via http://twitter.com/ShlomoArgamon/status/163977594566488064

"His general stance on email is off — understandably so. Who could ever have predicted our email culture? He is, for example, very up for doing email on weekends because “I’d rather answer email on Sunday and be in my pyjamas on Monday”. Unless the “Monday pyjamas” refers to working from home (which isn’t mentioned anywhere), this reads like a naive assumption that an hour tackling unending email on the weekend corresponds to going in late on Monday. Which, you know, it should. But it doesn’t.
Also, this gem: ”One of the enormous attractions of email is that it is not interruptive like a telephone.” This should be true, and is for some people, but I know that I and others struggle to restrain email checking to once or twice a day. Also, check this: ”You can process [email] at your leisure, and for this reason you may reply to messages that would not stand a chance in hell of getting through the secretarial defences of corporate, telephonic life.” I think not!"

"This is “the myth of selective sharing” (as Marc Smith calls it). Its an engineer’s dream based on a misunderstanding of the key distinction between offline and online life. Offline we assume that our conversations are not encoded and thereafter available to people outside of our immediate audience, by default. Yes, some lucky people give talks to large audiences, they get on the radio or tv. Most don’t. But everyone has some reason to share things with one person but not another. We don’t need to go as far as whistle blowers, political dissidents or closet cases in religious areas. Lots of people have grievances with their bosses, or find someone else attractive, or have problem students / subordinates they need advice on. Lots of people need advice on their own issues, be it alcoholism, drug abuse or gambling. When people do this offline, they do it in situations: temporally and spatially bounded contexts for action. The pub after work; the patio over a cup of coffee; the closed door meeting.

But what do we mean by offline anymore? Some assume it is when they are not searching and browsing the web? Or when they aren’t streaming video, emailing someone or inside a virtual world. Being offline actually refers to a much more limited space than that. Being online is being encoded and having that which is encoded available to some party other than those immediately present. You are not online when you are in front of a computer – you are online when your actions are being digitized and networked. Online is on-the-record. Offline is off-the-record.""if your speech is not confined to the context you are in – but available to a potentially unknowable audience – you are online.""This is why real name sites are necessarily inadequate. They deny individuals the right to be context-specific. They turn the performance of impression management into the process of curation. Facebook curates through the top news feed, Twitter does it through lists and Google+ through some confusing (and as far as I can tell, failing) social circles model. Impression management means selectively presenting an idealized version of one’s self specific to that context. ""Of course, this applies most strongly to non-addressed spaces. When I address someone in an email or on the phone, I am still online, but I’m not necessarily subject to curation. I send a message to a specific recipient, I expect that recipient to get the message, not have gmail decide (but even then spam is filtered out through some curation). On the other hand, when I submit content to social media sites, I do not have a clear view of who is, or will see it, outside of some vague notion of friend lists.

Pseudonyms have long been a way out of this situation. Someone might have one name for an anonymous support group, another for a group of bi-curious and closeted individuals (or just for sex in general), another for a message board about programming, and one for politics or political action. If these were mine, then the choice to blend them or keep them separate is mine. Real names and third-party curation takes away that choice. In their place they offer many advantages, but freedom is not one of them. And that’s why the imposition of one name, one network for all is an abuse of power. It says not only is the curator better at deciding who you should read your content than you, the curator won’t even give you the choice to begin with."

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"I think that code and experiment are actually linked at a deeper level. Both are an instantiation of process that take inputs and generate outputs. These are (to a first approximation – good enough for this discussion) deterministic in any given instance. But they are meaningless without context. Useless without the meaning that documentation and testing provide.""Too often when we write a scientific paper it’s the last part of the process. We fabricate a story that makes sense so that we can fit in the bits we want to. Now there’s nothing wrong with this. Humans are narrative processing systems, we need stories to make sense of the world. But its not the whole story. What if, as we collect and capture the events that we ultimately use to tell our story, that we also collect and structure the story of what actually happened? Of the experiments that didn’t work, of the statistical spread of good and bad results. There’s a sarcastic term in synthetic organic chemistry, the “American Yield” in which we imagine that 20 PhD students have been tasked with making a compound and the one who manages to get the highest overall yield gets to be first author. This isn’t actually a particularly useful number. Much more useful to the chemist who wants to use this prep is the spread of values, information that is generally thrown away. The difference between actually incorporating the running of the code into the documentation, and just showing one log file, cut and pasted, from when it worked well. You lose the information about when it doesn’t work.""Best practice in coding mirrors best practice in science. Documentation, testing, integration are at the core. Best practice is also a long way ahead of common practice in both science and coding. Both, perhaps are driven increasingly by a celebrity culture that is more dependent on what your outputs look like (and where they get published) than whether anyone uses them. Testing and documentation are hardly glamorous activities."

