Haystack Blog » News http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog MIT CSAIL Research Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:05:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Introducing FeedMe: A New Sharing Tool for Google Reader http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/11/16/introducing-feedme-a-new-sharing-tool-for-google-reader/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/11/16/introducing-feedme-a-new-sharing-tool-for-google-reader/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:12:03 +0000 Michael Bernstein http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/?p=721 A few weeks ago Adam and I blogged about some of our recent work investigating how link-sharing happens on the web. In contrast to most sharing tools out there, which broadcast your shares to anyone who will listen, we found that lots of sharing happens point-to-point, from friend to friend. An interesting outcome of this friendsourced link discovery is that it is highly personalized: rather than getting what the Internet or your social network finds interesting, as you would on Digg or Facebook, you get what people think you would find interesting.

We want to empower this kind of sharing to happen more. So, we’ve built FeedMe, a Greasemonkey plug-in for Google Reader on Firefox.  Today, we’re releasing it publicly!

FeedMe makes it easier to send brief e-mails to your friends to share links. Once you’ve started sharing, it starts recommending friends who might be interested in seeing the post you’re looking at. Ideally this makes it even faster to share with more people who would find content relevant, without requiring you to type or switch windows.

FeedMe has loads of other bells and whistles: optional digesting of shares, indications of whether the recipient already received the URL, how many URLs the recipient has gotten recently, and One-Click Thanks for recipients to tell you what they like (similar to the Like feature on Facebook).  If you don’t use Google Reader, you can still use FeedMe—we’ve created a bookmarklet that allows you to share any webpage!

Give it a whirl, and let us know what you think at feedme@csail.mit.edu! For you academicy types, you can check out more about FeedMe in our tech report.

To try FeedMe out, head over here, and let us know what you think.

]]> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/11/16/introducing-feedme-a-new-sharing-tool-for-google-reader/feed/ 1 Introducing “Eyebrowse” – Track and share your web browsing in real time http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/08/28/introducing-eyebrowse-track-and-share-your-web-browsing-in-real-time/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/08/28/introducing-eyebrowse-track-and-share-your-web-browsing-in-real-time/#comments Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:55:05 +0000 Max Van Kleek http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/?p=450 We’ve launched a service for letting people share, in real time, what pages they’re looking at on the web.  Our system, eyebrowse, lets the person choose exactly what sites they want to share their viewing patterns about, and eyebrowse does the rest — producing statistical visualisations of your web browsing habits over time, compared to your friends and the world.  It’s called “eyebrowse” and is available here:

http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu

It currently requires Firefox/Iceweasel and works on all major platforms.  All data that is collected is public and available to anyone who wants it (we do not horde or claim to own any of your data. We like Twitter’s model.)  We will soon provide a nice interface with daily tarballs of the database in RDF, XML and CSV.

Why would you want to share your web trails?

1. For Science!  It’s not fair that certain Search Engine Companies can do web trail research because they have access to massive repositories of data.  There should be public corpora for IR researchers around the world.  And these should be OPEN.

2. For your friends!  You look at lots of cool stuff on the web every day.  You might not think of explicitly sharing every single thing you read.  Eyebrowse is lightweight enough that you just have to tell it once per site you want to share.  I’ve already discovered tons of weird things that my friends are looking at that they would not have bothered to share explicitly.

3. To understand your own browsing habits.  How many times do you read ACM/IEEE every day? I bet you don’t know. Now you can get quantitative statistics and visualise long-term journal revisitation patterns – and other things.

Will it violate my privacy?

1. We give you control.  You have to tell eyebrowse explicitly what you want to share on a site-by-site (host) basis. You can take things off the whitelist at any time.  You can also go back and delete things that it has logged in the past all through our web interface.   It also respects Private Browsing (aka pornmode) and will not log any data regardless during this mode.

2. It fosters contemplation/awareness: We are trying to also raise awareness of what OTHERS (e.g. Google Analytics) are collecting about you as you surf the web, by showing you what you can learn from yourself by selectively publishing your own data feeds.

By letting people selectively publish web trails in an open, non-invasive way, we are hoping to foster a discussion of how we can use our web browsing behavior to build more adaptive and effective interfaces that respect people’s privacy.

Feedback is appreciated.  Please email us directly at : eyebrowse@csail.mit.edu

Oh and eyebrowse is free and open source software, licensed under the MIT License.  The source is available as part of the list-it codebase here: http://code.google.com/p/list-it

]]> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/08/28/introducing-eyebrowse-track-and-share-your-web-browsing-in-real-time/feed/ 1 Earn $30 for reading blogs! http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/08/13/earn-30-for-reading-blogs/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/08/13/earn-30-for-reading-blogs/#comments Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:47:19 +0000 Adam Marcus http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/?p=435 Michael and I are working on a project that we will release to the public soon. First, we want to make sure it does what we think it will, so we’re running a user study.

