One of the key topics (I think) in my Casual Privacy talk last week was the importance of “context” in privacy and sharing. That some people have trouble understanding how fundamental context is to all social interactions was my primary take away from SG Foo, and I’ve been preaching it quietly where I can.

All by way of saying, I made one of my rare visits to FriendFeed this evening, and I was reminded that I consistently regret it. Breaking down those contextual walls means I consistently like the people I find there less then I did when I was able to interact with them in isolated manners; fire walling the aesthetic from the technical from the political from the personal.

We need routing not aggregation.

NYTimes has an article on the ongoing Netflix recommendation open challenge thing. ($1mil to a team that can produce the best collaborative filtering mouse trap)

Unfortunately the project is flawed, because the basic question is flawed, fundamentally and in a very simple way. We have moods, we have shifting interests, and trying to compile all those multi-variates into a single vector of interest is impossible.

Rather then making the computers super smart, I’d rather see an interface like the Pandora channel creation where you choose 2-4 songs that suit your mood and the system finds the common elements.

Tonight at the video store I wanted something that was smart and fast enough to be engaging, without being so smart that it took work to follow. Maybe a political thriller? If I could have mixed a recommendation queue out of 3 Days of the Condor meets Wag the Dog meets something like Enemy of the State to find something in that vein that would have been better then all the weighted neural nets.

And I’ll wave the million dollars if they just build it already.

Not sure where this systemic biasis for computer as deep thinker comes from, probably dates all the way back to the Ultra project and other primordial computer science legends. But its the wrong metaphor here and now, smarter, smaller tools to extend the human reach, not replace humans.

(can you tell I didn’t find my movie?)

Photo by wili

http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/hightouch?entry=taxonomies_vs_folksonomies

http://sourceforge.net/projects/sux0r/

For a while there was largely nothing, then there was Allconsuming which was wonderful, but slowly died, and went dark before being re-incarnated in the mold of a 43x tool. And I have this memory of there being a nifty little $14/mo tool, back in the days when I didn’t pay for websites, but I wasn’t able to find it.

Last Fall, I started sketching down notes towards building my own, and in the intervening year its become an interestingly crowded space. (who knew so many other people felt the pull) Even in the 6 weeks since I first started jotting down sites for this blog post, the space has evolved with LibraryThing coming out solidly on top as the most active: most actively developed, most actively used, and most actively engaged developer.

That said, in a cursory search (mostly of my del.icio.us links) I turned up 5 other very similar services

• Allconsuming: the Next Generation
• Bibliophil
• Books We Like – “activist e-commerce and collective intelligence”
• Listal – where “all” is defined as DVDs, Books, Music, and Games
• Reader2 – repurposing of the MyProgs codebase

Also the Bookshelf example app from 24L, and the intersting related services What Should I Read Next?, and Library Elf

None of them are quite there yet, and I want more, more, more!

LibraryThing

• So like I said, LT is rocking out in terms of development and growth. When I first found it, it lacked import, ratings, and feeds. Wow.

• Additionally the search is amazingly comprehensive, fast, and accurate. Search is where LibraryThing originally shined, and it blows every other service out of the water. LT was the only service to successfully come up with “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town” when I searched for “someone comes”. Which is good, because there is no way I’m typing in full titles. (just re-tested, and Allconsuming which wasn’t finding anything last time I checked, also came up with the correct results)

• Surprisingly zippy.

• One-click export. Sweet.

LibraryThings: The Downside

• No per-tag feeds, apparently on the todo list, but I need per feed tags.

• No feed of reviews, also on the todo list, but I’m simply not willing to create content without an RSS feed. (which is why I’ve stopped writing $0.02 reviews on Netflix)

• Feeds lack anything beyond basic data. No structured meta-data (authors, isbn/asin, cover art, etc), so very limited usefulness.

• One dimensional tags. (no tag combos)

• Ugly, and awkward. Totally in the eye of the beholder, but I find the interface consistently confusing and awkward to use. I only have a handful of books in my catalog, but already its feeling unmanageable. Not a designer, so I can’t do much more then complain.

• One comment/review per book, meaning you can’t use it to blog your ongoing experience with a book. One of my use cases for a book service is that I can use it to power a book blog.

