Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!
Tu pure, o, Principessa,
nella tua fredda stanza,
guardi le stelle che tremano d’amore
e di speranza.
Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me,
il nome mio nessun saprà!
No, no, sulla tua bocca lo dirò
quando la luce splenderà!
Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silenzio
che ti fa mia!
(Il nome suo nessun saprà!… e noi dovrem, ahime, morir!)
Dilegua, o notte!
Tramontate, stelle!
Tramontate, stelle!
All’alba vincerò!
vincerò, vincerò!
[G. Puccini, Turandot, 1920]
Joinson, A. N. Looking at, looking up or keeping up with people? : motives and use of facebook. In CHI ’08: Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (New York, NY, USA, 2008), ACM, pp. 1027–1036. [PDF]
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This paper investigates the uses of social networking site Facebook, and the gratifications users derive from those uses.
In the first study, 137 users generated words or phrases to describe how they used Facebook, and what they enjoyed about their use. These phrases were coded into 46 items which were completed by 241 Facebook users in Study 2. Factor analysis identified seven unique uses and gratifications: social connection, shared identities, content, social investigation, social network surfing and status updating. User demographics, site visit patterns and the use of privacy settings were associated with different uses and gratifications.
The author starting assumption is that actual uses and gratifications of social networking sites are not well understood. The authors shed some light on probe more in depth the exact nature of “keeping in touch” as both use and gratification. The results of this study suggest that comprises two main functions: the first is a surveillance function, while the second is a self-presentation function. The goal of using sites like FB is to meet new people and therefor making one’s profile more open increases the chances of an interaction. Finally, associated with this use is the social capital building gratification, where FB is used to build and maintain ties with peers.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
William Shakespeare
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
Randy Paush, 2006
Cell Press and Elsevier have launched a project called Article of the Future that is an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how the scientific article is presented online. The project’s goal is to take full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through the content, while using the latest advances in visualization techniques.
I finally found some time to upgrade to WP 2.8.2. I really like the new dashboard and the auto upgrade functionality. This will reduce the administrative burden of keeping track of new releases…
Bilandzic, M., Foth, M., and De Luca, A. Cityflocks: designing social navigation for urban mobile information systems. In DIS ’08: Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems (New York, NY, USA, 2008), ACM, pp. 174–183. [PDF]
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This paper presents CityFlocks, a mobile system to enable visitors and new residentsin a city to tap into the knowledge and experiences of local residents to gather information about their new environment. The main argument of the authors is that social navigation (e.g., the cue in front of a restaurant is an hint that the place is good) is one of the main mechanism that we use to discover new knowledge and find new places in the environment that we inhabit.
Unfortunately, social navigation cues are not available for digital information. While most of the previous projects discuss such different features around indirect and asynchronous interaction method (i.e., people attaching information to physical places), not much work has yet been carried out on studying direct interaction methods (e.g., phone calls, text message).
Therefore the author of this paper build an application for mobile phone called CityFlocks that allowed the user to be in contact with a local citizen when in the need of local information. The application allowerd the user to make a phone call to the local citizen or to send text messages. Interviewed participants reported to have preferred this latter method because they felt awkward to call a stranger. One of the major issues that was reported in the study was that users could not associate a specific level of trust to the strangers they were paired with using the application. Also they reported misgivings in the use of SMS for time-sensitive information because the method could not offer rapid feedback that was necessary in certain situations.
“Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.”
Hermann Hesse
Thom-Santelli, J., Muller, M. J., and Millen, D. R. Social tagging roles: publishers, evangelists, leaders. In CHI ’08: Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (New York, NY, USA, 2008), ACM, pp. 1041–1044. [PDF]
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Social tagging systems provide users with the opportunity to employ tags in a communicative manner. To explore the use of tags for communication in these systems, we report results from 33 user interviews and employ the concept of social roles to describe audience-oriented tagging, including roles of community-seeker, community-builder, evangelist, publisher, and team-leader. These roles contribute to our understanding of the motivations and rationales behind social tagging in an international company, and suggest new features and services to support social software in the enterprise.
Nov, O., Naaman, M., and Ye, C. What drives content tagging: the case of photos on flickr. In CHI ’08: Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (New York, NY, USA, 2008), ACM, pp. 1097–1100. [PDF]
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This paper builds a conceptual model of the factors that stimulate people in generating tags for their multimedia items they share online. The model mainly tests three elements: te stated motivations for creating tags, namely to serve the self, family and friends, or public, social presence indicators, and participation level.
To test these hypothesis they used a questionnaire together with quantitative data extracted from the logs of Flickr the popular picture sharing web sites they focused on. They analyzed the answers and tested the model using principal component analysis (PCL). All the relation were significant except the relationship between family and friends motivation and the tagging level because, according to the authors, users added tags to describe images to family and friends, not to help them find images. The authors found that one of the key motivation of tagging behavior is the ability of increasing one’s social presence.
