Tough choice among sessions! A Microsoft researcher is talking about social software, Mitch Kapor is talking about Chandler, and Meg “Megnut” Hourihan is talking about “From the Margins of the Writable Web.” Meg’s always interesting and I love her title, so I’m here.

The tools for reading weblogs aren’t as developed as for writing them. Meg points to sites doing interesting things. E.g., weblogs that are tied to geographic areas. (You can put your geographic information into your blog via geourl.org.)

Also, sites are getting more explicit in their social relationships. E.g., create an OPML file of all your friends and put it in your weblog…

This is great stuff, but I can’t read the slides from in back and thus can’t get the URLs. I’ll get them from Meg’s site when she posts them. You should too. On to the Microsoft guy…

Marc Smith is talking about Netscan, a project for data mining newsgroups to see what we can learn about their social organization. For example, the number of cross-posted threads can indicate whether the newsgroup needs to fork. And 67% of Usenet threads have only two messages. Does this indicate success or failure? E.g., a customer support group wants short threads. How do you tell? One guy posted 95 times and every one was a reply. And posted 25 out of 26 days. He’s likely to be a high value “answer person.”

He thinks this type of analysis will be used by professional organizations trying to keep their discussion lists healthy. What makes an online community healthy? He says that you should look at things like time to reply, number of posts, percentage of messages replied to, retention of leaders, etc. He shows a user-friendly web page that Microsoft Research is trying to get Microsoft to build.

He demonstrates reading bar codes to get discussion threads about the bar-coded object. (It’s called AURA: Advanced User Research Application)

Fascinating. And Smith is a terrific presenter, getting laughter and applause along the way…tough for a Microsoft guy in this crowd.

Categories: Uncategorized dw