-archiving for all departmental research articles published: These had to be deposited in the department’s own Institutional Repository (IR) (upgraded using the first free, open source software for creating OA IRs, likewise created at
Southampton and now widely used worldwide)."

Interesting...

As Harnad says, the RAE is "a very cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive undertaking, for the researchers as well as the assessors" so we should really be looking into other possibilities.

"The data-mining potential of an OA corpus is enormous, not just for research evaluation by performance assessors, but for search and navigation by reseacher-users, students, and even the general public."

I wonder how this kind of OS metrics might fit in with the new RAE:

• 2008 will mark the final appearance of traditional peer review systems for the UK research assessment exercise (RAE)
• The UK government has announced plans to use a metrics system to assess research quality and guide funding
• A metrics system could fit well to chemistry but some worry that an element of peer review will need to be retained for areas such as theoretical chemistry
  

[knowledge representation: tagging, folksonomy, content, information, literacy]

Claudia Cragg was going to interview me about tagging for her Creative Writing and New Media Master's project...sadly (and super annoyingly) my mic. didn't seem to work for skype today. So, we're going to go all social media with this interview and I'm going to post Claudia's questions here, with my answers, for any of you who might be interested in my views on tagging and folksonomy and digital literacy and and and...

So, here goes (caveat - my personal opinions!):


Who came up with the term Folksonomy and how is it defined?

Thomas Vander Wal came up with it during an e-mail list conversation in 2004.

As the name suggests, it's a taxonomy made by the folks – user generated definitions and information structures. But folksonomy is just a part of a larger idea: tagging. Tagging is the tying of words to objects. I think Vander Wall explains that this method of tagging has less "cognitive load" for users because it’s about key words rather than some kind of overlying systemic planning. I see it more of a free–form way of categorising information – personalising it.

Folksonomy is a subset of tagging – identifying/categorising for personal use, “re–finding” information

Has it caught on as a term?

Yes! Just do a google search for folksonomy; there are 1,620,000 hits (at 15:07 GMT). But then, I suppose just because it has "caught on" doesn't make it any less fractious. I'm thinking of "web 2.0" and how it is bandied around...still lots of problematising. I'm remembering Cory Doctorow's "metacrap" and I think a lot of people still don't quite "trust" the folks...that's why users concerned with retrieving the "right" kind of information might trust certain folks whose ideas they value...a kind of filtering through the (*wisdom* of the) masses.

What, in your academic opinion, makes a good or bad Tag Cloud? (i.e. your thoughts on Anatomy of a Tag Cloud vocalized)

Hrm...good question. Firstly, a caveat: there can be no *exact* laws or rules about good/bad tag clouds because the tags/vocab and value are constantly changing - a punctuated equilibrium.

For me, a good tag cloud makes information accessible to those who are interested in it. Tag clouds with a gazillion different terms look "messy" to me. A pet peeve is the inclusion of spam in tag clouds - that just changes the whole positive participatory idea behind folksonomy. Also, if taggers use a lot of similar words (as I did when I first started tagging) like: blogger, blog, blogging, blogs - that just adds to the mess. I guess rules are necessary, figure out if you're going to stick to uppercase or lowercase and whether you'll use singular or plural terms (blog or blogs? FirstName or firstname?)

Look at TechCrunch's tag cloud courtesy of technorati:

Most of the terms are of a similar size which makes spotting information trickier (at least for me) and there is some html included which shouldn't be there...so it seems messy.

A good tag cloud is "tidy" with (seemingly) transparent access to information. I don't want to be left wondering how the "blogger" and "blogging" tags are different and whether I should bother clicking both tags...I want the story (or most of it anyway) there in the cloud. I just want the general overview (I always look first for the tags that are weighed heaviest and then move to those tags least used), it's up to each tagger to make things more precise/personal to them. It's a vocabulary that's constantly evolving.


By the way, there are loads of tools out there to create tag clouds of your site (rather than of your delicious - or similar - bookmarks).

