Clustering Tags in Enterprise and Web Folksonomies

Tags lack organizational structure limiting their utility for navigation. We present two clustering algorithms that improve this by organizing tags automatically. We apply the algorithms to two very different datasets, visualize the results and propose future improvements. Publication Info: To be published and Presented at International Conference on Weblogs & Social Media, Seattle, March 31st, 2008

+ Full Paper (PDF; 231 KB)

Source: HP Labs

Social Media Leads the Future of Technology

From Facebook to smartphones, advances in technology are changing the way we work and communicate. Professor David Yoffie led three experts in a recent panel discussion on “The Technology Revolution and its Implications for the Future” at the HBS Centennial Business Summit. Key concepts include:

• A lot of growth potential remains worldwide.
• The sticking point for business is spanning the gap between the physical and digital worlds. For example, it remains difficult to figure out consumers’ specific intent on the Web.
• What people want most of all is technology that is simple to use, said one panelist.

Source: Harvard Business School

New Small Business Blog Launched By Advocacy

The Office of Advocacy has launched a new small business blog focusing on regulatory issues, small business research, state regulatory activity, and more. “The Small Business Watchdog” can be found at http://weblog.sba.gov/blog-advo.

“We are excited about the fact that the Office of Advocacy is using social media and Web 2.0 techniques to help join together the small business community across the country,” said Shawne McGibbon, Acting Chief Counsel for Advocacy. “We anticipate that the conversation that arises out of our blog will help everyone who advocates on behalf small business.”

Advocacy encourages all small business owners and other stakeholders to check out the Small Business Watchdog and let us know how we are doing by leaving a comment. We welcome the entire small business community to join the conversation.

Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre

A story has a beginning, a middle, and a cleanly wrapped-up ending. Whether told around a campfire, read from a book, or played on a DVD, a story goes from point A to B and then C. It follows a trajectory, a Freytag Pyramid—perhaps the line of a human life or the stages of the hero’s journey. A story is told by one person or by a creative team to an audience that is usually quiet, even receptive. Or at least that’s what a story used to be, and that’s how a story used to be told. Today, with digital networks and social media, this pattern is changing. Stories now are open-ended, branching, hyperlinked, cross-media, participatory, exploratory, and unpredictable. And they are told in new ways: Web 2.0 storytelling picks up these new types of stories and runs with them, accelerating the pace of creation and participation while revealing new directions for narratives to flow.

Source: EDUCAUSE Review

Creating hierarchical user profiles using Wikipedia

Personalized information retrieval and search promises to improve the Internet experience. An important requirement for building personalized web applications is to build user profiles that represent the users’ interests. There are two representations commonly used for user profiles. One is using frequently occurring words in user documents. This creates large profiles where profile terms have low precision and have insufficient context to determine the user interests. The other is using a pre-existing ontology such as DMOZ. While this approach alleviates the ontology creation and maintenance problem, it requires constructing classifiers for each DMOZ node. Besides, of all the topics in the DMOZ ontology, most people will have only a small fraction of the topics as their interests and hence most of the ontology is redundant for capturing the interests of a specific user. This paper presents an alternative method to construct a hierarchical user profile using Wikipedia as the vocabulary for describing the user interests. The profiles created in this manner are more compact and have high precision compared to profiles that use words. We also discuss a method to tag concepts in these profiles as being of recreational or transactional interest.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 211 KB)

Source: HP Labs

on your 9th birthday. BTW, contributions are always welcome, according to Blake Carver:

With a growing family and LISHost I have less time to devote to LISNews, so many ideas, so little time, this is why I am always looking for more authors. Many days it’s all me, and I don’t like that. I don’t think of this is my site, and you all shouldn’t be stuck reading just what I post. The variety, depth and breadth of stories we get from having more people participate really makes things more interesting.

Please consider helping out if you have time. Share a story, write a story, volunteer as an author, moderate or simply leave a comment. Aloha, and always, I value your feedback.

Online Communities and Their Impact on Business: Ignore at Your Peril (PDF; 715 KB)

Working with online communities has long been touted as a great way for a company to save money in its marketing, support, sales, and even product development. But for most companies, the diversity of communities online, and the challenge of learning how to work with them, is daunting. Most companies don’t understand how online communities work, how they make a difference, and how to engage with them.

Among the companies that have tried to work with communities online, many have found that they conversation is dominated by extreme enthusiasts rather than average users, and have concluded that online community is a distraction from their real customers.

That turns out to be a very dangerous mistake.

Rubicon Consulting’s web practice team recently conducted a broad survey of US web users to understand better how people in the US use the web, with a special focus on web community and its effect on consumers.

Source: Rubicon Consulting

Hat tip: HillSearch.org Blog

Searching with Tags: Do Tags Help Users Find Things?

This study examines the question of whether tags can be useful in the process of information retrieval. Participants were asked to search a social bookmarking tool specialising in academic articles (CiteULike) and an online journal database (Pubmed) in order to determine if users found tags were useful in their search process. The actions of each participants were captured using screen capture software and they were asked to describe their search process. The preliminary study showed that users did indeed make use of tags in their search process, as a guide to searching and as hyperlinks to potentially useful articles. However, users also made use of controlled vocabularies in the journal database.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 133 KB)

Source: Proceedings 10th International Conference of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (via E-LIS)

Popularity v. Quality: Assessing Information Quality in a Commercialized Internet

In some ways, the Internet is a giant popularity contest. Worth is assessed by Google PageRank – a formula based primarily on how many people link to a site. Every news site prominently displays the most read, most commented, most e-mailed stories. Social news sites such as Digg, reddit, and del.icio.us exist as an aggregation of what is popular around the web. Another level up, PopUrls serves as an aggregator of aggregators, displaying all the most popular headlines from other news-sharing sites.

