I’m playing with an idea of comparing (parts of) my weblog with some of my published papers (and with the dissertation as a whole when I’m done). So far I’m interested in two things:

• how much of the text is reused
• how conceptually close two texts (weblog and a paper) are

Thought of a couple of ways to do so:

• One way would be to use all kinds of weblog analysis tool from Anjo. One of the difficulties there would be to figure out how to find similarities between weblog text, which is relatively self-contained microcontent pieces, and linear “build upon previousely said” academic papers.
• Another option would be to use some plagiarism detection tools. Only wonder if you can configure those to compare target paper with a specific weblog, rather than with “everything published”.

Any ideas?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/06/12.html#a1909; comments are here.

• Impermanence of weblog writing
• You either live, or write
• Sigmund on the US Presidential Debate

Ton in Weaving Webs: How to Quickly Find Somebody’s Online Traces?:

As I do after each conference I am currently busy finding people on-line and adding them to my ‘social filter’ after BlogTalk Reloaded. Basically that means finding their on-line presences and adding them to my feedreader, and connecting to them in different environments such as Plazes, Skype, Flickr, OpenBC/Xing, LinkedIn, 43People etc. Weaving them into my social web so to speak.

Ton is not alone in that: each f2f meeting I participate in follows with a surge of “let’s be friends” requests over many platforms. It’s becoming a practice that eventually will be supported by some tool that Ton wants:

Would there be a way to create a search agent that takes the name of a person you’ve met? Ideally you would provide such a search agent with your own account data of all the environments you are part of that you want to have searched. And then it comes back with a number of likely search results that might contain any or all of the following for instance:

Possible blogs of that person
Possible Flickr Feed, or 23 feed
Possible Skypename
Possible IM names
Profile in OpenBc.com
Profile in LinkedIn.com
Profile at 43people.com
Possible Plazes account
Possible del.icio.us account

I have a very mixed feelings about it, similar to those in the comment by Marc Canter:

Clearly their is a need for such a search function, but it steps right onto the issue of privacy and security on the web.

For me, as someone who wants to ‘bookmark’ digital bits of people I met offline, having a tool like that would be great. For me, as a one ‘being searched for’, it sounds like a nightmare: I’m not happy when others connect my online dots on one page, especially if I don’t know them.

For me leaving my bits online is a conscious choice, but leaving them disintegrated ‘all over the place’ is a consious choice as well: if I make choices to share specific things in specific contexts and not put all on the same page I have a reasons to do so. And I’d like those reasons to be respected by whatever search tools (as they currently supposed to respect NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW of web-pages). At the end I want to have at least some rights over my own bits (e.g. digital traces not being aggregated without explicit content)…

So, coming back to Ton’s problem – one of the options that I could imagine is ‘Plaze-based’ search, an advanced version of something I experienced at SHiFT:

• there I could easily see others on the same network and add them as contacts
• once they confirmed I could get their basic info (like IM names or web-site links)
• I can also see ‘plazes we have in common’, which could provide some context on the specific location (often associated with an event) where we have met

Of course, this is yet another centralised system (with all the problems of that), but at least it does a few things:

• makes ‘search’ much easier (by showing only people who are at the same location with me at the moment)
• provides people with choice of how much ‘aggregated in one space’ information they want to share with me
• provides me with some clues about the history of our relationship (if you want to get into that deeper – make sure to check danah boyd’s Master thesis for the idea of Digital Mirror, pp. 53-59)

So, two questions regarding all these:

• Can my Plaze-based search be generalised to any cross-platform search?
• Are there any chances that eventually I will be able to add NOAGGREGATE tag or something like that (‘aggregate only for my contacts’, ‘ask first’, etc.) to my digital bits to control how they are displayed? Anything practical I can do in that respect? [pinging Suw at ORG]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/10/09.html#a1842; comments are here.

• Automatic context-aware live blogging
• Combining data from various devices and privacy
• Topics and terms (categorisations and text analysis) for weblog conversations

Anjo is moving further in developing a blog-friendly version of tOKo (related to all our earlier work on weblog communities, conversations and topics):

A little bit of progress on the open source version of tOKo (and the like), and in particular making it suitable for bloggers.

