jaresty's tumblog

daymakermovement

Tue, 13 May 2008 11:51:17 -0400

daymakermovement

HelpOthers.org

Tue, 13 May 2008 11:50:26 -0400

HelpOthers.org

G.I.F.T.

Tue, 13 May 2008 11:50:01 -0400

G.I.F.T.

Ohloh and Ontology Social Networking

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:30:52 -0500

I love this concept. Ohloh is a social networking site that is focused on the users and developers of open source software. It is a great way to raise awareness about the various open source software packages that are out there, and put users in touch with others who have been there - used or developed the software to meet their own needs.

The other day, I was thinking about a problem that I’ve got with ontologies on the semantic web today. Please please correct me if I’m going about this the wrong way, but it always seems that I have to look hard to find the ontologies that I want to use for a given project.

One good thing about the semantic web community is that they try to preserve URIs forever. There is a downside to that practice - it results in a cornucopia of dead information. I have a very hard time, when I see an ontology for the first time, knowing whether it’s still in use.

Enter Ontology Social Networking: modeled after Ohloh, ontology developers and users can stand up and share both what ontologies they have used, and how they have used them. This will help to connect fragmented and confused users, and to encourage people to learn from existing solutions. It will encourage people to collaborate on developing new ontologies and to reuse existing ones where appropriate. With sufficient data, recommender systems could begin to directly connect users with useful and relevant ontologies much more efficiently than can be done currently through search, pick, and choose.

Who wants to get started building something like this?

User Research Social Networking Service

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:08:32 -0500

Imagine a site where companies could identify products they are bringing to market, and potential users would voluntarily, directly guide their product development.

Too often, user-centered design is still an afterthought in product design. It’s costly to do correctly, and the benefits (although very obvious after the fact) are hard to identify, quantify, and communicate. It’s practically impossible to do as a one-man programming team, and it’s still not easy when you’ve got just a few team members. Enter UR SNS - the user-research focused social networking service.

Companies will post products that they are developing, along with some pre-defined customer markets that they believe to exist. They will post a series of qualitative questions about the niche they are trying to fill.

Users sign up, and pick a product they are interested in using. They self-identify from the list of customer roles that the company predefined, and then proceed to answer the qualitative research questions that the company put together. They can either do a voice recording (which will be transcribed automatically), or type up their notes. At the end of the day, users who fill out these surveys can earn software discounts and reputation points which they can use to boost their profile’s visibility on the site.

The software may help the company to conduct qualitative analysis by allowing the company to later hilight quotes and identify key user mental models and behaviors.

This site, while promoting open collaboration and a fun atmosphere, will help to bring down the cost of conducting good user-research. It will encourage users to take an active role in developing their software. It might even be viable for open source projects to use this model to conduct user research - imagine what could happen then?

Distributed Social Networking - Update

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:00:22 -0500

It looks like this idea is well underway, after all! Very exciting - check out FOAFRealm, and their wiki.

Global Warming, and Standards Organizations

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:04:00 -0500

Up until recently, in my mind, I had a picture of how International Goverments would work toward international standards to reduce global warming. Today, it occurred to me that there may be a problem with that approach. There are two fundamental issues at stake here:

What targets, goals, etc. are necessary to prevent global warming (and various other environmental concerns).
What compromises are governments willing to make to achieve those goals.

I’m under the impression that most of the information regarding the targets/goals/etc is currently coming from individual actors or small groups of people. The conventions that have been held are trying to resolve both of those issues simultaneously, which is incredibly difficult - it results in a sort of tragedy of the commons, where it is in each government’s best interest to minimize the sanctions, but in everyone’s interest to maximize them. However, there is still disagreement about what outcomes are necessary to prevent these issues.

It seems to me, therefore, that we could benefit greatly (as a world) by founding open, international, environmental standards organizations - whose purpose is not to create laws or sanctions that *must* be followed by governments. Rather, their purpose would be to identify the necessary outcomes, and come to an internationally recognized agreement on just what it will take to achieve those outcomes. I hope to get some feedback on this post - please submit your thoughts.

p.s. check out Leonardo Academy.

