Inspired by Ted’s vision of what he’d like to see happen to data.gov, I decided to have a try at my hopes for it. Ted’s desires for data.gov are all ones that I agree would make the data more accessible. I would now like to discuss what else I might want in a world where [...]
The US Government efforts to create a culture of open government data is a big deal. Hopefully it signals a shift from the “pull” model of FOIA to a “push” mindset in which data is proactively returned to the public without first having to ask (and pay). Still, data.gov has a lot of room for [...]
I had an interesting discussion with my student Katrina Panovich today. I’m intrigued by the way people use twitter for “ambient awareness”—watching what goes by, but not worrying about what they miss. I find this paradoxical—if you don’t care about missing stuff, why watch at all? Especially given that each arriving tweet provides some degree [...]
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 [...]
HCI research needs to get better at spreading the word, sooner, in the Web 2.0 era. Typically, by the time that CHI rolls around, the research being presented is at least 7 months old. When (or if) a group decides to post PDFs early, the papers are so distributed that interested readers can’t find them. [...]
Which approach do you take to managing information overload on the web? Do you unleash the firehose on yourself, subscribing to RSS feeds or relying on content aggregators to keep up with the news? Or do you take small sips from the stream of content, regularly checking a small set of websites to look for [...]
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 [...]
From our friends in Southhampton (correction: and Hasso-Platner), a study of how to differentiate experts (who really know how to tag stuff) from spammers (who want to tag their own stuff, but try to acquire credibility by copying tags others have used). They try to exploit the difference that the people who tag first are [...]
A group from SMR asia is working on modeling threaded discussions. Threaded discussions pervade IMs, chat rooms, web forums, and mailing lists. They’re hierarchical. This group wants to mine the semantics (discover the topics) and the structure (author-reply relationships). The applications include spam blocking, reply constructions (figuring out which specific posts other posts are replying [...]
Phishing has been around for a long time (by internet standards), but a new batch of phishing attempts on Facebook has been seeming to spread like wildfire. Facebook is attempting to prevent some phishing scams, but many URLs, often with spaces in the middle, sneak through.
You can recognize these attempts because they often appear as [...]