How about indigenous content? "Created by the natives for themselves." That's the definition offered on Many to Many by Clay Shirky (who credits his friend Kio Stark) and available on NetLingo. The comments for that blog post offer some other interesting alternatives to "user generated content" such as "lovingly generated content" (instead of amateur, which lots is loving roots in translation).
I've been looking for a way to describe the content users of the SI Wiki contribute, and indigenous might work for now. I like that indigenous content invokes notions of a physical community, and it is, in part, the physical SI community that makes that wiki different. It's not a wiki for the world or for some mass of people who don't know one another; it's a wiki for the people, by the people. Stay tuned for more research on how that wiki works, who uses it, what kinds of information people contribute, and why all that matters. For a summary of the early work, see our GROUP paper.
Want to know if you're getting the best deal on that hard drive/coat/speaker/tire/pencil/camera/etc? mShopper.net is here to help. mShopper lets you use your cell phone to compare prices of in-store items to online retailers and other retailers near by. You can even set it up so that you can buy from an online retailer on the spot instead of waiting until you get home. My brother told me about it awhile ago; I can't believe I forgot to blog it. Check it out. I dig it; it saves me money. Oh, and you can designate a charity to receive a percentage of your mShopper purchases. Cool.
I was born in 1980. That puts me in a somewhat ambiguous (like that? somewhat ambiguous. ha!) position as far as those trendy Generation X, Generation Y terms go. Luckily, there's finally a full name for Generation that makes me happy. It's called the Work from Home Generation. We WFH types are good for the environment, more productive, and cheap. Well, we might be. We may also be bad brainstormers and a little on the workaholic side. That's what the article says anyway. My friend Jeff alerted me to the article, probably because my Google Talk status now says "working from home" nearly all day, every day.
People around the School of Information have been using status messages and display names including geographic info such as "at SIN" and "in DTW" for years, and I like to follow social norms sometimes so I do too. Trouble is, having my status say "@ home" all the time makes me sound like a slacker. You know I'm right. I'm not slacking though; I'm working in a nice room with 2 windows, 3 lamps, and loud music that just happens to be close to my leftovers and accessible by foot from my bedroom. I'm not one of those WFH types who stays in her pajamas all day, but I do spend much more time in my home office than in any other workspace. My office mate at school and I have different preferences for our space. She prefers quiet; I prefer music. She prefers fluorescent lighting; I prefer lamps and lots of 'em. Working from home lets me stay focused on all the writing I need to do as a late-stage doctoral student while listening to whatever music I want and without spending money on gas or getting nauseated on the Michigan buses.
Assuming you already have a good space at home that can serve as an office (and nothing else), I have a couple important policies that help keep working from home productive and enjoyable:
- Make lunch plans with people at least a couple times a week, and leave the house to meet them
- Get dressed!
- Use an external monitor, ergonomic external keyboard, and good speakers
- Schedule meetings with colleagues during the week, and leave time on both ends to take advantage of being in the office (e.g. printing, catching up with colleagues, bouncing ideas off others, making plans)
- Take breaks that get you moving around
That's what works for me. Well, I guess we'll know if it worked when my dissertation's actually done, but so far, so good.
Here's a summary of the other research I do (or want to do) that's not my dissertation. This was originally a 2-page research statement submitted to some people with money to burn.
Research Summary - Communities and Technologies
At the broadest level, my research is about communities and technology. My research enriches our understanding of the roles social media play in supporting offline communities. My approach differs from much of current social media research, because I focus on teams and organizations in which people know each other and use technologies to support their activities (e.g. Upcoming!, workplace wikis) rather than on online communities of people who do not know one another offline (e.g. SlashDot, Yahoo! Answers) (see Beenen et al., 2004; Lampe & Resnick, 2004; Preece, 2000; and Smith & Kollock, 1999). My work necessarily encompasses studying offline behavior as well online behavior; in order to understand social media use by groups, it helps to understand the nature of a community. My research highlights the situated nature of social media use by offline communities and focuses on how social and technical processes impact community behavior both online and off. A better understanding of behavior in communities using social media enables us to design social media more effectively and to recommend behaviors and tools to make communities more successful.
