Reboot8: Tags, blogjects, and social peripheral vision

Day two at the Reboot8 conference in Copenhagen starts with a good keynote by information architect Jesse James Garrett (blog). His talk is on "user-generated info architectures". There is a generally-acknowledged problem in designing websites and creating info architectures: too little is known about the way people think, the words they use, the way they want to organize information, the groups they relate to. Hence, much of information architecture is a work of guessing. But in recent years the focus in building architectures has been shifting to building systems that allow people to create their own architectures - allowing them to assign keywords metadata ("tags") to the information and create navigation devices to expose them (see the Wikipedia entry about tags, which are used to create subjects or categories of information).
Tagging doesn't come without problems though: people describe things differently and associate them with different words; the most popular tags are not necessarily the most relevant; and of course, here too, there is "tag spam" - people "hijacking" popular tags to point to, say, erotic content.
For Garrett, "tagging represents the first step in the trend of user-generated information architecture". Can it be improved? Most of the problems with tagging descend from the fact that it is an explicit activity: users have to actively participate. "The next stage will be to try to make the users' contributions to the architecture implicit - the architecture becomes a natural byproduct of the way users interact with the system, so that it can evolve with it.
The obvious example is Amazon, which uses an information architecture that's totally user-generated and algorithmic in nature. Amazon "connects concepts with users by processing enormous amounts of data", said Garrett, "they know a lot about everything users to with their websites, and use that information to generate architectures that connect users more effectively with their content".
I had never really thought about it, but if you look at an Amazon URL it looks like this:

The first part (http://www.amazon.co.uk) is obviously the address of the site. It's followed by what Garrett dubbed "some Content Management System junk" (exec/obidos/ASIN/) and by information about the product (0141019018/ref=br_lf_li_1_2/). And finally the session number (026-2395670-5354813). If a user clicks further, this last "tag" will be carried over to that URL, which will be dynamically generated. The permanence of this identifier allows Amazon to "follow" the users around and see how they behave on their site, what they look up, and perfect the way information is structured and presented. More: every link on the page and every search result also gets a unique tag indicating its placement in the interface, and on this basis Amazon can track the effectiveness of their algorithms.
"Algorithms are not gonna replace info architects", said Garrett, "but their job will be about how to better use algorithms". One point remains crucial: good algorithms depend on the availability of good data.

Jyri Engeström (profile / blog) is a designer, entrepreneur and thinker from Finland focusing on mobile communication, and his focus today was on the lack of "peripheral vision" in the way cell phones are designed. "They are designed with the assumption that you know who you want to call - that you know the number etc", he said, "but before dialing you still need to make a decision on whether it's a good time to call. You somehow need to infer from the environment (from the social periphery) whether that person is available, where he is, what he is doing, in order to decide whether you can/should  call now". Fixed phones have at least one of those elements - location - worked out. In the context of cell phones instead, that work of guessing extends generally to the beginning of the conversation, which most of the time starts with "where are you?".
So Engeström wondered whether it could be possible to give that intelligence to the mobile devices: to build location and status and planning information into cell phones the way they are available for example on instant-messaging "buddy lists" and Plazes maps and scheduling tools such as upcoming.org. He stressed this last point: "when you're not aware of other people's plans and availability, it is difficult to make your own plans; yet calendars in cell phones are designed assuming that only your own plans matter - other people's plans don't appear".
"Mobile 2.0 will not be about multimedia - making devices that show video or have better screen resolution. It will be about enabling social peripheral vision across space and across time".

Julian Bleecker, a professor at the University of Southern California, and Nicolas Nova, a PhD student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, study blogjects - objects that blog, that can produce content, share meaning, report about themselves, communicate. They wonder "what the world would be like if objects could participate with us in shaping the world". The discussion about networks of objects are not new: the ITU published last year a report called "The Internet of things"; writer Bruce Sterling wrote a book called "Shaping things" introducing the concept of "spimes" (see this previous post); etc. Bleecker however was frustrated particularly by the ITU report, "because the philosophy behind it was often related to business efficiency practices - but linking objects is not only about creating better margins for a corporations: it's about creating new social practices". So he wrote a "Manifesto for networked objects" (full PDF) whose sub-title reads: "Cohabiting with pigeons, arphids and Aibos in the Internet of things", trying to enlarge that approach and introducing the idea of "blogjects". The reference to Aibo is to the Sony robot dog, one of which at least does blog (meaning it reports on its activities during the day, posts pictures, etc). "That's an indication that objects can become participants in a space previously exclusively occupied by humans", Bleecker said.
Why does this matter? "Blogjects are traces, they are physical manifestations of the world, they know where they are, can trigger actions, and reshape social practices". Bleecker and Nova discuss a few examples, from GPS tracers to semacodes and other object-tags, to a "blogging pigeon" that carries a GSM cell phone modem and an environmental sensor on a small backpack "and while it flies around it records the micro-local environmental conditions. It trumps all the high-tech high-cost solutions - and the pigeon becomes a participant in the way we understand the world". Question: are social beings prepared to share the web (and the creation of meaning) with non-human content creators?

(I also gave a speech today. Topic: "If a mag marries a blog, what color will the baby's eyes be?". I spoke about the hybridization of "old" media and "new" media. Nicolas Nova blogged it. So did Henrik Fohns and Kim Elmose).

[tags: reboot8 blogjects tagging]

Comments

[Mac Steve]

You did a great job reporting from reboot8 and your own talk was one of the most valuable since the example you were talking about is a little less known because of the french language.

Now, not to be nitpicky here, but I'd like to add a little to the amazon system of URLs:

(1) "some Content Management System junk" (exec/obidos/ASIN/)

Obidos is a port city on the Amazon river in Brazil, and the name of the machine that runs the book database.
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware2/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=48202&ixReplies=22

The Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) is a product identification number used by Amazon.com ... For books with an ISBN, the ASIN and the ISBN are the same. Books without an ISBN and other products are also assigned ASINs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIN

(2) information about the product (0141019018/ref=br_lf_li_1_2/)

The product ID is only the first part here, the ASIN=ISBN in this case for "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything bySteven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner" (you can paste such a number directly in any amazon search field)

The "ref=br_lf_li_1_2/" is indeed the reference from where within the page you are clicking. Try this out yourself in any list of search results or recommendations at amazon and watch your status bar, where you see a "_1" for the first, "_2" for the second and so on results.