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.

http://beta.cell.com/

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]

———-

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]

——–

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]

——-

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.

Sigurbjörnsson, B., and van Zwol, R. Flickr tag recommendation based on collective knowledge. In WWW ’08: Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web (New York, NY, USA, 2008), ACM, pp. 327–336. [PDF]

——

This paper presents a technique for supporting the generation of metadata in Flickr through tag recommendation. The authors used tag co-occurrence to generate a list of tags that could complement some user-entered tags. The initial motivation of the author is that photo annotations provided by the author of the pictures relfect a personal perspective and cotext that is important to the owner but that might be confusing for other users trying to retrieve the same picture. Additionally, they note how suggesting non-obvious tags might be confusing for the users. They validated the tag recommendation using tag assessors that had to verify the “descriptiveness” of the generated tags.

Given a photo with user-de?ned tags, an ordered list of m candidate tags is derived for each of the user-de?ned tags, based on tag co-occurrence. The lists of candidate tags are then used as input for tag aggregation and ranking, which ultimately produces the ranked list of n recommended tags.

Miller, A. D., and Edwards, W. K. Give and take: a study of consumer photo-sharing culture and practice. In CHI ’07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (New York, NY, USA, 2007), ACM, pp. 347–356. [PDF]

——-

This paper report a qualitative study conducted using the Grounded Theory of how people use photo-sharing wesites. The authors interviewed a group of 10 Flickr users and found among then a number of power-users that differ from the standard “Kodak culture”.

The paper contains a structured literature review of how people use cameras and particularly digital cameras. One of the main issues is that organizing pictures is kind of inefficient with current technologies.

One of the most interesting finding of the study is that for power users tagging was reported to be a social activity where they could include inside reference and jokes as tags. Conversely, normal users tagged infrequently because they could easily retrieve their picture using their chronological order. Many of the participants interviewed said to share pictures through web sites like Flickr and emails. An interesting finding of the study was that the current tools do not use the storytelling aspect of photo sharing that are so important to the Kodak culture.

Lieberman, H., Smith, D. A., and Teeters, A. Common consensus: a web-based game for collecting commonsense goals. In Proceedings of Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI’07) (Hawaii, USA, January 28-31 2007). [PDF]

——-

This paper describes an online game that is used to collect commonsense knowledge about human goals. The basic mechanics of the game is that people are presented questions that follow a finite number of pre-formatted templates that they have to fill. Provided answers are matched to verify whether they are similar and points (and relevance of the provided answer) are assigned based on the frequency of the provided answer (i.e., the consensus). The game was tested with 11 subjects.