OUseful.Info, the blog…

A long time ago, I wrote:

A couple of weeks ago [err, that'll be years now;-)], I was telling a colleague about a podcast I’d heard earlier that day: Future Proofing Your Privacy. At the start of the talk, the speaker, Mark Hedland, tells of how he posted to an online group a post that said…

Hey, why don’t you read it, and why don’t you listen to what Mark Hedland has to say first hand (the first 7 or 8 minutes particularly).

For those of you who haven’t followed the links, here’s a recap. Something that was posted over 10 years ago to a part of the web that wasn’t supposed to be being archived, was – and now Mark Hedland can show how foolish he was then in thinking that [what] he was saying then would disappear.

As we talked, my colleague ["Sam Smith"] mentioned how 5 or so years ago they had posted a request to a news group asking for a translation of a traditional, Canadian French folk song, a translation they have since lost, along with the name of the song. (Actually, it wasn’t a song, French or Canadian, but it was to do with translation; I have changed the specific details to protect my colleague’s privacy!)

Two minutes after leaving their office (or maybe it was three, certainly no longer than that) I mailed my colleague a link to a Google Groups search page containing their long lost post. The query used the equivalent of these search terms: translation song “sam smith”. The post being searched for was the third item in the list of search results.

And so, as Google continues to roll out its social circle search facilities and use the people you know (and the people they know) to inform what search results you see, [and as Google buys up other social search companies, such as Aardvark (e.g. Google Buys Human-driven Search Engine Aardvark: Will It Make It to the Main SERPS?)], it’s worth bearing in mind a few things:

1) Just because you haven’t given Google your Twitter details, Google may know you’re my friend becuase I have given Google my twitter details and my friends and followers lists are public (an ‘asymmetric disclosure’? So for example, for a symmetric disclosure, Google might only use the belief that we’re friends if I follow you AND you have given Google your Twitter credentials AND you follow me. But if it you uses you to inform my results simply because I follow you, that would be asymmetric?)
2) Just because you haven’t given Google any personal info, Google might buy a company you have disclosed personal information to and then assimilate it into their growing total information awareness… (You do know Google owns Youtube, don’t you, and so has a pretty good idea of everything you’ve watched on it?;-)
3) Your mum may be influencing your search results… And you might be influencing your kids’ results… ;-)

See also: Time to Get Scared, People?, Brand Association and Your Twitter Followers, and so on…

PS a not evil thing to do would be to give users of an acquired service a guaranteed period of grace between the announcement that company has been acquired and the time when Google first has access to personal data, with the guarantee that users can withdraw from the service within that period and have their records permanently deleted.

PPS what does Google know about you? Here are two things to try: if you have a Google account, see who’s in your social circle; and whether or not you have a Google account, see what Google’s social graph API can turn up about you… .

PPPS if you’re on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, Mashed In provides a widget based tool for letting other people on those networks see how closely linked they are to you… The asymmetries might arise here from all over the place, depending on what Mashed In is actually doing (I’ll try to do some digging…). For example, you might log on to my site and see that you are connected to someone on Facebook who is connected to someone on Twitter who I’m connect to on Linked In. Those intermediaries, who maybe are trying to maintain privacy of a sort by having separate social circles on different networks, are suddenly exposed. Like weddings where guests from different parts of the happy couple’s life collide, your connections may b your undoing. (Hmmm, so I wonder, are all these social tools going to start being deployed on prospective MPs I wonder? Prospctiv Parliamentary Candidate X is only two steps away from both a member of an dodgy looking group on Facebook and an ex porn star, for example… MPs expenses could be as if nothing compared to the sorts of selective storytelling you might be abl to turn up as a result of friend of a friend connections. Think Twiangulate, but working over multiple servics (as Mashed In might do?), court records, local news searches, gossip sites, company directorships, etc etc… Nightmare…

PPPPS Not to self – do a post on this… Reidentification Using Social Networks (i.e. deanonymisation); for sample History attack code, see SocialHistory.js: See Which Sites Your Users Visit]

Today was another of those days when I rambled aloud, and in public…

Thanks for turning up, folks…. apols for not leaving much time at the end for discussion…

One of the challenges I’ve set myself this year is to write some sort of book about Yahoo Pipes. Reading Presentation Zen three or four weeks ago, I started to imagine the form such a book might take. What I aspired to was something uncluttered, something that would contrast with the typical confusion of words and ideas that tend to end up being dumped into OUseful.info; something like an artistic recipe book, perhaps, or an art gallery catalogue; the form should be decomposable, allowing sections to be removed or updated without too many side effects on the rest of the work; and the authoring environment should complement the the publication environment, enforcing constraints of the medium the book would be published into.

In short, something like Powerpoint done well, but for print rather than screen.