My most recent work asks, how do faculty and students in a graduate school use a wiki to share information about their community with each other and with the public? What does their use tell us about what it might be important for new community members to learn? How can we use their wiki use behavior to understand how people make decisions about what information to share and what to keep to themselves? Understanding the community provides insights into the way members of those communities interact with one another via social media. My goal is to leverage human and computing resources so that a sociotechnical system can use the skills of humans and benefits of computation to improve collaboration and its supporting technologies. The remainder of this document briefly describes projects in which I have been involved with and ends with an overview of my continuing work.
Sharing and Storing Community Knowledge
In an era when more than half of all doctoral students leave before finishing their degrees and students must compete for increasingly scarce human and financial resources, it's no surprise that students welcome help completing their degree requirements. What is surprising in this instance is that students are not just the primary consumers of the information but are also the primary producers. They share human subjects review applications, books that help them write dissertation proposals, interview protocols, even advice about how to set up an experiment using existing technical resources. We might expect students competing for the same pool of resources to hoard, but in this instance, students are much more collaborative than competitive. Their behavior on the wiki demonstrates this difference, but only by studying the offline community can we really understand why. In this case, it's likely that the collaborative ethic of the school itself permeates the doctoral students. Faculty and students at the school, regardless of whether they use the wiki, recognize and enjoy the collegial atmosphere of the school. Students are well-funded by research and teaching positions and are encouraged by their faculty's examples and instructions to work together to do better research. The wiki is not the reason students share, but it is the social media tool they use to do so.
Another aspect of the wiki example that I find interesting is the near-mashup nature of content created and the potential such behavior indicates. On the wiki, users include data available elsewhere but combine that data in community-specific ways. For instance, one wiki page serves as a marketplace for used textbooks required by courses within the school. That page includes data from the course syllabi, email lists, booksellers, and individual users. Such pages indicate community information needs - in this case, students need to sell their extra books to a small potential market while students in that buying market seek good deals on books and some advance warning of what textbooks they'll need. Such pages also indicate what potentially useful mashups might appear were users able to construct them. New social media that offer and use open APIs such as Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo! Maps, and Upcoming! make asking such questions - what data sources might users combine for their communities if they could do it themselves? - possible.
Facilitating Ad Hoc Ridesharing
I was part of the original RideNow team at the University of Michigan. Our goal was to facilitate ad hoc ridesharing in Ann Arbor and to develop technologies that could be used to do the same in other communities. Cars in the U.S. can comfortably seat four or five people but rarely carry more than one (Transportation Statistics, 2004). Filling some of those seats would create tremendous benefits for both individuals and society as a whole. Riders and drivers would have convenient travel and the possibility of pleasant conversation. Society would benefit from reduced emissions and road congestion. However, barriers to ridesharing include 1) coordination problems, 2) risks of riding with strangers, and 3) mismatch in cost and benefit for riders and drivers.
We designed a service, called RideNow, that approached the problem of ridesharing by capitalizing on the benefits of incremental and localized design. Our system avoids the costs of overengineering by allowing incremental changes to occur. For example, the first instance of the system was rather bare bones - it offered free text fields that allowed users to decide how to specify ride information. Later versions of the system offered structured fields based on the behavior users exhibited in the first system. For example, the second generation of RideNow can parse dates such as "next Friday" rather than requiring a user to enter a specific date. The system also capitalizes on the benefits of nuance and ambiguity afforded by localized design. For example, RideNow's data fields allow users to enter information such as "after the faculty meeting." Our goal with RideNow was to design a system that allowed a well-established community to use personalized, situated software (Shirky, 2004) and that remained flexible enough to be adopted by other communities.
Continuing Research
My future work will extend my interest in studying communities and designing/building software to facilitate their collaborative activities. It is important to me to have a close connection between field research and system design. As social computing tools become more prevalent and the distance between developer and user diminishes, opportunities to improve both development and use abound. I look forward to asking question such as, how can we make powerful mashup tools such as Yahoo! Pipes usable by non-developers? What would users do with such technologies if they could use them? How would users tailor the content of their mashups and contributions to specific community audiences? I have seen users embrace flexible, situated technologies such as ridesharing systems and wikis, and I believe there is great promise for end-user development of social computing technologies. Issues such as community building and information sharing generalize regardless of the community being studied, and I look forward to the opportunity to study social computing and larger, distributed offline communities such as political movements and distributed work teams.
References
(2004). Omnibus survey household survey results. U.S. Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Beenen, G., Ling, K., Wang, X., Chang, K., Frankowski, D., Resnick, P. & Kraut, R. (2004). Using social
psychology to motivate contributions to online communities. In Proceedings of the Conference on
Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2004.
Lampe, C. & Resnick, P. (2004). Slash(dot) and burn: Distributed moderation in a large online conversation space. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2004 (pp. 542–550). Vienna, Austria: ACM Press.
Preece, J. (2000). Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbility. New York: Wiley.
Shirky, C. (2004). Situated software.
Smith, M. & Kollock, P. (Eds.). (1999). Communities in Cyberspace. Routledge.
I'm in line for Cubs season tickets. I've been in line since November of 2006. That's not a terribly long time (not like the 473 years Packers fans have to wait). Guess what number I am in line? 21393. That's ~50,000 spots closer than the day I signed up, so maybe next year I'll get a chance to buy seats? Guess I better get a job.
Go Cubs!
Help me out. Is a 60% share of the search market really an indicator of search excellence? You've already heard that Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo. You've already heard that combined, Yahoo and Microsoft have a search market share that's less than half of Google's own share. First, I wondered how market share in searching is calculated. Computer World makes it sound like queries are the market, so more queries = more share. Ok, fair enough.
Then I wondered, are more queries really better? Imagine if you will that you want to find something on the internet, but you're not sure what that thing is. You go to Google, you start searching. You get some results, but they're not quite what you wanted. So you search again. You still don't get quite what you want, so you try again. The cycle continues. You're racking up search queries, but you're not racking up finds. This happens to me a lot.
It seems that the point of internet search is internet find. If a search engine can't get you to find, then it's not that great, and an insanely high number of queries may indicate lots of users finding or lots of users not finding. Does anyone know which it is?
I'm a happy TurboTax customer and recommend them if you're looking for a free filing option. I was able to file my federal and state returns this morning for the low, low price of $0. My AGI is less than $54,000, and I am less than 30, so I had a lot of free file options. I also have a tiny bit of interest and dividend income, and sometimes that additional income means I can't use the free filing option that the big boys like CompleteTax, TurboTax, and H&R Block offer. Not so this year, TurboTax was easy-to-use and totally free. State returns aren't free in every state, but Michigan offers a free file option. Many of the federal free file options won't file your state return for free, but TurboTax will.
If E*Trade would send my 1099-DIV before January 31, I would file my taxes even earlier. I'm not interested in giving the government any extra time with the interest-free loan I provide them all year. Granted, that loan is teeny, but to me, it's a bunch of money. Someday my taxes will be complicated, and I may even want the extra couple of months to get together money to cover taxes I owe, but now while I'm broke and itching for that refund, I file ASAP. Good luck to you with your own taxes!
This morning, I ventured out into the five inches of fresh snow Ann Arbor received overnight. I love snow, and I was happy to go out. My roommate needed to go to work; I "needed" to justify my ownership of a 4x4. For the most part, Ann Arborites do a good job driving on the unplowed streets. Why they (including the main thoroughfare) remain unplowed at 10:15am, I do not understand. Anyway, the drivers were cautious and gave one another enough room to maneuver. The same cannot be said for the cyclists.
Ann Arborites like to ride their bicycles. I'm not into biking, so this doesn't make much sense to me. The seat hurts, the sweat comes fast, locks are expensive, you know, whatever. So Ann Arborites ride bikes. Apparently even in five inches of fresh snow. Trouble is, bikes don't work so well in that much snow. I wish I had video clips to show you of the man on a road bike, without a helmet, heading downhill into a busy intersection where pickup trucks were sliding about 45 degrees off straight. He's a smart one. The other helmet-less biker on Tappan was less likely to get mushed between cars, but he also couldn't stay upright for more than a couple feet. If your bike can't handle snow, and you have no helmet, you should walk. Riding your bike in the snow (more like hopping on and off your bike while you push it forward) doesn't make you look tough; it doesn't make you any more earth-friendly than the people walking by in their snowboots; and it certainly doesn't get you anywhere faster than walking.
So, lessons for today: If Ann Arbor gets five inches of snow, you have no car, and they don't plow the streets, walk or get a ride from your Jeep-driving roommate. Everyone will be safer that way.