I've just used TagCrowd to make a cloud of my current blog which lists my last 10 posts:



How can Tag Clouds be used to drive traffic to a site?

In terms of general business use – there is huge potential here especially for smaller to medium size companies.

I think tagging can help with “findability” of company information although perhaps not so great with emergent vocab. which keeps changing. Also, I guess there might be a need to compare internal tags (tagged by employees) with external tags (tagged by customers) as each might have different words for the same or similar ideas.

But, as with peppering content with keywords, you can make sure you tag specific blog posts etc...with key words that you know your customers will search for.

Plus, the easier it is for customers to navigate a site, the more chance they’ll come back and using a tag cloud is, I think, a good way of making visible an overview of company info.


Tagging can also be a chance for any company (or organisation or university group etc...) to popularise their key word/s (or coin one) while simultaneously making data cohesive. Before we started using delicious there was no "nlab" as a bookmark, but now it is there and it means conference-goers and other interested parties can follow what NLab has been up to for the last 2.5 years. Shirky suggests that a refined approach to this kind of group classification is the next "big frontier."

I wonder how many tags there were for "longtail" before Shirky's article or for "web2.0" before frames of reference changed and people took to O'Reilly's coinage? (See Michael Wexler's 3 part series "I Hate Tags")

"In reality, our understanding of things changes and so do the terms we use to
describe them. How do I solve that in this open system? Do I have to go back and
change all my tags? What about other people’s tags? Do I have to keep in mind
all the variations on tags that reflect people’s different understanding of the
topics?"

If tagging is about naming/defining/narrativising content, then tag clouds aggregate content. Businesses can use this information in numerous ways, a few initial thoughts: establish a new market/audience, create a (new?) community interested in the same (or similar) things, get to know (on a deeper level) the needs of your customers and by having "tidy" tag cloud businesses are able to provide that much-called-for "transparency."

For example, a company can get an rss feed of a certain term and then track its usage (there are 190,688 photos tagged with "ipod" on flickr).

How are they best structured as 'jumping off points for dialogue'?

I think it's more about it's use-value. There isn't a "best structure" for dialogue but perhaps there are rules/strategies for certain kinds of dialogues. Two key words: tag clouds can refine conversations: they are "specialised" and can become (I'm optimistic) more "sophisticated."

As for jumping off points - tag clouds always already offer serendipity not structure (other than in the most general and probably ephemeral sense). I think when Will Richardson quotes Bruce Sterling who quotes Stowe Boyd (structure? what structure?) what he is saying can also apply to the role of tag clouds in dialogue:

"Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of
conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast
form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think
this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to
where is is most social…The way I am getting tugged to blog posts is
increasingly as a mention within a conversational bite in Twitter or Friendfeed.
I then click out of the flow to see the larger post, and offer my view in the
flow — not on the blog — and then I return to the flow, where I will be spending
most of my time. This makes sense: I want to talk about the blog post with the
person who brought it to my attention, more so that with some group of strangers
at the blog, or even the author, who I may not know at all. I also don’t think
we can expect the fragmentation of the social experience to slow down: it will
get a lot worse before it gets better."

Yes, tag clouds are dynamic and (should) reflect changing ideas and changing communication and people are probably drawn to tag clouds/taggers who offer valuable information but, in the end, it IS about communication.

What can be learned from their early use in Flickr for those wishing to use them in a more strictly narrative context - should there be distinctions between the types of clouds for predominantly textual content?

At the outset when tagging was new and etiquette hadn't yet entered the scene, I think people used as many tags as they could to classify something, trying to be as open as possible. but as the use has focused so have the terms and we see people (look at delicious) using a handful of tags to describe their bookmarks instead of trying to be all encompassing

I think clouds evolve according to the information so they’re kind self–aggregating or self–describing as the info changes so I don’t think you really need a distinction between types of clouds – i think that’ll be apparent to users.

