Jacob and I presented our poster and have since posted it online over at dlist.

We ran a Mechanical Turk study with over 2000 responses to help determine whether people would be willing to share their stuff more after some time had passed.

This study investigates users’ willingness to disclose information with respect to how long ago that information may have been created or captured. Users were more willing to share items as time passed.

Potentially, a “Later Button” should be put into practice to address this latent willingness (40% of sharing scenarios) to disclose information at a later date.

Conclusions:

The most striking outcome of this research is the apparent willingness of over 40% of people to share these types of information with others “later”, across demographics, the intimacy level of the item itself, and the perceived audience. This suggests a gaping disservice on the part of current tools.

Tools like Twitter and Facebook should consider an interface control that allows their users to designate the sharing of items “later”. The more granular data from this study (dividing “later” into more discrete chunks of time) suggests a strong default for this control to be set at “one month” of elapsed time between the creation/capture of an information item and its availability to the designated audience.

The apparent collapse of nuance between “inner” and “outer” audience and between “very” and “somewhat” intimate items suggests a flattening of how we understand and relate to our information sharing and our perceived audiences.

Are Facebook and/or Twitter to blame for this apparent flattening of our friendscape? Are all our friends equal when it comes to the mediated sharing of personal information?

The poster is up – Tag Decay: A View Into Aging Folksonomies (PDF 1.7MB)

It was a great problem to have people standing, listening, and asking questions for four hours. I just wish my throat had been warned ahead of time – I didn’t talk much the next day.

Thanks everyone.

Both short papers I submitted to ASIST were accepted.

Fred and I submitted a claimID write-up with the title “Self-Representation of Online Identity in Collected Hyperlinks”.

Additionally, my first attempt at writing down my thoughts about the use of social tags over time was accepted with the current title “Tag Decay: A View Into Aging Folksonomies”.

I’m very excited about both of them – and look forward to feedback. These two topics, in their own way, are presenting themselves as the structure beneath my upcoming dissertation research – Contextual Authority Tagging.

The second bit of news this week was concerning my talk at the VCU Technology Days next week in Richmond, Va. I’ve been given the keynote slot at 12:30pm on Wednesday to speak about “Online Identity Management”. Additionally, I’ll be there on Thursday to field questions about claimID specifically. Please drop in if you’re nearby.

It’s funny how weeks go by without a feeling of tangible progress. And then there are weeks like this one.