Category: Web 2.0

Categories
Web 2.0

Radical trust & Web 2.0

Cath Styles from the National Archives of Australia has a nice succinct summary of Web 2.0 presented as a paper to the Australian Historical Association online at Assembly. It is a easy read and another straightforward overview of the range of technologies Web 2.0 embodies as well as some of the more relevant examples from the libraries, archives, museums and galleries sector (and it is Australian!).

Like Jim Spadaccini from Ideum I picked up on her use of the term ‘radical trust’ which emerged from the library sector earlier this year. Radical trust means trusting users not to muck things up (and rewarding them with control in return). This is a nice way of describing the promise of Web 2.0 but as Benkler continually reminds us, this promise is only going to be achieved with appropriate legislative support and change – not least of all in terms of intellectual property law. It should also be stressed that most ‘systems’ of trust in Web 2.0 applications are specifically constructed to encourage and protect, through safeguards and small but not insignificant ‘barriers to participation’ (Wikipedia’s login and lock controls, Slashdot’s reputation system, Google’s continual tweaking of PageRank etc) what is being described as ‘trust’.

I’ve been re-reading Eric Davis’ Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Information Age from 1999 and Davis neatly (and rather floridly) examines the underlying spiritual and mystical qualities that us as humans, have been applying to technology since the earliest days. Drawing on examples from electricity and the telephone through to the post-bust Dot Com era, it is again a timely reminder that there is a certain attraction in technological promise that is far from rational.

As much as I like the term and the idea, part of the appeal of the term ‘radical trust’ is its quasi-moralistic/spiritiual/revolutionary tone.

Categories
Imaging Interactive Media Web 2.0

Flickr and geotagging

I’m a little late on this but Flickr has implemented geotagging which is very nifty. I hope this means a widescale uptake of this feature.

Categories
Folksonomies Web 2.0

OPAC2.0 Quick log charting of object popularity

A few weeks back I posted an initial chart showing distributions of object usage on our OPAC2.0.

Here’s a quick updated chart but done with logarhythmic scales on both axes.

MS Excel seems to only cope with 32,000 values on one axis so it cuts off artificially at 32,000 (out of 55,134 objects viewed of the total 61,780 currently available)

Some other useful data:
Total object views to date = 1,776,259
Max views for single object = 2104 (Delta Goodrem dress)
Average views per object = 28.751
Standard deviation = 40.819
Median views = 19

Popularity drops below 10 views at rank 39,313 (not shown on graph as a result of Excel limitations)

Already there is a clear line emerging which droops around the 20K rank point – which indicates that there is still some way to go with driving traffic down to the more obscure objects in the tail. The bump at the head is the result of objects that are receiving abnormally large amounts of traffic – the Delta Goodrem dress, the Nu-U bra (the one from 1957) – as a result of time-specific cultural factors.

Categories
Web 2.0 Web metrics

Reviewing web metrics

Evan Williams (one of the makers of Blogger) posts a strong argument for why organisations should be moving away from using page views as a metric much in the same way we all moved away from hits in the late 90s.

Looking at MySpace he compares page views with ‘reach’ (effectively uniqiue visitors) and maps the results against the same for Blogger.com. MySpace suddenly doesn’t look as far ahead as it did when based solely on page views. He draws on Mike Davidson‘s argument that MySpace has such enormous metrics largely as a result of poor architecture – requiring the user to go through refresh pages many more times than necessary if MySpace was redesigned from the ground up with usability in mind.

Ajax is only part of the reason pageviews are obsolete. Another one is RSS. About half the readers of this blog do so via RSS. I can know how many subscribers I have to my feed, thanks to Feedburner. And I can know how many times my feed is downloaded, if I wanted to dig into my server logs. But I don’t get to count pageviews for every view in Google Reader or Bloglines or LiveJournal or anywhere else I’m syndicated.

Another reason: Widgets. The web is becoming increasingly widgetized—little bits of functionality from one site are displayed on many others. The purveyors of a widget can track how many times their javascript of flash file is loaded elsewhere—but what does that mean? If you get a widget loaded in a sidebar of a blog without anyone paying attention to it, that’s not worth anything. But if you’re YouTube, and someone’s watching a whole video and perhaps even an ad you’re getting paid for, that’s something else entirely. But is it a pageview?

