For years the HCI and CSCW community have taken on the notion of a personal digital assistant as a gold standard. However, this supposedly-routine work is in fact complex and requires much knowledge of context, and as of yet we haven’t succeeded. What can we learn about these activities, and how can we bridge these [...]
If bookmarking on del.icio.us is fundamentally about personal information management — organizing and re-finding your own bookmarks — then it’s important to understand why users choose the tags they do. There are two major (possibly complementary) hypotheses for how tags are chosen: a social model (we’re influenced by what others on del.icio.us say) and a [...]
Wendy Ju, an interaction design researcher, writes: “Imagine, for a moment, a doorman who behaves as automatic doors do. He does not acknowledge you when you approach or pass by. He gives no hint the door can or will open — until you wander within six feet of the door, whereupon he flings the door [...]
We know that online collective intelligence can achieve incredible things — for example, the ESP Game, Wikipedia, Mechanical Turk. But many of these systems assume that individuals make independent assumptions and that these judgments can be aggregated. Neither of these are true in Wikipedia, where “truth” is generated through an intense combination of coordination and [...]