Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Novelty and collective attention / Huberman and Wu

If you wait long enough, it won't be novel, and thus it won't be worthwhile to pay attention to. Thus by incorporating a delay loop into your news consumption you'll miss a bunch of transient spikes of things that are no longer newsworthy.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/104/45/17599

Novelty and collective attention

Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman*

Information Dynamics Laboratory, HewlettPackard Laboratories, Palo
Alto, CA 94304

Edited by Harry L. Swinney, University of Texas, Austin, TX, and
approved September 14, 2007 (received for review May 25, 2007)

The subject of collective attention is central to an information age
where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus
of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and
eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the
dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of an
interactive web site, digg.com, devoted to thousands of novel news
stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model
characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate
that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law,
suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention
fades.

(via dragomir radev)

Technorati Tags: attention, novelty, digg

Yahoo leadership - nature abhors a vacuum

As GigaOM notes in Yahoo Please Put Up A Fight

Yahoo has a staggering 500 million users. However, it does a rather poor job of monetization. The vision that Yang shared at CES last week (“At Yahoo we want to be the most essential starting point for your life”) can come true if the key activities that we perform online are channeled through its My Yahoo service. And on the financial side, each of those activities needs to be backed up by a monetization model that takes full advantage of the traffic that Yahoo consistently manages to generate and preserve.

If you have an interesting network with a huge number of users and an awful way to monetize the traffic, people divert their attentions to other interesting networks with perhaps less users and much better ways to monetize traffic.  This is particularly true if the gating point for your interest and attention is your ability to fund day-in, day-out, constant attention to a project, and account or a campaign.

Jerry and Sue, you need to show some leadership.  Make it possible for me to make money on your network.  If you can't, I'll systematically divert my attention (and my clients spend) to other networks that perform better than Yahoo.  I'll happily take good ideas from Brad and Caterina and Stuart and Les and Susan and Joshua and put them to work somewhere that will generate good cash flow.  And I'll invite anyone who was laid off or who left Yahoo to join me on the Yahoo alumni network where we can figure out what's next.

social media metrics / quality without a number

“To seek the timeless way we first must know the quality without a number. There is a central quality which is the rooted criterion of life and the spirit of man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be numbered.”

Brian Kerr channeling Chris Alexander for a new century and an old industry.

Technorati Tags: qwan

Hotwire and Facebook Beacon

UPDATED: to make it more clear who is saying what!

0. My trip reservations (I got a great hotel deal) sent to Facebook, and noted on Flickr by Matt Hampel, with some surprise, in a post "Ed What?"

I sincerely hope that Facebook sees some righteous response about this weird privacy advertising-without-paying-us business.

1. Complaint to Hotwire, written by me.

I spoke with Tracy (employee number 1258) regarding a concern that I had that Hotwire was misusing certain data that I had an expectation of privacy on by sharing it with Facebook which in turn sent a note to 300 of my friends, one of whom asked if I was spamming them and if it was really me. I'm generally happy with Hotwire, and it's saved me a bunch of money, and I tell my friends that I use it, but the details of the interaction with Facebook and your customer service professional's insistence that I take up the problem with Facebook (with whom I have never spent any money) is disappointing. I would like an apology from Hotwire for spamming my friends, a setting in the Hotwire application to prevent it from ever happening again, and two free night's stay to compensate me for the hassle that you have put me through so far in explaining that no, I didn't spam all of them with details of where I buy my tickets.

2. From Hotwire customer service:

Dear Edward,

Thank you for contacting Hotwire regarding Facebook.

I regret the trouble you have had with Facebook.

Facebook Beacon provides advanced privacy controls so Facebook users can decide whether to distribute specific actions from participating sites with their friends. If you decide to use Facebook Beacon it means you have chosen to share your personal online usage information.

If you are logged onto your Facebook and complete a transaction on Hotwire, a pop-up window appears on the lower right corner. The pop-up presents a story about your booking.

If you do nothing or close the pop-up window, the story appears on your friends News Feed and their own Facebook homepage Mini-Feed. If you click "No Thanks" the story is not published.

Your friend sees the story and clicks on the link. For Hotwire they are taken to the vertical landing page.

Important: They do not see any information about what was purchased or personal billing information about you, the Facebook Beacon user.

For the privacy policy with Facebook go to
http://www.facebook.com/policy.php. You can also go to
privacy@facebook.com

I apologize for the inconvenience and frustration this has caused.

If we can be of further assistance, please feel free to reply to this
email or contact us directly at 1-866-HOTWIRE (468-9473). Thank you for
choosing Hotwire.

Sincerely,

Valerie R
Hotwire Customer Care
www.hotwire.com

3. From Facebook customer service

Hi Edward,

Just as News Feed has always enabled you to share the actions you take on Facebook with your friends, now you can share many of the actions you take on rest of the web as well.

Facebook is now affiliated with a variety of websites to have the actions you take on their sites pulled back into Facebook and communicated to your friends through News Feed. To take advantage of this feature, you must be logged into Facebook while you interact with one of these affiliated sites. When you perform an action on an affiliated site, you have the option to have this action generate a story in your friends’ News Feed. You will always be notified and given the opportunity to opt out of having that particular story published.

As a Facebook user, you have complete control to determine your privacy settings for the actions you take on other websites. The next time you navigate to the Facebook Home page after interacting with an affiliated site, you’ll receive a second reminder that that website is about to publish a story on your behalf. Again, you can choose not to publish that particular story. You also have the option to specify whether you want that website to always publish stories, notify you before publishing stories, or never publish stories for you. As always, Facebook gives you full control of your information. You can edit your privacy at any time from the Privacy Settings for Third-Party Websites page.

Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns regarding this new feature.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Reece
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

UPDATES:

Links on this topic (oh, there are a lot; just picking some contemporary ones):

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life / Some Thoughts on the Facebook Beacon

Recently I’ve read a number of negative posts about the Facebook Beacon which highlight how easy it is for a company to completely misjudge the privacy implications and ramifications of certain features in social software applications.

MoveOn to Facebook: We caught you red-handed

Shortly thereafter, the back-and-forth spat continued as MoveOn's Adam Green issued a response to the response. "Facebook has made zero changes in Beacon since last week--their policy remains opt-out instead of opt-in, their opt-outs remain well hidden, and if someone does jump through the hoops of opting out it only applies to purchases made on one external web site instead of all sites," Green's statement read. "Why did Facebook pro-actively make it harder for Facebook users to protect their privacy by eliminating the global opt-out feature days before Beacon's launch?"

MORE UPDATES:

41 sites using Facebook Beacon

Below is the full list and, when available, what information the websites send to Facebook. The one entry I found the most interesting was the one for Redlight. As I mention below, I couldn't find any site that went by that name that wasn't an adult site. Maybe the same people who share their porn viewing are the ones who are interested in Random Play?

Technorati Tags: beacon, facebook, giant-global-graph, hotwire, spam, travel

Wiki Wednesday / Ann Arbor / Nov 2007 notes

Last night was Wiki Wednesday in Ann Arbor. We met at Rendezvous on South U.

In attendance: @matth @homelessdave @edwardvielmetti griff
Regrets: @bkerr @vaguery @samrose @tedernst

The main topic was Arborwiki, it's continuing care and feeding.

I gave some results of initial local search log analysis from the new features in Google Analytics, as a way to systematically surface pages that people are looking for that aren't there or that need love.

We talked about ways to source more photos for Arborwiki, with a call to the local Flickr community. Many pages don't have pictures on them that could. The Ann Arbor District Library has an image archive, but copyrights are murky and thus most of the photos are unusable. Most Flickr people are happy to grant rights to their photos for Arborwiki use if asked.

Griff talked about ideas for putting together a local community newspaper out of Ann Arbor Alive. We worked through some of the mechanics and logistics of this including trying to figure out a hosting platform - consensus was that Arborwiki has some of the data, but that this might be an ideal student Drupal design project.

There was some brainstorming about bicycle-mounted, bicycle-powered low power FM. Dave has bike power and a trailer suitable for towing a mobile station. FCC regs (unclear on exactly which) allow some amount of low power broadcasts as long as they are non-interfering; with an Internet head-end and a network of neighborhood retransmitters you could reasonably build community radio on the cheap.

Dave suggested an area of focus around expanding the number of biographies on the site. It would be reasonable, for instance, to have a bio page for every elected official, for every person that a street was named after, and for other people with some notability or notoriety. Less clear was the relationship between people's "user" pages and people's "bio" pages for folks who are contributors.

Matt talked about maps and mapping and plugins that manage that, which appear to be evolving well. Some ideal future neogeowiki world has an infrastructure that generates KML as a byproduct of user behavior for mapping and search.

NEEDS LINKS - DO THAT NEXT - POST NOW

Google acquires Jaiku, film at 11

Google has acquired Jaiku. The Finnish service (what do you call it? a microaggregator?) pulls in feeds from your various web presences and turns it into a lifestream. My Jaiku profile hauls in a bunch of news from the various dispersed places I put thing.

I have about 30 friends I'm following on Jaiku, which is tiny compared to the rest of my use of these sorts of things. My use of it in the past has been some part backup relief valve for when Twitter is down, and part keeping in touch with a more European crowd.

The analysis of the Jaiku acquistion is happening in real time to the right hand side of my screen on Twitter. Ross Mayfield expects that Jaiku competes with Facebook's Social News Feed, and notes that integration with Google Talk adn Orkut is perfectly reasonable. Steve Rubel predicts that Twitter is the next to go and suggests that Yahoo will snap them up inside 45 days. There's the usual undercurrent of groaning about yet another chance for a cool service to be swallowed in the maws of a huge company, with the memory of Dodgeball fresh in mind.

Jaiku did some work to integrate with Nokia's Series 60 phones, and they have a mobile version for ordinary mobile phones. My early take on it compares it head on with Twitter's mobile version, which is much more awesome for me in part because it has my motley assortment of Ann Arborites, librarians, web geeks and fellow bus riders to help me get through the day in real time. I don't have that collection of people on Jaiku, and thus for me it does not have the same real time feel.

The other point of comparison is Jaiku vs. Facebook's tools for aggregating information about yourself. I don't know any other tool out there that quite so neatly pulls in abbreviated versions of the things you're up to and consolidates them quite so well as a personal chronology and record. This "lifestream" approach is nicely done, compact, and useful, and they figured out search optimization enough so that every so often I get Jaiku as a referrer for something I've written and have it show up high in search results. Facebook feels like it needs constant tending, but Jaiku can run in the background and passively gather the stuff you're doing on the open network and pull back 1% of it to keep a record.

With the current froth around Facebook and thus by extension all close substitutes for it I'm not surprised by this acquisition. Jaiku is much more a tool that belongs on and lives in the open Internet than Facebook. If you were to roll back the clock and make a comparison, it would be between AOL or Compuserve back in the day in the Facebook seat, and Usenet, home pages, email lists and What's New pages in the rest-of-the-world seat. Last time, AOL lost and the net won, but it won only by mostly destroying itself and remaking itself in the process. This time who knows.

Technorati Tags: jaiku, google, facebook, goog, acquisition, hosting

Michigan who? Oregon embarrasses the Wolverines 39-7

The font is Melior. Oregon's branding is done by Nike, which took over from Disney. Thanks to @jweise from Books By Chance for ID'ing it.

Know your foe - Oregon has all the rest you'd need to know.

The Oregonian is hosted on OregonLive.com, which will be familiar to you if you have seen or suffered through MLive. They print a charming Ann Arbor, for uninitiated which name-checks Bob Seger, Iggy Pop, the MC5, Gerald Ford, Robert Frost, Arthur Miller, Bob Ufer, Fielding H. Yost, Fritz Crisler, Don Canham and Bo Schembechler.

The pull quote is

With its tree-lined streets, coffee shops and jaywalking, it's not unlike Eugene -- if Eugene lacked mountains and had a much bigger football stadium.

Awesome Twitter coverage of the game.

@osmedd: Game over, Oregon 39, Michigan 7. And so ends the Michigan season for all intents and purposes.

@peterhoneyman this game is mercifully over. 7-39. it's official: michagan sucks.

@srah If this year is bad, next year will be worse: No Hart, new QB and - presumably - new coach.