Pageviews were never a great measure of popularity. A simple javascript form validation can easily cut down on pageviews (and save users time), while a useless frameset can pump up your numbers. But with the proliferation of Ajax, RSS, and widgets, pageviews are even more silly to pay much attention to—even as we’re all obsessed with them.

Categories
Metadata Web 2.0

Pay-for-answers : AQA and paid research

AQA (Any Questions Answered)offers a pretty unique service where uses can text (SMS) a question to a group of researchers. How it works is detailed in an interview with its founder Colly Myers in The Register by web realist/skeptic Andrew Orlowski. Colly Myers offers his views on the future of general web searching (falling away as it succumbs to data entropy), Wikipedia, and virtual sweatshops.

AQA served its 3 millionth answer recently, notching up the last million in four months. The previous million took seven months, and the first million took 19 months, which gives some indication of its growth ramp.

AQA’s owner IssueBits has been profitable since last October, says Myers, and he thinks the market is young and there’s plenty of opportunity to grow. AQA doesn’t have the field to itself – 82ask also caters to the curious texter – but it is in pole position.
Myers seems particularly proud of the infrastructure: AQA uses around 500 researchers to answer double the volume of queries it did before (the actual composition of the research staff varies, as they drop in and out of work)..

If AQA is correct and the value of Google and other general search tools drops markedly as users move to silo-searches (as the article describes teenagers are doing within MySpace) and entropy sets in, then there is a returning role for specialist research done by professional researchers in libraries and museums. And it is a role that if AQA indicates anything, is willingly paid for if the price is low enough and the requests broken down into simply separate questions.

Categories
Folksonomies Web 2.0

OPAC2.0 More on tag clouds

Lynda Kelly at the Australian Museum has relayed some reporting on tagging from a recent Web Usability seminar. (Lynda is part of an ARC project we are collaborating on.)

Roger Hudson took us through a brief history of classification and taxonomy(Linnaeus I think, Dewey, etc etc), making mention of an interesting Indian historical figure who had introduced the idea of classifying by “facets”. This idea was not widely taken up but is now highly relevant to the ways that tags are used. He also presented some *very* preliminary research with punters about tags – what they were and how they were being and could be used. The messages for me from his talk were (with apologies in advance to Roger as I am just outlining my impressions which could be wrong!):

1. Little understanding of the concept of tagging

2. Little understanding of why some words were larger in a tag cloud that others

3. A wide variety in the ways that people could potentially tag something. For example a picture of a redback spider was tagged as a spider (obviously); redback (also obviously); however other tags were Slim Dusty and dunny (think about it…) which i thought were pretty cool

4. The potential that as tag clouds make the “popular” tags the biggest, there could be “expert” tags that are lost (as in the above example where only 3 or so people used the word “arachnology” as a tag which is something that other experts may seach on)

When it comes to collections we are noticing some different trends emerging – mainly because tags on our site are combined with controlled vocabularies and are thus enhanced in this way, the end result for users is better/broader.

The stats we are accumulating are now showing a clear preference for tag as entry point, but interestingly enough, NOT necessarily tagged content as end point. Thus a user might click on the big tag MODEL TRAIN but then not view an actual OBJECT tagged as model train, but one of the results from a free text search for the term.

(I’ll be presenting some statistical evidence on these trends in future presentations and perhpas in a future post)

Unlike a lot of other sites that use tags we are not JUST using tags as a folksonomic classification system, we are also using them as search entry points. The use of tags as search entry points means that we are increasing the likelihood of users widening rather than narrowing their search.

Lynda has posted links to two excellent introductory pieces on folksonomies as well.

http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_09/tagging-cognitive.html

http://infotangle.blogsome.com/2005/12/07/the-hive-mind-folksonomies-and-user-based-tagging/

Categories
Digitisation Interactive Media Web 2.0

Collections Council Australia – Digital Collections Summit presentation (17/8/06)

Yesterday at the Digital Collection Summit in Adelaide I presented a short 5 minute overview of our OPAC2.0 and Design Hub projects followed by Dr Fiona Cameron introducing the upcoming theoretical research into Design Hub impacts.

