BookBlog

Bar Camp: Yahoo Finance and community

A session at Bar Camp on Ajax UI best practices veered into a discussion of UI for community reputation. We were there with the designer of Yahoo Finance, who has a truly thorny problem, where UI is the smaller bit of the problem.

In smaller communities, where people go by their real names and misbehavior has serious informal and formal consequences, like a wiki in a company, misbehavior is minimal. Many larger communities have mostly good people, with a few bad actors trying to spoil it for the rest of everyone. These communities develop specialized mechanisms for fending off trolls and crimiinals -- Ebay, Craigs List, Slashdot and Wikipedia (for much of its content) fall into this pattern. Slashdot has tools for making the nuisances inaudible, WIkipedia has tools for banning them, Ebay and Craigs List have processes for getting them locked up.

But with Yahoo Finance, a large population of the most active users are day traders. Their intent is to pump up the stocks they want to buy and trash the stocks they want to sell. There seems to be less of a core of "good community" than there is of bad actors.

One thought - is there a way to utilize explicit social networks, like investement clubs, plus "friend of friend" features in order to protect the good folk, and to create reputation that expandss the circle of known good folk?

And the perennial takaway - the tools you use to foster community online are dependent and interdependent with the nature of the community.

Campaign finance reform, censored

State Assemblyman Ira Ruskin had a series of town hall meetings this weekend. Menlo Park was emergency preparedness, Palo Alto was campaign finance, Los Gatos was renewable energy. It's pretty cool to have one's state rep be out advocating global warming and public campaign finance legislation, among a sympathetic crowd.

I went to the event at Palo Alto city hall because it was nearby and the time was convenient. That program wound up strange because the Assemblyman was not allowed to talk about Prop. 89, the ballot initiative. Instead, he spent his time talking about AB253 (I think), a state bill for public financing that he favored, but that didn't pass. After the event, outside city hall, a few proponents of prop89 handed out literature and explained the differences -- prop. 89 is apparently a mildly weaker version of public financing, that is supported by the powerful Nurses Union which had opposed the assembly bill.

The event was surprisingly low-tech. Palo Alto city hall doesn't have wifi, which would have made it easier to fact-check questions live. When an audience member asked a question the assemblyman and his staff couldn't answer, he offered to send out the answer in his monthly newsletter, instead of, say, posting to the blog later that day. I was pretty interested in the renewable energy event; it would have been cool to podcast.

Volunteer opportunity #253, podcasting 101 for state reps.

Hello from Google Wifi

It's geek tourism day -- just cycled to downtown Mountain View to check out the Google wifi service. It's linked up to your google account -- when I fired up firefox, I got this message: "Welcome to Google WiFi. Welcome back, Adina. Before using Google WiFi, we need to know a little more about you. Please enter the additional information below." -- but clicking though just took me to a portal page with some info about downtown Mountain View. There wasn't signal a few blocks away, when I missed the Moffett/Castro turnoff, crossed the highway, and realized I wasn't quite in the right place. So I took out the handy paper bike map and turned around.

p.s. just looked up directions to another store on Google Maps. Thank goodness it doesn't say "you are here".

p.p.s. sitting on the plaza benches catty corner from the starbucks by 650 Castro. There are flowering trees planted in a trough below sidewalk level, and there are working power outlets in the well by each tree. Wifi is fine.

Kathy Sierra on getting beyond P mode

Kathy Sierra's question about digital camera usersstuck in pre-programmed "P" mode was answered by Kodak a century ago in its pioneering advertising. Before Kodak cameras, there was no such thing as "home photography". In order to sell people on the new-fangled cameras, Kodak needed to introduce the idea of memorializing life cycle events and sentimental occasions. Kodak's advertising started early with "how to" use a camera -- its earliest ads focused on ease of use, but its landmark ads tought people why to use a camera.

Today, everyone takes the snapshot for granted. Now, a large number want to use newly affordable digital cameras to learn how to take better photos. Flickr is encouraging broader appreciation of the nuances of better photography. The techniques known to professional and skilled amateur photographers are now coveted by a larger number of people. The training that the Digital Camera class attendess is not in how to use the camera's features, but in how a given feature is used for esthetic effect.