There is a collective fixation on what is most popular, with the assumption that what is popular is also most worthy. Websites that show up on the first page of a Google search are more reliable than those on subsequent pages. There’s good reason for this kind of trust in popularity. Unlike the days when information was controlled by few hands in just a few media channels, the Internet is an incredibly democratizing medium, where both the barriers to entry and costs of participation are low. If you build it, they will come. The cream will eventually rise to the top. Popularity, then, can be become a shorthand for quality.

Now that social media has been a buzz word for a while, marketing companies have scrambled to exploit these principles. Advertising in the form of pop-ups and banner ads still abounds, but the savviest marketing mimics viral popularity. Whatever mistrust we may harbor toward corporate advertising, our guard comes down a little in social media. The Internet is perhaps the most democratic media platform we have ever had, it is still not a level playing field. A part of digital literacy is the ability to distinguish what has genuinely risen to the top and what has been inflated by outside influences. Popularity, then, is not always the most reliable metric for quality.

Source: Digital Natives

Social Networks, the Next Educational Tool?

At last year’s Educause conference, in Seattle, educators pondered what to do about students’ technology habits. Should they try to change them? Accept that they’re here to stay? Try to co-opt them?

A lot can change in a year. Many colleges seem to have moved on from the question of whether to follow students’ lead on technologies they prefer, from Web-based e-mail to Facebook to text messaging. Now, the dilemma they face is whether to adapt students’ existing habits — of messaging each other, checking each other’s profiles and browsing upcoming parties — to the educational realm.

A study conducted this year at Arizona State University sought to take a closer look at first-year students’ use of social networks, mainly Facebook and MySpace. While many of its findings aren’t surprising on the whole, the survey suggests potentially useful conclusions for educators thinking about how to use social networks to reach out to students — both as college applicants and as enrolled pupils.

Source: Inside Higher Ed

EDUCAUSE Review: Back to Virtual School
Articles include:

+ Virtual Worlds? “Outlook Good”
AJ Kelton (“AJ Brooks”)

Whether it is Second Life or another virtual world, this foundational movement is not going away. The question to be addressed in the coming months and years is how higher education and, subsequently, individual institutions will determine the best way to continue to move forward with virtual worlds.

+ Higher Education as Virtual Conversation
Sarah Robbins-Bell (“Intellagirl Tully”)

Virtual worlds can become an important tool in an educator’s arsenal. But using this tool requires a shift in thinking and an adjustment in pedagogical methods that will embrace the community, the fluid identity, and the participation—indeed, the increased conversation—that virtual spaces can provide.

+ Educational Frontiers: Learning in a Virtual World
Cynthia M. Calongne (“Lyr Lobo”)

The use of virtual worlds expands on the campus-based and online classrooms, enhancing learning experiences. Classes in virtual worlds offer opportunities for visualization, simulation, enhanced social networks, and shared learning experiences.

+ Looking to the Future: Higher Education in the Metaverse
Chris Collins (“Fleep Tuque”)

Beyond the capabilities that virtual worlds offer us at the moment, it is the possibilities that we can imagine for the future that may be the most compelling. Virtual worlds technology, like the Internet in general, is changing the way we access and experience information and the way we can access and connect with each other.

+ Drawing a Roadmap: Barriers and Challenges to Designing the Ideal Virtual World for Higher Education
Chris Johnson (“ScubaChris Wollongong”)

When using a roadmap, one can take many different paths to reach a desired destination. Similarly, institutions can take many different turns along the road to implementing an ideal virtual world for higher education.

Also includes links to “virtual world” projects in educational institutions worldwide.

Source: EDUCAUSE

Social organizer

Social networking tools have sprouted up like online dandelions. It seems as if every other e-mail message is a Facebook request, a LinkedIn invitation, or a Plaxo plea.

These tools carry plenty of potential professional benefits. Too often, however, the temptation to pop over to check the latest Twitter updates or see who is available on Facebook takes valuable time away from actual work.

With so many new distractions, new discipline is required. To help, there are now Web sites designed to do all the login and password remembering and organizing for you. There are also some easy tricks to harness the online social flood.

Source: Washington Business Journal

OpenSocial Programs Pop Up

Even as the economy seems to be crumbling, engineering work to enhance social networking sites is picking up.

On Friday, social network incubator Ning cracked open its doors to reveal 30 applications built on the emerging “OpenSocial” standards championed by Google. Those applications should run, with modest fiddling, on a constellation of other social networking sites supporting OpenSocial. (These include the likes of MySpace, Hi5 and others.) Ning engineers built five of the applications; outside developers contributed the rest.

The emergence of these applications could help set the pace for the next few years of social network development: if people like using them, such applications could help small social networking sites compete with the likes of industry powerhouse Facebook.

Alternatively, if they work badly or provoke yawns, that will serve as an indication of how hard the narrowly targeted social networking sites will have to work simply to stay in the game with Facebook.

Source: Forbes.com

From the article:

Out now from Microsoft Research is U Rank, an experiment that allows people to move results around, as well as share them with friends and add comments to listings.

Source: Search Engine Land

State of the Blogosphere / 2008

Welcome to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially. Our bloggers were generous with their thoughts and insights. Thanks to all of the bloggers who took the time to respond to our survey.

Blogs are Pervasive and Part of Our Daily Lives

There have been a number of studies aimed at understanding the size of the Blogosphere, yielding widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.

The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay

+ comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
o Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
o Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million
o Total internet audience 188.9 million

+ eMarketer (May 2008)
o 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)
o 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)

+ Universal McCann (March 2008)
o 184 million WW have started a blog | 26.4 US
o 346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US
o 77% of active Internet users read blogs

Source: Technorati