This weekend I finally got the picture: you have the quantities user and knowledge (as being relevant data) and you have the variables trust and relevance. And they all interact with each other. My guess is that all my previous post fit in these categories. User would be: “Personal portal, how to keep track of the second me” and “I am online“, knowledge would be: “Open source knowledge“, trust is also mentioned in “I am online” and relevance comes along in “Plaatsen vs Matchen” and “Chaos Control“.

Today I would like to dig a little deeper into “knowledge”. Eric Miller’s Thesis “Towards personalized metadata and knowledge systems” (2003) gave me some useful clues.

His paper is mainly about the use of metadata (which could be guessed from the title) But the focus of this blogpost will mainly be on the route from data to knowledge (if metadata is your thing, and you understand Dutch, please read this post “Folksonomies en de mythe van het semantische web“) Knowledge is the information that is useful to a user. And information is data that has meaning to the user. Using Brown and Duguid’s The Social life of Information Eric creates a scheme that made the differences clear to me.

Data
What we can access
Any accessible node of content on the network

Information
What we can understand
Nodes of content that fulfill certain requirements for usability. May qualify by language, culture, presentation, accessibility, timeliness, quality, reputation, distribution, technical compatibility, or other attributes that facilitate comprehension.

Knowledge
What we find useful
Nodes of content that are specifically relevant and informative for a specific user in their specific context. Differentiated from information because it adds value to a user’s personal ontology.

Given these scheme I find it also easier to understand why relevance and trust are important factors of what make data knowledge. Eric puts it in one line: A given node(st: data-object) may be accessible (data) and comprehensible (information) but what makes it valuable is the fact that it contributes to an individual’s pattern of understanding (knowledge).

So knowledge isn’t something that is definable as being there, it is only knowledge if it makes relevance to you. Should this conclude that the title of my previous post could better be “Open Source Information” One argument against it could be that we are looking from the personal point of knowledge, if you would look at it from a top view than the information in weblogs could be called knowledge too. The internet although not being a semantic web does learn from its users. (I don’t completely understand what I’m saying here)

In my vision most of the web2.0 applications also fit in the 4 categories. (most fit in more categories, but I like simplicity even when its a lie)

User
Flickr/svirsk (personal photos)
svirsk/blog (personal thoughts)

Data:
Flickr (photos)
blogger (weblogs)

Relevance (as being relevant at this moment)
del.icio.us (bookmarks)
Flickr/tagcloud (tags of today)
digg (interesting articles)
Del.ico.us/populair (what’s hot today)

Relevance (as being relevant to me)
del.icio.us/svirsk
Flickr/svirsk/tags
blogline weblogs

Trust
Ebay reputation (for sellers)
google pagerank (for pages and websites)
Microsoft passport (for people)

As you can see especially trust can use some extra research from my side, Raphaël Mazoyer mentioned in his paper that trust has something to do with transparency and Eric points that trust systems based on metadata are very hard to design and refers to the url of Prof. Suhl from the Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik.

Concluding my post for today I think there is a need for an application that measures the trustworthy of publishers and their expertness in a certain field. Which allows the user in understanding the relevance of information.

In web2.0 (lack a better term, so I use this) the web is really changing from a tech-top-down to a user-bottom-up structure. The result is that there is more information on the internet than ever before and it’s growing speed is going up each day.

Where six years ago Lev Manovich wrote that the key essence of new media is that it’s programmable, now this seems finally possible. Thanks to a whole new wave of web applications (instead of web sites). Low-tech users finally have the possibility to publish their ideas on the web.

It also change the way knowledge is created, In the old days written knowledge was made by professional writers, journalists, university research, professional writers etc. These days also non-professional writers have joined up. On their weblogs they comment on research reports, online articles and other weblogs.

When I was reading The Cathedral and the Bazar about open source software, I saw the possibilities for his theory about Linux’s success story as a way to describe the blog discussions. He discribes how he used the linux rules to make a succes of his own open source project.

• I released early and often (almost never less often than every ten days; during periods of intense development, once a day).
• I grew my beta list by adding to it everyone who contacted me about fetchmail.
• I sent chatty announcements to the beta list whenever I released, encouraging people to participate.
• And I listened to my beta-testers, polling them about design decisions and stroking them whenever they sent in patches and feedback.

