IFTF's Future Now

Flickr and "folksonomies"

Salon has an article about online photo sharing services like Flickr. The innovative thing about Flickr is not that it lets you put pictures online, or lets others see them; what's new is that it allows other people to annotate pictures and add keywords. The paradigmatic example is wedding reception pictures: you put up a bunch of pictures, and attendees can go online and identify themselves and others.

This is interesting for a couple reasons. First, metadata is notoriously hard to create and maintain. It isn't necessarily very hard to add to a picture, but it's exceptionally tedious. Flickr opens the door to collective, open source-like energy with photo metatagging.

Second, Flickr doesn't have a formal taxonomy of tags that you apply to photos; people create their own, generating what Thomas Vander Wal calls "folksonomies," bottom-up taxonomies. As Gene Smith explains,

[In systems like] Furl, Flickr and Del.icio.us... people classify their pictures/bookmarks/web pages with tags (e.g. wedding), and then the most popular tags float to the top (e.g. Flickr's tags or Del.icio.us on the right).... [F]olksonomies can work well for certain kinds of information because they offer a small reward for using one of the popular categories (such as your photo appearing on a popular page). People who enjoy the social aspects of the system will gravitate to popular categories while still having the freedom to keep their own lists of tags.

On the other hand, I can see a few reasons why a folksonomy would be less than ideal in a lot of cases:

• None of the current implementations have synonym control (e.g. "selfportrait" and "me" are distinct Flickr tags, as are "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us).
• Also, there's a certain lack of precision involved in using simple one-word tags--like which Lance are we talking about? (Though this is great for discovery, e.g. hot or Edmonton)
• And, of course, there's no heirarchy and the content types (bookmarks, photos) are fairly simple.

For indexing and library people, folksonomies are about as appealing as Wikipedia is to encyclopedia editors. Still, I think there's no denying that, their problems aside, there's some interesting stuff happening around them.

If you're not a subscriber, the Salon article's worth putting up with an ad to read.

Tesco in-store Tablets

Note that this is about tablets for in-store online order fullfillment, used by 'personal shoppers', rather than augmenting a shopper's experience. You have to believe though that once the infrastructure is in place, it would be easy to test providing it to regular shoppers. Another good example of the increasing use of technology in retail spaces.

Tesco In-store Personal Shoppers to Use Tablet PCs to Pick Online Orders
DECEMBER 08, 2004 -- LONDON - Tesco, the United Kingdom's largest food retailer, is upgrading the order-picking and fulfilment processes of its online shopping arm with a wireless smart tablet in-store solution from mobile computing specialist Xperience. In the multimillion-dollar deal, Xperience will equip 300 of Tesco's largest U.K. shops with at least 5,000 pre-imaged Xybernaut Atigo tablets. Alongside this, Xperience will provide on-site and off-site maintenance to the deployed panels, as well as a full support process.

The Atigo-driven cart-mounted computer system seamlessly integrates wirelessly with Tesco's existing Windows 2003 server technology, to ensure that Tesco's personal shoppers get the right customer order information at the right time ...

Seeing a lot just by looking

The UK's Department of Trade and Industry recently sent a group to the US to look at product design practices; their report, "Innovation Through People-Centered Design," is now available:

The mission aimed to investigate the impact of user-centred research in the design process, with a particular focus on new technology including computer hardware and software, mobile phones, and technology services. The group was interested in the ways in which user-centred research becomes integrated into both the product design and development process as well as embedded within organisational culture and long-term strategic thinking....

In sum, mission participants emphasise that <people in their social context rather than task-centric users should be considered a fundamental source of innovation.

Anne Galloway has some interesting reactions to the report.

Free registration is required. While you're at it, check out the full listof Global Watch Online mission reports.

Physics Model for Predicting Sales

We were pointed to this MIT Tech Review article on predicting book sales, using physics models. It uses what they call an "Epidemics-Type Aftershock Sequence model" to track how information about a book travels through social networks. Here is the UCLA Press release on the same topic with more technical detail. The researcher is Didier Sornette of UCLA. Could be used for prediction outside of books ... the basic premise is intriguing:

...Information about a book travels through the network of potential buyers in two possible fashions: exogenous and endogenous. Exogenous shocks come from sources outside the system they affect, like billboards or newspaper articles; endogenous shocks are made up of very small exogenous shocks that happen in a coordinated fashion, like word-of-mouth recommendations. The model predicts how sales will decline after they peak according to how the peak occurred. The decline after an exogenous shock is fairly steep, while the decay after an endogenous shock is more gradual. The model was 84 percent correct in the researchers tests ...

ACM on blogging

Late last month, Franz pointed to the ACM Communications special issue on blogging. I've been meaning to point out that the lead article, "Why We Blog," includes a picture of my daughter wearing a T-shirt (my shirt, actually) that says, "I'm blogging this."

