gdp's Comments

Scott Granneman's Classes : News the Crowd Can Use

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:55:48 +0000

Like it or not, this is the way things are moving. Many people are so skeptical of the traditional media that they feel that "social editing" is probably a more accurate way to view the news. In a way, they might be right. No matter how objective a professional journalist claims to be, I believe that everything passes through some sort of personal filter. That's not to say that the news is inaccurate; I just don't believe it's really possible to be unbiased. Fair, yes. Unbiased, no. Social editing is just turning over the news to more people. Hopefully the more extreme bias will cancel out.

Scott Granneman's Classes : Cheatsheet: What is Digg?

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:50:09 +0000

What's cool about this is that the popularity of a news story is what determines its placement. After it's no longer as fresh, it falls down the front page and eventually off of it. That really allows the users to have a vote on what's important. Warring factions can compete to keep something on the front page or get it moved off by alternately "digging" or "laming" a story.

Scott Granneman's Classes : Accomplish Your Goals With The Help of 43Things

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:45:51 +0000

Sometimes a key to reaching a goal is the support of others. This is a nice way to have the support of a friendly group of compatriots. They may be striving for a similar goal or just striving for a goal in general, but either way, they'll likely be supportive because that's what they want in return. This brings me to another motivator that may not be as evident here: accountability. Sometimes when you need motivation to achieve a goal, you need someone to be accountable to, not a cheerleader. This is particularly true of goals that are more than stretching. I don't get the sense that you get a lot of that here. Perhaps it depends on the goal.javascript:%20postComment(0);

Scott Granneman's Classes : Social Networking for Bookworms

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:39:44 +0000

I agree with Mr. Spalding. I think that the books you own are a very powerful representation of you. I've never heard the term "mental furniture" before, but I think it fits in this case. Although I can understand the draw of this site, for myself, I wouldn't really spend that much time here. For me, much of the fun associated with reading is heading to Barnes and Noble and browsing the titles myself. I don't really like asking other people for recommendations because it sort of take some of the fun away for me.

Scott Granneman's Classes : How to Set Goals Using the 43 Things Website

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:30:51 +0000

This is so cool. Things become so much more concrete when you write them down, and you're really forced to examine yourself.

Scott Granneman's Classes : No Rest for the Wiki

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:19:59 +0000

Thinking about my own job, I can see where people would get territorial about their information and not want everyone to have free reign to change it. It's human nature. However, really great things can come out of collaborative work, so sometimes you just have to let go and see what happens.

Scott Granneman's Classes : The Right Way To Fix Inaccurate Wikipedia Articles

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:00:14 +0000

The number and variety of ways Wikipedia has built in is really forward thinking. I'm sure this developed out of necessity over time and I'm just seeing the end products of the labor, but it seems like they have most angles covered. Speaking of angles, I liked the part about keeping the legal angles off the site, even though Wikipedia doesn't mind if you take someone to court outside of the site. Nice.

Scott Granneman's Classes : Your Guide to Wikipedia Tools & Resources

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:54:39 +0000

Those questions were really good, and the information about the programs that take Word documents or text with HTML tags and turn them into Wikipedia markup is probably some of the most useful I've seen on these pages.

Scott Granneman's Classes : What Is a Wiki (and How to Use One for Your Projects)

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:48:29 +0000

There is enough here to convince me that in order to get a wiki going at work, I need to involve our IT team. I thought it might be as simple as choosing a hosted website, but it looks like it's a bit more complicated than that.

Scott Granneman's Classes : Fall 2009 Student Wikipedia edits

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:43:28 +0000

I logged in as cbmayabb and added an "Event" to my hometown's entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Prairie,_Missou... In case it gets deleted before you see it: Events East Prairie is the host of the Tour de Corn bicycle ride each summer that attracts cyclists from many surrounding states and raises money for local charities.

Scott Granneman's Classes : Assignments for 12-18 October 2009

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:22:57 +0000

I went through the WikiMatrix and it spit out a list of possible wikis for my department. From what I could understand, it looks like DokuWiki might be the most suited. I'll try to talk to out IT team about it.

Scott Granneman's Classes : Wiki Engines

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:16:43 +0000

We were looking to possibly set up a wiki in my department at work for use for things like collaborative work. It wouldn't be on anything to complex, so would one of these like Wikispaces be something to look into?