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via http://twitter.com/ccmarshall/status/17600534612 "The uselessness of comprehensive life-logging tools reveals the common flaws in how Mayer-Schönberger and Bell think about memory: perfect remembering afforded by life-logging yields less actual memory than more restrictive and discriminatory forms of capturing an experience. Retrieving the video footage of one’s entire lifetime from a hard drive is simply not the most effective strategy for evoking rich and emotional memories of an experience. Given a choice between using a camcorder or an audiocamera (a gadget that takes photos and records the ambient sounds at the time of the capture) to document an experience, 79 percent of respondents in a 2005 British study chose the audiocamera. Photos set to ambient sounds trigger more intense memories of experiences than do the same photos set to participants’ own voice commentary or even the video footage. What we treasure most about the memories of an important event is not the knowledge of our GPS coordinates or body temperature at that moment, but the totality of experiences we felt.""Life-logging may, however, have virtues as a supplement to ordinary memory. What if we could hear the ambient sounds that we heard on the beach every time we lift that seashell from our bookshelf? Or see an automatically reconstructed class schedule for a random day in our school calendar or listen in to the canteen buzz when viewing photos from our university days? What if we could browse through a digital collage of little-noticed ephemera—bus and opera tickets, restaurant bills, wine labels, price tags, and the like—collected on a summer vacation abroad?
Life-logging provides an effective way to produce superior, smarter time capsules that could make our future memories of the past richer and more multilayered. Few of us would take the effort to devise such time capsules for all events in our lives—besides, the importance we attach to such events changes over time—but life-logging could do this automatically, revolutionizing how we reminisce. Appreciating these virtues, however, requires that we understand the value of memory. And a second large problem with Delete is that Mayer-Schönberger makes no room for the positive and therapeutic role that remembering and especially reminiscence play in our lives. As a result, he does not see how technology could actually augment our memories without driving us insane.""The idea of privacy may need to be rethought in an age of search engines and social networks. And for this purpose, the notion of “contextual integrity”—developed by NYU’s Helen Nissenbaum, and brilliantly summarized in her new book Privacy in Context—suggests a way forward. Nissenbaum argues that information revealed in a particular context always bears the tag of that context; no information is context-free and thus no information is “up for grabs,” even if it is revealed in public spaces. Thus, appropriating information revealed in one context (seeing your supposedly straight colleague enter a gay bar) and inserting it into another (sharing this knowledge with other colleagues) would violate your colleague’s privacy, even though the events took place in public view."

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"These results provide additional evidence that task context matters, and that no single interface, no matter how intuitive or obvious, is necessarily the right representation. Designers should pay attention to what representative users actually do, rather than assuming that a particular representation will always be the best. Finally, this paper presents a good case study of how a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, of system building and of wizard-of-Oz simulation, can produce interesting and nuanced results that would be difficult to obtain by any particular method."

"For the purpose of this talk, when I talk about Big Data, I am talking about the kinds of data that marketers and researchers and business folks are currently salivating over. Data about people, their activities, their interactions, their behaviors. Data that sits at the foundation of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and every social media tool out there. Big Data is also at the center of many of the conversations here at WWW. Many of you are in the business of mucking around with Big Data. Others of you are building tools that leverage Big Data. All of you are producing content that is feeding into Big Data.""People from diverse disciplines are analyzing social networks using diverse methodological and analytical approaches. But it kills me when those working with Big Data think that the data they’ve collected from Facebook or through cell phone records are more “accurate” than those collected by sociologists. They’re extremely valuable networks, but they’re different networks. And those differences need to be understood.

Historically speaking, when sociologists were the only ones interested in social networks, data about social networks was collected through surveys, interviews, observations, and experiments. Using this data, they went on to theorize about people's personal networks. Debates rage about how to measure people's networks and whether certain approaches create biases and how to account for them. ""Nobody loves Big Data better than marketers. And nobody misinterprets Big Data better than marketers. They do so because they think that What answers questions of Why. My favorite moment came when I was on a panel where a brand marketer from Coca-Cola proudly announced that they had lots of followers on MySpace. I couldn't help but burst out laughing. Coincidentally, I had noticed that Coca-Cola was quite popular as a "Friend" and so I had started poking around to figure out why. After interviewing a few people, I found the answer: Those who were linking to coke were making an identity statement, but it wasn't the fizzy beverage that they were referring to. ""Misinterpretations are beautifully displayed when people try to implement findings into systems. My favorite example of this occurred when Friendster decided to implement Robin Dunbar’s work. Analyzing gossip practices in humans (and grooming habits in monkeys), Dunbar found that people could only actively maintain 150 relationships at any time. In other words, the maximum size of a person's personal network at any point in their life should be 150. Unfortunately, Friendster mistakenly believed that people were modeling their personal networks on the site so they took that to mean that no one should have a Friend's list greater than 150. So they capped it. D'oh! ""Privacy is not about control over data nor is it a property of data. It's about a collective understanding of a social situation's boundaries and knowing how to operate within them. In other words, it’s about having control over a situation. It's about understanding the audience and knowing how far information will flow. It’s about trusting the people, the situating, and the context. People seek privacy so that they can make themselves vulnerable in order to gain something: personal support, knowledge, friendship, etc.""o get at this, I want to argue five points:

1) Security Through Obscurity Is a Reasonable Strategy
2) Not All Publicly Accessible Data is Meant to be Publicized
3) People Who Share PII Aren’t Rejecting Privacy
4) Aggregating and Distributing Data Out of Context is a Privacy Violation
5) Privacy is Not Access Control""And they've come to believe that, even when their data is recorded, they're relatively obscure, just like they're obscure when they're in the ocean. And generally, that's pretty true. Just because technology can record things doesn't mean that it brings attention to them. So people rely on being obscure, even when technology makes that really uncertain. ""Privacy is about understanding the social conditions and working to manage the situation. Limiting access can be one mechanism in one's effort to maintain privacy, but it is not privacy itself. Privacy settings aren't privacy settings; they're accessibility settings. Privacy settings should be about defining the situation and communicating one's sense of the situation to others. ""accessibility and privacy are not the same things"" If you knew the magnitude of visibility, you might think differently about what you share. In fact, this precise feature is used by corporate Exchange servers to limit people from spamming mailing lists. When I write a message in Outlook to a mailing list on our internal server, I'm told that the post will go out to 10,432 people. This inevitably makes me think twice. But I fear that Facebook doesn’t want people to think twice.

Facebook could also tell you all of the services that have accessed your data through their APIs and all of the accounts that have actually looked at any particular item of content. People do actually want this feature. Countless teens installed what were actually phishing programs into their MySpaces because the service promised to tell them who was logging in. They want the feature, but it’s not available to them. Because it’s not in any company’s better interest. It is more likely to stifle participation than encourage it. ""People don't seek privacy when they have something to hide. They hide because they want to maintain privacy. They seek privacy because they are social creatures who want to understand the context and manage information accordingly. They seek privacy because they want to be socially appropriate and make themselves vulnerable to those around them. People hide in plain sight all the time, but this is getting trickier and trickier with each new technology." A decade ago, Larry published his seminal book "Code" where he argued that change is regulated by four factors: the market, law, social norms, and architecture or code. The changes that we're facing with privacy and publicity have been brought about because of changes in architecture thanks to code. It is possible to do things today that were never previously available. As we've seen, this has introduced all sorts of new market opportunities and we're watching as the market is pushing privacy and publicity in one direction. As I've outlined today, social norms are much more messy and not even remotely stabilized. To date, the law has been relatively uninvolved in what's happening. This won't last. We're already seeing grumblings in Europe and Canada and, to a lesser degree, the US about what is unfolding. But where the law will fall on these issues is quite unclear. As technologists, you need to be aware of these other regulatory actors and the ways in which they are part of the ecology, part of trying to balance things out.

via http://twitter.com/jcstearns/status/12520483390

"Col 3 Location
The location of users as observed by IYOUIT. Positioning can be up to the precision of a GPS coordinate or a street address.
Col 3 Place
Places of interest. Based on location traces, IYOUIT will figure out the areas of interest per user. Such areas are highlighted as Places.
Col 3 Experience
Personal experiences shared by IYOUIT users. Tell others what you do, feel or think.
Col 3 Photo
Photos shared by IYOUIT users. Just point your phone and shoot. Photos can be tagged and automatically enriched with personal context.
Col 3 Sound
Sound recordings shared by IYOUIT users. Recording is easy. Sounds can be tagged and automatically enriched with personal context.
Col 3 Observation
Observations that you make. As technical as Bluetooth beacons and WLAN hotspots that you scan. As general as products you consume and books that you read.
Col 3 Books and Products
Thirst for knowledge? Whatever you read or consume, share it with others. See what your friends enjoy for diversity.
Col 3 Weather
Local weather as experienced by you and others. See how your friends wander in the chill or relax in the heat.
Col 3 Marker
Mark your territory. Markers allow you to leave your trace in the environment and can be attached to different kinds of context. "

"We also see why the word “marriage” matters. The Dutch same-sex couples I interviewed saw their civil union-like status as “a bit of nothing,” as one person called it, or as a political compromise that an accountant might invent. Only marriage has the social understanding to back up the legal status, and the social meaning is as important as the legal rights. Civil unions just don’t have that social meaning. One woman I interviewed put it this way: “Two-year-olds understand marriage. It’s a context, and everyone knows what it means.”"

"We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down."

"But for many sorts of information and in many concepts, privacy isn’t the salient concept.

There is another important concept from city and village living – the concept of tact. In coffee shops and restaurants every day, people converse about the matter of their lives – their kids schools, weekend plans, sports injuries. This doesn’t mean that it’s socially appropriate for the person at the next table to jump in and express an opinion about how to treat tendonitis. The participants aren’t trying to keep the information confidential – they know that what they’re saying can be overheard. But they take advantage of social norms of tact to assume that other people are choosing to politely ignore their conversation. "

"“When I shift my thinking about AR apps to the physical library space I see our whole collection opening up before our eyeballs. Imagine the ability to walk down an aisle and see the reviews and popularity of an entire shelf titles just by pointing the camera lens on your phone at the spines (or outfacing covers),” writes Helene Blowers in her blog, Library Bytes."

"Efficient workflows require that your services maintain some context for you. Why are you here? What did you do last? What are you likely to do next? These are relatively simple things to do in a single host environment. They become a little harder across multiple machines. They become very difficult across data centers. Now introduce failures into the system: machines crashing, disks failing, applications failing, networks failing... all things that will happen. Your systems must be prepared on every transaction to infer some context even if that system has not previously seen your history."

"t instant access to Stevens doesn't rob him of his place in a context; only forgetting him altogether could accomplish that.""In place of this digitized ease of access, Birkerts offers the middlebrow comforts of Bartlett's Quotations as somehow more contextualizing and enriching. But Bartlett's (which began its career as an act of piracy by Harvard's printer in the nineteenth century) is a famously troubled, context-negating device, a universal Cliff Notes, the last hope of the intellectually lame. Contrast its thin fare with YouTube, where you can listen to the poet himself read "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"—where you'll also find an animated photograph of Stevens performing "No Ideas But In Things" in the poet's own voice; John Ashbery discussing Stevens' impact on his work; or any number of unknown readers reciting Stevens' works in front of their computers."

"You instantly know from looking at this thing that it’s not necessarily finished yet; not quite complete. And rather than letting you down, that incompleteness (in this case, an aesthetic one) opens up a communication.""One technique that S&W has been using recently to illustrate design work is placing sketches or wireframes in situ. Whilst wireframes themselves are incomplete artefacts, designed to be work in progress, they still suffer for being uniformly incomplete. Wireframes themselves can be almost too beautiful, and this means that it becomes all-too-easy to criticise them as only wireframes, rather than as part of a product that exists in the world."

"Why can't my computer automatically show me things that will help me with what I'm doing, instead of making me search around for them? The goal of the dashboard is to automatically show a user useful files and other objects as he goes about his day. While you read email, browse the web, write a document, or talk to your friends on IM, the dashboard does its best to proactively find objects that are relevant to your current activity, and to display them in a friendly way, saving you from digging around through your stuff like a disorganized filing clerk. For example, if a friend IMs you and says "I can't wait for our camping trip this weekend!" the dashboard will show things like your recent emails about the camping trip, your camping bookmarks, and any files or notes you've got on your hard drive about camping."

"I’m not blind to the unwieldiness of the book, or to the cumbersome systems we must maintain to accommodate it—the vast libraries and complicated filing systems. But these structures evolved over centuries in ways that map our collective endeavor to understand and express our world. The book is part of a system. And that system stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly. The electronic book, on the other hand, represents—and furthers—a circuitry of instant access, which giveth (information) as it taketh away (the great clarifying context, the order). This will not be an instant revolution. Paradigm shifts take time...the Kindle still lives within the context of print. But what would happen if, through growing market share and broad generational adoption, the Kindle were to supplant the bound book?""That is the trade-off. Access versus context. "

"What I’m best at (and I’ve reflected on this before) is integration and commentary. I’m great at assessing what’s going on, finding the key components, and putting the pieces together into a big picture. But integration is very different from creation, and my sense was that this was mostly a gathering of creators. So I came in expecting to feel a bit out of place.""I don’t spend a lot of time in IRC when I’m home or at work, but when I travel it becomes a wonderful “home away from home” for me. A place that provides familiarity in new settings, and friendly voices when I’m feeling isolated."

