Wikia search follow up
Check it out - Jimmy Wales (co-founder of Wikipedia) created my User talk page on Wikia search. He welcomed me to the fold. Woot!
New (to everyone) and Useful (?): Wikia Search
Wikia Search (alpha) is here! Wikia's working on an open-source search engine. Search and search results have such power to drive internet traffic that I can get behind Wikia's statement: "I believe that search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and that it can and should therefore be done in an open, objective, accountable way." (from the About Us page) It'll take a while for the user-contributed parts of the database to get built up, but I've already started doing my part. I wrote a mini article about ICLS 2008 because that was the first thing for which I searched. I know what ICLS is but didn't have it bookmarked, so it seemed like a logical thing for which I could write a mini article. I'll be interested to see what happens with Wikia search, and I'm glad there's now an open alternative.
Google Calendar MediaWiki plugin
Ever find yourself needing to embed a Google Calendar in a MediaWiki page? Well, now you can.
Usage
<googlecalendar>umhappyhours@gmail.com</googlecalendar>
Code
<?php
# Google Calendar Extension
#
# Purpose:
# Embed a Google Calendar in a MediaWiki page
# Tag/Wikitext :
# <googlecalendar>docid</googlecalendar>
# Example :
# from <iframe src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=umhappyhours%40gmail.com"
# style="border: 0" width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
# Instructions :
# set $input to the Google Account that owns the calendar you want to embed
# set $width & $height to the proportions appropriate for your wiki page
#
# Credits
# This code is adapted from Kasper Souren's original extension, sometimes available at
# http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/wiki/index.php?title=Google_Calendar_MediaWiki_plugin
# License
# GNU Public
$wgExtensionFunctions[] = 'wfGoogleCalendar';
$wgExtensionCredits['parserhook'][] = array(
'name' => 'Google Calendar',
'description' => 'Display Google Calendar',
'author' => 'Libby Hemphill',
'url' => ''
);
function wfGoogleCalendar() {
global $wgParser;
$wgParser->setHook('googlecalendar', 'renderGoogleCalendar');
}
# The callback function for converting the input text to HTML output
function renderGoogleCalendar($input) {
$input = htmlspecialchars($input);
//$input = "umhappyhours@gmail.com"
$width = 425;
$height = 350;
$output = '<iframe src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=' . $input;
$output .= '" style="border: 0" width="' . $width;
$output .= '" height="' . $height . '" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>';
return $output;
}
?>
This page made possible by the Code Markup WordPress plugin. Thank you!
A love letter to mashups
Seriously, I love mashups. I love that they're called "mashups". I love that people make so freakin' many of them. I love that they have such potential to make the world more interesting and usable.
If you're not familiar with mashups:
Mashups are web applications that combine data available from multiple sources into one view. They often rely on open APIs from the data sources (API = application programming interface - essentially a set of functions, rules, etc. that a computer program makes available so that other programs can talk to it).
If you are but haven't seen any good ones lately:
- MashUpComing - Upcoming! and Yahoo! Maps
- LivePlasma - Amazon's media products and the relationships among them, a recommender system on steroids (a descendent of musicplamsa, that rockin' music recommender system)
- Flickr Sudoku - Sudoku + Flickr images of numbers (my mom says it's harder than "regular" sudoku because she got used to recognizing the patterns of her own handwriting and system font, and the Flickr photos don't present such patterns)
To find mashups you can love:
Programmable Web Mashup Directory - 2560 of 'em as of this writing
Solving the service provider problem
During the CDI Workshop at Rennselaer in September, one of the computer scientists complained that when he collaborates with social scientists, he feels like they view him as a service provider rather than a collaborator. It sounded like he had some experience with a social scientist who's approach was to say, "Go build this thing so I can deploy it and study the deployment." In my short talk, I mentioned that social scientists in interdisciplinary collaborations are not service providers either. I've worked with computer scientists before who approach our work with the attitude that I will "fix the social stuff", whatever that means. So it seems that we have a problem. Computer scientists and social scientists recognize that if we worked together, we might find answers to interesting problems. Here I'm thinking about expertise finding, knowledge sharing, and distributed collaboration as problems that might benefit from such a collaboration. How can we work together without having either side feel like the other side is using them for a service rather than as a colleague?
Man, I wish I had an answer. Why is this bothering me today? Well, I'm trying to set up CoSign so that the new version of the KNOW SI wiki will allow UM users to login using their existing UM login credentials. This means I need to dig into the innards of the Apache server we're running. That sounds almost CS-y to me. Probably not to a CS person though. Anyway, CoSign and the resulting permissions options represent one of the socio-technical problems that I think could benefit from both computer science and social science. What's the best way to set up permissions on our school wiki? What technical infrastructure (e.g. .htaccess, CoSign, MediaWiki extensions) is necessary to supporting the kind of social behavior (e.g. TBD, which makes the technical questions that much harder) in which people want to engage on this wiki? Those are the questions I'll be wrestling with this weekend and probably for a while.
Libby is also on the move
That's right - it's almost time for me to leave the Bel-Air apartments! Many of you have reveled at 815 during the last five years, and I know you must be sad to see me go. Have no fear; I'll be just down the street. My friend Molly and I are giving up our student apartments and moving into a lovely grown up house in August, and I can't wait! If you have a grill that needs a new home, please let me know. I'll be posting some stuff from my apartment on Ann Arbor eCycle this week. Even if you don't want any of my old stuff, I encourage you to join eCycle so you can reduce waste, no strings attached.
Collaboration and Identification
My dissertation proposal threatens me. When I use an alarm clock and end up hitting "snooze," it haunts my snooze time. It looms over my waking hours, mocking me with its shape-shifting. Writing in Word has proven ineffective, and so, I'll try some stream-of-consciousness right here on my blog.
I think my dissertation will explore collaboration and identification. I'm especially interested in how the ways in which we identify ourselves and others influences the ways in which we work with them. Some previous work on which this builds includes
- Common ground - Herb Clark
- Identity in organizations - Janet Dukerich
- Sociality - Michel Maffesoli
- Networks and context - Bruno Latour, Stan Wasserman
- Sensemaking (esp. property of identity) - Karl Weick
- Personal knowledge - John Bransford
- Smart groups - Brigid Barron
- Facework and presentation of self - Erving Goffman
- Social computing - Marc A. Smith, Paul Dourish
In the posts to come, I'll try to tease out what it is about those works that I think can inform my own. The list is obviously incomplete and non-exhaustive, but it helped to write it down. Now you can all hold me accountable for it (eventually).
Take that, positivists!
I've been struggling to articulate my frustrations with social software and community technologies, and I've finally found an article that helped me immensely. (Thank you, Sean Munson, for sending me the paper!)
What's bothered me is how anti-social so many examples of social software seem to be. They seemed to employ, as Paul Dourish said, a "highly positivist interpretation of social phenomena - a sort of social science, perhaps, uniquely attractive to engineers" (Dourish, 2005). Rather than recognize that often people just want to connect to others, social software seemed to assume that individuals were incredibly goal driven and that any software designed for those goals (e.g. organizing meetings) would be readily embraced.
Social Responsibility
As I wrestle with my ideas about what to study for my dissertation, the idea of "socially responsible research" keeps bubbling up. It's not a term I've heard used often; I'm borrowing it from "socially responsible investing." I'm not sure what it means to be socially responsible or to conduct responsible research, but I'm trying to figure that out. Studying poker players and their social identities seems like a great project for me, but it's hard for me to see immediate or short-term positive social impacts of that research. So instead, I've been reading up on socially responsible investing, U.S. politics, and rethinking my ideas about researching training/novices/newcomers/etc.
So, the questions weighing on my mind are:
When should I pick a Democratic candidate and start thumping for him/her? Who's Running in 2008? (nytimes)
How can I collect data about changes in social networks over time?
What would a study of new members' (of organizations) informal social learning look like?
When I start earning money again, where should I invest it? Socially Responsible Mutual Fund Screens (socialinvest.org)