As you would translate these points for open source software into “Open Source Knowledge” Than you would get what is happening now

• Release early and often write a blogpost as soon as you think you are “on” something.
• Make sure your rss feed is working, and get as many people on your feed as possible
• Write everyone that you have a weblog and that you post anything. Only if people know you exist, you exist.
• Listen to the comments that are made, and write a new post soon
• Subscribe too all the blogs of the people who post comments on your blog

Note 1. In the open source software community there is still a leader, in the open source knowledge area there are no leaders. There are some self acclaimed experts, and some community sites, but there is no real core.

Note 2. The only good examples for the open source knowledge communities are the ongoing discussions about Tags (folksonomies, tagclouds, clusters etc). And a friend of mine told me about the discussions about the impact of roll playing games.

Having read An argumented analysis of weblog conversations (2004) I got some extra information on how weblogs can be used to conversate. they split up blogposts in 4 categories

Weblog conversations, also known as blogosphere stories (Jenkins, 2003), develop around a number of weblogs and other information sources. The analysis by (Jenkins, 2003) describes the typical dynamics of blogosphere stories by distinguishing four types of blog posts found in most such stories:
(1) opinion posts that define a topic, and usually contain between 3-15 links, one of them being the instigator of the story,
(2) vote posts where a blogger (dis)agrees with another post,
(3) reaction posts in which a blogger responds to a single post on another site, and
(4) summation posts where the blogger summarizes various other blogs.

A second usefull quote is

As a result at any given time a blogger is involved in two types of conversations:
(1) conversations with self
(2)conversations with others (Efimova, 2004).

Another helpfull quote for me was

“One of my constant frustrations is not being able to keep track of a conversation when it’s spread across weblogs and comments on weblogs. There’s an interesting comparison with the traditional published literature where citations allow the reader to follow a thread across many journals. The lack of formal writing structures in weblogs often means that citations are not present and the narrative is broken.” ((Davies in http://radiocomments.userland.com/comments?u=109961&p=1110, March 6, 2004))

I implemeted the footnote ((sw’as Footnotes 0.9 Plugin for WordPress 2.0.x)) plugin as an experimental tool..

Today I read the thesis of Raphaël Mazoyer “I Am online: Presenting myself at work through a website”. And it gave me some useful clues in solving the mysteries of the personal portals. First of all since meeting online people is different from meeting people in real live. You have recreate the feeling of trust, one way of doing that is by transparency:

Reality as a proxy for the requested accuracy; subsequently, transparency as the natural way to convey reality to visitors; finally, the completeness implied by transparency.

So in order to create a real life feeling of trust, you need to be as open as possible. And what better way would there be than letting all the flows of your digital life come together in one stream of your homepage. In his aim to recreate reality he writes: “The assumption was that the reality of my person was bound to appear clearly to the visitors, if they were presented with all the activities I have during the course of a day.”

In order to recreate reality he writes: “Instinctively, memory seems an area where the computer can best extend” referring to the ideas of McLuhan that technology are extensions of the human, and the computer can be best used as an extension for the brain (memory). Later on he continues whit an investigation how the human brain works, and concludes with the idea than information can be best stored in 3 ways: The library (long term memory), Date (short term memory) and Thematic (where does it relate to) And to my surprise these where already the things i used in my weblog (or everyone uses)

Then in the second part of his thesis he quotes Breton “we are shown everything, and yet the essential seems to escape us.” And the impact of this quote still scares me.. This brings me back to one of my earlier questions: Chaos control, how to keep track of your personal information. Or perhaps rewritten as how to be able to see the essential from the everything.

A great example of the truth of Breton is perhaps Raphaëls current project page. And an article why William Gibson gave up blogging.

He (st: Gibson) collects and refines ideas over time, and has a gift for organizing his language to maximal effect. Put another way, he chooses his words carefully, and he chooses the contexts in which they will have most impact.

So The lesson for to day is how to distill the essential from the everything and the quality from the quantity. And apparently blogging is not the answer.

