Mathemagenic

Last week I’ve got a comment on the draft chapter that got me stuck. In the study I describe my uses of weblog to develop dissertation ideas using meta-blogging posts from my weblog. As a result the section tells how this happens and from the comment it became clear that I also have to show it. Which is pretty tricky.

How do you show how ideas grow? I think as a reader of a weblog you just see them unfolding and connecting over time and, if you see a product that comes out as a result, you can often pinpoint traces of those early ideas and emerging connections. But how do you show it to someone who doesn’t have that experience, ideally in a condensed, easy to digest way?

Given what I know about visualising blog (and other) data I can think of nice visualisations of terms, tags and links over time, but I also know how much effort creating those visualisations requires.

I tried an easy route - looking at Wordpress plugins that could show anything over time based on my weblog archives. Interestingly, while there are many of them to track external statistics (visits, referrals, most popular posts, etc.), there are hardly any to do it for the weblog itself. GeneralStats, that “counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, tags, link-categories, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages”, is one exception I found, but even it does not show, for example, numbers of weblog posts per category per month.

All of this is a bit sad. Not that much because it gives me a headache thinking about editing the chapter, but mainly as lack of tools to see patterns in one’s own weblog shows lack of demand for it…

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Something that I had to blog one million years ago - my colleagues are working on the cool things in MobiLife project.

One of the things they are working on is Context Watcher:

The Context Watcher is a mobile application developed in Python, and running on Nokia Series 60 phones. Its aim is to make it easy for an end-user to automatically record, store, and use context information, e.g. for personalization purposes, as input parameter to information services, or to share with family, friends, colleagues or other relations, or just to log them for future use or to perform statistics on your own life.

The context watcher application is able to record information about the user’s

• Location (based GPS and/or GSM cell based)
• Mood (based on user input)
• Activities and meetings (based on reasoning)
• Body data (based on heart and foot sensors)
• Weather (based on a location-inferred remote weather CP)
• Visual data (pictures enhanced with contextual data)

The uses of it are nicely illustrated by Johan Koolwaaij. His Flickr photos are not only automatically posted from his mobile phone, but also automatically annotated with all kinds of context metadata (e.g. location or people around). Then it goes further - to context-aware live blogging. Weblog posts are automatically generated from all kinds of data and look like that:

A busy Cebit and Hotel Hubertus day

Today was a busy Cebit and Hotel Hubertus day (70.4% covered). I took 8 pictures in Hannover.

[Flickr pictures go here ]

I visited Hannover (52.9%) and Laatzen (37.4%), mainly Cebit (43.5%) and Hotel Hubertus (35.3%). I met wahlau (42.1%). My maximum speed was 153.3 km/h.

More examples, docs and code to download are at context watcher showcase. See also presentation (.ppt).

Related:

• Phil Wolff long time back talking on objects that blog
• Marc Canter’s digital lifestyle aggregator
• Plazes Flickr geotagging
• Erik Benson’s “me” aggregator
• AURA from Microsoft Research
• some other things that I don’t have time to dig out…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/22.html#a1743; comments are here.

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One of the directions that keep on popping up when I’m thinking about blogging in KM context is topic-based blogging. There are a couple of reasons behind it:

• personal - if blogs are used as a personal knowledge management tool than ability to tag posts is important to be able to organise, retrieve and share them
• corporate - once weblogs are used in a company one would want to be able to slice an aggregated stream of posts into topic-based streams to support knowledge sharing

liveTopics and k-collector are good examples of personal vs. corporate implementations (see also: liveTopics and k-collector compared) and del.icio.us is an example of connecting personal and shared views on topics together.

In this post I’d like to focus on personal side and describe what topic-based blogging functionalities one may want as a blogger. And because I’m very practical and selfish I’d describe it as my liveTopics wishlist :)

What liveTopics do now

• allow adding topics for every weblog posts - e.g. check this post via browser
• display a list of posts per topic - e.g. my posts about liveTopics
• display topics as a frequency list or recently updated list - e.g. my topic index
• provide an interface for managing topics (renaming/deleting + backup + some settings)

My liveTopics wishlist

• Printing
  • I’d like to be able to print posts for a topic or combination of topics (so far I can think of AND/OR combinations, but may be I’d want more once related topics are there ;)
• Aggregation
  • Topics indication in my RSS feed (e.g. in ENT format)
  • RSS feed for each topic (ideally for a combination of topics as well :)
• Related topics
  • Indication of a relation (below are different overlapping! dimentions)
    • Automatic vs. manual
      • Automatic: based on co-occurences in the same post - e.g. related tags for innovation at k-collector or del.icio.us
      • Manual: added by me to indicate how topics are related in my head - e.g. I’d like to be able to specify that blog communities is a narrower than communities, but also related to blog ecosystem
    • Internal vs. external
      • Showing that my posts on blog communities are related to my del.icio.us link collection on blogCommunities
    • Me vs. others
      • Showing that my posts on innovation are related to post on innovation at k-collector
  • Inference
    • Once relations are there one can do all nice things with inference rules.
      • For example automatically including narrower topics when broader topics are selected, e.g. when someone selects communities posts on blog communities are shown as well even if they are not explicitly marked that way
• Visualising
  • Dynamics
    • I’d love to see how my use of topics changes over time; something similar to temporal rhythms of interactions with others visualised from email arhives
  • Relations between topics
    • Just a nice image :) Something like delicious mind
• Small liveTopics/Radio specific things
  • Shortcuts for topics added automatically
  • Expanding of posts by topic in topic index pages

Of course, I wonder how many of those things are “nice to have”/”Lilia specific” and which features would be used by many blogger, but this is a “further research direction” as I’d write in a paper :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/10/13.html#a1384; comments are here.

