CNN.com has a neat little feature called ‘Story Highlights’ that companions each article at their website. Here’s an example from this article:
I like the feature. It gives me an overall view of the article in question and sets me up for skimming and deciding which parts to read thoroughly. If I know the context of the story beforehand well, it may even be enough to just know these simple points to get a good understanding.
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service with tagging at the center of it’s functionality. It’s a useful tool for an individual to organize and remember items on the web, and it has some interesting aspects of social sharing.
What it is
del.icio.us users can save links to pieces of information from around the web to their personal accounts. By taking advantage of tagging, users can add associative words to each item for later finding. The saved bookmarks are either public or private.
The service has a built-in network function where users can connect to each other and thereby follow bookmarked items from other people. Bookmarks can be exported and retrieved through RSS or automatically pushed to a daily blog posting.
Another thing worth mentioning is the total saves count. Each bookmark has a counter, that shows how many times the item has been saved in total by del.icio.us users. del.icio.us uses this feature to promote saved items to it’s front page, and thereby has a Digg-like functionality.
Context and perspectives
del.icio.us does in a way provide access to context and other perspectives. It’s not based on the saved items themselves, but on the associated tags. When I bookmarked the recently released WordPress theme CommentPress, I used different words to describe it:
commentpress wordpress plugin blog annotation books collaboration tools comments
If I want to get back to it again, all I need to do is ask del.icio.us to show me the items from my account that are tagged with one or more of these word, e.g. wordpress and annotation.
What’s interesting is that anytime I’m looking at the results of a specific tag request, I can choose to view all items saved at del.icio.us with the same tags. Using the two tags from above, del.icio.us gives me this list. By moving through other people’s bookmarks, I discover items that may be associated with my own.
In this example I found another system for paragraph level commenting. By combining some of the other keywords, I also found interesting blog posts and discussions that would be hard to find by searching through Google.
These functions are not really a built-in feature of del.icio.us, but rather ways to utilize the system. Functionality like this could probably be enhanced and combined with other tools to provide this service more directly to the user.
Meaning creation and action
When bookmarking, the user has the option to describe the item in maximum 255 characters, so there’s not much room for reflective thoughts that could benefit other users. Also, there’s no comment function.
Conclusion
del.icio.us is a useful tool for personal bookmarking. The service has never been meant to be a tool for staying up to date, but it works quite well as a way to monitor what people in one’s network is focusing on. Also it can be used in interesting ways to find context and perspectives based on tags.
The tagging and sharing process as a whole can - with improvements - probably be put to some interesting uses in context of e.g. crowd powered blog monitoring.
Further reading
“In many ways these new tools resemble blogs stripped down to the bare essentials. Here the essential unit of information is a link, not a story – but a link decorated with a title, a description, tags and perhaps even personal recommendation points. It is still uncertain whether tagging will take off in the way that blogging has. And even if it does, nobody yet knows exactly what it will achieve or where it will go – but the road ahead beckons.”
“The internet disorganizes information for you, so you can organize it for yourself — alone or with friends. That is the distilled essence of David Weinberger’s theory about how we create meaning and understanding for ourselves in these times.”
“I am continually finding organizations are thinking the social bookmarking tools and folksonomy are going to be simple and a cure all, but it is much more complicated than that. The social bookmarking tools will really sing for a while, but then things need help and most of the tools out there are not to the point of providing that assistance yet.”
“To conclude, the beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding add much cognitive cost. At the cognitive level, people already make local, conceptual observations. Tagging decouples these conceptual observations from concerns about the overall categorical scheme. The challenge for tagging systems is to then do what the brain does - intelligent computation to make sense of these local observations, and an efficient, predictable way to ensure findability.”
Mind maps is a great tool for brainstorming and organizing one’s thoughts. But can it also be used for presenting complex information in new and better ways?
What if we add functionality to the concept and evolve the whole idea just a bit?
What it is
The inventor of mind-maps, Tony Buzan, explains in this video what a mind-map is and why it’s useful for at lot of purposes.
Wikipedia defines mind-maps this way:
“A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, and decision making. It is an image-centered diagram that represents semantic or other connections between portions of information. By presenting these connections in a radial, non-linear graphical manner, it encourages a brainstorming approach to any given organizational task, eliminating the hurdle of initially establishing an intrinsically appropriate or relevant conceptual framework to work within.”
Mind maps as a tool to create overview in complexity
This mind map about brainstorming shows how powerful a tool it is. In a very clear an intuitive way we get a very good overview of all the complex pieces of information that adds up to the process of brainstorming, even though there’s complexity enough for several books. Note how images are used.
WikiMindMap is an interesting tool that outlines information from Wikipedia into mind maps. Have a look at a mind mapped version of the Wikipedia entry about mind maps.
Clicking on any node in the mind map opens the Wikipedia entry in a new window with an inline link to the specific section of the article. Nodes with + and - signs indicate further sub-sections, and nodes with the green circular arrows indicate a link to other Wikipedia entries. When clicking these entry-nodes, the mind map reloads and reveals a whole range of new connections in all directions.
Why it’s interesting
A mind map structures thoughts and information in relation to each other. There’s a link between each piece. Mapping out Wikipedia in a mind map provides a whole new kind of overview and a whole new way of exploring information.
WikiMindMap is also interesting because it combines the traditional mind map with direct linking. Each node and the connecting lines is a link both visually between the elements, but also to web pages with more extensive information.
WikiMindMaps is a simple tool - it only shows the headings of entries and sub-sections. But what if the model was bigger, if each node actually contained the whole content? What if we used it in context of a online news service, a sensemaking media or a weblog?
Imagine
Imagine a news article encapsulated in a mind map with connections in all directions to extra context. Imagine a node for each person mentioned in the article, each geographical place, each conflict, each company, each website, each non obvious connection, etc. Then imagine that it was done in an intuitive 3D-model where size, thickness of the visual connection and even distance between elements has a meaning. Pretty cool, I think.
Then imagine it being open for user-contributions and digg-like voting on the quality and importance of each contributed node. Add’s a whole new element to it, as it takes a lot of time to build models like this. With 500 people working on one mind map with a news article in the center, this thing could become pretty useful.
I’m just playing with thoughts here - I have no clue how to build it :) And the 3D thing is just a wild thought, even in 2D these functions could work. There is definitely interesting perspectives here that may and may not work well.
One can argue that the web already is a kind of mind map with all it’s links and different artifacts connected in complex ways, but the usual style of presentation is limited to lists of links and in-text linking that only provides the context without exposing the underlying relationship and relative importance of information.
To spice it all up, I have tried mapping out my immediate thoughts on the subject of mind maps. Mind42.com allows collaboration. If you’re interested in adding/editing the mind map, we could do a little experimentation with reader involvement here. Post a comment if you want access to edit it.
We also have an overall mind map for The Copenhagen Project.
Any other thoughts/links on this?
Further reading
“The human brain is very different from a computer. Whereas a computer works in a linear fashion, the brain works associatively as well as linearly - comparing, integrating and synthesizing as it goes. Association plays a dominant role in nearly every mental function, and words themselves are no exception. Every single word, and idea has numerous links attaching it to other ideas and concepts. (…) Because of the large amount of association involved, they can be very creative, tending to generate new ideas and associations that have not been thought of before. Every item in a map is in effect, a center of another map.” (My emphasizing)
“VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.”
“This paper describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces. We contribute the design and implementation of sense.us, a web site supporting asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. The site supports view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation, and social navigation and includes novel interaction elements. We report the results of user studies of the system, observing emergent patterns of social data analysis, including cycles of observation and hypothesis, and the complementary roles of social navigation and data-driven exploration.”
“Vic’s compendium of software that supports knowledge management and information organisation in graphical form. Includes mind mappers, concept mappers, outliners, hierarchical organisers, KM support and knowledge browsers, 2D and 3D.”
So, we are basically building a catalogue of all the small tools and concepts we have found during our research.
Now it’s time to one of my favorite ways to get a good overview of the most important events around the globe: The Economist’s ‘Politics this week‘ and ‘Business this week‘. It’s lacking a lot of functionality, but combined with other tools it could be a interesting concept to create new formats upon.
Presentation
What the editor of The World This Week (as the two pages is called in the print magazine) do is basically to summarize the most important events and issues from the last week, dedicating one paragraph to each focus. The result in the print edition is two full pages of the last week’s most important global political and business related news.
Here is an example of a paragraph:
“International inspectors confirmed that North Korea’s plutonium-producing nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, north of the capital, Pyongyang, and four other facilities there have been shut off. A first instalment of fuel oil promised to North Korea in return for ending its nuclear programme arrived, and six-country talks resumed in Beijing.” (It’s from here).
If The Economist is running an article on the given subject there’s also a link to that article immediately after the paragraph in the online edition.
It’s interesting how the ‘resolution’, i.e. how many separate news paragraphs that are present, is determined by the size of the physical magazine, not whether a specific week has many or few relevant events to focus on.
Context and perspectives
In the print edition: No context. Really - nothing. Not even a page reference to articles about the event in the magazine. In the online edition there’s a link, but as stated above only to one article and only if the magazine has one about it.
In terms of comprehension one can argue that the whole concept helps the reader to get a very good overview of what is important and what isn’t - according to the editor’s view, of course (or, a set of editorial values - which is a interesting thing about news judgment we probably will get back to later in the process).
A problem I see with traditional newspapers, is that the front page especially, but also the newspaper as a whole, serves as a function to rank the news of the day after importance. The problem is, that it only function in context to that specific day it’s published. One day the frontpage story may be a plane crash, the next day that the U.N. estimates 600.000 civilians deaths in Iraq because of the war.
There’s a big difference in the importance of these two pieces of information, and with traditional newspapers readers aren’t supported in their comprehension of that. ‘The World This Week’ provides - to some extend - this useful service.
Tools to create meaning and take action
Aren’t present. As events are only summarized with no detail, there’s no help in understanding why the information is important and relevant, and there’s nothing that encourages action on part of the reader.
Conclusion
The World This Week gives the reader a quick overview of the main events of the past week. It’s fragmented, and there’s very little guidance to explore the information further. It’s strongest forte in it’s current form is helping the reader to understand the importance of different event’s from the past week in relation to each other.
There’s very few tools out there that help people to perceive the importance of information, and it’s seldom openly discussed upon which values and principles the prioritization of information is based.
The World This Week could be much improved if it was combined with other tools and methods of information presentation, e.g. the concepts from my post The power of extensive linking, but also the other functions we’re gonna examine during this project. This is partly what we’re trying to do here; look at interesting services and tools and finding new ways to combine them into concepts that can serve as effective new ways of staying up to date in the future.
Note: If any one knows similar services, they are very welcome to post a link in the comments.
Digg is an interesting platform for a variety of reasons. In the perspective of this project it has some great features, but overall it’s not helping users in having an overall view of our complex world. Let’s look at Digg through our model.
Presentation
Digg’s way to present information to the user is determined by a collective voting system. What Digg presents as important to it’s readers is therefore not determined by a set of editorial values, but rather by the average sum of the user base’s values at the time given. The links that gets digged to the frontage share a common value to the community that can be summarized as ‘interestingness’.
As there is no overall editorial guidance, the front page of Digg and the subsections are continually running lists of interesting pieces of information presented with no relation to each other. There’s very little introduction to each link and it’s usually a short summary of the content. The summaries seems to be of relatively high quality on the front page. It’s probably rare that a link get’s digged if it has a bad or uninteresting description.
Context and perspectives
The context provided to links at Digg is user comments. It’s interesting that Digg uses it’s voting system to rate conversations: Comments found valuable by the community is digged to the top, bad and invaluable comments is digged down.
At June 18th Digg launched it’s new comment system, which seems to succeed very well in the hard task of structuring thousands of comments and still making it possible for the conversation to be meaningful.
I like Digg’s voting system in the comments a lot. Rather than read through all comments, it’s possible to have them sorted with the most digged first. The Digg-function seems to be a powerful way of organizing conversations and context, and will probably be something we’ll get back to later in the project.
Tools to create meaning and take action
As Digg is an editorial and discussion tool, users is only helped in their meaning creation by the conversations in the comments. The social aspect is important at Digg, and it’s enhanced by the possibility for the community itself to vote down trolls.
There’s not really any build-in function that supports or encourages people to take action upon provided information.
Conclusion
The Digg-model needs huge improvements to work as a general entry point for people to get an overall view of what’s happening in the world. Overall Digg seems to be more of an exploration tool.
The most interesting part about Digg is not how the community ‘edits’ the frontpage, but how discussions and comments gets structured. Digg’s commenting system is probably the most advanced out there, and it works really well. In relation to The Copenhagen Project it’s interesting how this concept can be used to facilitate better context and perspectives when combined with other tools.
IMHO of course.
Other ressources:
- Toward a Better Digg. A list of 10 services that uses Digg-like voting in different ways.
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