It takes a higher level of skill to take visually nuanced photographs than to take a snapshot of a kid blowing out birthday candles. Users need technical training in light, filters, focal lengths. In Kathy's comments, a number of readers suggest that Canon isn't responsible for technical training. Geoff Moore in his classic Crossing the Chasm series on high-tech marketing explans how to bridge that gap. Complicated products like software and cars develop a large "aftermarket" in the training and additional products needed to get users the "whole product" they are looking for -- not just accounting software, but the skills to keep books; not just an automobile, but the services to keep it fueled and clean. Canon might not want to take on the very different business of providing training in popular art photography, but could cultivate a network of providers of photography classes, contests, clubs, and other services and incentives for people to learn how to make better pictures.

Bike route google mashups

This one designed for cycling, and this one is nominally for running, but is just lovely for road routes -- double click at each turn and it counts the miles.

Also, no books on the plane

At least not on this flight from Edinburgh to Newark. If you didn't have a receipt from the airport, into the looting pile it went. Sheesh. This is sheer gibbering idiocy from shampoo bottle to crappy novel.

Pursue justice?

A propose of not much, I finally put my finger on why the "media justice" meme strikes me as going in the wrong direction. In political vocabulary, "justice" is a a buzzword and a code word. It implies a strategy of pursuiing redress of grievances, speaking truth to power, protest.

The lightbulb came on when I was reading an article in the Nation about the need for environmental and progressive groups to rebuild a grass roots base, that quoted Peggy Shepard of West Harlem Environmental Action. That group was born out of street protests to call attention to a sewage plant that had been making people sick for years. The group organized a demonstration that held up traffic at 7 a.m. on the West Side Highway in front of the North River plant on Martin Luther King Day, eventually filed a lawsuit, and catalyzed a $55 million repair operation by the city.

When pollution is making people sick, protest politics make sense. Polluters can get away with it as long as the harm is kept quiet and it's easier for the polluter to continue than to stop. Protest politics raise awareness and make it less convenient for the polluter.

The "justice" metaphor and strategy makes a lot less sense to me when applied to media. When there's a polluting sewage treatment plant or chemical plant in your neighborhood, you don't have a lot of power on your own. You can't shut it down or move it. You rely on recalcitrant business people and politicians to help you. In classic form, you need to organize and and petition those that have the power for redress of greivances.

With media, though, a community group or an individual can easily get a voice and become part of the media. By easy I don't mean trivial, it takes work and information-gathering and networking. But it is within the power of an individual or group of people, unlike, say, shutting down a polluting chemical plant. So, a large part of the focus to get "justice" in media coverage is DIY and entrepreneurial. Don't ask somebody to do it for you, just do it, and then reach out to get the story amplified. There are tremendous opportunities for business and civic entrepreneurship here. Don't ask, do.

There are some aspects of media where political activism is needed, where the rules are overly influenced by folks with concentrated power. In order to get open spectrum, organizers need to wrest it back from the claws of the incumbent oligopoly. In order to get net neutrality, organizers need to win the battle with the incumbent oligopoly - or, harder but better, break the oligopoly. Even then, the rhetoric of petition isn't nearly enough to win the war, since this speaks to a fraction of the supporters. Allies in that battle include the tech entrepreneurs who want to ensure space for a competitive market. They don't see themselves as the powerless asking from help from the powerful -- they want market forces to work, and concentrated oligopoly works against the competitive market.

So, environmental justice is a powerful strategy for a set of problems. "Media justice" plays a much narrower role, motivating a particular constituency on a particular subset of a set of issues where other strategies are a larger part of the solution.

Are social networking services nightclubs without dancing?

Young people flock together. They dress up and show off, make small talk and flirt, identify in fashion tribes. At any moment, there's a hot venue, the place where everyone has to be. And then, suddenly, there's a new hot place, and the old hot place is shuttered. And then, gradually, there's a new generation, with different music, different dancing, a different style of gathering. Dance halls, driveins, discos, raves, different generations of the same always-shifting cultural pattern. People who used to be young graduate to other forms of association, related to work, family, neighborhood, interest.

Are social networking services similarly ubiquitous and ephemeral, the same cultural pattern, but with many more people per club and without the dancing? Friendster was the hot place to be, and then it wasn't. Orkut was in for the technotribe for a few minutes, and then for Brazilians. MySpace is huge right now. Will Myspace carry over to the next microgeneration, or will it be replaced by the next online hangout?