Today i read the thesis “Narrative Elements in Digital Media” by Cristian García (1997) There where some basic structures that text needs to be a story. And some differences en resemblances with the way interactive story telling could / would be.

A Story in new media consist of events, as in linear media but their length, development and arrangement in time are not decided by the author. In my opinion, the cause and effect chain turns to be the user as a cause-action and the computer makes an effect-reaction. The suspense, the curiosity for the next happening is now the curiosity for the effect the computer can generate: what happens if i do this? (st: Perhaps the “dont push the red button effect”)

A small description is given about the iris writher James Joyce (born 1882) who introduced in his last Books Ulysses and Finnegans Wake a technique of represents the human mind; the stream of consciousness. But further than the intern monologue he writes down all the thoughts we have in our head: associations, reminds, anticipation, visual and auditional impressions. In such a way that a single day takes 400 pages.

Another intresting thing is the description of some basic rules of a virtual character: “A character has to be prominent and individual, has to be noticeable and cannot be eliminated from the story without provoking a important change in the plot”

Conclusion
So how does these thesis mix with my interests? Well yesterday I wrote: “In the future you might consider your online being as a really second me. How do you create such a thing, and how do you keep it in control?” And today I thought: what if the future is now, and people are creating second me’s already. Than my examples of Personal Portals would still remain their value. And can even be considered as being a story about a person (or perhaps more a documentary, is there a word for it, cyberdocu?) Lets go trough the quotations I made and compare them to Matt Brett. reading (or using) his website is almost like a new media story, what will happen (or will I learn) when I push this link? I don’t know if you can call it suspense but it evokes at least my curiosity.

And when you compare his site to the writings of James Joyce you get almost an likewise story, I can follow his bookmarks on the internet, I can see his photos, I can hear his music, I can read what he things and I can build a mental picture of this character. So for me he is a real virtual character. If you consider the internet as a story and Matt as a character than he indeed applies to all the qualifications that a virtual character needs to be real (or believed to be real).

Some questions could be: what is knowing a character, do you know a story or a movie character. What defines a real person and how does it differ from a virtual character.

A possible project could be: creating a virtual character that is a real person on the internet (like a fictive documentary)

(note: I’m in no way a specialist on Narrative, so its possible that I made some misinterpretations, please use the comment link to point me on that)

(note2: thanks to Maarten for reminding me of virtual characters)

(this post has an update at Categories of virtual Identity II)

Warning: the web never forgets
The tv program I saw yesterday inspired me of the following thoughts. In the future you might consider your online being as a really second me. How do you create your second me, and how do you keep it in control? An article about detective bureaus checking who you are when you apply for a job, reminded me about how important it is to be carefull in what you write and publish. As you google for my name for instance you find on the second page a post I put in a guestbook in 1999 that kinda scares me. 7 years ago my whole vision of the world coud be completely different, and yet you (and everyone else) can still find the things i wrote back than. (not to mention archive.org) Now for me that’s not such a big problem i had never radical visions, but still, I want it to be my own decision about what you know about me and what not. (An idea for an emma project would perhaps be, make an education site where you can learn how to use the internet and let it work for you now and in 7 years)

Personal Portal
In the past months I have seen some sites that build the idea for a weblog in to a complete personal portal (mine should become svirsk.org/blog). These personal portals remind me in some ways of the 2000 period where everything had to be portal (this period was off course brutally ended by the google interface) So where will this lead to? A small list of website’s I already found:

the-daily-mess.de/blog/ I like this blog because it tries to mix it all together text, images, links etc. And it’s horizontal layered, and not explicit 2 or 3 columns (For the record I have to say she was my colleague at Mediamatic)

shauninman.com/plete/ I discovered this site a few months ago, and for the first time since a long time, my mouth fell open and i said “wow”. Especially in love with his dropdown navigation. (the menu reminded me a bit of the Amsterdam.nl site)

mattbrett.com/ The first blog where I really noticed it. Having flickr photos, cd’s portfolio items posts comments quick links and much more, all on one page.

http://veerle.duoh.com/ some days ago i came across the blog of Veerle, She also caputred it all on one page. Which makes me wonder, it’s this the best solution or would be splitting image from words (like i do) be a better one?

