WebVisions Designing for the Personal InfoCloud Presentation

The presentation at WebVisions of Designing for the Personal InfoCloud went quite well yesterday. There is ever growing interest in the Personal InfoCloud as there are many people working to design digital information for use across devices, for reuse, for constant access to information each individual person desires, and building applications around these interests.

In an always on world peoples desires and expectations are changing for their access to information. The tools that will help ease this desire are now being built and some are great starts have been made in this direction. I will be writing about some of these tools in the near future.

I am more exited today than I have been in quite some time by what I see as great progress for the reality of a Personal InfoCloud. It is ever closer for the Personal InfoCloud being more automated and beginning to function in ways that really help people find efficient ways to use information they have found or created in their lives when they want it or need it.

Not only does the Personal InfoCloud need devices but it needs people designing the information for the realities of Web2.0, which is not the old web of "I Go Get", but the new web of "Come to Me". This change in focus demands better understanding of sharing digital assets, designing across platforms and devices, and information being reused and organized externally.

Social Machines

Those of you that follow this site will also likely enjoy Wade Roush's continuousblog. Wade is the West Coast editor for the MIT Technology Review magazine. He has the August cover story in the TechReview titled, "Social Machines" and has posted Social Machines on his site as of today. Please be sure to pick up a print copy and/or read the article on the TechReview site when it is published there.

[I should mention I am quoted in the "Social Machines" article]

Local InfoCloud and Community

I have been thinking about the Local InfoCloud and its role lately. Viewing the world through the InfoCloud lenses has found some rough edges around the Local InfoCloud, initially defined by information accessible because of location or membership to a closed group. The location component makes sense, but it really also needs to include community.

I have recently read Ramesh Srinivasan's Village Voice: Expressing narrative through community-designed ontologies (his MIT master's thesis). In Village Voice Ramesh uses the following definitions of community from Brian Smith (et al.):

• Ethnic/political communities: These are communities that may have no proximity, yet have a common political identity, or ethnic background. A variety of web sites have been designed to allow these groups to come together.


• Geographic communities: These are communities that have physical bounds. These sites aim to complement the face-to-face interaction that already occurs.


• Virtual communities: Virtual communities are groups that come together based on a common interest that the web medium makes possible.


• Demographic communities: A number of web-based demographic communities have emerged to serve various constituencies. Web sites that are based upon a demographic community are growing in popularity.


• Activity-based communities: These communities are defined by a shared activity such as shopping,making music, or playing games.

This connection between Local InfoCloud and communities is one that seems paired in the following manner as it pertains to the InfoClouds. The Global InfoCloud is all the information available to everybody, if one can find it. The Local InfoCloud is that information that is protected by a firewall, membership, or by interest. Adding interest as means of grouping and providing social interaction, which also provides organizational understanding (such as vocabulary, common ideas, and cultural understanding). The distinct social implications of information, whether it is by discipline, work, or other community have similar traits that are different from the Global InfoCloud and the Personal InfoCloud and it stands between the two in the middle ground.

Location is still important to this InfoCloud as our proximity to information and information reuse in the context of location is important. The context of location drives need, but so does social context that comes from community, in relatively similar ways.

Does it make sense to keep the name Local InfoCloud, or would Community InfoCloud be more appropriate? If there is a change, does it make sense to go back and change all the preceding documents or just deal from this point forward.

Who Are You

The person is the center of focus in the Personal InfoCloud, but each person has to interact with others and others' information. It is at this point of interaction where identity becomes important. We use many services around the web. From Epinions to LinkedIn to our personal blogs and beyond we all have many identities and usernames. These "can" be manageable for ourselves, but often our friends value what we say and some of our opinions. We are also interested in what others say, for those opinions and taste that run similar to ours. We also are a verbose bunch writing in volumes over time. We also comment and review on many different services, like restaurant reviews on Yahoo Local, Amazon A9, and other sites.

Now lets say we are going to another city on travel. How do we leverage our friend's opinions and their network of friends reviews? In part we need granular social networks, but we also need digital identity that works.