Will generations stay with their network as they grow up, like the baby boomers stayed with rock'n'roll and their parents stayed with Sinatra? Or will they move on to other places? Will other types of online association have greater stability, with fashions that wax and wane over longer generations, like Haddassah and Elks and DFA?

The war on hair gel

This MSNBC interview with aviation consultant Michael Boyd confirms what you might have thought -- the latest ban on hair gel, toothpaste is theater, not real protection. Meanwhile, the TSA and DHS are ignoring serious security problems at the airport cargo backdoors, delaying investing in technology that can tell explosives from suntan lotions, and spending our money instead on dog booties, beermaking machines, and golfing retreats

Can flywheels keep the California grid up next summer?

Where the Saudi oil production numbers are potentially influential and very bad, this story is potentiall influential and very promising.

A company in the Boston area, Beacon Power, is running trial systems for the grids of New York and California that use flywheels to balance out the fluctuations of supply and demand in the grid. Today, when peak demand strains the grid, the network sends a signal to a power plants with idle capacity to start producing. This is costly and polluting, since power plants are cheapest to run and least polluting when they are producing at a steady level. The flywheel system can respond faster -- seconds instead of minutes -- and doesn't add pollution.

If the six-month pilots of scale model systems in New York and California go well, the company will be able to sell their first production-scale systems next year, perhaps in time to spare the grid in air conditioning systems. The company, which started by selling backup power for telecom, and went public in 2000 right before the bottom fell out of that market, has retooled to sell to the electric grid. They've been losing $2-3 million per quarter, and have working capital of $8.5 million. Here's hoping the technology, timing and investment banks all work out to get this technology on line.

One piece of information I haven't yet been able to find -- how much C02 and other polution is due to the marginal use of natural gas plants to cover spikes in electricity demand. If the role of spare power was filled by flywheels instead of power plants, how much would emissions be reduced?

Found the story in the Renewable Energy Access blog, pointing to this MIT tech review article on Thursday.

Amazon still doesn't get links

One of the persistently frustrating things about Amazon's reader reviews is that they don't have permalinks. Reviewers can't respond to other reviews, or even bring in references to reviews of other books. This prevents people from talking to each other. It prevents flamewars, and it prevents community.

Recently, Amazon has added several new "features" that borrow from the forms of social software. A "plog" looks like a weblog. It is a listing, in reverse chronological order, of posts about products you've seen or expressed an interest in. Unlike a "blog", which consists of posts the author has written, a "plog" is a marketing newsletter, with messages from authors and others who are trying to sell you things. Apparently the right to write is bestowed by Amazon upon slected authors or marketers. The recipient of this unnatural hybrid has very little over the content. You can make a comment, and comments even have permalinks. But there is no venue inside the Amazon sprawl to use these links to write back. The user doesn't have obvious ways to write or link. This is the opposite of user-generated content, it is content inflicted on the user.

In the same family of mutant social software is Amazon's wiki feature. The so-called wikis appear near the bottom of a well-shaft-long scroll of various product description and review features. If you log in with a username and credit card (!), you can edit a page about that product. I need to upgrade my credit card, apparently, in order to see if the wiki even has a linking feature. It is clear from perusing the top wikis that linking isn't part of the idiom. People who are writing collaborative commentary about, say, the XBOX, aren't building a rich , interlinked history and knowledgebase of the games market, trends, and technology, unlike the WIkipedia entry. Instead, the Amazon "wiki" is a short and shallow review that happens to have been written by more than one person. The Amazon XBOX wiki doesn't even have it's own link as far as I can tell, all you can do is get to the xbox page and scroll all the way down. This is the opposite of the design pattern of atomic entries, identified by links, and interconnected by links, that allows the Wikipedia entry to grow and deepen with links to Microsoft, components, games, market trends, and related information.

The problem with Amazon's reviews is that the absense of links inhibits the creation of community. The wikis are antithetical to the concept of building a rich knowledgebase using shared vocabulary as links. The plogs don't allow user-generated content. In all of these "features", Amazon's interface designers have borrowed the appearance social software but missed the meaning and the social dynamic that makes the whole of blogs and wikis to be greater than the sum of the parts.

Affective computing: the mood thermometer in the lecture hall

Here's the anecdote that was most telling about the wrong track taken by Affective Computing, the book by MIT's Rosalind Picard about the digitizing of emotion.

Picard writes about giving a lecture as part of an elearning program. She was troubled by the fact that she could not read the emotional responses of people in the audience, unlike a physical lecture hall, when you have visual signals of interest. Her suggestion was to wire the audience, and get a digital readout of the emotions.

In recent years, conferences and remote meetings have developed a different mechanism to read the response othe participants. A simple text chat enables people who are engaged to show and share emotions with smiles praise, questions, or heckling. In great presentations, the backchat is dead silent, as the audience is spell-bound.

Unlike a physical room, where even someone silent may reveal emotional signals through physical signs of boredeom, excitement, or anger, a backchat reveals nothing from someone who is silent. That's not quite true - someone who wants to telegraph excitement or displeasure in a 3D meeting room will also use backchat signals. In small groups, silence in a teleconference and backchat is also revealing. A group leader can ask someone who is unusually silent to say what they are thinking.

Another big difference is that in a lecture hall, or a remote presentation with backchat, participants have substantial control over the emotions they display. Picard's hypothetical mood thermometer might pick up on involuntary emotions, or emotions the participant might want to hide. A participant might be feeling angry at a family member, or lustful for a fellow member of the audience, or exhausted because of a small infant at home. Picard's hypothetical mood-reader would transmit those emotions to the lecturer.

Picard herself notes that all known emotion-detecting technology can be fooled by skilled humans. So emotional surveillance in the virtual classroom would lead to unnatural emotional repression. what's weirder, the mood thermometer is one-way -- the lecturer can see the mood of the audience, but the audience can't read each other. Backchat is very different from the mood thermometer. Like same-place emotions, backchat allows participants to feed on each other expicitly. This difference comes directly from Picard's belief that affective computing is "personal" -- her model doesn't include the social aspects of much of human emotion.

The backchat model can be extended to include emoticons, color feedback, and other signals to share emotions with other participants and the leader. These nonverbal signals can complement text chat; allowing people to do the thing they're good at, combining thoughts and emotions in communication.

Picard's theories rely on complex tools to automate emotions, rather than on simpler tools that allow people to share thoughts and emotions with each other. I think her theories are misguided, in an interesting and revealing way.

Saudi oil output continues to decline

Saudi Arabia oil production continuing to decline, according to the EIA August data, via The Oil Drum.

Gulp. Hopefully there is some innocuous explanation. Why isn't this front page news?

Peterme on Tufte's latest

I confess I haven't yet read Tufte's latest information design tome, Beautiful Evidence, but have been following along peterme's review posts. In the most recent writeup, peterme take's issue with Tufte's desire for unambiguous diagrams. I think I can put a finer point on it.

This consulting deliverable, is a an illustrated artifact of a research project that Adaptive Path did with a client. Adaptive Path and the client lived through the research together, and the illustration complements the story they put together about the experience people have when comparing financial products online. The illustration doesn't stand alone. If peterme didn't tell the story in a few paragraphs of text below the picture, it wouldn't mean much to someone who wasn't there. And the illustration didn't need to standalone. The client was paying Adaptive Path to talk to them. So there was no need to make an artifact that would speak for itself.

By contrast, the seemingly plain yet elegant graphic of SARS transmission is more self-contained. The textual narrative adds content, but the picture tells more of the story by itself. The medical article needs to be self-explanatory, since, unlike Adaptive Path consulting deliverables, the journal article does not come with a set of medical researchers explaining it to the reader, and the readers were not already part of the research team with the writers.

There is no single standard for explicitness in an information diagram, because the need for explicitness depends on the context in which the illustration is used.

Campaigns without people

I've found three slick websites supporting greenhouse gas policies. This Climate Choices site from the Union of Concerned Scientists, focused on the California Legislative session is nicely designed, links to the bills, has videos and action alerts. But no obvious people, and no direct feedback.

This national site from Environmental Defense focuses on getting signatures in support for the languishing McCain Lieberman bill in Congress. It has a petition and videos, as well as gizmos you can put on your site, including banners, instant message icons, and PC wallpaper. But no humans, no way to provide direct feedback, no obvious way to meet fellow activists. I can see that over 100,000 people have signed the petition in California. Uh, yay, I guess.

This National Resources Defence Council has an action alert, a postcard to send, and a place to sign in and see the history of actions you've taken. . But no humans, no way to provide direct feedback, no obvious way to meet fellow activists. I can see that over 100,000 people have signed the petition in California.

These campaigns use the internet as if it were a fancier form of direct mail. A beautiful brochure, with some more widgets and animation. No opportunity to take advantage of the ability to meet to the people behind the scenes and to talk to each other. None of the messy, potentially unpredictable consequences of actual political organizing.

California's greenhouse bill, results this month?

California's greenhouse gas bill promises to cap state emissions at 1990 levels by 2020. The bill would impose mandatory reporting and a "cap-and-trade" system. This vision is far ahead of US national policy which is to shut eyes tightly while headed for the cliff.

The legislature is pushing to get the bill done before a recess at the end of August. A hearing is expected in the Senate Appropriations committee in two weeks.

It sounds like the bill outlines the goals, and delegates the implementation rules to a task force. The current squabbling surrounds who will have the power to write the implementation rules. The original bill gives the power to the California Air Resource Board, while the Governor wants to give that power to a board appointed by the governor.

Backers of the bill include the Union of Concerned Scientists They have a Climate Choices very polished site with action alerts, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense. These sites all have action alerts, press a button to support the bill.

Smart meters in Northern California

On July 20, California's energy regulators approved a program to roll out smart meters to 9 million gas and electric household customers. These meters report electricity consumption on an hourly basis. This enables PG&E to set pricing that varies by season and time of the day, rewarding customers who shift energy use to off-peak periods. The peak pricing program will start out on a voluntary basis, and the full rollout is expected to take five year.

So far, the only source I've found for this is the PG&E press release, which was picked up by a number of newspapers and trade publications, and the PG&E earnings call.

The he said/she said coverage found an industry watchdog group that is skeptical that the increased rates to pay for the capital costs of the program will pay for benefits in conservation, and concerned that the program does nothing to decrease overall demand. It seems logical that giving consumers feedback and differential pricing will shift demand off peak. Thipilot programwith 100 households in Oregon shows the successful shift of demand away from peak hours.

Jesse Berst, the former IT analyst who's now covering energy cautions that smart metering technology is changing, and buyers should watch out for total cost of ownership and standards support. I haven't yet found information about who is supplying the meters to PG&E.

Affective Computing doesn't feel right

Currently reading Affective Computing by Rosalind Picard of MIT. The book envisions computers that are trained to detect and express emotions, and thereby become better servants of people. I think the premise is badly misguided, but interestingly so.

One core flaw is that I don't think you can have the features of emotions without the bugs. Emotions are integral to the pleasure and pain-seeking circuits of an organism. When well-tuned, they help the organism survive and thrive. When off-balance, you get addiction and depression.

The author envisions affective computing as a personal technology. But this doesn't map to way emotions are build into the social nature of the human species. The circuits used for love and loyalty also run betrayal and tribal hatred. Given the frequency of divorce and war, it seems unlikely that we'd be able to do a better job invoking social emotions in machines.

Scoble doesn't get Vox

In his BlogHer writeup, Robert Scoble dings Vox for being targeted at novices.

"As to Vox, the idea is great (expand blogging to more "regular people") but I've gotta wonder how successful it'll be. Microsoft's Bob taught the world that no one wants to be a beginner, or seen as one. I think it's condescending, don't you? If you're going to get dragged to learn to ski, don't you want to get off the beginning slopes and hang out with your friends on the intermediate and advanced slopes?"

Vox strikes me less as blogging for novices and more like LiveJournal or MySpace for grownups. Vox takes the build-in social networking and privacy design patterns and applies them in an application that's more tastefully designed and easy to customize. The Vox target audience is grownups wanting to communicate privately to friends and family. The challenge for SixApart is the need for viral spread of a more introverted application.

The younger culture is more extroverted, not to say exhibitionist. The tools spread across social networks defined by groups of friends and subcultures that want to reach out and leave their mark. These networks can spread like wildfire. The growth of grownup networks of public blogging, using tools like Wordpress and MovableType, connected by implicit links and overlay tools like Technorati rather than explicit networking features, are driven by a different exhibitionistic impulse. For reasons personal and professional, many bloggers strive for recognition and fame. This can be microfame (say, bay area food bloggers) or macrofame (DailyKos), but there's a built-in drive for attention.

The grownup friends and family networks that Vox seems to want to support are more stable and more private. People might want to share pictures of kids in the pool that they wouldn't share on a public blog. The question is whether this quieter desire to share and connect will cross the threshold needed for viral growth and baseline success.