Interrelativity

Category: Web/Tech

  • Serendipity Platforms, Unintended Consequences and Explosive Positivity at Web 2.0 Expo

    The keynotes on Day 1 of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco exposed a number of common threads, perhaps best summarized by a quote attributed to Tim O'Reilly by conference co-chair Sarah Milstein: We're trying to maximize the surface area of serendipity. The official theme of the event is "Platforms for Growth", and all…

  • There’s no data like more open data

    When I was working on natural language processing and speech recognition systems in the 90s, one of our mantras was "there's no data like more data", i.e., all things being equal, the accuracy of recognition tends to increase with the addition of more labeled data. The Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania was…

  • The further commoditization of Twitter followers

    A few months ago, I wrote about the commoditization of Twitter followers, after discovering a number of automated, semi-automated and manual strategies that people – and non-human systems – were employing to artificially boost their Twitter follower counts. My earlier discovery was sparked by noticing some unusual numbers in the profiles of some recent followers…

  • Some highlights from CSCW 2010

    CSCW 2010 – the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work – is the first CSCW I've missed since 1998. I tried following along remotely via the Twitter #cscw2010 hashtag, which may have been the next best thing to being there … but it was a distant second. I was glad to read a few…

  • Notes from @BigBlog meetup at Soulfood in Redmond

    I enjoyed attending my first SeattlePI.com BigBlog meetup last night at Soulfood Books, Music and Organic Coffee House in Redmond. Monica Guzman (@moniguzman) organized the event, and Nick Eaton (@njeaton), who writes the SeattlePI.com Microsoft blog, was the special guest. According to a tweet posted by Monica at the outset, other bloggers / tweeters /…

  • Power Laws and Pyramids: Participation, Gratification, and Distraction in Social Media

    I've been thinking and reading a lot lately about the different ways we can participate in social media, how others' responses to the social media content we produce can promote a sense of gratification, and how this – and any – gratification can also lead to distraction. One of my earliest and most memorable encounters…

  • Co-promotion Reconsidered: The Recursive Attraction of Attention

    Amybeth Hale, a Talent Attraction Manager with AT&T’s Interactive Staffing team, wrote a great primer on 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in your Career, which was recently posted on Mashable. The four traits are: Develop authentic relationships Be a digital trendsetter Take risks Give back (and/or pay it forward) I think there is…

  • The Commoditization of Twitter Followers

    I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. I see – and have increasingly experienced – many benefits to its use, especially with respect to its propensity to foster meaningful new connections with consequential strangers and acquaintances. However, I am becoming increasingly cynical about some of the practices that are evolving, particularly with respect to the…

  • Conversations and Conversationalists in Social Media

    Josh Bernoff recently wrote that Forrester Research has added "Conversationalists" to its Social Technographics typology of social media users, which had previously included the occasionally overlapping categories of creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives. He and his colleagues define conversationalists as people who post status updates on Twitter or other social networking sites at…

  • Place-centered Sociality

    Jyri Engestrom first introduced me to the concept of object-centered sociality almost 5 years ago, through a blog post in which he argued that social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. Jyri suggests that the problem with some social networking services (such as LinkedIn [at that time]) is that they…