The digital identity light went off thanks to Brett Lider and it has been a deep interest in the many months since. This may have also been triggered by the Identity Gang and the Gilmore Gang's December 30, 2004 digital identity show. Identity has been a solution fraught with schisms and opposing camps, but it seems to be coming together to some degree at this point. The more I read about digital identity from the Identity Gang and in particular Kim Cameron I realize it is central to the Personal InfoCloud.

At this point we need to modify our address books or use their notes forms to dump in our friends identities and usernames we know about across the various systems we interact with them on. This is unmanageable and not easily usable at this point. But if we want to follow John Doe and his reviews we have to know he uses jdoe, doe, paininmaximus, and 33482aad across various systems. We have to know what systems he is what identifier/username. Now lets say he gave us a card/key that he managed what we knew and he could update as he changed his information. We could then use that information in our own aggregation of information he has posted

It is Getting Personal

One of the main concepts around the Personal InfoCloud is access to our information when we need it.  It has become relatively easy to find digital information on the internet these days, but keeping track of information for ourselves is a huge problem.  Not only do we have the problem of tracking our information on one device, but across our devices (our laptop and desktop at work, our mobile, our PDA, our desktop at home) it become nightmare.  We have gone from the scent of information (Xerox Parc term), to the current stench of information, and we are trying to get to the sweet smell of information.

One of the tools that has helped many manage some of the information they find on the web is del.icio.us.  Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool that give the person the means to save the bookmark in a web-based tool and add tags (keywords) to the link that are of their choosing for their own bookmark retrieval.  The tool really caught on as people can easily refind that information they stored because it is saved using their own vocabulary.  Other people can find the same object (it is a shared "social" tool) if they use the same vocabulary to describe the same object.

It is time we all start to focus on the person and how they use and reuse the information.  How do people  combine disparate information in what have been separate applications and separate devices?  Our design and development has to get personal.

It is these solutions an focus that are lacking from many approaches to web and application development today.  Yes, it is still lacking, but it may not be for much longer.

What has changed the environment?  Personalization has triggered much of this change.  No, not the giant portal personalization that the content management overloads want to sell for mega-bucks and still provide mini-returns.  This is personalization that allows the person to decide what information or information source is important to follow.  People and vendors (be it information or products) have a desire to strengthen their connection.  Vendors need to make it easy on the person who has an interest in the vendor and one or many of their products.

One of the tools that has caught on in the mainstream is RSS/Atom feeds.  This allows a person to subscribe to the information that most interests them.  This information can be news feeds that are targeted to specific genres or it can be a listing of products newly available, as Apple is doing with its new additions to iTunes each week and Amazon is doing for it product categories. In the past e-mail has been one of the few avenues that has been available to provide a personal connection.

So if it is getting easier to have the information from vendors easily subscribed to, how difficult should it be to  subscribe to our own information?  This is one of the del.icio.us solutions, well it seems to be targeted to others subscribing to our shared bookmarks, but we can easily subscribe to an RSS feed of our own bookmarks  or even our own specific tagged bookmarks, should we wish to.

With calendaring we have similar subscription options if we use the iCal standard.  There are even RSS event capabilities that can be incorporated (RSS with Dublin Core attributes as Upcoming does, or event module attributes).  Subscribing is one solution, but often I need to add calendar events into my mobile device (Treo 600 or Nokia Series 60 phone) with out having to rekey everything.  There are open standards for calendaring, why don't mobile device calendar applications just incorporate accepting these standard file types?  Using standard solutions to keep all of the facets of our life, or at least our calendar related facets, seems to be a wise and relatively easy solution. 

Focus of Startups

David Weingberger discusses Meet-up new charge to use plan and wonders about free competition. David, and those commenting on the posting, offer alternatives to Meetup. I am not so concerned with Meetup charging money as I am the changes that have come to Meetup in the past year, some have been very good.

