Quiet Tueseday morning is perfect from blogging – sun, absence of noise, fresh neewsfeeds and fruit – so here comes a blog with some recent thoughts. One of the most interesting things for me today is to follow how the “discovery” feature of the Web is growing in prominence. I recently discovered social networks that I didn’t even new existed, like Habbo and 4chan. I discovered Habbo on the recently published new version of Social Web map by Flowtown, by noticing a big area that I was totally unfamiliar with. Then I went to habbo and opened an account to see what there is. Amazing thing is the feel of discovery that you get right away. Clearly it is a thing for kids, where you have your 3d avatar and you move through the 3d space, meet other kids, but as opposed to Facebook where in order to see some activity you needed to have friends, and twitter where you could rely on public timeline to gain friends and then follow just them, Habbo seems to be really focused on social injection of teens (the role that was once played by schools in the now ancient society we were born in). A person who remembers the old days when Web portals, ICQ and forums ruled the Web, and where you would go to meet new people and talk to strangers, would feel this same atmosphere on Habbo. It feels like a place fo discovery, not for information filtering.

Then Technology Review featured an article about 4chan – a growing network for expressing yourself through pictures, a network where you can be anonymous and express anything. 4chan looks like a mixture of everything, which gives it this retro - beginnings of the Web – feel. This website emphasizes one important aspect of discovery - anonymity. Being anonymous means being able to express more, and explore more without being judged.

If we remember one of my earlier posts on information discovery, it becomes interesting to compare the social networks by the level of discovery/filtration that they provide. One could say that Facebook is mostly focused on filtration , Twitter is in the middle – supporting bort filtration and discovery and their mutual interplay. Foursquare is more towards discovery, but still a contextualized and limited one. 4chan and Habbo are all about discovery.

The change of preference over time is also interesting. At the beginnings the discovery networks were most prominent, and then they almost disappeared giving way to the filtration networks. Are we going to settle in between, or are we going to always oscillate in preference between those two extreems?

It will be interesting to observe what flavors of networks arise in the (filtering,discovery) vector space, and to see what forms will the privacy take in there. Would it disappear of find a way to coexist with discovery networks?

via Fabien Gandon

Many words have been written already about the data. Data is everywhere. Data is the next big thing. Data is the value on the World Wide Web. In this post I investigate how data contributes to the process of generating value on the Web, and how it is the crucial component of this process. The model that is presented here may not be too sophisticated, but it helps gain the basic understanding of why some services work, and others don’t. It is also an attempt to explain why some data exchanges are realistic, while others will probably never happen.

If your service has data, you have power. You can sell your data (like Twitter did), or you can build valuable service to users, and show ads. If you look at the Google‘s service, what it has is this marvelous Web index (data). Based on this it offers a very useful search service, and gets a revenue through ads. Google got its data through the use of Information Retrieval techniques, which sounds a little baroque nowadays. New ways exist to harvest data. Users can do it for you. Crowd-sourcing is nothing new. The real question is how to make people engage in crowd-sourcing and leave you their data. You may also gain data by taking it from another service on the Web. Here I construct a more  general scenario that unifies all those modes of acquiering and using data.

The most important to understand is that data is what powers all services provided on the Web. Based on data (web index in the case of Google, user data in the case of Facebook) you can provide useful things to users so that they come and interact with your service.  Data is the essential resource that coupled with good interaction design, contextuality and other values makes truly relevant Web services. So users come on your website, benefit from the service and can pay for it in three ways:

• by leaving new data (filling out profiles, posting tweets, comments, marking favorites, editing maps, creating Foursquare locations and annotating them etc.);
• by attention to advertisements;
• by paying money for the service.

In the first case you acquire more data and make your service richer. Coupling of this kind of payment with one of the others is needed to make the service alive and make it grow.

Once we have accepted that data has value, we can ask ourselves what interest there is for a website to share its data with other websites. Instead of just keeping data for themselves, websites may share data in order to get more data. Twitter for instance allows you to almost fully replicate its functionality by taking over the data, but as a result, it acquires new data through third party interfaces. Since for Twitter data=value, then a decision to open to a certain degree in order to become the agregator for data is quite economically rational.

Services open their data and engage in interactions with other services whenever those interactions can be payed off (through data or other means). Facebook is ready to give social graph data to other services based on the hope that this utility will make it a de-facto address book for most users, in which case it would just gain more and more data.

In the next blog post we shall see what are the motivations for users to leave their data to a service on the Web; and later we will consider the reasons why other services might be motivated to contribute data.

