Posts under /Matter Category
I recently received an email message announcing the creation of a new journal, entitled The Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results (JSUR), which focuses on reporting research efforts that differ from “what is traditionally thought of as a publishable result.” They are looking for papers in both Computer Science and Life Science.
Last month, I read a study by B. J. Fogg and others from the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, entitled “What Makes Web Sites Credible? A Report on a Large Quantitative Study”. The paper described an early effort to systematically determine how different elements of web sites affect people’s perceptions of credibility (defined roughly as the intersection of trustworthiness and expertise). The original study design had 1400 participants completing a survey which presented them with 51 web site elements and asked them to rate how much more or less each element would affect the believability of a web site. The two questions I hope to answer, roughly, are “What has changed in the past 10 years about how people assess web site credibility?” and “Is there a cheaper, yet effective, way to do a study like this?”. The results have implications for website design.
This is a duplicate of my very first post on the PARC blog!
Last month, PARC hosted the first of two National Science Foundation-funded workshops on Technology-Mediated Social Participation, co-organized by PARC’s Peter Pirolli and the University of Maryland’s Jennifer Preece and Ben Shneiderman. The primary goal of the workshop has been to produce reports which will address participants’ government, academic, and education recommendations, and implications for a National Initiative for Social Participation.
These are some slides from a presentation I gave on some Mechanical Turk data I collected about how people are using Activity Streams. Specifically, I was interested in what tools people were using, what they were using them for, how these tools might be improved, and how people had been using these tools to collaborate/coordinate. Here’s what I found…
A week or two ago, Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) posted a message on his blog entitled “Microsyntax: A Messifesto”, in which he outlines his plans for a structured survey of ‘microsyntax’ for Twitter, which he defines as “various ways to embed structured information right into the text of Twitter messages.” Some obvious examples of these are ‘@’ for replying to people, or ‘#’ for inserting keywords, which, while invented by Twitter users (see Chris Messina’s (@chrismessina) original/updated post on using hashtags from back in August, ’07), have become so commonplace that they are now an indispensable part of the Twitter grammar.
Back in December of 2008, I had a discussion with Mike Krieger (@mikeyk) where I started thinking about possible ways to revise the way that we retweet. The rest of this post is the result of some more recent thinking on the subject inspired by Chris and Stowe’s efforts:
