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WikiDashboard now performs with live data

Ed Chi has posted again to the PARC ASC Blog about WikiDashboard.

This time, he’s announced the new version of WikiDashboard that pulls live data from Wikipedia using the Wikipedia Toolserver. Instead of a local copy of the dataset from Wikipedia (that is instantly out of date), this version queries the Wikipedia database itself.

This is especially exciting to me, since this is a lot of the code I worked on this summer, now in production. The activity graphs are now clickable – pulling you deeper into the context and timeline of the wiki edits of a page you want to explore.

This type of digging into historical versioned data will only become more and more common. We are generating versioned data all the time, and these views allow for critical analysis and sythesis as we move forward.

I’m proud to be a part of it. Let me know what you find using these new tools.

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Summer of ’08 – Part III

I’ve been home from California for nearly a month now. On the way back, I visited the aliens in Roswell, rode a bike in Kansas with a friend traveling the other way, jumped in front of many monuments, and had the dirt of a rainless summer washed from the car as I approached the Appalachian mountains. It’s been a packed few weeks of catching up, filling out paperwork, political discussion and fervor, planning a wedding, and making lots and lots of lists.

PARC / WikiDashboard

I had a wonderful time at PARC this summer. I worked with Bongwon Suh and Ed Chi in the Augmented Social Cognition group very closely and I feel we got some quality work done. I’d never been in a corporate environment myself before this summer, and while I realize that PARC is not the average corporate environment at all, I definitely have a newfound appreciation for the depth of knowledge and pace of development happening inside. PARC is a great place to work and I would highly recommend their summer intern program.

Daily Porsche Count

One of my developed habits while being in the Bay Area this summer consisted of counting the number of Porsches I saw each day. The Daily Porsche Count, at first, was just a joke as I realized I’d seen three or four in about fifteen minutes my second or third day out there. I was living in Palo Alto and also spotted a Maserati, multiple Lotuses (Loti?), a couple Lamborghinis (one red, one yellow), and of course, the latest entrant, the Tesla. (The Tesla showroom actually went up while I was there, and they are incredible (both the showroom and the cars). )

Over the summer, I realized I had started counting the Porsches every day – and the average was definitely around 4 or 5. But sometimes I’d reach that quota before breakfast. It was a rare day I saw zero. The biggest Porsche Count was 21, the day I rode my bike across the Golden Gate Bridge and over into Tiburon.

The other interesting observation was that on the way home, via L.A. and Tucson, the Daily Porsche Count dropped (as expected). What was unexpected was that the Daily Corvette Count increased proportionately as we headed to L.A.

Additionally, the only Porsche I saw on the drive back to NC was painted on a barn in Kentucky advertising a no-longer-in-business pit stop down the road.

Follow-Up: I saw four yesterday in and around Chapel Hill. Maybe I’m a little more tuned to their existence now…

Wedding

I mentioned it above, but hadn’t mentioned it before – I’m getting married.

This takes over your life for a short while. There are lists upon lists. Spreadsheets and registries. Deadlines, supplies, and shipping. Gifts, Flowers, Suits, Photos, Dress, Vows. What a process.

Good thing we’ve been working together for a while. We have a fairly fine sense of our strengths and weaknesses, tone and timbre.

1 barn. 233 confirmed family and friends. Many cakes. A few surprises.

What fun.

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WordCamp SF 2008 – DiSo and more

Will Norris spoke Saturday morning at WordCamp in SF (9:30am Sat slot is tough). He received a couple interesting questions regarding OAuth and current practices, but for the most part, it felt like this conversation is maturing quite a bit in the last few months. People see the possibilities now without having the 10-15 intro slides demonstrating the ‘vision’.

Discussion around ‘hubpress’, BuddyPress, and DiSo have started to show some commonalities. There is a growing awareness of the need for self-hosted data – the individual should own and control their own stuff. I’m working on laying out my ideas for these cases and why the ability to proxy my own data should be baked into these systems by default.

Later in the day, I heard Matt Mullenweg discuss the ‘State of the Word’ (the wp-openid plugin is 145th most installed) and how updating WordPress will soon be an ‘internal’ process where WordPress can update itself. This is a big deal and something that Apple and others have understood for a while. But it’s hard to do well. I expect we’ll see far fewer successful exploits in the wild as soon as updating is simple and included (if not also optionally automatic).

I worked with Will to fix a bug in the wp-diso-actionstream plugin and then went to the evening party with Tron and Hackers projected on the wall. I guess just going to a conference about a piece of blogging software wasn’t nerdy enough…

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Yes, Google owns you

Well, we haven’t seen this before quite so dramatically

But, honestly, is anyone really surprised?

Nick Saber isn’t happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:

Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]

That’s it.

Nick sent a message or three to Google for support. He got back this:

Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our
investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at
this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very
seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information
about this account.

And that’s it.

Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.

Yes, the tools are shiny. The tools are wonderful and productive and helpful and largely state-of-the-art. But you should have a backup plan – a plan B – if you’re going to use online coolstuff.

We are still crawling towards a set of solutions, but we *are* making progress. We need self-hostable apps. We need continuous export in open formats of our data. We need offsite and redundant copies made of the things we create and generate.

We need OpenLifeBits. And we’re nowhere remotely close.

We need DiSo.

We need Tahoe.

Please hurry.

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Phelps, Zidane, and The Federer

This week, things seem to be getting read in pairs.

Today, our sports icons and their demeanor, their control, and their psychology.

Phelps

A great Mark Levine article in the NYTimes about Michael Phelps. I’ve read bio pieces on Phelps before, but as a run-up to the Olympics, this is the best I’ve seen this season.

Indeed, while it is tempting to regard Phelps’s thoroughgoing immersion in chlorinated waters as inevitable — akin to Tiger Woods picking up a golf club or Roger Federer a racquet — his route to success in the pool was, Bowman says, “the confluence of a lot of happy things.” Out on the accidental frontiers of human possibility, the best athletes are produced by a perfect storm of circumstance: rare natural talents; state-of-the-art training; and a deep wash in the murk of psychology, where, perhaps most mysterious of all, ferocious ambition, discipline and capacity for self-sacrifice reside.

Levine writes about the intense focus, or rather, the lack of expression:

He remained underwater for the full 15 meters that swimmers are permitted from a start or a turn. When he emerged, ahead of the field, rising into the lunging motion of the butterfly stroke, his face looked a bit too relaxed for someone who had been exerting himself in an atmosphere that is 800 times denser than the one the rest of us move through. He seemed positively peaceful. His strokes were long and smooth, he kept close to the water to breathe — a sign of exquisite control and efficiency — and he seemed oblivious to Lochte’s presence, one lane over, level with his thighs, within striking distance.

A lot is made of Phelps’ youth and “eastern bloc” upbringing with regards to his rigorous schedule and level of training. Let’s hope his competitive days eventually end with a calm and healthy transition back to mortality.

I met Phelps, out of his element, in a lounge at the United States Olympic Training Center, following swim practice. He was not an eager conversationalist. He fidgeted, resisted eye contact and responded to my questions briefly and with little enthusiasm. After 20 minutes, there was a pronounced silence between us. I’d like to think I understood the discomfort of the meeting. Yes, he was probably tired after practice; no doubt he was run down by endless obligations to the media. Above all, though, it seemed that Phelps was signaling the basic difference between his world and mine, between swimming and talking about it.

Zidane

Meanwhile, UK magazine The Liberal just published a piece on the Zen of Zinedine Zidane. Ed Smith opens with this paragraph:

WHAT is the ultimate quality in a sportsman? Is it athleticism or skill? Maybe it is courage, self-belief or the ability to seize the moment? Perhaps there is something greater still that sets apart the very best: the ability to create the illusion of complicity. Great players, at their peak, sometimes exert such a mastery over opponents that they appear complicit. They reduce usually aggressive competitors to seeming like mere accomplices; the great man is the puppet-master, the feisty opponent just a puppet. Simon Barnes, in his insightful new book The Meaning of Sport, calls this gift ‘Federer’, in honour of the elegant Swiss tennis genius.

To have the gift of ‘Federer’ is to be capable of extracting complicity from the opponent. I really like that.

He goes on:

Zidane has something else, too. Where Federer behaves as if a scrap would be somehow beneath him, Zidane combines calmness with simmering street-wise aggression. There is a darkness to his concentration – he would be just fine if things got nasty, in fact he might relish it. He has ‘Federer’ plus violence. His is not a gentle kind of zen.

“The Federer is strong with this one.”

“It was close until he went all Federer on that guy.”

“Do not anger the Federer.”

Federer

Of course, all this cannot hold a candle to the most excellent piece of sports-related writing I’ve ever read – David Foster Wallace’s 2006 piece entitled: “Roger Federer as Religious Experience”:

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.

And then…

It was like something out of “The Matrix.” I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.

Seriously. Go read it. Again.

Clooney

Lastly, Clooney has something to say about all this for those who are NOT superstars.

“If you can’t beat ’em, cheat.”

“And do drugs, kids.”

Funny man.

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A Ze Frank Interview and Michael Wesch’s YouTube Anthropology

In the last two days, I’ve seen two videos that unexpectedly went together very well.

The First

Yesterday, I watched Ze Frank on The Sound of Young America hosted by Jesse Thorn. The 30 minute interview ranged from silly to philosophical and impressed me. With these two people near the prime of what they do getting a kick out of one another and sharing an honest discussion in a live environment, you’re forced to realize that the way our participatory media culture is being defined is truly changing – at a breakneck speed with very new rules. (case in point: Color Wars 2008: Youngme / Nowme)

The interview’s very inspiring and highly recommended. Self-deprecating and insightful. Why can’t all people be funny *and* smart?

And of course, this isn’t the first time.


Ze Frank on The Sound of Young America from Jesse Thorn on Vimeo.

The Second

And five days ago, Dr. Michael Wesch posted his presentation to the Library of Congress from June 23, 2008. He’s the professor at Kansas State University who captured the hearts and minds of YouTube, and then everyone else, just before the Super Bowl last year with his video called “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us“. It has now been viewed over 6 million times directly at YouTube. Being an anthropologist, he jokes that this is kind of a big deal (the usual magic number for ‘the tenure folder’ is 200 people seeing your work). His second video, Information R/evolution received similar wide acclaim. He’d really found his calling and has only gotten better with practice. He’s mastered the remixed mashup video genre.

His Digital Ethnography class this past semester helped him craft 40 minutes of the 55 minute presentation. The time and energy they put into it really comes through. They joined the community at YouTube themselves and employed “participant observation” to understand and experience the culture.

Dr. Wesch’s style is natural and the points he makes about our society and identity and reflection and collective experience really need to be seen.

Please watch this video.

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

I put these two videos together because their sense of Identity and Play and Realization of ‘The Social’ match very closely. I’d love to know if/when Ze and Mike can sit down and talk with one another about their experiences. They both have a deep understanding of this new medium and how it’s transforming everything we know.

That little camera forces us to deal with ourselves in ways we’ve never had to deal with ourselves before. We might as well spend some time to listen to these two who have already figured it out.

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Summer of ’08 – Part II

So, a couple of my recent excursions up into the great city of San Francisco have involved rather nerdy things.

Tahoe Hackfest

A couple weeks ago I attended the Allmydata.org Hackfest (5th in a series, as I understand it). Zooko and Brian Warner hosted a few people at the allmydata.org offices and fed them pizza and code. Adam Langley spoke about his recent posting of Obfuscated TCP. Oskar Sandberg talked about his current work proving some of Freenet’s original routing code was mathematically efficient. David Molnar shared his current PhD work at Berkeley (metafuzz and catchconv), which are used to find bugs in programs.

I don’t pretend to understand all of what happened in front of me at the hackfest, but I know that I’m definitely putting the next Hackfest on my calendar and going if possible. The pizza was good and I really like having conversations with people who know their math.

DiSo / Drupal

Within a week or so of the Hackfest, I found myself headed back up into the city for dinner at the DiSo / Drupal meetup. The conversations were not as directed as I’d hoped, but I met some interesting people. Chris Messina, Will Norris and Kieran Lal held court at one end of the table, and I talked with Andrius Kulikauskas, Neil Drumm and Dan Kurtz down on the other end. I think DiSo is poised to become as big as microformats are today – and eventually become the standard for how we’ll interact as individuals (I’d say “online” here, but I think it’s more than that). I cannot wait to have my people in my pocket – XMPP and OAuth enabled – making recommendations and filtering out the noise. Please get here soon.

WikiDashboard

Unrelated to the city of San Francisco, I’ve been at PARC for two months now, and I’ve finished my first milestone. The WikiDashboard code I’ve been working on shipped today. This is a big deal for me since just a few short months ago I saw it on the internet for the first time and thought it was a really cool project. Now, I’ve contributed my own code – and even got paid! A neat trick.

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Multijurisdictional Task Force

The news today in Missouri reminds me again that identity issues online are really just the same things we’ve always dealt with in person.

A fake-officer convinced a small town for 5 months that he was a federal agent.

How does this happen? A sustained message of fear for years and the repeated mantra of trust of those in power coupled with a man who looked and sounded the part.

That said, it’s refreshing how quickly these things can be unraveled when the right questions are asked (and people do their jobs).

Those who wish to perpetuate a lie will go to great lengths. We can never completely prevent it, but we can create infrastructure that raises the bar for those trying to hide and deceive. Good tools, vigilance, and a little skepticism on the part of the deceived can go a long way to prevent this type of thing from happening near you.

“Town Finds Drug Agent Is Really an Impostor”

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s anti-drug campaign abruptly unraveled after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding-performing minister, a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

The 51-year-old reporter apparently used about an hour on “the computer” after finding Mr. Jakob’s real name and uncovered enough to end the ruse.

I find that to be extremely comforting.

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Summer of ’08 – Part I

It’s almost June. Wow.