"We, as educators and information professionals, may not need to know how to program, but we need to understand how software works — lots of software — so that we can understand the context and the principles of the environment in which our users operate. Key to that kind of understanding is curiosity. Curiosity about the world. Curiosity about new technology. Curiosity about our users. Curiosoity about the Next Big Thing."

"My strong belief is that a critical change is needed in our thinking to move from looking scientific disciplines to scientific “contexts.” "if you look at the flickr photo-sharing site and search on “James” you will find, at the time I write this, over 750,000 hits. Yet why in the world would this be of use? How often do you say, “I wonder if I can find a picture of someone named James”? The key, of course, is that rarely would someone look for this in such a general search. Rather, flickr allows a user to look at pictures entered by a particular person or group. So if I know I’m looking at your flickr photos, and I know you have a brother named James, then suddenly it becomes a very meaningful tag. "

I don't agree but this does stake out a position well.

"One problem with storing RDF/XML graphs in a triple store is that information about the origin of the RDF graph could be lost, depending on the triple store used" "But, the resulting reified triple doesn’t have the same expressive power. A reified triple isn’t the triple itself"

"A seller's purpose is to attract a buyer and close a sale, and that is what eBay metadata is intended to do. This is similar to what library metadata is intended to do--create awareness of an item in a library collection and enable the interested party t

"parsability and memorability are intertwined" "there is still little consensus about what makes a good tag""there is a significant tension between shortness and memorableness" "my current feeling is that brevity trumps clarity (at least assuming a desire

with the right software, built-in hardware such as accelerometers, light sensors, a GPS, and the phone's own microphone could provide contextual clues about people's activities and behaviors. A sensor-enabled phone could feasibly help monitor your exercis

bibliographies, terms, narrowing

"in addition to semantic soundness, the major benefit of RDF is interoperability and standardization"

'If you have any suggestions for what is king, make sure it begins with the letters "cont".' "More importantly, the sharing of her opinion will give her a sense of participation in a community around the book, along with the readers that preceded and foll

"location based contextual marketing is just a matter of time. How do we as developers of such services ensure that the user still gets a good experience? How do we ensure that we do not create a world where we all long after spam e-mail because it was so

"To successfully design the library requires an understanding of users' current work patterns and attitudes toward the library content."

Identifiers for concepts

"We hear that authority control, including name authority control, is responsible for upwards to 40-50% of the time it takes to catalog a book. Part of this is in determining if you do indeed have a new author to enter into the system. Another part is in

"The reader who insists that a database stream does not replace his beloved Virginia Quarterly Reviewis not wrong, and is in fact telling us something very important. ... The *form* of these journals is a large part of what these journals are, and it's ou

"Educators should not make the mistake of assuming that college students want to use technology in the classroom to the same extent that they do outside of it"

http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0009.106 "Words simply do not signify. In literature as in speech as in other textual forms, the occurrence [and omission] of certain words may be meaningful, but only in highly complex ways. "

"Very few libraries in Georgia have card catalogs anymore, but you might see the chest of small drawers hidden in a dark corner in some libraries." :)

"folksonomies are not bottom-up taxonomies that replace top-down taxonomies...Folksonomies contain the information required to let us have multiple simultaneous categorizations.
via:http://catalogablog.blogspot.com/2007/05/tagging.html

"Imity is a little app you can run on your phone, turning your phone into a more context aware device. Imity uses Bluetooth to 'scan' your environment for other devices." ***Good take on privacy/security***

"connecting the digital to the physical"

Re: Lee, Hur-Li. “Collection Development as a Social Process.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 29.1 (2003): 23-31.

"Topic maps provide an approach that marries the best of several worlds, including those of traditional indexing, library science and knowledge representation, with advanced techniques of linking and addressing." "For traditional commercial publishers, pr

And I'm not saying we need to do away with OpenURL. I think instead that we need to recontextualize what it is we think OpenURL is for, and to do so in a way that focuses on the common use case of service linking on the web today. And I think we need to a

There are equal words which mean different things. With the word “Jaguar??, we know a car, a feline, a software.. And it is significant who makes the question and from where. Are we going to see all that integrated in the search engines?

It is alread

Context implies interactive IR and there may exist a stratification of contexts in association to IR engines and systems. Such strata range from the traditional content features of and between information objects, like words nested in paragraphs and hyper