(caveat: I only started this logging about a month ago, so there aren’t as many data points as I’d like. However, there is enough to see some interesting trends emerging).

Day of Week

First, here is the spread of activity over day-of-week for my machine at home. I found this surprising! I’d expected my weekend hacking projects to show a significant weekend effect, but I did not notice the Thursday slump. It’s interesting when data shows us stuff about ourselves that we didn’t realize. I have no idea what causes the Tuesday mini-spike.

Next, I have activity per hour-of-day, broken up by weekends-only and weekdays-only (because my behavior differs significantly between these two sets).

Weekends

Both charts clearly show my average sleeping times. Weekends show a bump of morning hacking and evening hacking, with less computer time than I’d have expected in the middle of the day.

Weekdays

I love the evening just-got-home-from-work-and-finished-with-dinner spike for the weekdays, followed by evidence of late-night hacking (probably too late for my own good).

Where to go from here

I wonder if the unexpected Tuesday spike and 6pm-weekday spikes are legitimate phenomena or artifacts due to data sparsity. It will be interesting to check back in with this data in a few more months to see how it smooths out. (Ugh, daylight savings time is going to mess with this a bit =/ ).

Also, this only measures one aspect of my activity in a day–stuff typed at the command line, which is mostly programming-related. I would love to plot other information alongside it (emails sent, lines of code written, instant messages sent, songs played, GPS-based movement). I’m tracking much of this already. I’ll need a good way of visualizing all of these signals together, as the graph is going to get a bit crowded. Maybe I’ll pick up that Tufte book again…

(And, speaking of visualization, I think a heatmap of activity per hour of the week would be interesting as well… Google Spreadsheets doesn’t do those, though, so while I have the data I couldn’t whip one up easily tonight).

Lastly, what’s the purpose of this all? What do I want to accomplish from this analysis? They’re nice-looking graphs, for sure. And honestly there is a bit of narcissistic pleasure in self-discovery. And I suppose it’s good to realize things like the mid-week slump (exhaustion from work? external calendar factors?) are happening.

But I’m eventually hoping for something less passive than just observation. Later I look forward to using this data to change myself. I can imagine later setting goals (in bed by a certain hour, up by a certain hour, no coding on day-x vs more coding on day-y) and letting the statistics show my progress towards those goals.

• The great thing about delicious and folksonomy is that it creates an ontology as an emergent biproduct of individual self-serving efforts (that is, personal bookmarking). I’m wondering if we can take a similar tact to solve other AI problems.

Inward-facing Questions:

• What is the best way to represent the evolution of a tag’s meaning (evolution on both the individual and group scale). Folksonomy is a lot more dynamic than a fixed ontology, so we might not be able to use the same old tools.
• Folksonomy is the relationship between three types of information: tags, tagged objects, and the users who tag them. What information can we derive each that are not explicit in the structure. You can call this “tag grouping”, “neighbor search”, “related items”… but it’s really all just clustering. What are the differences when you cluster each?
• Continuing from the last quesiton: it’s most intuitive to hierarchically cluster tags—this maps well onto the formal “ontology” model that information architects and NLP researchers are comfortable in dealing with. But what happens when we hierarchically cluster users and tagged items? What does hierarchy infer about the relationships between parents, children, and siblings in the resulting structure?
• What are the differences in (tags, users, items) between digg, delicious, flickr, and citeulike?

Ah, to have time to pursue these….

My attention is a scarce resource, and different ideas, media, schools of thought, compete for it. (This is what makes multidisciplinarity hard).

It makes me think twice about metaphors for learning that compare research and knowledge acquisition to foraging for food. What if, instead of likening ourselves to the predators and farmers, we liken ourselves to the prey and the farmed.

There’s plenty of discussion of memes as pseudo-genetic entities (evolving, reproducing, self-transmitting)… but underlying this is the idea that we are the medium of transmission, we are the host to the virus.

It certainly puts a new spin on the way I look at sites like All Consuming.

I don’t like this metaphor of being consumed, it feels too passive and fatalistic to me. But maybe it’s true.

My hunch might be wrong, but it seems to be web2.0 applied to raw application development. What I mean is this: the typical read-write-web facilitates user-contributed data, and the social sharing of user-contributed data. Ning looks like it facilitates user-contributed code, and the social sharing of user-contributed code.

And, by providing a good development platform, it encourages mash-ups between applications, data-sharing, etc. I am curious if this enablement is just inward-focused or also outward-focused. That is, is it just as easy to API into a Ning app from another webapp outside Ning as it is for one Ning app to talk to another?