@toddmundt i'm wearing an Iowa shirt today. way to go Michigan :(

@argedee: Bo and Four

A roundup from the sports blogs:

FanIQ: Oregon Ducks Embarrass Lloyd Carr, Michigan Wolverines 39-7

Lloyd Carr is going to be lucky if he makes it through the season ... alive. I realize the Wolverines lost some key starters to the NFL, but a defense this bad is unacceptable. The amount of missed tackles is only eclipsed by the number of boos. Even worse, an offense that has no excuses for not being explosive could only muster 7 points? What is going in A-squared?

Ann Arbor News: U-M falls to Oregon, 39-7

A week after Appalachian State's upset made Michigan the nation's laughingstock, the Wolverines didn't do anything to redeem themselves Saturday against Oregon.

Quo Vadimus, Michigan Loses to Oregon -- Unbelievable, Yet Entirely Predictable

Michigan has now lost four in a row dating back to last season, having lost each game since Bo Schembechler's death before the Ohio State game last year, and are completely lost, on every level.

Michigan Daily / The Game: Oregon vs. Michigan Live Updates

Here’s some halftime analysis from our beat writers. But if you’re looking for a good laugh to cheer you up, go and read some our pre-game predictions (cough) Bromwich (cough).

I'll leave @bkerr with the final word: OREGON

Technorati Tags: annarbor, eugene, melior, michigan, michigan-who, oregon, twitter, unempLLOYD

a2b3 lunch non-summary August 16, 2007

We had about 35 people for lunch at Eastern Accents. The question of the day way "what event is on your calendar" - here's the results in the simplest most basic format w/links to Arborwiki for detail pages.

in the rough order of the events

tomorrow procrastination

every Thursday a2b3 lunch at Eastern Accents (arrive early to avoid a line)
every Friday coworking at Pure Visibility in the a.m.
Saturday music event at Great Oak Cohousing starts 11am
Saturday Facebook event in Chicago
this weekend Ypsilanti Heritage Festival
Monday deadline for "stick around Ann Arbor" story
Tues UPA Generational Design in Livonia (carpool available)

Aug 24 Dexter Cider Mill opens. Fresh, hot donuts.

Aug 28 Leaders Connect / Connect Ann Arbor event
Aug 30 Lansing-Mackinaw City bike ride

After Labor Day back to school, 1st day kindergarten
1st weekend September AAUW book sale at WCC

Oct 13, 20 Ruby conference sponsored by Ruby user group
mid Oct MyReggae launches

Oct 27 ArbCamp - Bar Camp Ann Arbor at WCC Morris Lawrence building

Nov 30, 31 NSFNET Legacy 20th reunion in DC area

when this note shows up on Facebook I'll tag it with some people and we can generate the corresponding events there.

thanks all for an awesome lunch.

scrabulous: online scrabble game needs Facebook developers w/experience in load balancing

from the error page at the scrabulous facebook site:

Need another day.

What we did last night did not work, we need another day to get this running.

There's no point in letting everyone try to play and face errors, so we're closing it for some more time. Please check back in tomorrow.

Any programmers with experience in load balancing please email fb.scrabulous@gmail.com . We can do with some support in that area.

Sorry folks ... trying our best to give you the best.

always interesting when facebook apps go down because of heavy loads (and I do miss my scrabble games).

Technorati Tags: scrabble, scrabulous, facebook, load-balancing, scaling, architecture, games

starting and keeping a group going

Derek Mehraban, Debbie Merion and I got together for coffee at Caribou and talked about group organization and group building. Here are her notes:

Here are the top four social networking ideas I heard from Ed and Derek
during our 6/4/07 chat as we talked about starting a large group
quickly (Connect Ann Arbor) and a smaller group more slowly (A2B3):

1. Call up the leaders of organizations to mobilize a large group of
people quickly

2. Use the moderator tools of Yahoo groups to send out an automated
monthly reminder to group members and a welcome message

3. Assume that starting a new group takes some period of time (2
years?!) and regular messages and face meetings to find the best place
to meet and engaged folks.

4. The payoff for being distracted online by others is that they get
to know you and will also allow you to distract them, meaning you can
mobilize a large group of quickly when you have something to say.

What are your tips for getting people engaged in a group?

Technorati Tags: a2b3, connectannarbor, abby