The last month and a half have really been a blur. Let’s see if we can work out why…

PARC
I met Ed Chi at ASIST last October when he hijacked a panel with his very interesting work on WikiDashboard. I had seen the work already and knew enough about it to approach Ed and pick his brain about how I could collaborate with the project. In December, while in Mountain View for IIW again, I made an appointment to visit PARC and see how things worked inside a research center famous for many years for doing cool things. I left with the plan to apply for a summer internship working under Ed in the Augmented Social Cognition group on WikiDashboard itself. In the Spring, I heard that they really wanted me and I made the decision to be in Palo Alto for four months. I’m thrilled with the work I’ve been doing for the past four weeks and the people I’m working with. There is quite a bit of interest in wikis and other collaborative tools in ASC and I am very pleased to be in the middle of it. I hope to be able to share a bit more about what I’m working on when the time is right.

Drive to California
Of course, after making the decision to be in California for the summer, I needed to work out how that was going to happen logistically. The decision was made to drive and so, for six days, many miles were covered, a sister was visited, and lots of money was spent on gasoline. All in all, a grand success – and one I look forward to duplicating on the way home in early September, except for the gasoline part.

IIW 2008a
Already being in Palo Alto, it was very easy to join in the semi-annual gathering that is the Internet Identity Workshop. This was my fifth(?!) and again, it was great to sit and talk with the people building this next generation of technologies. The climate has shifted even more now to business models and reputation – a far cry from the spec discussions and interop demos from only a year or two ago. I spent an afternoon talking with Eugene Eric Kim, yet again, and still find him one of the most compelling people working in this space. He’s got projects around the world and he’s excited about how these technologies are helping groups get their stuff done.

Park Alumni Society
Speaking of groups getting their stuff done – I’ve been in a heavy development cycle in the last couple of months. I’ve written more code and pushed more new features into production in the last 7-8 weeks than any time since writing claimID. I am the president of an alumni group at NC State and run our intranet and web presence as well. We recently added a unified login to our forums and wiki and the new application that runs the Park Office’s interactions with the scholars themselves. The effort required to network across classes and facilitate communication should go way down. I’m very happy with the result and hopefully I can start to sleep a little more soon.

Park Scholarships
The Park Scholarships itself is undergoing some change. The director of the scholarship has announced her decision to take a new position, and after eleven years, we need to find a new leader. I have been asked to be on the search committee by the Chancellor and I hope we can help deliver a candidate who can fill the rather large shoes being left behind in August.

ClaimID
ClaimID is getting some development love itself this early summer (in between rigorous interviews). Fred and I are integrating a new authentication mechanism into the mix. It works by selecting images instead of typing passwords. Watch this space as we work out all the kinks and make a new shiny thing.

iPhone
And with all of that, I’ve finally found the need to enter the modern world of telephony. I bought an iPhone before the trip out west, and have been thrilled at how much it’s changed my daily interaction with the information around me. Numbers, addresses, internet, camera, music, podcasts, calendar, maps – it’s in my pocket and it syncs with the stuff I already had. Very cool. Highly recommended.

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Reflections on iConference08 at UCLA

Over a month ago (how did that happen already?), I attended the iConference at UCLA and had a great time. I spent three nights and four days in a blur of activity and ideas. Over my time in Los Angeles, I visited Kinko’s twice, generated three presentations, gave three presentations, and had fancy finger-foods at the Getty Center (and Research Institute and Museum) (which has one of the most stunning architectural layouts I’ve ever seen).

Doctoral Colloquium
I spoke about my ongoing progress towards my dissertation topic of Contextual Authority Tagging and laid out my most recent plan of attack (pdf 736kB). I can see how the pieces are fitting together now and did my best to convey a few years of work into 10 minutes. It’s not an easy thing to do, but I’m getting better at it. Practice definitely helps.

Poster Session
The next day, I shared my newest results concerning Cloudalicio.us and its use for seeing the tags used on a group of items change over time. This was the first time in public for this data and these views, and I received some wonderful feedback regarding periodicity (and the potential predictive power of these graphs) as well as generalizability.

Watching Organizational Opinion via Social Tagging (pdf 424kB)

It turns out, if I can describe the type of data I’m graphing better – others may be able to push their data into Cloudalicio.us and see how their own data is changing over time. This is very exciting as it opens up many potential collaborations – with people and datasets I’d otherwise not have an opportunity to see.

Panel Session
The third day of my whirlwind week was an early-morning presentation of the contribution that may have the most impact on others doing research. Tag Decay (pdf 176kB). I posit that by adding time to the tagging ‘triumvirate’, we add a fourth dimension.

tagdecay.png

The feedback for this talk was very strong and I have a couple good ideas moving forward, if only I can get some time to get a bit of code working.

Plane Home
One last little note. On the flight home, I was able to get the Cloudalicio.us engine to parse and process data from Connotea in addition to the native del.icio.us tagging sets I’ve been using. This means there’s hope for multiple parsers to be designed/coded in the wild. Cloudy may have its day, yet!

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