Yahoo News has been redesigned for the better. Unlike Google News, it doesn’t automatically figure out what’s news by looking at thousands of news sources. Instead, it defaults to showing you the news from one of six major news sources, one source at a time, although you can add any RSS feed as a new source. I like the fact that at Google you’re likely to find an Indian or Chinese newspaper’s version of, say, an American political story, but Yahoo — which is configurable, while Google News is not — presents more stories on a single page than Google does.

If you want to see how Yahoo manages the problem of compressing more news stories per square inch of screen real estate, hover over any of the news links for a second or two…

Cool! [Technorati tags: yahoo google news]

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Andrew Rasiej is running for Public Advocate of NYC. He would transform this position into a true voice of the people…not to mention that he’ll do very cool things with the Net. Heck, his theme is “A New Campaign to Reconnect New York.”

You can sign up here. And here’s the campaign’s blog.

Go Andrew! [Technorati tags: AndrewRasiej politics]

I should have mentioned not only have I met Andrew a few times, for a couple of months I was on the payroll of Personal Democracy Forum (to the tune of a couple of hundred dollars total), which Andrew generously bankrolls. Sorry for the lapse, but I promise you that my enthusiasm for his candidacy is based on knowing something about him and not on the money that changed hands.

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Jobs doesn’t like what a biographer says about him so he stops Apple stores from selling all books by that publisher? Note that he’s not just keeping the book he doesn’t like out of the store. No, he’s de-shelving any book from that publisher in retaliation.

You can pre-order the book here. Let’s drive it up the charts. (Hey, Amazon, how about pairing this book with a Dixie Chicks album?) [Technorati tags: apple SteveJobs DixieChicks]

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TotheSource calls for a reform of how the US spends our money on malaria prevention and treatment. It argues that small amount of DDT could save many lives without causing environmental damage.

I’m not an expert in, well, anything, so I don’t know how much DDT it takes to start screwing up the ecosystem, nor do I know how effective it is at preventing malaria when used in small amounts on house walls, as ToTheSource suggests. But wel over a million deaths a year — most of them children? And apparently the US aid agency, USAID, has not been forthright about how it spends our money.

(The article is not yet up on the ToTheSource site. Check the archive eventually, for “Silent Tsunami.”) [Technorati tag: malaria]

Chris Locke has a disturbing bit of history on display at ChiefBloggingOfficer, discussing research into America’s history of support of eugenics, including Margaret Sanger‘s belief in the “mass sterilization of so-called defectives.”

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Doc’s photos from Les Blogs 2005 in Paris, the lucky bastard! [Technorati tag: lesblogs2005]

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danah blogs enthusiastically about her time in Austria being a judge for Prix Ars Electronica. Apparently, the discussion of what constitutes a community was vibrant and informed by a sense of the differences in the world. A snipppet:

We had a long conversation about what it means to think about two axes – the process of giving people access and the process of allowing people to make their voices heard. So much of what we considered sat in this narrative. We talked about technologies themselves vs. the communities that take the technologies to a newer, deeper level. We talked about work from around the world that fit into so many different cultural contexts with so many different languages.

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Amy Bruckman at George Institute of Tech says that researchers knock the use of the word “community.” We ought to use a prototype model for defining communities, using Eleanor Rosch’s idea of prototypes, she says. [Go Rosch!]. Our prototypes for communities vary by “genre,” e.g., Flickr is one type of community and so is the WELL; we understand them in relation to different prototypes. The work she proposes going forward would try to discern the relevant differences among the prototypes.

Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon’s CommunityLab Project begins by upbraiding the conference for using a panel of kids to discover what kids think instead of using the serious research that’s been done on the topic. He suggests using group theory to design online groups. For example, in many online communities, a small percentage of people (80:20, roughly) contribute. The “collective effort model” explans under contribution and the conditions that mitigate it. It says that “effort = outcome probability x outcome value.” It predicts you can increase contribution by make salient the uniqueness of contributions, increasing how much people like the group by making it more homogeneous, and make the benefits of contributing more salient. (This is based on well-established research, he says.)

He describes two experiments.

First: To get more people to contribute movie ratings, the system reminded posters of their uniqueness (identify a movie the person has rated but no one else has) and made the group more attractive by putting together people with similar tastes. Results: Uniqueness increased the number of discussion posts and movie ratings, but similarity in tastes depressed the posts. (The first finding supports the hypothesis, the second disconfirms it.)