We’re looking for Google Reader users to try out a new extension that helps you share interesting items with people you know. E-mail the FeedMe team at feedme@csail.mit.edu to participate!

If you are: a Firefox user who uses Google Reader regularly (addicts are welcome!)
You can get: a $30 gift card for using our Google Reader extension at least every other day, for two weeks
We are: an MIT computer science research team
Dates of the study: preferably Tuesday, August 18 to Tuesday, September 1

E-mail feedme@csail.mit.edu if you’re interested. Follow your feeds while you help science!

]]> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/08/13/earn-30-for-reading-blogs/feed/ 1 A Simple Extension for Microformat & RDFa Table Support http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/05/19/a-simple-extension-for-microformat-rdfa-table-support/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/05/19/a-simple-extension-for-microformat-rdfa-table-support/#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 14:01:48 +0000 Edward Benson http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/?p=332 Microformats and RDFa provide a way to interweave semantic markup within a web document so that structured information can be more easily extracted. Both Microformats and RDFa follow the hierarchical model of HTML: structured data to be extracted may exist spread across several layers of the DOM 
hierarchy. A pseudocode example of this is below, where we see that the statement <Jefferson eats Hamburgers> is spread across three levels of the DOM Tree.

 

<div subject="Tom">
   <div property="eats">
      Hamburgers
   </div>
</div>

 

A wrinkle in this hierarchical mindset is the fact that a great deal of structured information on the web lives in the one HTML construct that does not fit a hierarchical representation: tables. 
Consider Wikipedia, as just one source of structured data virtually begging to be annotated with RDFa. On many Wikipedia pages one of the first things that catches a visitor’s eye is the “Info Box”. This is a small box containing a structured summary of the key factual items on the page. Equally important is the way in which Info Boxes are populated: they begin their life as templates — the “Capital City” or “Baseball Player” template, for example – and all the Wikipedia contributor has to do is fill in the empty field values.
Microformats and RDFa are able to mark up tables, such as these Info Boxes, but they do so in a suboptimal way: they require repetition of semantic markup across each row (or column, depending on the orientation of the table). This:
  • Is redundant from a representational standpoint 
  • Clouds the ability of a data enhanced web browser to infer that entire rows and columns of the table talk about the same thing. 
  • Forces the template writer to put markup within the table body, rather than on its column and row declarations
To cure this, here is a simple proposal to add table support to both Microformats and RDFa. It is compact, needing only a single sentence to describe:

When parsing the DOM to extract embedded data and a <TD> element is encountered, treat its corresponding <COL> element as if it were the DOM parent of the <TR> element for that cell.

The problem with tables is that a table cell (TD) is contained in HTML by its row (TR) but not its column  (COL) because of the way HTML works. This means that when we use tables and microformats/RDFa  together, we’re stuck: we can put information across each row, but not down each column. So the proposal is to make a special case for table columns when it comes to pulling out structured information in the cells: even though the cell isn’t technically contained by the column element, pretend that it is. 
Let’s see how this cleans up the representation of a simple table of president names. This table has one president per row: Thomas and John. 
Here is a pseudocode example of how microformats/RDFa currently require such a table to be marked up. Notice how the “first” and “last” properties needed to be repeated across each row.

 

<TABLE>
  <TR><TH>First</TH><TH>Last</TH></TR>
  <TR subject="tj"><TD property="first">Thomas</TD><TD property="last">Jefferson</TD></TR>
  <TR subject="ja"><TD property="first">John</TD><TD property="last">Adams</TD></TR>
</TABLE>

 

If we allow structured content to live in the <COL /> elements, then we do not need this repetition:

 

<TABLE>
  <COL property="first" /><COL property="last" />
  <TR><TH>First</TH><TH>Last</TH></TR>
  <TR subject="tj"><TD>Thomas</TD><TD>Jefferson</TD></TR>
  <TR subject="ja"><TD>John</TD><TD>Adams</TD></TR>
</TABLE>

 