I have been watching trends in the last year or two that bring a needed tool to market. It catches on and one of two things happen most often 1) they do not innovate and listen to their user base and improve on their great start, or 2) they start including other components and start looking like a social network or something not quite related to their initial goal. The exceptions to these are those that go under quickly or those that do it well get bought for their great special tool. There are many that fall into category one that flourish and stagnate and there are many valid reasons for this, change in life for the developers (married, baby, death, new job, etc.) or loss of interest. The second category seems to be the influence of money and advisors, or some odd force unknown to me.

Companies that fall into category one still have a chance. They are thin and can innovate if they focus. Look at what Upcoming.org did in a couple weeks after John Udell made some insightful comments. This is what many of us users of the site had wished for. Hopefully Upcoming will continue with the progress, but it is sticking to what it has done well, build a site around events that keeps the calendar open and easy to get a subscription to the event. Upcoming has always had a great interface that was easy to figure out and was fun to explore.

Meetup seems to have fallen in to the second category. It has been a solid site and resource, but it kept adding user features for finding people and communicating with people. Nice, but there was a lot of effort there rather than improving the ability to organize a meeting and get it off the ground. The meeting focus came back (nearly everybody I knew had the same complaint, they could not change the date or place for the event) and the site started to work much better for many. The social networking components are nice, but to have sacrificed their core interests, getting people to meet face-to-face and helping the meeting come off. Now Meetup will, inevitably loose some of its audience, but how much will be left? Had Meetup focussed on building tools for the meeting organizers they would already have something special. If the meetings don't happen they loose the flocks that come to check in on their meetings, I watched local groups wither because of Meetup's lack of focus. I am really not trying to blame anybody, just making observations.

What is the point? Focus on what you are doing that is different. Listen to your core constituency that makes your site worth going to. Make your offerings open so that the person using the service feels like they have control of their information (they should have control of that information as they are trusting the site owner's with it and trust can wither quickly). Make it easy to for the people to not only manage what information they give you, but allow them to consume this information in the manner they wish (Upcoming allowing me to subscribe to my own events I am following is a great step and that is the focus interaction should take -- the person chooses how they best want to consume the information). Focus on simplicity (of interface, of interaction, of purpose). Provide an element of play in your offering as life does not have to be boring (not too cute as cute ages fast).

Good Bye to the User?

One of the side-effects of my focus on the Personal InfoCloud has been finding putting the focus on the person gets to more options than focussing on the "user". When doing user interviews for existing systems and sites, we are interviewing people. These people we ask: What works for them; what is missing; What are the devices they use; What locations do they use the information; In what context do they use the information; and How do they reuse and repurpose the information (as some of the questions). These are real people supplying the answers.

In the past we roll-up these people's answers and build an user persona. In rolling up we are building one or many common users and try to generalize. This simplification of the problem set we build to starts to limit our solutions. If one percent or less of our user base is using a mobile device to access information or our application do we throw them out of the persona? Normally, we would tend to do this and focus on a higher portion of our population.

But, in building a user-centered approach we can miss some of the easy solutions that will help the people that are part of the smaller populations. By keeping the person with the mobile needs in the mix, we are able to build scenarios and solutions that will work across many device needs. The steps between a desktop/laptop web browser only community and many mobile devices is relatively small. The difference to the desktop/laptop user is minimal, but to the mobile user it can be the difference between having access to information when it is needed and not having access at all when the information is needed most (like working remotely on a project that is 50 miles from the nearest landline and internet connection).

As we look at providing solutions we base our choices on users who make up a large percentage of our population. Lets take the 80/20 rule, we build for 80 percent of our users with 20 percent of the work. Sounds good, until we realize that one in five users are left out of the equation. By focussing on the person, we can look at extending our success. Often by building more than one solution into our products or one interface metaphor (folders versus tags for storing e-mail) we can provide better solutions that work for more people. Does this add complexity? Many times, yes it adds complexity on the design and development side, but knowing early enough in the process we can build more open and more flexible systems that lead to greater adoption. Not, only do we get greater adoption, but we open up the potential for uses beyond what we designed into being.

