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
Interactive Media

Kapor on Second Life

3pointd presents his very comprehensive notes and outline of (Linden Labs board member and IT pioneer) Mitch Kapor’s talk on Second Life at the Second Life Community convention. There is some really fascinating talk contained within – about innovation, about paradigm shifts, about disruptive technologies.

“Today’s skepticism about Second Life, and I hear this not in this room or in the 40,000 people a day who are logging on, but in the next concentric circle of people reading Business Week, is that this is not for regular people. ‘I’d never use this.’ It reminds me of other things I’ve heard people say. In 1995 I was showing people Amazon, and they would say I will never put my credit card information on the Internet. Well, we got over that one.”

“It’s all about imagination. When people say, I just don’t know what I’d use it for, the gap between their imagination about what they might do and their perception of what goes on isn’t sufficiently close.”

“Two things are happening. There’s an enormous explosion of new stuff going on in Second Life. The number of possibilities becoming real on a daily basis is exploding and expanding, and the kind of knowledge and understanding people have of it is also growing dramatically. So, ‘this is not for regular people,’ that’s going to go away. It only looks like it’s not going to go away to some people. So my experience says, in the battle between faith and skepticism on these kinds of things, you don’t have to take on faith that faith is going to win. There’s lots of good empirical evidence from past waves to give you confidence that the early stage that we’re in now is in fact an early stage and we’re going to see maturation, growth and further change.”

“One thing that’s very important to keep in mind is something called Macromyopia. For people who are inside a new phenomenon like Second Life, we tend to overestimate the short-term effects. We think more great things are going to happen sooner than they typically do. Conversely, we underestimate the long-term impact. People are not especially good at forecasting this. What I would say is, certain situations that may be problematic in the short term may well take longer than anyone would like to fully resolve. On the other hand, it’s very diffcult to fully grasp and imagine what the long-term impact of Second Life and things like it are going to be. We have to stretch to think about that.”

“In particular, in the short term, right now there’s still a chasm between the power users and the clueless newbies. Those are slightly provcative terms, they’re not the best, it is just a fact, there’s still a significant number of people who come in, try it and leave. It’s not ready for prime time. I don’t believe it’s going to change overnight. It’s going to change in stages. It’s hard to know how long it’s going to take, and how long before it’s mainstream. It’s not tomorrow, it’s not next year, but it’s coming.”

Categories
Young people & museums

Notions of class and ‘digital natives’

Norm Friesen from Simon Fraser University questions the whole notion of a ‘net generation’ (or as we might say, drawing on Marc Prensky, ‘digital natives’), drawing to the fore issues of class rather than age.

This is the first in his E-Learning Myths series where he aims to dispel, or at least, challenge many of the ideas which he sees as underpinning ideas of e-learning.

Recent sociological and governmental studies paint quite a different picture of this same generation. Often focusing specifically on the Internet, they report –similar to the sources above– that “children and young people [are generally] claiming greater online self-efficacy and skills than…their parents” (Livingstone, Bober & Helsper, 2005; 3: emphasis added). However, they do not take these claims at face value, and universalize them to youth in general. Instead, this research emphasizes, for example, that the complex skills needed to effectively utilize the Internet are distributed not only by age, but also by “gender and socio-economic status” (Livingstone, Bober & Helsper, 2005; 3). One of the most important predictors for these differences is class –with middle class children more “likely to experience the Internet as a rich, if risky, medium than less priveged children (Livingston, & Bober, 2004; 415).

Friesen’s site contains a lot of his academic publications including an interesting contestation of the idea of ‘learning objects’.

Categories
Social networking

Social networking academic research summary

danah boyd has posted a very useful starting summary of academic articles related to social networking and internet communications.

danah’s work in this area has been very useful in considering and bringing some sense of rationality to the hyped media interpretations of the MySpace phenomenon. Others, particularly Stutzman and Ellison who focus on the more ‘confined’ and ‘purpose-specific’ Facebook are also worth investigating.

I’m of two minds when it comes to applications of social networking tools within museum and gallery environments. On one hand, such tools could feasibly allow museums to become the nodal point for specific community interactions around their collections – for example, at the Powerhouse Museum, it would be logical to set up a system to facilitate online interactions between railway enthusiasts and our substantial actual locomotive and also model railway collections. On the other hand, though, my research and theorising leads me to agree with boyd (2006) and others that the primary function of social networking tools is communicative, not informational. If this is the case, then with regard to railway enthusiasts, we would be more likely to end up having to manage and maintain a communication nexus for such audiences with little return to the museum in terms of information sharing and acquisition etc.

The other issue for museums setting up their own systems is that of promotion. How does someone choose which, of many, social networking services to use? The answer, I think, lies in a mixture of application, geography, and existing real world networks. Facebook works because it is very specific in application (keeping track of friends) and geography (your college or high school) and it draws on the real world networks of these to pull you in – if your friends weren’t already on Facebook then you would be less predisposed to join (and you couldn’t join if you weren’t at college).

MySpace works because of the massive-scale subcultural promotion of the resource combined with the even more massive mainstream media hysteria over it (see Thornton’s classic work on moral panics and subcultures in Club Cultures, Routledge, 1996 – actually I see a lot of parallels between acid house and rave moral panics and the current moral panics around MySpace). MySpace has very broad application and geography, but it is more than likely that your friends are already there so peer pressure draws you in.

It needs to be noted that even with MySpace there are significant differences between UK MySpace users and US MySpace users. US MySpace is inhabited by teens and is, at the moment, dominated by their internal communications where as in the UK it seems that MySpace is more used by music labels and bands to communicate with their fanbase. Taking a long shot, could it be that this is in part a result of differences in the availability, especially in the late 1990s, of cheap and plentiful webhosting in the UK. UK bands and labels have taken up MySpace primarily for its hosting and promotional facilities, whereas in the USA for pure hosting there were (and are) a vastly different and cheaper range of alternatives for simple band hosting.

Categories
AV Related Copyright/OCL

Channel fragmentation

Those museum staff who came to my presentations earlier this year on Web 2.0 would remember that I talked a bit about the idea of ‘channel fragmentation’ in relation to traditional media. I used the example of cinema releases, DVD sales, cable TV licenses, traditional TV licenses, as well as competition from Copyright infringing distributions (P2P, DVDRs, pirate copies etc).

Here is another great example of channel fragmentation – ‘Giveaways killing DVD cash cow’ – from The Australian that has nothing to do with Copyright infringement.

British newspapers are now giving away free as many DVDs as are being purchased in stores, revealing a silent factor contributing to the decline of Hollywood’s cash cow format.

The cover-mounted DVD giveaways, which have included Prizzi’s Honour and Donnie Darko, devalue the format in the eyes of consumers, one-quarter of whom said they would have bought the same title if they had seen it in shops for a reasonable price, according to a report released on Thursday.

and

Although most of the major Hollywood studios oppose the newspaper giveaways, the smaller local distributors who have licensed the films are opportunistically doing deals with publishers for short-term gains that can generate as much as £250,000 for a film.

“The argument in favor of this is that the majority of these films have reached the end of their commercial cycle,” Ms Jayalath said. “In many cases, they’re no longer stocked because traditional retailers have a limited amount of space. For the rights holder, it can be the last bite of the cherry.”

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