Following became quite popular nowadays. It seems we are not so shy to follow any more. It is actually our following of people that makes them pop up, and shine in their relevance. Of course, I play here with multiple senses of the word “follow”. The video below explores the importance of following in the sense of being a follower of a spirit, of a state of mind, of an idea.

In this post however, I explore the following in the larger sense: following like watching, following development, life and evolution of something or someone. In short : following like caring for something.

On Twitter we follow. On Facebook we friend, we become fans, we like. All those followings shape the stream of information that comes to us, and defines the content of our social space – of our world. When we follow people, we get to see their activities, postings, etc. When we follow pages on Facebook, we see their updates. Facebook has just announced that it will now make every page on the Web likeable. With the new Facebook API, any page could have a Facebook like button, and thus connect with its followers.

I wounder what it would be like if we could actually follow everything. If we could follow events, and get updates about who joined them, who plans on coming. If we could follow places on Foursquare and get updates of who comes there. If we could follow problems on Hypios and see when they get solved. There seems to be many objects to follow and like.

Social interactions around objects are actually a realization of the concept of object-centered sociality. The theory behind this concept argues that objects actually give relevance to human interactions in virtual worlds, and tie people together. People bind by commenting on the same objects, and interacting with them. The objects give a special flavor to virtual human networks and make really valuable. In the sense of this understanding, it would be quite logical to follow many different types of objects. The current state of following people and fan pages is obviously quite limiting.

We should be able to follow many more types of objects like for example:

• metro lines (if there is a change in traffic on a metro line it gets into my information stream)
• places (who gets in; how many people is there in line; who intends to come)
• events (who joins; who plans on coming; related documents)
• bakery (state of the croissants supply)
• research publications (new citations, comments)
• etc.

As you see, some of those things are not yet on the Web, but are good candidates of joining the emerging phenomenon of the Physical Web. If my washing machine was on the Physical Web, I would gladly follow it. I don’t know why, but there is one odd thing I would like to follow (I know your perverse minds are working now to come up with a guess): I would like to follow restaurant menus, and see who are the people who order my favorite meal in my favorite restaurant. Those must be extraordinary people to discover.

Of course following everything will create a great deal of overload, so we might have to come up with ways to filter out. Types of postings might be one useful facet for this filtering. On Facebook I can block certain applications – types of postings from a person. But the level of detail in which I have to set it is still tricky. Do I unfollow all the pictures, or just pictures from a certain friend or groups of friends? I have to deal it with it myself, and I am never sure what am I missing by my own filters. I cannot even imagine the mess when following the metro lines and washing machines comes in. Granularity of following is also a question: do I follow the restaurant’s menu, or just one menu item? Level of interest is another dimension : as an organizer of an event / owner of the washing machine, I may be more interested in their updates then the people who just like those objects.

Is there a way that would just reflect my desire for content to what appears in my stream, without me having to set the preferences for each object I follow, and each type of update? Is there a way I can discover diversity without irrelevance? Beautiful challenges await in the future of Web research

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How many times have you faced another reality? I am talking about a feeling when you encounter a person, an event, a fact that has existed for ages in parallel with you, but you were totally unaware of it. It happens to me from time to time, to encounter someone who lives under totally different rules (different than my way of life, and different from all the people I am surrounded with), who has totally different values, who does totally different things, and who has a totally different perception of the world.

Although I am aware that I mostly live surrounded by like-minded people (because their company pleases me), it always strikes me, how far some other worlds are, from the world I am living in. We all live in a certain world, defined not just by geography and class, but also by perception, values, background, profession etc. This separation of worlds is reflected on the Web as well. When you log in to Facebook, what you see is not the same other people see. Your view is limited by your social circle. This phenomenon is well pointed out by the foremost Social Media researcher, danah boyd.

Filtering, recommendation, and personalization narrow our view to relieve us from irrelevant content. It is true that his functionality is needed, as in the opposite case we would find ourselves in a chaos of information coming from all sides. However the possibilities of serendipitous discoveries, broader view, tasting the differences seem to be quite limited. I remember my early days on Twitter, when almost none of my friends used the service, so I turned to following people I didn’t know (but I admired them, or they seemed interesting). It was there that I discovered a lot of interesting stuff, a bit of the regular track of my work and thought. danah boyd also argues that Chatroulette is now one of such places for random discoveries, and stepping out of your walled garden world, that reminds her of the early days on the internet, when the early users communicated with strangers (since the strangers were more or less the only one around on the internet.

