Paper blogging: A New Medium? Retro? Old School? Arts and Crafts?

Proving that satire is one of humanity's fundamental instincts, Packetrat strikes a blow for (wood)fiber-based communications networks with paperblogging, or plogging.

Outstanding.

local tags: blogging, humor, media, satire

Minnesota Researchers Debunk Metcalfe's "Law"

A recent article from ZDNet - Researchers: Metcalfe's Law overshoots the mark - reports that two researchers at the University of Minnesota have released a preliminary study in which they conclude that Metclafe's law significantly overestimates the rate at which the value of a network increases as its size increases. The study was published March 2, by Andrew Odlyzko and Benjamin Tilly of the university's Digital Technology Center.

Here's some snippets from the paper:

"The fundamental fallacy underlying Metcalfe's (Law) is in the assumption that all connections or all groups are equally valuable."

I'm always happy to find a declaration in support of quality as a differentiator. Of course, quality is a complex and subjective measurement, and so it is no surprise that Odlyzko and Tilly first recall it to relevance, and then continue to say, "The general conclusion is that accurate valuation of networks is complicated, and no simple rule will apply universally."

It makes me happy when I see smart people saying complicated things are complicated. Odlyzko and Tilly are academics, and so it's in their interest for mostly everyone else to believe the things they study are complicated, but I think that there's less danger in this than in basing your business plan or your investment decisions on a fallacious assumption that a very clever entrpreneur transmogrified into an equation - which somehow by exaggeration became a 'law' - in a moment of self-serving marketing genius. I know this from experience, because Im guilty of both of these mistakes.

Moving on, as an example, Odlyzko and Tilly declare,"Zipf's Law is behind phenomena such as 'content is not king' [21], and 'long tails' [1], which argue that it is the huge volumes of small items or interactions, not the few huge hits, that produce the most value. It even helps explain why both the public and decision makers so often are preoccupied with the 'hits,' since, especially when the total number of items available is relatively small, they can dominate. By Zipf's Law, if value follows popularity, then the value of a collection of n items is proportional to log(n). If we have a billion items, then the most popular one thousand will contribute a third of the total value,
the next million another third, and the remaining almost a billion the remaining third. But if we have online music stores such as Rhapsody or iTunes that carry 735,000 titles while the traditional brick-and-mortar record store carries 20,000 titles, then the additional value of the 'long tails' of the download services is only about 33% larger than that of record stores." {citations available in the original report}

This last begs the question of value, but of course that's also a complex and subjective judgement...

And with this they've introduced context as another important criterion. Context of course can take many forms; they make most use of geographic locality, and then extend their analysis by looking at how common interest in content on the part of academics functions as another index of locality, saying, "Communication networks do not grow independently of social relations. When people are added, they induce those close to them to join. Therefore in a mature network, those who are most important to people already in the network are likely to also be members. So additional growth is likely to occur at the boundaries of what existing people care about."

The references alone make this paper worth downloading and scanning. Read more of Odlyzko's work.

local tags: complexity, metcalfe, metcalfes_law, networks, odlyzko, quality, theory, zipf

Plant a (Virtual) Tree With Your Cell Phone

For those who would rather plant trees than cell phone towers:

The Canadian Film Centre's Habitat New Media Lab in collaboration with the SEED Collective will unveil an innovative interactive art installation, SEED, during the �scopeNew York Art Fair, March 11th to 14th at Flatotel, 135 West 52nd in New York City. This public interactive art installation invites participants to use their cell phones to plant "seeds" to grow a virtual forest.

SEED explores the convergence of rich media and wireless technology in the creation of a collaborative and evolving work of art. Through sound and imagery users create and populate a forest together. By dialing a particular number, each audience member will be given a "seed" to grow using the keypads of their cell phones. With each punch of the keypad, audiences have the ability to grow their seeds, choose the type of trees they want to plant, and change their texture and colour. After the three days at the scopeNew York Air Fair, the end effect is that all trees created by audience members will reveal a virtual forest.

local tags: art, cellphones, cyberart, mobility, virtuality

Executive Dashboards Poster From The IA Summit

Thanks to all who stopped by to ask questions and express interest in some of the concepts central to executive dashboards, portals, or to simply say hello during the poster session at the IA Summit in Montreal. Many of you took cards, and I look forward to hearing from you soon. Based on the level of interest, I'm talking with the good people at Boxes and Arrows about how to share some of this experience and these ideas in more depth. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, until the summit site offers a full set of presenter materials, you can find the.pdf version (it's a largish ~6MB) here.

The pubished description of the poster is below:

Executive Dashboards: Simple IA Building Blocks Support A Suite of Sophisticated Portals

This poster depicts how a small set of standardized Information Architecture structures and elements was used to create an effective suite of interconnected Executive Dashboards at low cost and without substantial redesign effort.

This suite of dashboards meets the diverse information needs of senior decision makers working within many different business units in a global pharmaceutical company. These dashboards incorporate a wide variety of data types and functionality, but present everything within a consistent and usable User Experience by employing modular tiles and navigation structures.

This set of modular tiles and navigation structures met the diverse information needs of senior decision makers operating within several different business units.

The poster shows how the basic IA component or 'atom' of a tile or portlet, with a standard structure, elements, and labeling can contain a tremendous variety of content types. The content types include qualitative and quantitative visual and textual data displays, as well as complex functionality syndicated from other enterprise applications. It also shows how tiles are easily combined with other tiles or portlets to create larger scale and more sophisticated structures that are still easy for users to comprehend, allowing them to synthesize and compare formerly siloed information views to guide strategic decisions.

The poster shows how simple information architecture components common to all the dashboards allow rapid access to a tremendous amount of information, from many sources. The poster shows how this IA framework scaled well and responded to changing business needs over time, allowing the addition of large numbers of new tiles, views, and types of information to existing Dashboards without substantial redesign or cost.

The poster demonstrates how a set of IA components allows designers to present critical business information by operating unit, geography, topic, or specific business metric, at varying levels of detail, based on the needs of specific audiences.

The poster shows how this set of IA components allowed numerous design teams to innovate within a framework, thus creating an extensive library of reusable tiles and views available for syndication throughout the suite of Executive Dashboards.

The end result of this approach to solving diverse design problems is a series of well integrated User Experiences offering substantial business value to a wide audience of users.

local tags: dashboard, enterprise, events, executive_dashboards, ia, iasummit, ia_building_blocks, portals

IA Summit Photos

I've added a batch of photos to the Flickr group for the IA Summit here. More coming soon...

local tags: events, flickr, ia, iasummit, photos