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Stephan J. Schmidt / Matthias L. Jugel: Bottom up Knowledge Management with Weblogs and SnipSnap (presentation)

These guys do some interesting work with SnipSnap (integrated weblog/wiki solution) in Fraunhofer, but they talked mainly about bottom-up KM (which is kind of “common knowledge” in the blogosphere) and failed explaining the interesting part (what exactly they do, how people are motivated and the rest of details).

Daniel Dögl: “Zoomblox - A Universe Of Topics From Children For Children” (slides)

A great example what could be done with weblogs if you care: weblogging tool for kids, well thought interface, architecture and policies (should be on at www.zoombox.at somewhere autunm 2004).

Jörg Kantel: Turn Your Radio On or Tweaking And Tuning Your Weblog

Funny and entertaining talk on weblogs as an alternative media. Hope the presentation will be online, because it’s a lot of interesting things that I don’t want to type :)

Jon Hoem: Videoblogs as ‘Collective Documentary’ (presentation, presentation notes)

Two traditions: vogs (Adrian Miles) and moblogs; lots of interesting stuff after. Since talking with Adrian I’m getting an idea that videoblogs can be actually one step closer to be used than I thought before…

Questions

• I asked what types of user studies they do. As far as I can there is much user studies, most just guided by their own perceptions on what users want…
• What is a critical mass of people you need blogging to move it on in the company? We have to redefine what is critical mass :) Obviousely it’s not in numbers…
• Memory: achirves, wikis, documentary - is it unexpored area of blogging?

Other notes: Anu Gupta, Martin Roell, wiki: BlogTalkNotesPanel1

This post also appears on channels BlogTalk

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/07/05.html#a1259; comments are here.

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What would be a good way to find all (blog) pages linking to a specific blog post?

• trackbacks only show up if both weblogs are trackback enabled
• Technorati indexes only links from homepages
• Blogdex (and other blogtracking tools) indexes only subset of blogosphere
• Google only shows incoming links for pages

Note to myself - check more carefully, may be there is something in Site statistics for weblogs (2) and tracking tools

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/05/26.html#a1224; comments are here.

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RSS Neighborhood by Thomas Burg - I do not understand German, but I can follow the links. Check this out:

Similar Feeds uses Share Your OPML! data to produce Readers who subscribe to Mathemagenic also subscribe to…

The way to get it is not very obvious, so:

1. Go to http://grumet.net/syo/findThatFeed
2. Type the name of your weblog
3. Find your RSS feed (if there are several) and then click on <sim> next to it
4. Enjoy :)

Thanks go to Andrew Grumet :)

Update 1: Andrew says

The query uses a fudge factor to filter out the most popular weblogs, which otherwise would show up every time.

You can play with including/excluding more popular weblogs by using Tweak results on the left of the list.

Example: weblogs more popular and less popular between subscribers of my RSS feed

Update 2: Try selecting a number (x) that follows every weblog title: it gives you a list of people reading both weblogs.

Example: people reading both Mathemagenic and Ton’s Interdependent Thoughts

Do not forget: all these nice things are built based on RSS subscription lists in Share Your OPML!, so not everything is there ;)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/02/14.html#a1084; comments are here.

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Is there a tool that can be used to make one RSS feeds from several feeds I select?

If I have it I can use Feedroll to display “15 latest posts from KnowledgeBoard bloggers” or “10 latest posts by my colleagues”…

It’s should be so easy to make one, but I wasn’t able to find any :(

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/02/11.html#a1078; comments are here.

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An old post by Seb pointing to Themes and metaphors in the semantic web discussion by Peter Van Dijck with a suggestion to check HTML source. I did - and loved the way quotes are crafted:

• each quote has a name and a face next to it
• this is done by simple
  

  and styling

Are there any technical people around to implement it? Otherwise the only option is to do it manually with Radio shortcuts or something like it…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/12/10.html#a863; comments are here.

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Matt Mover and Paolo Valdemarin announce the launch of K-Collector 1.0. Congratulations and good luck!

It was fascinating to see how it all developed - from the seed of idea into a fully-grown product. I had (and still have ;) my concerns about it, but anyway it’s nice to see how many insights on how people work with knowledge went into it (some of it is in a story on KM and weblogs explained in vectors).

Now I’m curious to see several things:

• how k-collector weblogging works
• price tag
• implementation case-studies (I can volunteer to do one :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/24.html#a851; comments are here.

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IEEE Computer Magazine: Weblogs: Simplifying Web Publishing by Charlie Lindahl and Elise Blount (registration required). There is a companion blog for this article, but there is not much there.

3 pages popular tech article about weblogs: intro, a bit on comsumer-producer blur, a lot on blogging system features (separating content from presentation, templates, blogger APIs, information management, syndication), a bit on expected integration with mobiles.

For my taste, technical aspects of blogging are described well, but there is totall miss of social aspects (may be the fact that I wasn’t able to find the authors blogs in Google explains it ;). I don’t believe that the best thing of blogs is easy webpublishing.

And a quote:

There are two basic blog styles: filters and journals. The filter style focuses on a collection of links to other Web sites. The journal style is an online personal diary with dated entries presented in a “stream of consciousness.” Both styles use headlines and excerpts — putting the most recent entry at the top of the Web page — to entice readers to investigate further.

This makes me wondering what is the style of my blog? Somewhere in between? And I don’t have excerpts :)))

Nothing new, but nice to know as a paper reference on tech side of blogs.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/08.html#a831; comments are here.

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