People need filtering and personalization. Even more, they need a walled garden in order to feel protected and among friends, to be confident to share personal experiences. Walled gardens (walled in the sense of privacy) provide means for this natural need of sharing with friends to take place on the Web. But people also need a break from the routine, from usual and expected. They need a seed of randomness, and serendipitous discovery, that helps them form a global picture and know where their world is with regard to other worlds.

However, there is, for now, only a small number of ways how this randomness can be achieved on the Web:

Random page/profile

On Wikiedia, you can try Random article, and gain some knowlegde in an unexpected field. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Random person page on Social Networks. However, this randomness is not good enough as it is totally random, so chances that I wouldn’t be interested are quite significant.

ReTweet

Retweets do not give an insight into a totally distant world, but make some jump into an adjacent world possible. If my friends retweet something I can gain an insight into what is going on in their world. Provided that they have a circle of friends that is different enough; they present a boundary and a passage between two worlds. This kind of passage is enriching in walled networks; and I guess it provides mostly interesting stuff; but this way of breaking from the usual has difficulty in reaching distant worlds and distant information.

Public Timeline

Public time-line is like Wikipedia Random article. On Twitter (and similar services), you may use it so see a global picture. I personally do not know anyone who uses this, as it is way too noisy, and mostly useless.

Trending Topics/Digg

As trending topics, is the third thing on my list that comes from Twitter, it seams to me that Twitter is the best we get for jumping to other worlds Trending topics relies on the number of people that speak of a term, and puts puts the most popular terms in everyone’s sight. This gives a global picture, a bit out of the closed view. It is in fact similar to Digg (that sounds a bit retro now, but is a useful service).

Location Based Services

Who said Foursquare? Gowalla? The emerging location based services, make discovery possible on another ground: using location. You may discover people that you don’t know, just because they were at the same place where you are. They might have left you a message, a tip, an object to collect. You can discover total strangers. Yet, this is all quite new, and maybe not yet fully adapted to a meaningfull discovery of new people, and new things.

* * *

If I were to classify all those ways, I would say there are two apparent categories. There are ways that use a certain property, a certain fact about me as hole between my world and somehow adjacent worlds, and make a discovery of new things possible through that. This property can be a friend that is on the border of social circles (in case of retweet), or location (in case of location based services), but we can imagine many more properties (items on restaurant menu can connect me to people who took them as well, etc.).

The other kind of ways are those that profit from the big picture; services like trending topics and public time-line. They take the totality of users’ behaviors and draw patterns from it. Later they serve as those patterns showing us where we are in the global community, indicating the other, unknown side of the Moon.

To take away: broadening our view is maybe as important part of our Web experience as narrowing it, and should be treated as an equal player in designing Web communities.

Lindt Petits Desserts Musse au Chocolat Blanc is the chocolate of the month March. Although this is the kind of chocolate you can buy in a supermarket, Lindt provides an exceptional experience. This subtle, melting chocolate gives a sensation of a buttery late spring garden party, dipped in afternoon sun. It is a light experience, but still rich in cocoa butter flavors, with  contrasting textures  of mussy interior and glazed but easy melting exterior. Ideal for spring afternoons.

Chocolate of the month is the series of blog posts where I proclaim a chocolate of the month. While it is guaranteed that there will be a mention of a chocolate, there is no guarantee that there will be one every month. “of the month” is just a reference to more-then-random, but less-then-often nature of the postings in the series.

Image via Wikipedia

There has been a long time since I haven’t tasted a true Austrian cake; and when I was almost about to forget how great they were, Debbie brought me a Dobos Torte de Gerstner Konditorei (Vienna); with slight indications of rhum, a masterpiece of cake. If you ever come by Vienna, do not miss it

• buying organic fruit at Marché d’Aligre in a chilly Sunday morning
• Café Viennois outside, on a spring-like day near sunset-time, looking at the pink sky, saying goodbye to the long winter
• Late winter sun all over the facades and roofs of Paris
• Lunch at Chez Janette
• Drawing with crayola colors while waiting for faux fillet, at En Attendant l’or
• Looking through Prada sunglasses
• White chocolate with almonds, Jeff de Bruge
• Rue des Rossiers

see other posts from the “checklist for a true hedonist” series.

After a certain stage in their life-cycle, companies get so big that they turn into big closed worlds. I know such companies, where conditions of entry in the corporate buildings are more severe than on the borders between countries. You need to be announced and registered in the security system 15 days before, you must come with a passport, etc. The idea enhance with the outside world is of course a no-no in such worlds.

The apparent inefficiency of big companies has led to the development of many approaches in management that try to make the rigid corporate structures more flexible. Open innovation is one of those approaches that takes the assumption that many times, valuable ideas reside outside the company and that company should reach for those external sources of ideas, expertise and intelligence.