Scott Granneman's Classes : Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Wed, 9 Dec 2009 01:57:49 +0000

There are so many good points in this, where to start? One of the most interesting things Shirky says is when dealing with how many people may categorize the same thing in slightly different ways (movie vs. cinema), traditional classification would say that it's becoming to complex because those words are similar, but in fact, there is tremendous value in their subtle difference. Part of the signal is the difference! That's genius. And since everything's electronic, we can have a cloud of links rather than a flow chart. Everyone can potentially classify things in the way it makes sense to them, and a sort of "collective" classification scheme emerges. I also appreciate the distinction between believing the world makes sense and we make sense of the world. I'm a supporter of the latter, and because of this, classification by many appeals to me. There is no "right" classification scheme. Taxonomy is right because enough people go along with it, but it could be done better, especially knowing as much as we do now about genetics.

Scott Granneman's Classes : The Snoop Next Door

Sat, 5 Dec 2009 22:34:10 +0000

This is kind of funny and it harkens back to the soccer player on YouTube who pulled the other soccer player down by her hair. Almost everyone has a cell phone camera, and no one is afraid to use it. Act appropriately or you might be on one of these sites or YouTube. I don't disagree with the fast driver in that some things are judgment calls that can't be interpreted correctly when taken out of context, but most of these examples aren't. I hate it when people talk on their cell phones where they shouldn't. Honestly, I think that sometimes they talk loud because they want you to hear them because they want you to find them interesting. Aarggh. No one thinks they're rude, so sometimes they need some convincing. And it's not slander if it's not materially false...

Scott Granneman's Classes : The Cornucopia of the Commons: How to get volunteer labor

Sat, 5 Dec 2009 22:23:07 +0000

Although the examples used in this article are older, the points are still very good for today. I had no idea about the CDDB; I thought is was probably a coalition of major record labels listing title and tracks. Wow. The most salient point in this article to me is that you have to incentivize providing accurate data. In my job we take calls from consumers or veterinarians who use our products and we log all of those calls into a database. When we used a data cube to explore that data, we found that depending on the type of call, we got different levels of data from the customer. For example, if someone complained about that the pet didn't like the taste of our product, we captured all the details about the product, the customer, the production information, the pet's information, etc. But if someone called and asked a question about the use of the food, we didn't capture that much information and sometimes it wasn't logged in at all. In order to correct this, we started a contest to reward the person with the most complete entries and our complaint entry level and accuracy jumped.

Scott Granneman's Classes : Cornucopia of the commons

Sat, 5 Dec 2009 22:00:26 +0000

The "logic" of the tags evolves. By offering up the tags of other users, you can see tags that may not have come to your mind, but you agree with once you've seen them. In doing so and adding those tags, you strengthen the association. Just as with the examples of social media, this can grow and grow making the categorization both robust and specific. Over a long period of time, we could see some very strong associations develop and part and parcel to those, the development of networks of users with like interests (at least in terms of url's).

Scott Granneman's Classes : Collaborative knowledge gardening

Sat, 5 Dec 2009 21:50:56 +0000

The key to the success of metadata management, in my opinion, it providing a listing of existing tags that "pop up" once you begin making the tag that suggest, but don't require tags that are currently being used. The second thing is what the author describes in the following: "As soon as you assign a tag to an item, you see the cluster of items carrying the same tag. If that’s not what you expected, you’re given incentive to change the tag or add another." It's surprising to me how efficient the system is. My initial impression was that millions of tags would exist because users would say that the existing tags don't quite fit what they're tagging. But I think the opposite has happened. Instead of dividers, we tend to be aggregators. In most cases, if something is close, it will work.

Scott Granneman's Classes : Nothing quite like Slashdot.org - experience it!

Sat, 5 Dec 2009 21:41:59 +0000

Although this is a very old article, I was very interested in it because I've heard of slashdot, but I just didn't know that much about it. It looks to be a community of people dedicated both to technology, and the freedom in it's use. In the past, this would have been something you'd find on a bulletin board or some other unknown network, but today it's out there for anyone and it is full of users. Just as with any movement, it helps if people know about you. Being "in" with a small group is cool at first, but it doesn't help advance your cause in the longterm.

Scott Granneman's Classes : Assignments for 9-15 November 2009

Sat, 5 Dec 2009 21:33:52 +0000

toread is pretty innovative because I would be more likely to read an article later if I had an e-mail to do it. I know that many sites currently allow you e-mail the article, but usually this ends up being an e-mail with a link. I would like a service that allowed you to get an e-mail of the article itself so that when I'm on a plane and don't have access to the internet, I can still use my e-mail in remote mode.

Scott Granneman's Classes : Markaboo is awesome open-source social bookmarking

Sat, 5 Dec 2009 21:29:39 +0000

Markaboo seems to add the features of saving things via sending an e-mail or text message. And it allows saving pictures, notes, and other files. I think others like Furl allow this too. From the description, this one wasn't new or different enough to compel me to look into using it, but for someone who has just started bookmarking and hasn't developed a preference, this one looks as though it could be a good one to start with.