I’ll be able to tell more after I get my beta developer account, which according to Gordon should be “any hour now” =p.

But, wow, this looks like it could be the sandbox to end all sandboxen.

Update: ahh, here is the business model (i.e. where the money’s gonna come from):

the third party ad networks such as Google AdSense don’t look warmly upon more than one person running ads on an App or a page. Hence the trade for running apps on Ning is that we offer free app creation, management, hosting, security, and shared services, and – in return – you open your code to inspire other developers and refrain from running third party ads. We totally understand if this is not for everybody.

http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MoinMoinQuestions
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MediaWiki

It also imports and exports to bibtex, for low barrier-to-entry.

I’ve known about CiteULike for a while now, but somehow never got around to using it. Paper-reading is too-often a chore (I’d all-too-often rather be coding!), and entering in metadata and tracking is not the sexiest of tasks. Well, an impending self-imposed deadline for a journal submission made me realize “uh oh, need a literature survey!”, combined with “well, I’ve surveyed a lot, but it’s all buried in a (literally!) two-foot stack of printed-out journal and conference papers, hilited and with notes in the margins”. So, in a bout structured procrastination last Friday, I got around to picking out the most succulent of the papers and entered them into my citeulike page.

My first impressions:

1. The social aspect of it has a lot of promise. It’ll be great to see other users who read the same papers I do, or use a categorization tagset that overlaps with mine. The only problem is that not too many NLP (much less pedagogy, second language acquisition, or even linguistics) people use it. This kind of social software has usefulness roughly proportional to the square of its users. I’m still a little skeptical that the userbase will ever grow to make the system as useful as del.icio.us–academics are a small subsection of society, the pieslice of academics with research areas overlapping with mine is miniscule indeed, and the forkful of those that discover citeulike? I suspect I might finish dinner still hungry.
2. That said, the personal content management aspect of citeulike is a win. That was what was so good for del.icio.us: it works in the social-software arena, but it’s useful from an anti-social arena as well (I know people who use it just to store their bookmarks from a web-accessible location, tag for their own future lookup, and don’t really care that other people are bookmarking what they bookmark). I’ve always had trouble tracking and documenting my reading binges, and maintaining an up-to-date bibtex file of everything I consume/produce. This system looks like it can solve that.
3. Use of paper metadata remains unexploited. Let me browse “Other papers that were published at this conference”, “Order-by-publish-date”, “Order-by-last-read-date”. And citations and references inside the papers themselves forms a rich web of data that I’m sure can be mined for reading-recommendation-goodness.
4. The social aspect remains unexploited. Yes, Richard is probably lacking both data and CPU cycles, but I can’t wait to see “people who bookmarked the same things you did have rated these other papers very highly, that you haven’t read yet”
5. I’ve always had a problem of following journals, and this (along with Google Scholar) has helped a lot. The RSS-viewable watchlists, and the searchability is really, really handy (speaking of which, what about some more integration with google scholar?).

Update: More thoughts:

1. Let me rank papers that I have read, perhaps with criteria similar to those used by paper-reviewers for conferences
2. Tag intersection, union, difference. These are the tools that make a tag-based organizational system as powerful as (or even more powerful than) your traditional strict hierarchy system. Why don’t more folksonomic systems implement these? They’re not that much more expensive, computationally.

Yes, I know the requested feature list grows and grows, and I realize that citeulike is just a side project for Richard… alas…

More to follow…

So, a short flow of consciousness stream of thoughts and subjects, to capture what I can and hopefully prompt more organized reflection later:

• social software turning the world into Small Town, where grassroots reputation matters again, more than big top-down messages the media distributes
• social software as a watershed technology that changes academics in a way that is COMPLETELY different than any technology-wrought change that even the tenured-generation professors have seen (this includes video, etc)
• and what makes this difference is the empowerment of a wide range (intergenerational, different walks of life, even, dare we say, outside of academia) of people
• questions about the future of academia because of this changing: will it shift and adapt and adopt, or will it become a hollow shell that has lost its prior authority and societal function?
• current academic reputation is maintained on a “publish or perish” meritocracy, with publishing filtered by a longstanding tradition of peer review in controlled journals. blogging allows the everyday man (or the everyday professor) to be a wide-reaching mouthpiece, allows the possibility of peer-review-by-hoi-polloi-many instead of peer-reveiw-by-few-on-the-paper-acceptance-committee
• change in paradigm as we relate to information: before it was the scent of information we would try to follow, now it’s the stench of information we’re overwhelmed with
• psychological patterns honed in the old scarcity of information world that lead to harmful/self-destructive patterns in the new world of information (book-hoarding, infornography, obsessive bookmarking, …)
• future of intellectual property in a world where content and meta-content is easy to create (do people always have the right to create metacontent? or does it ever infringe on the “rights” of the primary content creators? and should those primary content creators even have exclusive rights to ideas?)
• when content is housed by universities (e.g. campus-wide blogs) does the student or the university own the student-generated intellectual property
• what role will new social technology play in the teaching world (when are blogs/wikis the right tool for the job, when are they not?
• when professors can establish authority by means of blogs instead of the traditional paper publishing machine, what happens when competent authorities emerge who are outside academia (e.g. Thomas Vander Wal), how do they fit in to the picture
• how are those extra-academic authorities dealt with in attributions and citations?
• how are blogs and wikis (changing, maleable, created by MASSIVELY large groups or created by anonymous groups) to be attributed and cited in the academic publishing machine?
• and lastly (perhaps most importantly?) when will we get RSS readers that don’t suck?

more on any (all? none?) of these later. each sentence in here deserves at least a half day of mulling over. This will keep me busy with thought-fodder (heh like i’m ever at a loss for that) for…hmmm… half of the summer? that’s conservative.

p.s. Micro-bounty-note-to-self: I owe Leonard a dinner at Chanos if he ever codes the personal lifetime web cache that never forgets the content of a site you visit. This will be a powerful punch combo when paired with ubiquitous desktop searching (beagle, spotlight, google desktop search, msn desktop search).

p.p.s. Note-to-self-2: continue getting to know the other USC Social Software Researcher Fellows (Richard, Daniel, Aram, David, et. al)–they are both nearby and awesomely brimming with neat ideas.

p.p.p.s. More thought fodder

Well, the more controversial and future-looking the better, I thought, so I suggested the following:

What will happen to the Ivory Tower as social software makes advanced research more accessible to the armchair academian?

Well, as of a few days ago, I got to taste the repercussions of this firsthand.

As a Doctoral Candidate student, I’m not exactly an “armchair academian”–at least not in my areas of focus (Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition, Artificial Intelligence/Natural Language Processing). When it comes to Information Architecture, though, I’m as novice and {self-,half-}educated as they they come.

In his blog, Jess McMullin takes a few lines to beat an earlier post of mine to a bloody pulp saying

“The New School of Ontologies is just so off the mark… The article reads like a jumble of classification buzzwords stirred once and regurgitated.”

Ouch!

His complaints about things being “off the mark” seem to be more directed toward folksonomy in general. And the “jumble of classification buzzwords” bit?

By nature, the Ivory Tower has always been exclusive, and therefore filtered. The good part about this filtering is that it filters by quality. PhD applications/screening/quals, submissions to papers, conferences (well, most conferences), submissions to journals… these are all good quality filters. But there’s also a filter on content, too. Anyone involved in upper academia has seen the ebb and flow of “acceptible” (read “fundable”) theories. Research in neural networks was dead for decades because some of the fathers of AI didn’t think it was feasable. And then there’s the Cult of Chomsky, and its strangelhold on Linguistics–just try giving a talk at USC that doesn’t agree with the tenets Generative Grammar, X-Bar Theory, or UG. On the remote possibility that they even accept you to speak, asbestos underwear would be a must for the after-talk discussion.

As social software puts windows (phone lines? cracks? what’s the metaphor I’m looking for here?) into the ivory tower, it’s going to break down this exclusivity. Whether this is benefit or detriment I can’t say for sure. On the downside, it definitely increases the noise:signal ratio. And it empowers people like me who will then {pontificate,spout off} without full knowledge of either the jingo or the theory. This can, of course, be annoying to the educated reader. But on the upside it encourages cross-pollination of ideas, and exposes the idea-filtered elite to new (or out-of-vogue) ways of looking at the same old problems.

This isn’t anything new. We’ve seen it happen over and again, fifty million different ways, every time new technology is introduced. Blogs vs mainstream media sources. Home video cameras, VHS, and cassette tapes allowing amateur distribution of music/video. Copy-machine zines. But this might be the first time the Ivory Tower has felt the crumbling

Note: This wasn’t the place to address McCullin’s criticism of my folksonomy paper. Perhaps in a later post…