No two people are alike and we should build toward this reality so that there is choice, freedom, and ease. The more granular approach does not completely wipe out the user personas, but greatly enhances their functionality. Go back to the original people interviewed and use them in scenario planning for their needs across their contexts and tasks. How well does what we are designing work for them? How different will a solution need to be to have it work for them? Do these users have older technology? Do we want to rule people out categorically or can we do a little more work and be inclusive?

Focussing on the person and the granularity is where things get more difficult, but this is where we can make huge differences. This is what we get paid for right?

SXSW Calendar the Personal Way

I really enjoyed my short time at SXSW Interactive Festival this year. One of the things that helped me was their step to help people interested in SXSW to build their "own" calendar. Yes, they understood the people attending have a lot of offerings to consider and nobody wants to miss anything they really would like to see. The SXSW site showed the conference sessions and if you liked it you could add it to your SXSW calendar. This calendar could be accessed as an iCal, which means as you update the calendar on the site, or the calendar is changed by the SXSW folks, you calendar is updated. Being that it is iCal it is relatively easy to synch this to your mobile device.

Why is this important? It is not only a great step to help the people attending the Festival, but it builds a connection between the person and the SXSW site as well as a enables the person enjoyment of the Festival. Technology should help the person control what they would like to do and help them do it with out worry.

I remember my first SXSW in 2001, where they had a Palm Pilot that would beam you a packet including the conference sessions as well as food and other amenities. The application allowed you to add the SXSW sessions into your Palm calendar and restaurants into your address book. It was a great app, but you only got the application when you got there and you had to have a Palm device (luckily I did). This year's version greatly improved on this as it allows the person attending to build their own calendar and choose how they want the information to follow them. The person attending just added the information to their own Personal InfoCloud and the person consumed and reused the information as needed.

Brilliant and Bravo.

Recent Speaking Engagements

I have posted the last three presentations I have given in the last five days. The presentations and a little about each presentation are available as follows: IA for the Personal InfoCloud from the IA Summit, Folksonomy: A Wrapper's Delight a panel at the IA Summit, and The Blog as Personal Knowledge Managment from a panel at the local Potomac Chapter of ASIS&T.

Some of the ideas and themes in these will bubble up here fairly soon. I am also speaking in Austin at SXSW Interactive Festival this upcoming Sunday. Stop by and say hello.

Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies

I have been explaining the broad and narrow folksonomy in e-mail and in comments on others sites, as well as in the media (Wired News). There has still been some confusion, which is very understandable as it is a different concept that goes beyond a simple understanding of tagging. I have put together a couple graphics that should help provide a means to make this distinction some what clearer. The folksonomy is a means for people to tag objects (web pages, photos, videos, podcasts, etc., essentially anything that is internet addressable) using their own vocabulary so that it is easy for them to refind that information again. The folksonomy is most often also social so that others that use the same vocabulary will be able to find the object as well. It is important to note that folksonomies work best when the tags used to describe objects are in the common vocabulary and not what a person perceives others will call it (the tool works like no other for personal information management of information on the web, but is also shared with the world to help others find the information).

Broad Folksonomy

Let's begin with the broad folksonomy, as a tool like del.icio.us delivers. The broad folksonomy has many people tagging the same object and every person can tag the object with their own tags in their own vocabulary. This lends itself very easy to applying the power law curve (power curve) and/or net effect to the results of many people tagging. The power terms and the long tail both work.

The broad folksonomy is illustrated as follows.


From a high level we see a person creates the object (content) and makes it accessible to others. Other people (groups of people with the same vocabulary represented people blobs and noted with alphabet letters) tag the object (lines with arrows pointing away from the people) with their own terms (represented by numbers). The people also find the information (arrows on lines pointing from the numeric tags back to the people blobs) based on the tags.

