archive for the ‘social & enterprise computing’ category

Languages and social network behaviors: Top 10 languages on Twitter

26 April 2011 | Lichan Hong

There's a tendency on the part of designers, researchers, and others to assume that English-language users' behaviors in social networks generalize to that of other language users. But in a recent study where we examined 62 million tweets collected over a four-week period, we found significant differences in how people of different language backgrounds used features such as URLs, hashtags, mentions, replies, and retweets. But first: how did we examine this large-scale data set?

Finding inbox meaning in a time of overload

4 February 2011 | Victoria Bellotti

[Editor’s note: PARC contributed this post to Inbox Love (produced by 500 Startups).] Email is, for many knowledge workers, a habitat: the place where they spend most of their working day online. Indeed it can be thought of as knowledge work’s Grand Central Station as far as information distribution and workflow are concerned. A major part of knowledge worker information overload is trying to manage the influx of email content in terms of prioritizing obligations communicated via email and making sure they can always locate the resources they need within all the content in their inbox. In order to handle the demands being placed upon it, email needs to be far better integrated with its users’ content, communication streams, and productivity tools, and come pre-armed with powerful features to support things like content organization, project planning, workflow, content retrieval, analytics and so on...

Want to be retweeted? Add URLs to your tweets!

16 August 2010 | Lichan Hong

In a previous post, I described a recent study in which we found that including hashtags in a tweet enhances the retweetability of the tweet. In this post, I'll focus on another factor that might affect retweetability: the URL.

Design principles for news abundance

6 August 2010 | Mark Stefik

Google's Eric Schmidt recently observed that the Internet is disruptive because it replaces information scarcity with information abundance. What is now scarce in our busy world is reader attention, not "column inches" of news print -- so traditional design rules don't apply. People expect to access this abundance of information easily, and want systems that help them manage their reading attention and information diets.

The quest for the perfect news reader

2 August 2010 | Lawrence Lee

Don't get me wrong, I think aggregators like Flipboard offer a great way to read content from your social information streams. But is it the best way to get your news? Or let me put it this way: are you doing yourself a disservice when you only read news that comes to your attention through your friends? Frankly my friends’ interests don’t necessarily overlap with my own, and the cumulative interests of my friends doesn’t exactly cover all of my interests. The ideal news reader...

Enabling news companies as content curators

27 July 2010 | Lawrence Lee

There's a feast and a famine in news today: we're getting too much news too fast and struggle to filter quality information from noise, and/or we struggle to find high-quality, relevant content along our individual long tail interests. Curation is one way to deal with this problem. But sharing is not necessarily curating. The best curation requires domain knowledge and strategic thinking to organize topics with a purpose and point of view for the curated collection. What's missing: an effective, scalable way to do this across the Web. This is a huge opportunity, especially for news companies.

At the heart of curation: Kiffets backstory

27 July 2010 | Mark Stefik

In their competition for readership and advertising revenue, online news publishers need to differentiate themselves through curation. This project (as with many things at PARC!) has roots in a trajectory of evolving expertise -- spanning early collaborative filtering and later information visualization and sensemaking systems (beginning with tools for intelligence analysts), to social computing today. Intelligence analysts' situations then are not that different from people's information needs now: too much too fast or too little too late. So insights from our analyst research have guided development of the Kiffets system, which personalizes news along people's content needs and passions. As in our systems for intelligence analysts, the AI and collaboration technology serves as a cognitive amplifier that enables scaling the sheer amount of information that needs to be collected, filtered, and organized.

Connecting information using context: Meshin

22 June 2010 | Meshin - Chris Holmes

Let’s face it: email is ripe for innovation. We rely on folders and keyword searches to sift through thousands of emails to locate buried messages and documents… but the problem goes beyond the inbox. Today’s business processes are more dynamic, more human-centric, ad hoc, unscripted, and loosely orchestrated – they represent the framework for our interactions with team members, business partners, and customers. The information that fuels these interactions is digital: emails, documents, web site links, database records, IMs, tweets, and so on. Keeping track of all this information in the context of a person, a partner or customer, or a particular activity is a TIME CONSUMING, MANUAL, CUMBERSOME process. And it’s only getting tougher.

Model-Driven Research in Social Computing

14 June 2010 | ed h. chi

I'm in Toronto attending the Hypertext 2010 conference, where I gave the keynote talk at the First Workshop on Modeling Social Media yesterday. I want to document a little bit of the points I made in the talk here. The reason we seek to construct and...

Model-Driven Research in Social Computing

14 June 2010 | ed h. chi

I'm in Toronto attending the Hypertext 2010 conference, where I gave the keynote talk at the First Workshop on Modeling Social Media yesterday. I want to document a little bit of the points I made in the talk here. The reason we seek to construct and...