• Uses frames!?!?? In this day and age? Meaning it can’t be the that “definitive URI for books” that I keep looking for.

Listal

• More then just books if you’re in to that thing. I’m not really, and find it kind of frustrating that I sometimes end up searching DVDs.

• Slick, clean, attractive.

• Allows browsing by author! (key missing feature for LibraryThing)

• Per tag feeds, multiple reviews/comments per book.

Listal: Cons

• Feels sluggish, aggravated by a click heavy interface.

• Limited import.

• Not run by a book nut, and in general the site is voiceless failing to expose either the developer, or the user community. Feels stagnant.

• Search failed the “Someone Comes” test.

Bookshelf

I thought I was going to like Bookshelf. I love the concept of the Ning “Pivot”, if not the implementation. Unfortunately Bookshelf is very slow, and buggy. I dived into the code (I can do that with Ning, whoohoo!!!), and unfortunately rather then the domain specific langauge for building social webapps I expected to find, I just found a messy of PHP code.

What I Still Want/Need/Dream About

I wrote down a list of things I wanted a while back, and LT is converging on it very quickly, and for that I’m inclined to overlook the interface.

Syndication

I need more feeds. Per tag feeds allow for intelligent interaction with the site. Beyond topical tags, functional tags (e.g. *to:read) allow me to syndicate the information out in useful ways

And richer feeds please. E.g. if you can’t syndicate the cover art give me the necessary metadata so I can pull it from AWS.

More data and Webservices

And note, I’m happy with my primary webservice being a feed, but I need richer way to interact with the data before I can make it work for me.

I’d like to be able to hook this up to my local library (auto-request books flagged *to:read), Upcoming, and Amazon.

Plus I should be able to power my involvement in What to Read Next/Books We Like/innovative new service from within LT (or at least with my LT data)

More Pivots

I’d like author, and ratings smooshed down into the tag namespace. So I can browse by author, and by rating. Additionally I’d like to be able to browse tag combos, author plus tag combos, and author plus rating combos.

Insta-Community

I love the idea of integrating a forum into the site. And really integrating it.

1. Allow people to start new threads from a book page
2. Tag those threads with the book
3. Display only properly tagged threads on the book page
4. Aggregate all threads in a more standard forum view.

(We’ve discussed doing something similar for Social Source Commons, though haven’t yet)

Book Scanning

Ala Monster’s Delicious

What would be involved I wonder if writing a simple app/Firefox plugin to scan barcodes using something like an iSight or a CueCat, and have it post the data to a URL?

Blue Sky: Peerflix for Books?

Like Bookcrossing for books you want to get back someday.

update: Also Stuffopolis, and Douban

http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/thread_patterns-2005-10-27-00-53.html

For example I use the tag “inspiration” to keep track of ideas I want to steal, or think about more on my various projects. (inspiration+redesign are my first notes towards a Magpie re-design)

Variations on toread, and *toread are in wide use as useful meta-tags, and a handful of people are using variants to track specific research projects, or tasks.

Marnie is experimenting with the tag nptech to build a community of non-profit tech workers, we’re using a different tag for the our anarchist tech work, and there are a handful of bibliographies being organized around a specific indicator tag.

And lastly don’t be afraid to build combos. One of the key ways tags work is the set logic of multiple tags. They’re your links on redesign inspiration, javascript usability, Boston bakeries, or Photoshop books. Much like with wikis, the meaning arises not from the individual components, but when you ram them together to indicate a single new concept. (and I won’t even make you use CamelCase)

A few weeks back Matt Haughey asked, why are we still using reciepts? We live in a computerized society, why is information still externalized onto pieces of paper? Aaron expounded on the fragility of digital information: digital media’s cycle of obsolescence, the illusion of always on electricity/net, blogs’ rather dismal prospects as bath time reading. Matt Web however got to crux of what interests me about the issue when he said paper receipts are primary keys to a distributed database. You see Haughey’s model requires a centralized database which is implicitly trusted.

One of the core American myths (and to a large, but lesser extent, all of Western society) is the myth of progress — the constant drum beat of the march to the future, a linear progression that renders the old bad, and the new both better and inevitable.