Second: They sent email inviting people to contribute ratings. Some were told thjey’ve been invited because they have unusual tastes, others because they have typical tastes. Some were told that the more ratings they contribute, the better the system works for you, or for other people. Again, emphasizing uniqueness helped, but being told the number of benefits they would get depressed the results.

He concludes by looking at how useful it is to approach the design of online communities by starting with theory. He found that it inspired design features not often used and allows for reuse of principles.

Randy Farmer, now at Yahoo! but an early pioneer in Net communities, says that at last we’re ready to scale. But, he points out, there are problems with scaling communities, including spam, fraud and “intellectual property” issues.

Massively Multiplayer games have blazed one trail, Randy says, raising hard questions of virtual economies and property law: Are virtual goods property? He says Sony is enabling an actual cash market for Everquest.

Social networking has blazed another path. Because too much info was published with too little to do with it, selective disclosure is arising.

Challenges: Boundaries of identity and disclosure. How do we scale trust? Answer: “Hand the trust question over to the users.” He says Yahoo’s “This is spam” is an example of handing trust to users. And how will public-scale tagging avoid tagspam. How do we do “pagerank” for tags?

1. Tag rating: Positive reputation: “537 people tag this as penguin” Negative: People respond to a tag saying “This is not a penguin.”

2. Tagger reputation: As people are known for putting better tags on things, their tags count for more.

David MacDonald at U of Washington looks at “visual blogging communities” — sites with photos and a little text. (Example 1 2 3) His project has been archiving 9-25 sites of the 53+ he knows about. They picked 19 sites with at least 3 months of data. You can do content analysis (what’s in the picture?), ethnographic analysis (what is this picture about?), and interaction analysis (what’s the relation among a set of pictures).

He talks about preliminary results from the interaction analysis. He suggests some categories: Positional polay (glance, point), inmage stealing (re-use), theme (impromptu or planned group action), text in picture as a title (which forms the majority of the interaction). Then he gives great examples of how people engage in various forms of “conversation” in these photo sites via their images. (Molly Wright Steenson in the backchannel points to the Internet employee of the month page at Flickr.)

Fernanda B. Viegas at MIT Media Lab talks about a project visualizing the evolution of wiki pages. She’s been visualizing archives: email, usenet, chat. She shows work, with Martin Wattenberg, in visualizing wikis as a way of understanding the dynamics of the community that builds them. You can play with it yourself: HistoryFlow. She points to the abortion page, showing how quickly it gets restored. And she points to the chocolate page where a zigzag pattern indicates an editing war, in this case over whether there is such a thing as a “chocolate collage.” The patterns also show that the text of the people who start a page tends to be long-lived.

She says IBM is releasing the software and will likely also release the Wikipedia plugin.

[Excellent morning.]

[Technorati tags: scs2005 community]

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Satellite Fun finds some amusing photos in Google’s collection of satellite images (similar to here and here, previously blogged). It also has a link to City-Data that displays long lists of data about various cities. For example, did you know that between 7:30 and 8:00AM, 201 people over 16 leave for work in Great Barrington, MA, making that the peak leaving-for-work time in this city of 7,527? [Technorati tags: maps google]

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Wendy Kellogg from IBM Research says that IBM replaced its solid doors with ones with windows so you could see if someone is on the other side before you slam the door into her. They call this “social translucence.” Not only can you see the person, but the other person knows that you know, which creates accountability. Social translucence is common in the real world but rare in computing systems, she says. She talks about how this got idea got implemented in the Babble and Loops projects that provide a minimalistic graphical “proxy” that provides some of the metadata that occurs naturally in face-to-face meetings. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware ibm]

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Molly Wright Steenson talks about some interesting student experiments. In one, students put up official-looking “Silence please!” signs in a car of an Italian commuter train, resulting in that car being the loudest in the train. Another was a favor bank. Another, Mass Distraction, studies the social interactions around being interrupted by cellphones: In one example, you have to close your hood around your entire head in order to take a call. In another, if you get a call, you have to give your friend a video game to play and your call lasts only as long as she keeps on playing. At FashionVictims you can see clothing that bleeds when it comes in contact with cellphone radiation. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware mollySteenson]

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