a list of interest
jaredigital.com/
9rules.com/
fiftyfoureleven.com/
lisamcmillan.com/journal/
(please contact me when you know more examples)

The question perhaps is, what are these pages? Is it rehypermediation? where first there was hypermedia (more forms of media on one screen) there now is a screen where there are many multimedia outputs generated in one screen. Is the weblog time coming to it ends, and do you only count when your site is totally web2.0′ed (In other words are you only cool when you have at least the output from flickr, delicious last.fm technorati in one page) Is content still king here? Is this the revenge of the technic people (who can use there technical knowledge to out-cool the normal webloggers, who just have to stick to their normal template) Or are these the first sign of something new at the horizon?.

How to keep track of the information you have already seen, but didn’t completely remember. One of the reasons I started this weblog is that I needed some kind of center where my digital identity and my “real” me, would meet. And than still, this log is only a starting point for my “professional interest”. In the upcoming years I expect that keeping your online identity in control will be one of the important cases. (Or keep the information in control). And I (and we) can’t do that alone, only if we work all together in keeping information in control, we will succeed in using information instead of information using us. To put my last week in a list, I present you my to … list (inspired by the toread tag from delicious)

ToWatch
In de toekomst gaan we steeds meer in de tweede wereld leven. Terwijl onze computers steeds kleiner en onzichtbaarder worden, wordt onze aanwezigheid op Internet steeds groter. Alles en iedereen zal worden aangesloten op het Net. En alle informatie over iedereen is straks terug te vinden in Cyberspace.
http://www.vpro.nl/programma/detoekomst/afleveringen/25886302/

ToRead
As tag clouds come to replace expert taxonomies in common practice, carefully constructed hierarchies vanish. In their place is a flattened world where every idea, at any level, is a topic as worthy as any other. Eight Mile is a topic at the same level as Detroit, which is a topic at the same level as Cities, which is a topic at the same level as United States, and so on. – Jeffrey Zeldman. Remove Forebrain and Serve: Tag Clouds II

ToStudy
Afgelopen donderdag naar een voorlichting van Nieuwe media & Digitale cultuur Master geweest. Hoewel ik het zeker interessant vind, heb ik nog wel mijn twijfels. Kent iemand bijvoorbeeld een goede buitenlandse master over ongeveer hetzelfde onderwerp? De enige Britse studie die ik tot nu toe tegenkwam was deze Digital Culture & Technology MA : Programme search : King’s College London en daarvoor had ik toch al de hele lijst van top universiteiten uit Groot-Brittannië gehad. (Wellicht is media studies niet de juiste richting)

ToGoTo
The eleventh edition of the Sonic Acts Festival will be held from Thursday 23rd to Sunday 26th February 2006 in Paradiso and De Balie in Amsterdam. Entitled Sonic Acts XI — The Anthology of Computer Art, the festival will include a three-day international conference, three evenings and nights of live performances, an extensive film program and an exhibition. A DVD and a book on the festival theme will also be published to coincide with it. Sonic Acts

1. Description of the individual project part (max 150 words):
I want to create a web experience that give people the feeling that the site really listens to their input. Something that creates a personal reflection of the persons interest.

I want to explore the use and possibilities of the personal tagging, that nowerdays is seen on many websites. Can it be used for making the web more personal, and where do people really use it for.

I want to explore the possibilities of human association power to become the main design goal for the website, not a plan that some desinger made when the website is first released.
2. (point two is a planning)

3. Description focus of thesis part (max 150 words):
I want to do research in the field of self learning web applications. (like automatically matching and suggest items) What is their future, and how does it deal with things like privacy. And also important where is it going to.

Areas that it may cover are: The Wisdom of Crowds – (a book by James Surowiecki) how can the collective wisdom of people be used for a better outcome for us all.

The ongoing battle between databases and narratives (As described by Manovich) How can matching and autosuggest give people the feeling that they are part of their own story, that the web is really listening to them.

4. Project / thesis interconnection: (max 150 words)
They strongly connect as I will need a lot of research about tagging, auto suggest, auto matching etc. Since I’m more interested in how humans experience and impact on those new possibilities than in what the technical backside of it is. My thesis will be just as important as my application which has to show or proof the outcome of my thesis.