Examples:

• books were to be doomed by the information superhighway
• a love of paper understandable for aesthetic and nostalgic reasons, but on its way out.
• blogging is supposed to replace/kill old media because it is so democratic/innovative/natural.

One of the favorite tropes of this march of progress is “paperlessness”: the paperless office, the paperless government (egovernment), and, apparently, paperless shopping. A brave new future of the receipt repudiated by the database.

Interestingly current events are starting to wake us, as a society, up to the value of paper. It seems that a central database, affectionate known in the literature as a “Big Brother” model, is vulnerable to a variety attacks, a broad subclass of which fall under the moniker of “Diebold attacks”. Apparently large, central databases, without proper, verifiable audit trails, have some issues. (Google pdf2html version) All of a sudden some people are asking for paper tickets (also known as “recipets”), a total contradiction to our consensus on what the future looks like!

Which makes it fascinating to read Kristine Smith’s scifi trilogy (Code of Conduct, Rules of Conflict, Law of Survival) featuring aging heroine Jani Killian as a “document examiner”, and 2 distinct cultures (one of them alien) built upon (or at least seen through the lense of) paper, paper trails, paper handling, and verifiability. Part religion, part art, utterly techie (such cool gear!), the paper system, and document examiners (dexxies) stitch together the consensus reality of the intergalactic future. The books project forward from trends of today where digital data and records are easily forgeable, and photography no longer meets the criteria of proof in many courts. Dexxies are the hacker-esque trained specialist that keeps the it all working.

At first I was a bit turned off by Smith’s use of words like “shooter” and “skimmers”, they sound like baby talk. No society is going to refer to its weapon as a shooter, not even as slang, sounds moronic, and it is a classic first scifi novel mistake. I almost put the books down at that point, and wrote her off. I’m glad I didn’t as the paper system is utterly unique in my experience of the genre (or any genre). The only futurist I’ve encountered who did take the Micosoftian (think Faustian) hype that we’d all be moving to a paperless existence to heart. Instead she did some original thinking about the evolution of human interactions with information with interesting results.

As a geek/hacker/trained specialist in charge of today’s communication infrastructure I found the paper system to be Smith’s most interesting creation. However her idomeni, alien creators of the paper system, are also quite good, and reminiscent of Cherryh’s Foreigner books. (in fact Cherryh writes the cover blurb for book 3, as Asaro did for book 2, and Moon for book 1) They suffer a bit from “Atevi syndrome” which says that in order to have a really indepth exploration of an alien’s psyche you have to make them pretty damn human, or it is just too alien to be meaningful. Reality is still much more alien then fiction, but Smith is hardly unique in failing that metric.

Code of Conduct is her first book and a bit rough, but over the next two books she settles down to writing good, strong, character driven fiction (which unfortunately seems to have become code for “scifi written by a women”, but I digress) with hackers as heroes, and some genuine insight into the nature of technology.

Lastly, for all I find Smith’s paper system compelling, I would like reiterate my plea for a decent ebook implementation.

• Writing up these notes would have been greatly facilitated by a full text search feature built into the book
• I would have felt distinctly less uncomfortable carrying, and reading these books in public if I’d been carrying a generic ebook reader, as Eos has seen fit to saddle them with truly hideous covers as if they got jobbed out to someone who usually works for Harlequin. (Kristine keeps the faith, it only took Bujold a dozen critically acclaimed novels, winning every major genre award, and switching publishers to get a decent cover.)

.pps, in Laws of Survival the rebellious Haarin give a most damning condemnation of the Liberal “play nice” strategy of social change. Warmed the heart.

diveintomark

newdoor - is an aggregator that learns using seed data from Blogging Ecosystem. Usable agents, and the promise of webservices in one fell swoop.

He is also talking about how hard it is being perfect, and the traps of XHTML 1.1.

Shirky

Continueing the theme of group forming found in new door, Shirky hilights seminal documents in 3 online communities (LambdaMOO, Slashdot, and Wikipedia), in his post Morning constitutional(scroll down), links to work on developing a social rhetoric, and links to the oldie, but still relevant, The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

Online Organizing Sucks