brightly colored food

One of my longstanding wishes has been for a personal lending library system. Not sure how well it works, but Mediachest, mentioned on BoingBoing today, is one of the first online efforts I’ve heard of. I’m curious to see how its used.

The visual design looks a bit Friendster-ish, which makes me both celebrate and cringe about standardization. As Neilsen points out (it’s hard not to call him Nielly now), users spend most of their time on other sites, not yours, so some standard visual conventions are generally a good thing. On the other hand, it’s ugly, and the only thing worse than one ugly design is an ugly design that’s becomg convention. Flickr was banged together in eight weeks and looks right nice. Some of the other social network services do a decent job as well (this is not going to turn into a design review), so I’m left hoping this is an isolated incident and not a trend.

Anyhow, the user agreement and privacy policy for Mediachest are understandable and seem reasonable at first glance (though it’s interesting: both list when they were last updated, which implies that they’re subject to some amount of change. I wonder if anyone tracks changes in agreements on sites like this).

So I signed up. The sign up was painless, didn’t ask me to disclose anything unreasonable, but the book submission process is laborious, as you’d expect: typing in the ISBN numbers off the back of books isn’t too exciting. And for the outward appearance of convention, navigating around to edit my profile took more effort than I’d expected.

Part of my thesis is on self-presentation: how and what people share about themselves. Browsing shared iTunes playlists over the network has become a bit of a thing on college campuses, so I wonder how this will compare. Unlike services like Friendster, my profile is visible to all. Though I can limit who views my booklist by groups (everyone and friends) and also by book, anyone can see what I’ve added recently, going against any of the permissions controls I’d just set up.

I grabbed 100 books off my bookshelf and added them to my profile. Curious guinea pig that I am, I’m still going to wait before putting the rest up. I haven’t really explored the groups or the specifics involved in sharing - no point until there’s more people - but I’ll post again if anything interesting happens.

Update: In a wonderful example of customer-centered design, it took less than an hour to get an email from one of the lead developers at Mediachest. We IMed about the visual presentation and site functionality, and they’re amenable to design suggestions (I gave him plenty), though overwhelmed with work. There are some nice functional improvements coming out soon, so I’m excited to see what happens.

I’m looking to install a wiki platform for use in classes. Can anyone make some recommendations? Ease of use, ease of installation, and visual presentation are probably the most important factors, though there are others I’m probably missing. Suggestions would be most welcome.

Here’s a list of wiki platforms, and a most excellent visualization of how wiki entries change over time. For the uninformed, a wiki is a website that allows anyone to create or edit anything on the site, quite a useful function for building collaborative encyclopedias or something more modest, like maintaining a list of resources.

You’ve got to love it when a Salon article turns into a software development jam session. Even if Stephen Johnson is just riffing by himself, he’s one hell of a soloist. This is easily the most interesting article I’ve read on blogging by the mainstream media. (does Salon count as mainstream?)

Salon: Use the blog, Luke

The collective future of blogs lies not in dethroning the New York Times — but in becoming a force that can make sense of the Web’s infinity of links.

This seems timely, given that the next Star Wars movie is coming so soon (but hey, Spiderman already made up for the absence of great movies over the past several months).

Star Wars Galaxies: A Case Study in Participatory Design

It’s interesting to see how far community involvement went in the development of this massively-multi-player online community/game. For example, users debated with developers over what characters they could play and what it took to be a jedi. This is the best part of the article…

More important than the answers to these questions was how the issues were handled. The designers took a strong stand on issues central to the nature of the community, and then proceeded to respond to players’ concerns on the board, publicly, until the issue had been reasonably resolved in the community. Through the ensuing dialogue, readers gained not a thorough explanation, but unique insight into the reflections of top game designers as they practice their craft. As Holocron commented at the time , how community leaders respond to these issues is critically important in establishing the gaming community. The theory goes that if community leaders establish a social norm of open dialogue and civil discourse, thoughtful players will be attracted to the game, and civility and openness will become the social norms of the community. The designers hope that this core group of early game adopters will embrace this ethic, and make it the community ethos. So, in a very real way, building an active, involved player base — even months before release — is a critical part of the game design process.

Seems like this is a much more involved effort than most examples of participatory design (at least that I’ve heard). Involvement from users lasted a year, was considerably substantial, and involved a (relatively) large number of users. This type of approach seems ideally suited for online gaming communities, though I wonder how it would play out for other development efforts.

Does most open source development count as participatory design, if those who “participate” are coders as well? Hmmm. What are other examples along the participatory design continuum between a Star Wars Galaxy-level effort and gathering feedback from beta releases or harvesting feature requests from support bulletin boards? Thoughts? Anyone?

There’s also a link to the companion site for the book “Community Building on the Web”, which has a nice overview of the principles involved in community building.

Here’s a class on Simulations and Gaming that’s taught by Kurt Squire, who wrote the article and runs Joystick101.org, which he describes as focusing on “on examining issues surrounding games in depth — particularly the intersections betweeen games, human behavior, culture, design, and society.”

From Design for Community via elearningpost
Good stuff from Derek Powazek (whose new book just came out), Matt Haughey, and the crew at Evolt.

From haddock.org via blackbeltjones

From MetaFilter
Well-written NYTimes article (registration required) about identity on the internet.

Two papers cited on the CHI-WEB list, and two others — a website and a paper — worth mentioning.

Examining the Effectiveness of Electronic Group Communication Technologies: The Role of the Conversation Interface[.pdf]
Argues that “different social and technical designs of electronic group communication technologies will influence various aspects of electronic group communication, such as level of participation, patterns of interaction and genres of communicative purposes”. It’s an obvious point, but from a quick look at the paper there’s some decent analysis and development.

Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes
Tom Erickson from IBM has done some great research on things like patterns for interaction design, the role of storytelling in design, and social interaction online. This paper examines properties that enable graceful face-to-face interaction, identifies three main characteristics — visibility, awareness, and accountability — and looks at an online chat system that tries to support these characteristics.

The Dynamics of Mass Interaction[.pdf]
From the AT&T Labs Research Group. Looks at the relationship between demographics, conversational strategies, and interactivity.

Conversation Map: An Interface for Very Large-Scale Conversations

The Conversation Map system is a Usenet newsgroup browser that analyzes the text of an archive of newsgroup messages and outputs a graphical interface that can be used to search and read the messages of the archive. The Conversation Map system incorporates a series of novel text analysis procedures that automatically compute a set of social networks detailing who is responding to and/or citing whom in the newsgroup; a set of discussion themes that are frequently used in the newsgroup archive; and, a set of semantic networks that represent the main terms under discussion and some of their relationships to one another.

How can I listen to these mixes?

You can’t through Art of the Mix. Best bet is to contact the person and arrange a trade. Don’t be afraid! Most people are more than willing to engage in the thrill of long distance exchange. The entire concept of trust and interest comes into play and is powerful.

I ran across the latest story at Fray, and to my suprise it was about Michael Hedges, the greatest guitarist ever (I’ll save that digression for another time). He’s one of those musicians I kept like a secret, like Cassandra Wilson or early Keb Mo or even MeShelle Ndgeocello before each got big or boring, so I was confused as to why there was a story about him.

The story itself is pretty good — it’s about Hedges having a brief dalliance with the author of the story, an interesting way to picture your idol. There were some great posts to the question that ended the story: “who do you remember?”. There was a post from someone at artifakts, so I checked it out. The tagline at artifakts is “found things. lost pieces. glimpses into other lives.” Here’s how they describe their site:

each day, you will be shown an artifakt upon the front page. it is yours for the day. every visit to the front page on a given day will display this single artifakt. others visiting the page will likely be shown a different artifakt. on rare occasions, when a particularly good and/or timely artifakt has been submitted to the site, every visitor on a given day will be shown this single new artifakt.

if you would like to view more than one artifakt a day, you may dig deeper. you will be allowed to view a certain number of additional artifakts, after which point you will be asked to submit an artifakt of your own for the priviledge of continuing to dig.

What makes this site compelling and unlike any other site that could list random found objects (admittedly already a compelling idea) are the rules that are imposed upon visitors: you’re each being shown different artifacts, and if you want to see more, you must contribute. It makes them want to contribute by provoking their curiosity — a strong but subtle motivator, and the hallmark of many great designs. What are the others seeing? What else is there? What can I contribute in order to see more? Artifakts provokes contribution and involvement in an empowering and creative way, and for that I commend them.

How many websites today can provoke that kind of curiosity or compel you to do something?