When parsing either of these two tables for data, we extract the same information:
  • :tj :first “Thomas”
  • :tj :last  ”Jefferson”
  • :ja :first “John”
  • :ja :last  ”Adams
Tables are all over the web, and they make great templates to assist users in entering structured information. This small change to the semantics of microformat and RDFa parsing should allow a cleaner syntax for publishing both data and data-templates, easing the adoption of the respective
formats.
]]> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/05/19/a-simple-extension-for-microformat-rdfa-table-support/feed/ 0 A Short Note about Short Notes (to Self) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/04/12/a-short-note-about-short-notes-to-self/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/04/12/a-short-note-about-short-notes-to-self/#comments Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:29:23 +0000 Max Van Kleek http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/?p=294 Wednesday morning Katrina, Michael, Greg and I presented our paper, “Note to Self: Examining Personal Information Keeping in a  Lightweight Note-Taking Tool”, to a packed room at noon in the “Personal and Public Information” track at CHI2009 .   This paper describes our first study that we conducted with our List.it note taking tool in September 2007.  Michael and Katrina filmed a quick “teaser” (no sound) which summarizes our talk in 25 seconds below.

We received lots of positive feedback after the talk, and received a number of questions and suggestions.  We wished to briefly re-address them here in case others were also wondering:

  • Can I try it? Yes, find it here: List.it – a Quick note taking tool for Firefox
  • Is the source code available?  Yes, via our List.it Google Code Respository
  • Can I use it to run my own study on note taking?  Yes, that’s a major reason why we’re releasing the source under an MIT license.   We have not yet released our server code because it’s being cleaned up and refactored; expect this soon.
  • Are you releasing a notes corpus to the public for PIM research use?  We hope to, eventually. We believe that a corpus of notes-to-self will help us to develop smarter tools.  But, we are currently trying to figure out how to help users who volunteer to share their notes to easily scrub note contents to prevent the release of sensitive info, and yet to retain enough of the original characteristics of the notes so as to be useful for research.  We will keep you updated.
  • Are there plans to produce a mobile (iPhone/Android/Symbian) version? Yes. We have one new student who has joined the project to build a mobile list.it.  In the meantime we recommend the following alternatives: Evernote for iPhone and AK Notepad for Android.
  • Are you planning on adding feature X?  Please see our Google code Feature Request List.

Once again, we are looking for contributors who are interested in making list.it more useful and have some coding experience. Also we are always looking for your comments, opinions and insight about features that would make list.it more useful.  Join our Google Group if you are interested in contributing your insight and/or code.

]]> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/04/12/a-short-note-about-short-notes-to-self/feed/ 3 Graph Sketcher wins Best Note at CHI http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/04/12/graph-sketcher-wins-best-note-at-chi/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/04/12/graph-sketcher-wins-best-note-at-chi/#comments Mon, 13 Apr 2009 03:03:14 +0000 Michael Bernstein http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/?p=301 Haystack alum Robin Stewart won Best Note at CHI with a short paper based on his recent masters thesis, “Graph Sketcher: extending illustration to quantitative graphs.”  What’s more, his software got bought out by the Omni Group — yes, those OmniGraffle guys — and is being reborn as OmniGraphSketcher!  Congrats Robin!

If you can say the name OmniGraphSketcher five times fast, Robin might give you a free license.  I did it in 3.6 seconds.

]]> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/04/12/graph-sketcher-wins-best-note-at-chi/feed/ 0 CHIstory wins Golden Mouse Award at CHI! http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/04/12/chistory-wins-golden-mouse-award-at-chi/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/04/12/chistory-wins-golden-mouse-award-at-chi/#comments Mon, 13 Apr 2009 02:55:40 +0000 Michael Bernstein http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/?p=299 Last summer, a few other Microsoft Interns and I kicked around the idea of making a Mystery Science Theater 3000 parody video for the new CHI video showcase event.  Then we watched a lot — a LOT — of old CHI videos.  I’m pretty sure that most people never expected that these would be seen again.  We hope never to see many of them again either.

That idea evolved into CHIstory, a fake history-channel-from-the-future: after the Great Usability Cataclysm wipes out all knowledge of human-computer interaction, we are forced to reconstruct history from scant video evidence.  We get it very, very wrong.

An esteemed panel of judges, many of whom we made fun of, made the mistake of rewarding our insolence with the Golden Mouse award for Most Entertaining Video.  Next year, maybe we’ll get a paper in!

]]> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/04/12/chistory-wins-golden-mouse-award-at-chi/feed/ 1 Announcing list.it v0.4.0! http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/03/24/announcing-listit-v040/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/03/24/announcing-listit-v040/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:32:21 +0000 Greg Vargas http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/?p=283 list.it v0.4.0

The list.it team is proud to announce the release of list.it version 0.4.0. We’ve been working hard on it and we’re ready to release it to you!

