Categories
Interactive Media Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Current dialogues

Its a busy time at the museum at the moment with the Great Wall of China exhibition coming up in a few weeks. And there are a lot of deadlines so here’s a couple of interesting blog posts I’ve been reading recently.

Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School leaps to the defense of experimentation of social media like blogs and wikis within organisations. There has been a lot of talk about the internal impacts of these web technologies within museums – usually about the visitor/curator interaction that results – but there may also be some interesting lessons to be learned from IBM and other knowledge companies that have rolled out social media within their organisations to better implement knowledge management internally. And what are museums if they are not centrally about knowledge management?

Fascinating dialogue between Ulises Ali Mejias and Raph Koster following from a multi-person discussion piece in Harpers about video games and literacy.

Also, the American blogosphere has been full of discussion about changes at Facebook. As usual it is Fred Stutzman and danah boyd who offer some great meta-ideas around the how it is users who own social networks (at least at the moment).

Categories
Imaging Interactive Media

What does a song look like

There is a nifty new visualisation tool for ‘visualising repetition in MIDI files’ called The Shape Of Song.

What does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see–literally–the shape of any composition available on the Web. The resulting images reflect the full range of musical forms, from the deep structure of Bach to the crystalline beauty of Philip Glass.

You can view (and hear) a stack of MIDI files on the site or you can point it at an URL containing a MIDI file. Already it has been overrun with Def Leppard and Tool.

Categories
Web 2.0

A new look at who writes Wikipedia?

Aaron Swartz in his article Who Writes Wikipedia? takes a new look at the oft-repeated claim by Jimmy Wales, and thus almost everybody else, that Wikipedia’s content is really mainly contributed by a small core group of about 500 people.

Swartz, at Stanford, cleverly unpicks the claim that “the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits” by actually looking at the actual contributions in some randomly chosen articles and anaylses them not by number of edits, but by content of edits.

To investigate more formally, I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives. I wrote a little program to go through each edit and count how much of it remained in the latest version.† Instead of counting edits, as Wales did, I counted the number of letters a user actually contributed to the present article.

If you just count edits, it appears the biggest contributors to the Alan Alda article (7 of the top 10) are registered users who (all but 2) have made thousands of edits to the site. Indeed, #4 has made over 7,000 edits while #7 has over 25,000. In other words, if you use Wales’s methods, you get Wales’s results: most of the content seems to be written by heavy editors.

But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit — this one! With the more reasonable metric — indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study — the result completely reverses.

I don’t have the resources to run this calculation across all of Wikipedia (there are over 60 billion edits!), but I ran it on several more randomly-selected articles and the results were much the same. For example, the largest portion of the Anaconda article was written by a user who only made 2 edits to it (and only 100 on the entire site). By contrast, the largest number of edits were made by a user who appears to have contributed no text to the final article (the edits were all deleting things and moving things around).

[UPDATE – more studies on this from Wikimania 2006 (via Ross Mayfield)]

Categories
Folksonomies Imaging Web 2.0

Google Image Labeller

Everyone is talking about the new Google image labeller. Think the ESP Game but where your tags help Google deliver better image search results.

O’Reilly nails it in their description of it.

The launch of Google Image Labeler, a “game” that asks people to label images, and figures that images given the same label by multiple people are likely to be correct, continues the Web 2.0 trend towards bionic software, that is, software that combines machine and human intelligence. This is really just another version of the web 2.0 principle, harnessing collective intelligence, but with an emphasis on “harnessing” rather than on “collective.”

Like Distributed Proofreaders (the granddaddy in the space), Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and mycroft, but unlike, say, a Flickr tag cloud as a reflection of collective labeling of images, Google Image Labeler puts people explicitly to work.

There’s a spectrum of ways to put humans to work refining computer results, from the implicit to the explicit. The most explicit, of course, is going to be when the third world job shops now engaged in making booty for World of Warcraft start offering their services for more general hire.

[UPDATE : O’Reilly continues their investigation looking at the roots of the Image Labeller in the ESP Game]

Categories
Folksonomies Web 2.0

Taxonomies of tagging

danah boyd, Cameron Marlow, Marc Davis and Mor Naaman, all of Yahoo, explore social tagging in detail in their paper presented to ACM/Hypertext06 in Denmark.

