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 [...]
[Sketchy guy from high school] added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know [sketchy guy from high school] in order for you to be friends on Facebook. Confirm, or ignore?
Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios presented the largest regression analysis at CHI, and it was focused on just this situation. [...]
Moira Burke at al. from facebook studied what led new users to post more over time—in terms of feedback from those how saw their posts, how broadly they were distributed, etc. They counted what happened over someone’s first two weeks on facebook and predicted what would happen over the next 3 months. They considered variables [...]
Posted a little less than a year ago (the video was uploaded May 05, 2008), this entertaining video has gotten over 5,000,000 plays and looks like a great viral video. It’s got quite a bit of appeal as we watch vaguely athletic 20-somethings jump (and land) in pairs of jeans in interesting ways. [...]
Today I got a call from a job recruiter who had found my phone number on a public web site at MIT. I cut him off early: “Thanks, but I’m not going to be graduating for several more years, and I’m not currently looking for employment.” Goodbye.
Or not. “No, actually–”, he jumped in, “I’m not [...]