12 places to intervene in a system.

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:03:38 -0500

12 places to intervene in a system.

Read a neat article on The New York Times called the...

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:05:03 -0500

Read a neat article on The New York Times called the “Moral Instinct”. These are the five moral “colors” discussed in the article. The idea was very compelling to me, so I want to remember these well.

Nonpartisan Social Network - Continued (Idea)

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 22:41:39 -0500

To avoid appearing too complicated, you would want to market each plugin separately. That is to say, don’t say “An RDF-triple store” that allows FOAF and other plugins. Instead, say a FOAF server, and then, a SIOC server (etc). The reality is that each would be a prepackaged RDF server with a plugin, and on the developer site you could find out more about that (and build a custom multi-plugin server).

The reason for this is - there are far too many solutions that claim to be silver bullets and end up confusing and complicating things. For that reason, users (and developers) may steer clear of things claiming to do too much. I do believe that there is something to be gained through abstraction here, but don’t want to scare people away. For that reason, marketing this as separate servers may work very well.

Nonpartisan Social Network - Continued (Idea)

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 22:34:59 -0500

In fact, why stop there? You could imagine similar needs for blog posts and all sorts of other structured data. Maybe a basic distrubuted triple-store server, with various plugins (written in scripting languages - python, ruby, perl) to handle specific types of data (FOAF, etc.).

You could do very similar things using SPARQL update, but I think that having a server with plugins (as mentioned above) would make it much easier to build domain languages for different business objects. This would allow a greater level of abstraction for developers, which would speed up adoption as it would be both useful and trustworthy/open/transparent.

Nonpartisan Social Network (Idea)

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 22:16:04 -0500

One of the major reasons that DNS is so successful, and that OpenID seems to be catching on, is that they allow any person to set up a server. Each client decides which servers to trust, but servers can be set up by anyone at all. It seems to me that it will prove difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to make social graph data portable, so long as each company develops their own tools to provide an API to their data. Even if most companies adopted FOAF as a standard for exporting their social graph data, any new companies would need to develop new libraries to import, export, and use that data. I believe that a distributed social graph server, a-la OpenID, that served up its data as FOAF, could provide a nonpartisan solution that would be adopted very quickly.

Thinking Tools

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 19:20:30 -0500

Thinking tools, in increasing order of complexity and utility:

Freeform text (Pen and Paper)
Paper & Diagram Techniques (Three Column Technique, IBIS, Systems Thinking)
Dedicated software programs (Compendium)

12 Places to Intervene in a System

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 19:14:04 -0500

12 Places to Intervene in a System: Excellent article, but requires some knowledge of “Systems Thinking” (The Fifth Discipline)

Wizzard.tv iPhone Podcatcher

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:26:52 -0500

Wizzard.tv iPhone Podcatcher: iPhone users - really neat podcatcher. I’m psyched :)

Issuu

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:46:03 -0500

Issuu: Neat little gadget - lets you publish animated, embeddable magazines.

Mindhabits.com

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:47:00 -0500

I like to call this site the ‘smile game’. They claim to be backed by years of research, and frankly, I believe it. I’ve been playing the Matrix game - very simple idea, seems too simple really - they present you with a grid of faces. Some are smiling, some neutral, and some frowning. Your job is to click the smiling faces. Tiles shuffle, time runs out, and all-in-all they manage to make it pretty challenging. It’s not the most fun game in the world, but I feel like it really helps build confidence, and reduce anxiety for me. It strikes me as funny - a simple game like this could have a big impact on how I feel day-to-day. We aren’t so far from apes, after all.

Mindhabits.com

Guide to Arguing Less and Saving More

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:37:45 -0500

I imagine I could write a neat book about this topic.

Content Recommendation Engine

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:04:40 -0500

Believe it or not, it already exists. It’s funny what you’ll find when you go looking.

Idea - build a recommendation engine for FLOW

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:01:05 -0500

If FLOW takes off, perhaps I should build a recommendation engine. Hmm.. I wonder if one already exists for Drupal?