Of particular note are the sections on system design and user incentives which cover the differing types of systems and methods behind different implementations of tagging. They also suggest that considerably more research is required into the different ‘lects’ used in tagging and the phenomenon of ‘vocabularly overlap’ between random users’ tags in a short Flickr case study.

Essential reading.

ABSTRACT

In recent years, tagging systems have become increasingly popular. These systems enable users to add keywords (i.e., “tags”) to Internet resources (e.g., web pages, images, videos) without relying on a controlled vocabulary. Tagging systems have the potential to improve search, spam detection, reputation systems, and personal organization while introducing new modalities of social communication and opportunities for data mining. This potential is largely due to the social structure that underlies many of the current systems.

Despite the rapid expansion of applications that support tagging of resources, tagging systems are still not well studied or understood. In this paper, we provide a short description of the academic related work to date. We offer a model of tagging systems, specifically in the context of web-based systems, to help us illustrate the possible benefits of these tools. Since many such systems already exist, we provide a taxonomy of tagging systems to help inform their analysis and design, and thus enable researchers to frame and compare evidence for the sustainability of such systems. We also provide a simple taxonomy of incentives and contribution models to inform potential evaluative frameworks. While this work does not present comprehensive empirical results, we present a preliminary study of the photo- sharing and tagging system Flickr to demonstrate our model and explore some of the issues in one sample system. This analysis helps us outline and motivate possible future directions of research in tagging systems.

Categories
Interactive Media

Using VOIP to visit the past

Back in the pre-internet days, then back even further to my first computer, a Commodore 64 (of course!), I used to dial in to BBSes (bulletin board systems) on a 300 baud modem. For a moment I got excited when 1200/75 connections were possible to a commercial BBS-meets-teletex news system called Viatel here in Australia. That excitement was shortlived when I realised that it was content and not speed that mattered – and Viatel had content I really had little interest in – especially when private BBS systems held so much other material.

What happened to all of this?

Over at Vintage Computing there is a fascinating story of using VOIP to connect to some of the very few remaining ‘live’ BBS systems still up and running in America. I wonder if anyone is now trying to do this in Australia and whether any of the old boards are still running?

Here’s an excerpt but drop over and read the whole piece –

All this makes me wonder why the Sysops who own these BBSes keep them running with such little traffic. Did they just forget to turn off their machines in 1998 as the Internet finally swept away the traditional US BBS scene? Did the old Sysops die and nobody noticed that the automated machines were still running, undetected, in a dusty back room somewhere? The possibilities are incredibly compelling; they really stir the imagination. That’s why finding such forgotten realms elicits a sense of discovery in me, like being an explorer discovering a long-lost temple in the overgrown jungles of Peru — all the more reason to give the old places a visit.

Categories
Social networking Web 2.0

Simple example of Web 2.0 in a museum

One of the best examples at the Powerhouse Museum of Web 2.0 thinking across the museum (not just the web services team) is in fact our Preservation Department’s use of de.icio.us.

This was such a simple idea – but with profound impacts on internal processes.

Preservation get a lot of enquiries from the general public and also from small regional museums about preservation techniques. We needed quick and low-tech, dial-up friendly solution to offering the best and up-to-date information on preservation methods.

Traditionally this sort of issue would have been resolved with fact sheets and perhaps a static set of links. Both of these solutions would be time consuming but worst of all, ‘finished’ when they went online – and probably not updated for several years.

Using a del.icio.us account communally shared amongst the Preservation Department staff, staff can all bookmark websites of use to the public in answer questions about ‘how do I preserve . . . ‘. Each site is tagged with the type of object that it refers to.

Shortly the Museum will be presenting these aggregated links on the Museum’s website under a ‘recommended preservation resources’ section.

Rather than build our own bookmarking system Preservation opted to use del.icio.us because of its ease-of-use and social features. All the resources dedicated to the project have been from the Preservation Department who can work incrementally and add or edit a few resources at a time in an ongoing, continuous project requiring micro-efforts rather than a singular focussed time-limited effort.

Rather than fact sheets – which still may be produced from time to time – by pointing to other online resources we save reinventing the wheel.

And, as del.icio.us is all text based it is great for those in regional areas with slow internet connectivity.

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.