So my five year-old has been published in ACM Communications before me. Kids in Silicon Valley grow up fast.

The Buzz around Buzz Marketing

The Knowledge at Wharton site has an article describing "buzz" marketing. Their description does a pretty good job of summing up the article:

"People are buzzing about buzzing," says Wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn who adds, along with others, that word-of-mouth marketing has long been recognized as a way to influence consumer behavior. What's new about buzz marketing is the structure and hype surrounding it and the attempts to measure its effectiveness on sales.

Knowledge@Wharton has a lot of interesting articles and informaiton. Site registration is required, but it is free.

Feral cities

Today's Telecom-Cities digest (which I highly recommend) reproduced this article by Naval War College professor Richard Norton on the concept of "feral cities."

Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power.... Yet this city would still be globally connected. It would possess at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its inhabitants would have access to the world’s most modern communication and computing technologies. It would, in effect, be a feral city.

Google Suggest

Charles Hill pointed us to Google Suggest. Another development from Google Labs ... it completes your search terms as you type them in. More from Google. Appears not to use phrases that just exist on your laptop, say like Google Desktop Search ... though they are ultimately found ... Its not primarily its ability to finish the typing thats useful for me, but the list of phrases that it knows exists ... a determination of the semantic 'region' of a partially completed phrase.

Author meets critics: John Thackara writes back

One of the perogatives of being a blog author is that you can elevate interesting comments to the level of posts. When I saw that John Thackara had left a comment on my post on "Design books as weak signal," I figured this was an opportunity to invoke that privilege.

Not uncharacteristically, Nicholas Nova comments first:

I think your're right, something's happening out there. However, even though I found all those books nice, interesting and relevant, their conclusion are somehow all the same: focus on people/context/processes and not on technology... Well of course, there are some differences but since Donald Norman's "the design of everyday things" or "things that make us smart", this is a known fact... maybe I'm wrong and taking user into account is obvious for us but not for others (in the cscw course we give here at EPFL, it's crazy to see the engineer-approach of design, so technology-driven).

From a quantitative point of view though, the number of books about this is impressive, it means, as you mentioned, that there is a global move.

A couple days later, John Thackara replies:

When I see the words "nice" (Nicolas) and "sensible" (Alex), it's like a dagger in the heart. I live in fear that we people-centered design persons are going to get denounced and/or ridiculed for:

a) being social engineers without a mandate;
b) lacking a sense of humour.

If post-tech-push social innovation is about being "good" it will fail, and deserve to do so. It needs to be edgy, controversial, upsetting, and funny.

I suppose there's always the danger in theory that a critic will actually be noticed by an author, but you never really expect it. (Or I never do, anyway.)

So to clarify. My reaction to this literature has the same roots as Nicholas': I agree with their arguments, and find them logical enough to wonder why they need to be made at all. After all, you want to make things that people will buy; you do that by making things that people will use; and you make things that people will use by making them (to quote the Roman poet Horace) dulce et utile, beautiful and useful. (Latin scholars out there, if I've misspelled that, please let me know.)

I mean, what's not to agree with there?

To some degree, Kim Vicente's book does a better job of being usefully controversial by scaring you: he makes a great case for just how dangerous bad design can be. Tens of thousands of people die in hospitals every year from preventable medical errors, many of which could be avoided if hospitals and hospital technology were designed so that overworked nurses and sleep-deprived residents could use them more reliably. Leonardo's Laptop also takes a stab at arguing how users should rebel against bad design, but ultimately (to my mind) is overwhelmed by its own reasonableness.

From what I've read of Thackara's other work, though, I suspect that In the Bubble won't suffer the same faults. I certainly hope not. As I wrote last year, I thought "The Post-Spectacular City" was "deeply opinionated, pointed, and infuriating. Probably the best thing I can say about it is that it's not something to be consumed passively, but engaged and interacted with. It's the kind of writing with which you can fruitfully disagree." Rereading the piece again now, I have the same reactions: some of it bugs me, some of it I agree with, and all of it makes me think.

John's right: "post-tech-push social innovation... needs to be edgy, controversial, upsetting, and funny." Let's hope he usefully stirs the pot.

The hot city

Following up on Franz's post about WiFi in the city, The San Jose Mercury News recently had a piece on "The 'hot city'," projects by metropolitan areas to provide free, long-range wireless access.

For anyone who's been following decisions by (particularly smaller) cities to provide free WiFi in their downtowns and public spaces, there may not be much that's surprising-- except, perhaps, the relatively unsurprised tone of the piece. Of course cities are thinking about this. In this part of California, at least, it's becoming as unexceptional an idea as 2-hour free parking.