It seems (of course!) that Tim O’Reilly had already executed a similar idea in the form of the Twitter Book, as John Naughton pointed out to me a couple of days later.

You can read more about O’Reilly’s take on the philosophy behind this sort of representation in Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web.

Anyway, I spent a weekend doodling ideas, and then left it a couple of weeks. Now I’m looking at it again, and I’d appreciate your comments on whether this sort of presentation works for you, (and if not, why not?), how it might be improved, how it might be simplified (but remain accessible to a novice) and so on. The numbering scheme used is not related to pages – instead, each “point” I make has a number, and these are referred to from the index (I drew inspiration for this sort of numbering from The Pengin Cookery Book). Comments on the level at which the technical content is presented, and the way in which I have started trying to develop a narrative, will also be appreciated.

I originally thought that the “book” should be printed in an A4 landscape form, but then I started to wonder whether two landscape A4 pages could be combined into a portrait A4 page. The font size is problematic, and the I don’t think the same layout works for the landscape vs. portrait view, at least, not as it currently stands.

Anyway, here are the landscape and portrait versions. I don’t think they work as embedded content, which is a shame, but they weren’t written for that sort of medium, so it’s to be expected.

(If you are reading this in a feed reader, you will probably need to click through to the original post in order to see the embedded documents.)

Please bear in mind, too, that I’m not a designer (this much will be be obvious), but that I do think design could play a large part in making this approach usable.

Please feel free to add your comments below:-)

Although I subscribe to a lot of online app blogs, I don’t subscribe to them all, instead relying on twitter and subscriptions to other commentator blogs to do some of the filtering for me. This isn’t always reliable, of course, and sometimes I rely on “new” flags to alert me to new features in some of the apps I use regularly.

Like this one:

A ‘browse these bookmarks” feature in delicious (original announcement).

Pick a user, one or more tags, or any combination thereof, and you can click through a preview of the bookmarked websites using something they’re calling the browsebar:

If you look at the top of the screenshot you should see the browsebar – it lets you click through the links one at a time, in the order they were bookmarked. So if you’re giving a presentation based around demoing a series of websites, this is a handy way of doing it.

And this is where my unprediction comes from, either from April 2006, or maybe somewhen in 2005, depending on whether you trust me or not…;-) deliShow, aka the Feedshow Link presenter

At it’s simplest, Feedshow would take and RSS feed and present the links in a window in much the same way that the delicious browsebar works:

I also added tools to splash a shortcode for the presentation (and maybe in a later tweak, the currently displayed bookmark?), so that viewers could also click through the slideshow in their own browser, and started working on feedshow synching facility so that remote viewers could synch the current state of the presentation to that of the person leading the presentation.

Unfortunately, the code behind feedshow appears to have rotted (maybe I should redo it at Dev8D?)

Of course, if we give delicious a year or two, they might implement something similar themselves? ;-)

PS I wonder if they’ll release a DeliTV app too, to allow users to use delicious to programme their Boxee TV viewing?;-) (More on that in the next couple of weeks….)

A couple of days ago I came across the phrase search mechanic in a post on US IT Spending:

The budget request calls for launching a new tracking tool with daily updates that would provide the public with the ability to see aggregate spending by agency and also by geographic area as an effort to increase transparency. Obama also wants a new search mechanic [my emphasis] to allow the public to “mash” data by location, agency and timeframe.

By this, I take it to mean search mechanic in the sense of game mechanics, that is, something like the way the rules/architecture of the game (or ‘code‘ in the sense Lessig uses it) determine the game play and the user’s interaction with the game. (If you’re interested in how games and the business of games works, why not sign up to my Digital Worlds course?;-)

So for example, one different search mechanic might be a different user experience, such as displaying results on a map or timeline rather than as a list, or another might be a different way of determining (or ranking) and presenting the results based on user profiling; topically, using social search for example (e.g. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine, and Search is getting more social).

Anyway, for a long time I’ve been looking for a phrase to describe what I think is likely to be a core skill for librarians, namely, the ability to generate effective search queries over a range of systems, from popular search engines, to traditional subscription databases (in the sense of things like Lexis Nexis or EBSCO), to ‘proper’ databases and even Linked Data stores (how’s your SQL and SPARQL?)

So I wonder – is there a role for search mechanics (like car mechanics) and search engineers? The search mechanics might be there to help you get your search query working on the one hand, or fix the ranking algorithm in your search engine on the other, whereas the search engineer might be more interested in working at a different level, figuring out effective search strategies, or how to use search in a particular situation?

Short notice, but then, if I gave more notice there’d have been all sorts of calendar negotiations over a week or two then we’d have rescheduled anyway…

Presentation trailer

Many OU folk will have already spent an hour or two at the Learn About fair (fayre?) on that day, so you might as well as right the whole day off in terms of doing “proper work”…;-)