Digging a little deeper we see quite a few people (8 people) in group "A" and they have tagged the object with a "1" and a "2" and they use this term to find the object again. Group "B" (2 people) have applied tag "1" and "2" to the object and they use tag terms "1", "2", and "3" to find the information. Group "C" (3 people) have tagged the object with "2" and "3" so that they can find the object. Group "D" has also tagged the object with tag "3" so that they may refind the information this group may have benefitted from the tagging that group "C" provided to help them find the information in the first place. Group "E" (2 people) uses a different term, "4", to tag the object than others before it and uses only this term to find the object. Lastly, group "F" (1 person) uses tag "5" on the object so that they may find it.

Broad Folksonomy and the Power Curve

The broad folksonomy provides a means to see trends in how a broad range are tagging one object. This is an opportunity to see the power law curve at work and show the long-tail.

The tags spike with tag "2" getting the largest portion of the tags with 13 entries and tag "1" receiving 10 identical tags. From this point the trends for popular tags are easy to see with the spikes on the left that there are some trends, based on only those that have tagged this object, that could be used extract a controlled vocabulary or at least know what to call the object to have a broad spectrum of people (similar to those that tagged the object, and keep in mind those that tag may not be representative of the whole). We also see those tags out at the right end of the curve, known as the long tail. This is where there is a small minority of people who call the object by a term, but those people tagging this object would allow others with a similar vocabulary mindset to find the object, even if they do not use the terms used by the masses over at the left end of the curve. If we take this example and spread it out over 400 or 1,000 people tagging the same object we will se a similar distribution with even more pronounced spikes and drop-off and a longer tail.

This long tail and power curve are benefits of the broad folksonomy. As we will see the narrow folksonomy does not have the same properties, but it will have benefits. These benefits are non-existent for those just simply tagging items, most often done by the content creator for their own content, as is the means Technorati has done, even with their following tag links to destinations other than Technorati (as they initially had laid out). The benefits of the long tail and power curve come from the richness provided by many people openly tagging the same object.

Narrow Folksonomy

The narrow folksonomy, which a tool like Flickr represents, provides benefit in tagging objects that are not easily searchable or have no other means of using text to describe or find the object. The narrow folksonomy is done by one or a few people providing tags that the person uses to get back to that information. The tags, unlike in the broad folksonomy, are singular in nature (only one tag with the term is used as compared to 13 people in the broad folksonomy using the same tag). Often in the narrow folksonomy the person creating the object is providing one or more of the tags to get things started. The goals and uses of the narrow folksonomy are different than the broad, but still very helpful as more than one person can describe the one object. In the narrow the tags are directly associated with the object. Also with the narrow there is little way of really knowing how the tags are consumed or what portion of the people using the object would call it what, therefore it is not quite as helpful as finding emerging vocabulary or emergent descriptions. We do find that tags used to describe are also used for grouping, which is particularly visible and relevant in Flickr (this is also done in broad folksonomies, but currently not to the degree of visibility that it is done on Flickr, which may be part of the killer interactive environment Ludicorp has created for Flickr).

The narrow folksonomy is illustrated as follows.

From a high level we see a person creates the object and applies a tag ("1") that represents what they call the object or believe describes the object. There are fewer tags provided than in a broad folksonomy and there is only one of each tag applied to the object. The consumers of the object also can apply tags that help them find the object or describe what they believe are the terms used to describe this object.

A closer look at the interaction between people and the object and tags in a narrow folksonomy shows us that group "A" uses tag "1" to find and come back to the object (did the creator do this on purpose? or did she just tag it with what was helpful to her). We see group "B" also using tag "1" to find the object, but they have tagged the object with tag "2" to also use as a means to find the object. Group "C" uses tag "1","2", and "3" to find the object and we also note this group did not apply any of its own tags to the object as so is only a consumer of the existing folksonomy. We see group "D" uses tags "2" and "3" to find the objects and it too does not add any tags. Group "E" is not able to find the object by using tags as the vocabulary it is using does not match any of the tags currently provided. Lastly, group "F" has their own tag for the object that they alone use to get back to the object. Group "F" did not find the object through existing tags, but may have found the object through other means, like a friend e-mailed them a link or the object was included in a group they subscribe to in their feed aggregator.