The first problem is turning a (your?) blog into a corpus. tOKo is pretty flexible as to what a corpus looks like, but the process must be automated. Jack Vinson and Ton Zijlstra provided great help by converting their blogs to a Movable Type export file and making the result available. Therefore, tOKo now contains a “Create corpus from Movable Type” function. The nice thing is that several blogging platforms provide Movable Type (MT) export. For example, in TypePad (which I use) a MT file can be generated from the web interface. Moreover, an MT file contains all information, including comments and trackbacks.

I’m getting into research fun anticipation – getting hold of comments next to post text would be such a great thing for the analysis :)

And, if want to help to develop the tool you can contribute your blog archives in Movable Type format (WPexport could be handy for WordPress users). This especially makes sense if you feel belonging to KM bloggers community (paper) – or, as Anjo puts it:

If you have linked to Jack, Ton, Lilia or myself in the past, this would be particularly interesting (also if you can only export to Movable Type). The only disadvantage of making your weblog available is that I might ask you to alpha-test tOKo :-).

My email address is: anjo science uva nl (one at, two dots).

You get a bit more insight about this work from Ton’s impressions on the work in progress and Anjo’s visualisations (1, 2, 3, 4).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/11.html#a1761; comments are here.

• Trust in weblog conversations
• Shout if you want to be heard or Technorati blog finder
• More on reading weblogs

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.

• Learning webs
• Blogging software: looking for suggestions
• Sigmund on the US Presidential Debate

Anjo, in What is a topic?

The most mysterious term that I encountered a lot recently is topic. I have no idea how to define it and, neither seem the weblog research proposals that suggest finding the topic of a post is something worth doing. Being on holiday currently, and given it was raining and snowing outside, I tried to apply the notion of “topic finding” to weblog conversations (see also: here, and here).

Anjo goes on, providing an example of “unique” terms extracted from three weblog conversations (more details in the post). Although those provide a good picture of what conversations are about, they do not really answer the question of what is a topic of each of them.

Which makes me thinking of my own experiences around the issue…

One of the things we planned to do this year, but didn’t get to do, was looking at personal categorisations. To be more specific the idea was to compare categories (~tags, ~topics) that a blogger assigns to her posts and the results of the text analysis of those posts to see if there is any correlation between the language used and conceptual categories. [I still think it's an experiment worth doing, but not sure I personally can devote serious time to it. Anyone interested?]

Thinking of my own weblog I can imagine that for some topics (I call them topics ;) that I use for my own weblog the correlation should be present (e.g. posts related to events are likely to be labelled with it and mention it in the text).

However there are others, those where I assign topic to organise my ideas on ill-structured themes (=I feel that those posts belong together, but I don’t know why yet, or I don’t have a good label for it). The examples of the second type are posts on life, knowledge mapping or transparency.

Which brings me to the reason I started to write this post. I think that topics are conceptual categories used to characterise a group of connected pieces (conversations with others, conversations with self, or something in between) and to give it a nametag. The common name makes sense – it makes it easier to remember those pieces belong together, to retrive, to communicate about.

The problem is that conceptual categories are subjective. They depend on a person, group or even groupthink (as with pressure to use certain tags to appear at right places in Technorati and not because they make more sense than others). So I suspect that once we define a topic of a conversation there will be someone who would say that it’s about something else (referring to Anjo’s examples – it could be “not about Skype, but about presence”).

That’s said I still think that defining a topic of a conversation makes sense. Personally, I’d prefer to have a Sigmund picture (~frequent terms and relations between them) for a conversation, as some kind of ontological fingerprint of what the conversation is about. Or there is a number of ways to select one of the terms from the “unique term list” for a conversation:

• by further selecting “least unique” from the subset (i.e. terms used by highest number of participants of the conversation)
• by selecting terms that match categories some of participants assign to posts
• by selecting terms that match predefined ontology/folksonomy/keyword list
• by selecting terms most of the participants are likely to agree (don’t ask me how to do that :)
• by selecting terms most closely resembling those of an external “customer” for the analysis or those that non-participant is likely to understand

Or we just have to find a way of matching personal caterogisations. Given there the tools are going this shouldn’t be that far…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/12/20.html#a1717; comments are here.

• Researching blogs and blogging research: synergies of colliding worlds
• GOR 2006: session on social software?
• Formation of norms in a blog community

Just a quote from danah boyd:

Our lives have started to escape categories.