In order to build an application that has really something to say I need to have done some strong research about what I want to say I’m not sure yet if I want to give people a feeling from what’s going on these days or make a “useful” application

update 22 feb:

After reading and writing i came up with the main and sub researchquestion:

How to keep track of your Personal Information

later defined as

bewuste virtuele persoonlijke imagoconstructie als antwoord op postmodernistische identiteitsversplintering.

and how to get the essence from the everyting

Answers are by blogging, by tagging and by using social applications. a side effect is you create a virtual character of yourself.

How to get the essence from the everything is using the wisdom of crowds to sort the bad from the good. (Question are they the right solution) Or just by thinking and rethinking (as Gibson pointed) so one blogpost a week instead of one each day.

Zoeken naar collectieve intelligentie, hoe kun je het gedrag van groepen gebruikers (of eigenlijk een verzameling losse gebruikers) zo gebruiken dat de applicatie / interface / systeem daar beter van wordt.

In mijn post van vorige week schreef ik over hoe je menselijke intelligentie zo soepel mogelijk naar computers kunt overbrengen. Die gedachten heb ik wat verder ontwikkeld.

Langzaam beginnen de thesis / project ideeën op te borrelen. Wat vanavond in mij opkwam was de volgende Thesis titel: Plaatsen vs Matchen, De opkomst van intelligente website’s. Waar ik op doel zijn database website’s die de gebruiker bij het bekijken van een pagina voorzien van mogelijk interessante aanverwante artikelen. (bijvoorbeeld psychonaut’s wiki of een artikel op de Mediamatic website) De vraag is hoe ver kun je hier in gaan. Is matchen een manier om databases menselijker te maken (ja voelt als antwoord). Maar er zijn ook nadelen zoals een altijd veranderende context, en mensen zijn gewend om dingen via paden af te lopen, en niet via zoekgestuurde vragen. andere interessante voorbeelden zijn wellicht de zoekmachine clusty en de clusters van flickr zij proberen orde te scheppen door middel van woord verhoudingen.

Tot nu toe, lijkt dit allemaal erg reëel over te komen, maar is deze door computers berekende verwantschap wel zo helder duidelijk en waar, of worden wij hier misleid om te denken dat computers ons begrijpen? Is er een verband in taggen -> matchen -> clusteren? (zijn matchen en clusteren gelijk aan elkaar) (of zoals Lev Manovich schrijft: werkelijkheid -> media -> data -> database -> (taggen, matchen, clusteren) en dan? Een nieuwe werkelijkheid? Een ander voorbeeld is wellicht deze website, waarin ieder zoekresultaat al een pagina op zich zelf is. En natuurlijk het experiment van ondergrond, waarin de gebruiker geen andere keuze heeft dan het gematchede bekijken. (Of positief gesteld, de gebruiker zelf geheel in controle is over wat hij te zijn krijgt)

Andere interessante insteken die Manovich schrijft in The language of new media is dat historisch gezien kunstwerken uniek waren in een medium, en dat daarom de interface en het werk gelijk aan elkaar waren. (Is het lezen van tekst dan niet het interpreteren van een interface, en het omslaan van bladzijde?) Of valt tekst weer buiten deze categorie van kunstwerken.

Een tweede was dat van oudsher Europese schilderijen in een keer het gehele verhaal vertelde. Alle informatie stond in een oogopslag de gebruiker ter beschikkingen. Na de introductie van de film (of volgens Manovich na de assemblagelijn) werd het echter steeds gebruikelijker om de gebruiker informatie in een verhaal achter elkaar op te dienen. Voor een computer interface is dit echter geen technische noodzaak toch gebeurt het nog bijna altijd. Een pagina waar alle wegen open liggen is wellicht de befaamde flickr tag pagina

Een derde inspirerende uitspraak vind ik

“This move can be read as the desire to create a database at its most pure form: the set of elements not ordered in any way. If the elements exist in one dimension (time of a film, list on a page), they will be inevitably ordered. So the only way to create a pure database is to spatialize it, distributing the elements in space.

Hierbij verwijst hij naar het ruimtelijke werk van Peter Greenaway. Beide bronnen zouden nadere bestudering kunnen gebruiken.