The Web is perceived, by most of the modern open innovation approaches, as a perfect platform for open innovation, because it allows for broadcasting of innovation challanges to a large audience. Companies like Hypios, exploit this feature of the Web to provide open innovation services to big corporations. However, many unanswered technical challenges emerge from such a novel use of the Web. In this post I try to list of those challenges and potential outcomes of the current state of things.

Broadcasting

The open innovation platforms on the Web are based on broadcasting. They externalize problems and publish them online hoping that somewhere out there, in the deep forests of Amazon, or in high skyscrapers of Malasya, someone would be capable to solve them, or might already have a solution to a similar problem. This works for now, as the users of such platforms are still only the early adopters. The current state reminds me of the early stage of twitter, when only the fun and brave were using the service, and when I used to go on the public timeline to see what is going on Those days are gone now, as broadcasting has took a more massive form, and now even my personal feed contains enormous amounts of noise. We can observe such an evolution in all broadcasting systems. Facebook‘s news feed has faced a similar history. At the beginning, while I had 50 friends I might follow their updates, but now, with more than 200, I simply had to block a large majority of them in order to make the service usable. However in social networks, creating filters is rather easy using the social connections. I wonder what will happen in open innovation platforms when the number of problems reaches a certain limit. People might just be annoyed and stop reading the proposed problems. And, in case of problems the effects of overload might show even earlier that with Facebook and Twitter, since problems take time to read and understand, they are not limited to 140 characters.  Filters will be needed in order to reduce the noise.

The main problem is that with innovation, we never know who may have a solution. A solution for the longitude problem, which was believed to be an astronomical problem, was delivered by a clockmaker. One may never know Thus limiting the broadcast to communities of certain competence/interest is of little use here. At this point we come to the interesting challenge that the Web is going to face soon. How can we design such a targeted broadcasting, so that we maximize the chance to find a competent and capable problem solver i.e. how can we know where the solutions might reside.

In hypios we begin the quest for such a magic solution, that would turn the (Social) Web into an innovation engine. In the following blog posts I will talk about solution transfer and several ideas how the Web can be made to recognize potential solvers in unexpected fields of interest.

Socialization

Problems are a social thing. In Serbia, where I come from, people have especially developed the skill of sharing problems (i.e. complaining). Everyone is always complaining, there. From the moment you get your feet on the ground, and get into a taxi, all you will hear are complains. Complaining is the main form of conversation, and thus a central notion in socialization. Problems that are shared, allow to develop social bonding, sympathy and cooperation. The same will hold for the problems that get posted on the Web. In order to reach their full potential problem solving networks need to go beyond the mere seeker-solver matching. They should also allow the partnering of those with common problems, discussions over problems, and how they are to be solved, etc. Ecosystems that might arise around problems, with all sorts of problem-related interactions might increase the chances that a problem reaches its ultimate solver. Discussions might help shape the understanding of the problem, and redefine it if necessary. Those interactions around problems will also help to reveal implicit social connections, that are not explicitly stated in friend lists, but may be extremely useful for user classification and detection of social circles and social patterns.

The main challenge with socialization around problems, is that in open discussions it is difficult to measure different contributions that lead to the final solution.

… to be continued …

Dear fellow researchers, Semantic Web enthusiasts, citizens of the Web,

it is my pleasure to invite you to the second VoCamp in France, and the first ever in Paris which will take place on 13th and 14th May. The VoCamp is generously sponsored by Hypios.com – a young and innovative company that runs a marketplace for problems and innovative solutions. Our research department is working on Semantic Web technologies to support the problem solving networks, and it is our great pleasure to host this VoCamp and gather with fellow Seamntic Web researchers.

For those unfamiliar with VoCamp, VoCamp is a series of free informal events where people can spend some time creating and maintaining lightweight vocabularies/ontologies/thesauruses for the Semantic Web/Web of Data/Linked Open Data. (see http://vocamp.org/ ) The VoCamp idea is influenced by BarCamp but is oriented to hands-on technical work and practical outputs to publish new vocabularies. The emphasis of the events is not on creating the perfect ontology in a particular domain, but on creating vocabularies that are good enough for people to start using for publishing data on the Web. VoCamps are free for participants.

HypiosVoCamp Paris is organized by Alexandre Monnin [1] and myself [2].

Hurry up and register while there are still places left:

http://vocamp.org/wiki/HypiosVoCampParisMay2010

Please feel free to distribute this announcement further.

[1] http://ceppa.univ-paris1.fr/spip.php?article67
[2] http://milstan.net