Quite a few people have asked for a copy of the presentation – so here it is. Unfortunately it doesn’t have the witty banter and arm-waving/finger-pointing that accompanied the ‘real life’ version.

If you would like more information on these projects then please get in touch.

There are several other posts here that cover some of the current and emerging trends in usgae of our OPAC2.0 which provide some extra reading.

Download Powerpoint show

Categories
Folksonomies Interactive Media Web 2.0

OPAC2.0 Effects of tag clouds on search term usage

Rob Stein from Indianapolis Museum of Art asked me on the STEVE list –

Do you have a feel[ing] for how many people are actually entering the collection through the tag cloud you have on your page versus how many are using the category listings? I’ve often wondered if the nature of a tag cloud naturally bias’ big terms to get bigger, and smaller terms to disappear. Presenting a cloud like this side-by-side with the categorical hierarchy seems like an interesting comparison.

Since launch we’ve had nearly 1500 user classifications. Interestingly there seems to be no immediate pattern in the way in which objects are user classified and the rationale for classification is unsurprisingly very mixed (as is our collection). Most of the larger user classifications such as ‘bowling club‘ is the result of a single user classifying multiple objects in one go. (Bowling club were all tagged on the same day and none added since).

Whilst we don’t specifically track category listing use we do track tag cloud use. Here’s the figures for the last 7 days.

Date | Total successful searches | Subset of searches using tag cloud

13/08/2006 (11,665) (4,006)
12/08/2006 (12,165) (4,847)
11/08/2006 (13,613) (1,352)
10/08/2006 (5,572) (569)
09/08/2006 (6,782) (318)
08/08/2006 (4,530) (564)
07/08/2006 (9,605) (1,638)

At its lowest tag cloud searches represent 4.68% of searches, and its highest 39.84%. That is a pretty large difference but I have a feeling that the reason for the recent few days generating both more total searches and a higher percentage of tag cloud searches is that Google has again spidered the site and picks up the tag cloud words as keywords.

Because tag cloud words are user-generated there is a greater chance that they will be ‘more used’ than words from our official taxonomies. This means not only will they be more used on the site, but that they are probably also going to be words that are more often searched for in Google as well.

Now when a user clicks a tag cloud word they get TWO sets of search results. The first set of results is a simple tag search, the second is a general free text search for that keyword.

Rather than necessarily biasing the ‘tagged’ objects what we are actually observing is that a tag cloud click more frequently results in the viewing of an untagged object which appears in the later free text results. I’ll have to keep an eye on this and see if this trend continues as more objects are tagged.

As for the categorical hierarchies, we are seeing very little usage of them. The vast majority of users are using direct search terms or clicking the tag cloud, or, more often than not, getting to objects or search results via a Google search.

What has changed recently is that we have added ‘subject terms’. These are slightly looser taxonomic classifications which address particular ‘themes’. An example of this is the term ‘federation’ which is used to refer to object related to the period of Australian federation. These subject terms don’t describe the actual object but are related to its provenance and significance – and thus are particularly useful to high school teachers and students. A small portion of our total objects have subject terms attached currently and they tend to be those relatively recently acquired.

What I am noticing is a very marked appearance of subject terms in the search terms indicating that they are being used as navigation devices to discover ‘related’ objects. In the next week or two we will be making the subject terms much more prominent as it seems that they are perhaps more useful to the user than our broad object categories despite their limitations.

Categories
Digitisation Interactive Media Web 2.0

GoogleMaps gaming

GoogleMaps plus gaming –

– Goggles : a flight simulator using GoogleMaps as the terrain!
– Endgame : real-time strategy wargaming using GoogleMaps

Categories
Imaging Interactive Media Web 2.0

Relational Flickr search

Flickr Storm is a fantastic and fast new tag search tool for Flickr.

Unlike other good Flickr browsers like Airtight’s tag browser, Flickr Storm also searches ‘related words’.

For example – a search for Japan also pulls in, and accurately identifies, images tagged as sakura, kyoto, and even autumn leaves!

Another nice feature is its ‘advanced search’ which allows filtering by license conditions, great if you are looking for Creative Commons licensed or public domain images.