We see that the richness of the broad folksonomy is not quite there in a narrow folksonomy, but the folksonomy does add quite a bit of value. The value, as in the case of Flickr, is in text tags being applied to objects that were not findable using search or other text related tools that comprise much of how we find things on the internet today. The narrow folksonomy does provide various audiences the means to add tags in their own vocabulary that will help them and those like them to find the objects at a later time. We are much better off with folksonomies than we were with out them, even if it is a narrow folksonomy being used.

Conclusion

We benefit from folksonomies as the both the personal vocabulary and the social aspects help people to find and retain a tether to objects on the web that are an interest to them. Who is doing the tagging is important to understand and how the tags are consumed is an important factor. This also helps us see that not all tagging is a folksonomy, but is just tagging. Tagging in and of its self is a helpful step up from no tagging, but is no where near as beneficial as opening the tagging to all. Folksonomy tagging can provide connections across cultures and disciplines (an knowledge management consultant can find valuable information from an information architect because one object is tagged by both communities using their own differing terms of practice). Folksonomy tagging also makes up for missing terms in a site's own categorization system/taxonomy. This hopefully has made things a little clearer for all in our understanding the types of folksonomies and tagging and the benefits that can be derived.

Stitching our Lives Together

Not long ago Jeffrey Veen posted about Will you be my friend, which brought up some needs to better stitch together our own disperse information. An excellent example is:

For example, when I plan a trip, I try to find out who else will be around so I have people to hang out with. So my calendar should ask Upcoming.org, "Hey, Jeff says he's friends with Tim. Will he be in New York for GEL?"

This example would allow up to interact with our shared information in a manner that keeps it within our extended Personal InfoCloud (the Personal InfoCloud is the information we keep with us, is self-organized, and we have easy access to). Too many of the Web's resources where we store our information and that information's correlation to ourselves (, Flickr seems to use. The advent of wide usage of RSS feeds and RSS aggregators is really putting the user back in control of the information they would like to track. Too many sites have moved toward the portal model and failed (there are large volumes of accounts of failed portal attempts, where the sites should provide a feed of their information as it is a limited quantity). When users get asked about their lack of interest in a company's new portal they nearly always state, "I already have a portal where I aggregate my information". Most often these portals are ones like My Yahoo, MSN, or AOL. Many users state they have tried keeping more than one portal, but find they loose information very quickly and they can not remember, which portal holds what information.

It seems the companies that sell portal tools should rather focus on integration with existing portals. Currently Yahoo offers the an RSS feed aggregator. Yahoo is moving toward a one stop shopping for information for individuals. Yahoo also synchs with PDA, which is how many people keep their needed information close to themselves.

There are also those of us that prefer to be our own aggregators to information. We choose to structure our large volumes of information and the means to access that information. The down side of the person controlling the information is the lack of common APIs and accessible Web Services to permit the connecting of Upcoming to our calendar (it can already do this), with lists of known or stated friends and their interests.

This has been the dream of many of us for many years, but it always seems just around the corner. Now seems to be a good time to just make it happen. Now is good because there is growing adoption of standards and information that can be personally aggregated. Now is good because there are more and more services allowing us to categorize various bits of information about our lives. Now is good because we have the technology. Now is good because we are smart enough to make it happen.

(Originally posted at vanderwal.net.)

Upcoming.org and Others Understand Ease of Information Reuse

Some sites are getting that helping the user with date related information by providing the information in a standard format that allows the user to drop the information into their calendar tool. One such site is Upcoming.org's iCal Integration.

The I recently ran across a similar tool, but for vCal, on the Hilton site. When you book a room on the Hilton site the site provides a standard calendar format data chunk that drops right into Outlook or other vCal ready application. This is a no fuss and no error means of helping the user get the information right and dropping it right into their Personal InfoCloud so they can synch that with their mobile phone or PDA and have the correct information (with the confirmation number) within ready reach at all times.