archive for the ‘social & enterprise computing’ category

Workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation: Reports

12 January 2010 | Sanjay Kairam

PARC recently hosted the first of two co-organized and NSF-funded workshops on Technology-Mediated Social Participation. Workshop reports addressing themes such as integrating theory across levels from the individual to the community; developing new methods of measuring social connections and social capital across networks; and building an infrastructure for reliable and responsible data collection are now available.

Cloud computing and security

21 December 2009 | Richard Chow

You can’t avoid the cloud computing topic these days. As usual, the extreme viewpoints are the most visible -- cloud computing is either marketing hype, or game-changing. If you turn to security experts, it’s either “nothing new” or a “focal point". While there’s some truth in each viewpoint, it’s a little hard to untangle what’s really going on. An oft-quoted survey from IDC reports security is the biggest concern with cloud computing. We did our own series of interviews with different members of the cloud ecosystem, and asked them to identify the security/privacy issues and the concerns of their customers.

The Future of Technology-Mediated Social Participation

7 December 2009 | Pete Pirolli

Who would have thought that simple architectures for participation could rival the scale of results previously achieved only by massive private or public works projects? While we can get excited about the possibilities, we also have to be realistic. Most social technology efforts fail: for every Wikipedia, there are thousands of dead or dying wikis. The Workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation at PARC will bring together approximately 30 researchers from industry, academia, and government to draw up a scientific agenda and educational recommendations for a new era of social participation technologies. As individuals, we’re limited by how much we know or think about any of these things, which is why I’m hoping that participants on the panel and in the audience at this week’s PARC Forum can help. We see further when we stand on the shoulders of others.

Experts’ domain knowledge improves automated recommendations

9 November 2009 | Ellen Isaacs

It’s almost eerie how well the music website Pandora recommends music based on just one example of a favorite song. It does so by relying on human experts to characterize songs based on a large and musically sophisticated set of characteristics (melody, harmony, rhythm, orchestration, etc.). This approach -- of using human expertise to develop a rich set of attributes that deeply capture the essence of an item -- could be adapted to greatly improve the recommendations currently being offered in other domains, such as news, movies, hotels and so on. In our enthusiasm to develop automated recommendation systems, Pandora reminds us of the value of incorporating the intelligence of domain experts into the process.

Tempted by location apps?

5 November 2009 | Richard Chow

Privacy should be the biggest concern for users of location-based social networking apps like Foursquare, Google Latitude, Loopt, and others. Will these companies store and analyze your location traces to figure out what ads to show you as part of their business model? You can deduce a lot about people from their locational traces: where they sleep and work and play, what stores and restaurants they like, who they spend time with, more.

Personalizing news on the long tail

5 October 2009 | Mark Stefik

Online news is a crowded field, and personalized news is becoming the Holy Grail for news publishers facing decreased revenues and outdated business models. The challenge in personalizing the news: matching what people want with what they get. I believe that successful personalizing the news on the long tail requires three approaches with their own unique sources of "power": curation, search, and social participation. To news consumers, the appeal of personalized news is that they can keep up on the news that they care about, better manage their reading time, and address their information overload. For online news producers, the appeal is increased consumer satisfaction and potentially greater revenues.

Why a good curator is more than a filter

15 September 2009 | Mark Stefik

In addition there is growing interest by information consumers in taking more control of their media time. They want personalized news for their specialized interests. The problem? News on specialized topics is often hard to find and is scattered across many sources. Mainstream publishing organizations do not cover topics deep on the long tail because they lack both the editorial resources and the expertise. Can social media provide the means for curating the long tail? In traditional news publishing, the role of curating is typically combined with publishing. While curators of online information are needed to help us find interesting and quality content, the requirements and roles differ from traditional publishing.

Remixing the news

8 September 2009 | Mark Stefik

Once music lovers could "Rip, Mix, and Burn" their own CDs they took control of their listening experiences. The economics and consumer expectations have changed for all digital media. Digital media consumers now demand more flexibility in getting what they want, stretching beyond traditional broadcasting models which pre-package content into channels. But as personalization, discovery, and sharing come to the news, it needs to be different from "playlists". How about social indexing to remix the news?

The slowing growth of Wikipedia (part two): resistance from dominant editors

10 August 2009 | Ed Chi

Part one of this post, which shared findings on the slowing growth of Wikipedia, recently received coverage in the New Scientist, Fast Company, Business Insider/ Silicon Alley Insider, and more... In this second part, we share more details on the plateauing, more-linear-than-exponential growth rate of Wikipedia. In a nutshell: the treatment of edits from different editor classes has been widening steadily over the years -- and not in favor to the less-frequent editors. We consider this disparity as evidence of the dominant Wikipedia community's growing resistance to new content, especially when the edits come from occasional editors.

Augmented Reality: Increasing collective intelligence

23 July 2009 | Lawrence Lee

Search engines like Google have trained us to believe we can find the answer to any question. Now activity streams from Twitter, Facebook, and others are changing our expectations around information yet again. We now demand information in real-time that’s socially and contextually relevant. Contextual information transforms our interactions within our physical environment... This area of research is called Augmented Reality, and it spans a wide spectrum of applications...