Look at the flickr tag cloud from Jan. 2007 that I included in my "Anatomy of a Tag Cloud" post and look at the current flickr tag cloud (these are both for the "all time most popular tags"):

key tags for '07 were: wedding, party, japan, friends, family, travel, london

but today look how "France" has appeared as a tag and "band". Also, both flickr tag clouds have the term "girl" but neither have "boy."

However, both clouds have the tag "me." Isn't that an answer there - tagging isn't about structure; it's all about "me"!

Do Tag Clouds in any way alter the reception of text by a reader and if so how?

I think there is an interesting difference between people who tag for themselves and those who tag for others – when there’s a clearer idea of the subject the tagging is much more concise. Readers of tag clouds might judge a site by it's cloud (judge a book by its cover?)...and come to the site with the knowledge of the value of a site or of a tag (depending on weight and size of font etc...).

I wonder whether the tags imbue readers with a certain kind of passivity or...gee, not quite sure of the word...some kind of awareness of their role as reader rather than creator? I'm wondering this because the flickr tags seem to be mostly descriptors...where are the verbs? If readers were guided by tag clouds/tags that were active (running, reading, creating, see, listen, looking) that must surely change the perception/reception of any ensuing text/story/media? I think it's about different kinds of readers and contexts (what are you searching for and why) as well as different literacies.

See Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach's tactical or strategic view:

In what other ways have Tag Clouds evolved and how do you think they might evolve in the future?

Have a look at Philipp Keller's tag history:

and read Vander Wall's own rationalising of the state of tagging.

My thoughts on the future of tagging...hrm...I think there is going to be a visual tagging service. I’m thinking of the new visual search engine that I’m beta testing (searchme.com) and I think we’ll start seeing visual tags and maybe sonic tags. Besides the richer interfaces and applications

As an educator, I'd like to see tag clouds used as a mode of assessment. I'm thinking of Janet Harris's use of Tag Crowd to analyse the MSNBC Democratic debate:

(aside: isn't there loads of interesting stuff here...note who is the only person to mention women...hrm...also note the use of "America" but one candidate chooses only to say American, keeping it more personal?)

We could generate tag clouds (of work that is handed in electronically) of the student's most-used words. Wouldn't that be a good way of showing students why it's necessary to avoid repetition if they can actually *see* the repetition? We could also use tag clouds for our lecture notes or powerpoint presentations etc...to help students get an overview of the key points we're trying to share with them. What about generating tag clouds of 18th C. lit. and current lit. to see how vocabulary changes? When I taught a media module last term we looked at the supposed *neutrality* of reporters...but we could generate tag clouds for each reporter and compare how they write about different news items as well as compare what reporter A and report B say on news item C. hrm...seems lots of possibilities here. But, that age-old question arises... critical/digital/transliteracy: how do we *teach* students how to adequately *read* tag clouds.






buttons found at haveyouseenthisgirl on flickr.

[freebase - like crack for databases]

According to Jon Udell "Freebase is like Wikipedia in the sense that it’s an open data project. But where Wikipedia is a database of unstructured articles, Freebase is a database of categorized and related items. You can use it to add or edit items and, more ambitiously, to create or extend the categories themselves."

Esther Dyson explains: "It's basically an extensive tool to represent the world in a way that can be understood by computers as well as by people. The excitement is not that it can support better search, but that it can support more powerful applications. Rather than present information to humans so that they can figure out what to do with it, it represents information in a way that lets computers manipulate it.

For example, suppose you want to plan a trip to Moscow (or imagine your own favorite information-intensive task that involves integrating information from several sources, making a few transactions, and ending up with some complex task accomplished). You may search for information about venues and hotels. You will check your schedule to see what appointments you have to plan, and perhaps look at Google or Yandex maps to minimize your travel (and time spent in traffic). But in the end, you don't really want search results: You want to book hotels, schedule appointments, communicate with the people you're going to visit."


O'Reilly sums it up nicely: "While freebase is still VERY alpha, with much of the basic functionality barely working, the idea is HUGE. In many ways, freebase is the bridge between the bottom up vision of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more structured world of the semantic web."