Most of these features were strongly influenced from feedback from our users. If you have any feedback of your own (feature suggestions, bug reports, questions, comments) please contact us through our new Google Group at  http://groups.google.com/group/list-it or email us at  listit@csail.mit.edu.

Remember, list.it is open source and our code is hosted here, so please take a look if you are interested. We also have a list of features we’re currently working on in the Issues section of the site, and we’re always looking for more.

For help in understanding some of our more useful features, we have created a short tutorial movie you can find on the list.it project site or by clicking “About” at the top of the list.it window.

This version also contains quite a few new and exciting features:

  • Notes can be re-ordered! (drag them by their dot)
  • Faster and lighter code.
  • Improved synchronization.
  • Quick re-searches using the re-search tab
  • Undelete (dustbin)
  • Enabled click-and-hold-to-select notes
  • Changed sidebar (note) icon: Left-click icon to open listit, right-click now opens input panel

We hope list.it v0.4.0 will make for easier, better and happier note-taking!

Expect much more coming very soon.

We have 10,400 registered users!!

We’re always very excited to see list.it get mentioned in the press and we were elated when we saw that Le Monde’s website was featuring list.it as its top Technology story last week. I’ve been told the article was quite good.

This might help explain why we currently have 10,400 registered users of list.it. I would like to congratulate the list.it team (electronic Max, Michael Bernstein, Katrina Panovich and Mason Tang) for this achievement.

]]> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/03/24/announcing-listit-v040/feed/ 0 list.it project launched on Google Code http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/01/25/listit-project-launched-on-google-code/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/01/25/listit-project-launched-on-google-code/#comments Mon, 26 Jan 2009 03:30:04 +0000 Max Van Kleek http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/?p=246 We just completed the first phase of moving list.it to being its own independent open source project by moving the codebase to a project called “list-it” on Google Code.   The entire team has switched over to using this repository for our main development, and so you will see our changes as they happen.  (We have no affiliation with Google; we just found their repository service to be mildly more modern than Sourceforge’s).

Although this is personally the first major open source project I’ve helped to launch, we are following the advice of our friends with the Simile Project, in particular recent Haystack alumnus David Hyunh who led the creation of the Simile Widgets google code project early last year.   And, of course, we live in the birthplace of the Free Software Foundation so we have a lot of people to lean on.   But we welcome comments; we’re newbies to this and want your input!

Over the next few days, you will see our project page slowly take shape; we’re working to rapidly create some tutorials and documentation both for end-users and developers.  We’re going to fork multiple branches of our client to support more experimental development and listit extensions.  And finally we will populate our “Issues” page with our “Want.It” plans for features we are currently working towards for future list.it releases.

We are hoping that people will find our project even more useful, and welcome those interested to take part in it’s development.  We need your help!

]]> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/01/25/listit-project-launched-on-google-code/feed/ 2 Study on note-taking nominated at CHI2009 http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/01/17/study-on-note-taking-nominated-for-best-note-prize-at-chi2009/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/01/17/study-on-note-taking-nominated-for-best-note-prize-at-chi2009/#comments Sun, 18 Jan 2009 01:47:31 +0000 Max Van Kleek http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/?p=235 We are very happy that our paper on a study of our note-taking tool, list.it, which we conducted in September 2008 has received a nomination for best note at CHI 2009!

My co-investigators Michael Bernstein, Greg Vargas and Katrina Panovich and advisors David Karger and mc schraefel and I are very pleased at this nomination, and are looking forward to presenting it in April here in Boston.  We are meanwhile also working vigorously to design a follow-up study surrounding specific aspects of note-taking, mobility and retrieval.   We now have over 4,000 list.it users and many have volunteered to let us study their note taking habits.

We would like to thank all of our study participants and those who have downloaded and use list.it on a daily basis.  We also thank everyone who has used list.it and given us feedback about ideas and areas for improvement.   As PIM tools are the most used tools in the everyday activities of our lives, we believe that this area is a fertile and important area for formal study and innovation.  We would also like to reach out to the numerous other researchers in HCI studying note taking and related areas in PIM to identify potential ways to run more effective studies and design future tools.

Our submission for our paper can be found here:
M. Van Kleek, M. Bernstein, K. Panovich, G. Vargas, D. Karger and mc schraefel. Note to Self: Examining Personal Information Keeping in a Lightweight Note-Taking Tool. Note, CHI 2009.

Please contact us if you have any comments or questions at listit at csail dot mit dot edu .

]]> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/01/17/study-on-note-taking-nominated-for-best-note-prize-at-chi2009/feed/ 1