The post is actually about experiences on topical vs. personal blogging. Jack Vinson has a follow-up on shifting interests, forgetting and categorisation.

I’m thinking of some examples from my study at Microsoft, but this will have to wait (mainly because work is hard as I’m less than 24 hours away from my long awaited vacation :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/10/21.html#a1700; comments are here.

• Most common words of BlogWalk participants
• Weblog and information overload
• Misleading visualisations, binary thinking and research

Anjo documents the experiment of creating a cooking ontology by running smart tools through the content of Chocolate and Zucchini:

• From Weblogs to Ontologies
• Cooking: Creating a Corpus
• Cooking: Utensils – Anjo, did you try correlating terms with (explicit) categories of the weblog to define higher level concepts? E. Dehillerin and knifes have something to do with Kitchen Paraphernalia and Paris City Guide…

Curious to know what Sigmund would say :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/08/30.html#a1650; comments are here.

• Getting more by reading less blogs: some thoughts on ‘Cost-Effective Outbreak Detection in Networks’
• WBC04: day 2 morning
• The high cost of not finding information: Reinventing is more fun than reusing

Anjo gives a bit of insight into our internal discussions on uses of ontologies:

Andy Boyd came up with a wonderful new term: “ontological fingerprinting” and to illustrate how imaginative he is: zero hits on Google! Suppose one has an ontology (lexicon, thesaurus) and some software that can determine whether the terms in the ontology are present in a document. Applying the software, one gets a “fingerprint” of the concepts in the ontology for a given document. Comparing fingerprints for different documents, such is the assumption, provides a better metric of the similarity between these documents than comparing plain words. Ideas like this simply have to be tested in practice. Fortunately, Andy is making available a lot of real data to try it.

I like the term, but find it a bit misleading: usually documents do not have fingers :)

I’d associate the term with people – you may think of “ontological fingerprint” of a person, which could be something like conceptualisations produced by Sigmund based on analysis of weblog posts written by someone, set of personal categories someone uses to classify a document or mapping one’s documents to a shared ontology. Then you can look for others with similar “fingerprints” (this was one of uses I imagined for Sigmund, but didn’t have such a nice term to talk about it :).

May be we should rather talk about “ontological abstract” in case of documents…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/01/28.html#a1493; comments are here.

• NOAGGREGATE: what if I don’t want my digital bits to be connected at one place?
• The high cost of not finding information: Reinventing is more fun than reusing
• Shout if you want to be heard or Technorati blog finder

As I still have work to do I’m not going to add relevant links for the on-going discussions on folksonomies, related tools and social implications, but just link to a few things.

Bits of research:

• Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community
• Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata

Visualising del.icio.us:

• “related tag” network visualisation
• del.icio.us subscriptions as social networks

Regarding the last one:

• Wonder how many people actually look at their del.icio.us subscriptions (I don’t)
• Thought that it would be fun visualising social networks based on similar linking patterns, but discovered that that particular feature is not in del.icio.us anymore. Given how often I used it as an argument it’s pretty stupid not having screenshots.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/01/26.html#a1489; comments are here.

• Trip report (3): knowledge/community mapping
• Classifications for archiving, search and retrieval
• Experimenting with creating an ontology based on weblog content

Had an interesting discussion with Anjo and Rogier on how and why people categorise things (documents, bookmarks, blogposts)… Thinking of all kinds of things that I’d like to know about my own categorisation:

• Why I categorise things the way I do? What are the criteria?
• When I categorise things for further retrieval, how often I actually go and retrieve them? Does categorisation helps in it?
• How categories evolve over time? In relation to: changes in thinking, changes in tasks, changes in tools I use?
  • e.g. did categorisation in my weblog changed since I started to use del.icio.us
• How categorisations in different spaces (e.g. file folders, email folders/tags, paper files, weblog topics)overlap? What explains overlaps? How you could connect them? Is there a need to connect them?

Just a brain dump…

See also: LiveTopics wishlist or topic-based blogging support on how I categorise things in my weblog and what features I miss.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/12/09.html#a1451; comments are here.

• Lessons learnt implementing expertise locator system (2)
• Tools to find similarity between two texts (weblog and papers)
• Sigmund on the US Presidential Debate