Transcript An Irish perspective on emerging social networking technologies

Emerging Social Networking Technologies
and Possible Implications for Libraries
John Breslin
[email protected]
http://www.johnbreslin.com/
 Copyright 2005 Digital Enterprise Research
Institute. All rights reserved.
Lir Annual Seminar
14th April 2008
www.deri.org
A little bit about myself!
Hello, World!
1990: VMS
MAP.COM
1998: Forum* on the
Irish Games Network
2000: boards.ie
Ltd. Formed
2004: Researcher
at DERI, NUI Galway
2008: 10th
Anniversary*
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What is DERI?
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Digital Enterprise Research Institute
Established at NUI Galway in June 2003
One of the largest “Semantic Web” research institutes
About €25 million in funding from SFI, EI and the EU
Now has 128 members (staff and students)
Two main research clusters:
– Semantic Web
– Semantic Reality
• About 100 project partners
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We all live in a social network…
• …of friends, family, workmates, fellow students,
acquaintances, etc.
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Everyone’s connected…
• Friend of a friend, or “dúirt bean liom go ndúirt bean leí”
• Theory that anybody is connected to everybody else (on
average) by no more than six degrees of separation
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Milgram’s six degrees of separation theory
• Sociologist Milgram conducted
this experiment:
– Random people from
Nebraska were to send a letter
(via intermediaries) to a stock
broker in Boston
– Could only send to someone
with whom they were on a
first-name basis
• Among the letters that found
the target, the average number
of links was six
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Stanley Milgram (1933-1984)
The Erdős number
• Number of links required to
connect scholars to Erdős via
co-authorship of papers
• Erdős wrote 1500+ papers with
507 co-authors
• Jerry Grossman’s site allows
mathematicians to compute
their Erdős numbers:
– http://www.oakland.edu/enp/
• Connecting path lengths,
among mathematicians only:
– The average is 4.65
– The maximum is 13
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Paul Erdős (1913-1996)
Trying to make friends
DERI
Uldis
Latvia
Valdis
Met
John
Marc
Clare
John C
Dublin
Andrew
Bros
Marc and I already had friends in common!
I later found out my cousin Ailish also knows Andrew.
The “small world” phenomenon…
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“It’s a small world after all!”, by Kentaro Toyama
Bash
Kentaro
Ranjeet
Sharad
Prof. McDermott
Anandan
Prof.
Kannan
Venkie
Karishma
Ravi
Prof. Sastry
Prof. Veni
Prof. Balki
Ravi’s
Father
Prof. Prahalad
Maithreyi
Soumya
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Pawan
Aishwarya
Nandana
Sen
Pres. Kalam
Prof. Jhunjhunwala
PM Manmohan
Dr. Isher Judge
Singh
Amitabh
Ahluwalia
Bachchan Prof. Amartya
Dr. Montek Singh
Ahluwalia
Sen
* Source: http://research.microsoft.com/toyama/talks/
The Kevin Bacon game
• Invented by three Albright
College students in 1994:
– Craig Fass, Brian Turtle, Mike
Ginelly
• Goal is to connect any actor to
Kevin Bacon, by linking actors
who have acted in the same
movie
• The “Oracle of Bacon” website
uses IMDB to find the shortest
link between any two actors:
– http://oracleofbacon.org/
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Boxed version of the game
The Kevin Bacon game (2)
• Total number of actors in
database (as of 15th October):
– 893283
• Average path length to Kevin:
– 2.957
• Actor closest to “center”:
– Rod Steiger (2.68)
• Rank of Kevin, in terms of
closeness to center:
– 1049th
• Most actors are within three
links of each other!
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What are social networking services (SNSs)?
• From the beginning, the
Internet was a medium
for connecting not only
machines but people
• Idea behind SNSs is to
make the aforementioned
real-world relationships
explicitly defined online
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• 2002:
– Friendster
• 2003:
– MySpace, LinkedIn, hi5
• 2004:
– orkut, Facebook
• 2005:
– Bebo
The popularity of SNSs
• The 10 most popular
domains ~= 40% percent
of all page views on the
Web (Compete,
November 2006)
– Nearly half of those views
were from the social
networking services
MySpace and Facebook –
wow!
– And that’s just in the top
10…
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Alexa rankings:
#5: MySpace
#6: Facebook
#8: hi5
#10: orkut
#18: Friendster
#119: Bebo
#212: LinkedIn
SNSs attracting lots of monetary / media attention
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Friendster – $13M VC
Tribe – $6.3M VC
LinkedIn – $4.7M VC
Bebo – $15M VC, sold to AOL for $850M
MySpace – Sold for $580M
Friends Reunited – Sold for £120M
Facebook – $1B Y! offer, 1.6% sold to MS for $250M
Other niche SNSs
• Age:
– Multiply (seniors and settled); Boomj (baby boomers); Rezoom
• Country of origin:
– Silicon India
• Gender:
– CaféMom; MothersClick; Sister Woman (female friends)
• Occupation:
– ModelsHotel; FanLib (fiction writers); AdGabber; TheFeng.org (financial
services executives); MilitarySpot (military families); Sermo (doctors and
physicians)
• Business and careers:
– ConnectBuzz; Doostang; Execunet; Netshare; Ryze; Viadeo; Xing
• Interests:
– TradeKing (investors); StreetCred (hip hop); IndiePublic (art and
design); PeerTrainer (health and wellbeing)
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* Source: Paul Gibler, Wisconsin Technology Network
Motivation for social networking services
• Allows a user to create and
maintain an online network
of close friends or business
associates for social and
professional reasons:
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Friendships and relationships
Offline meetings
Curiosity about others
Business opportunities
Job hunting
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– For social good:
• Kevin Bacon – sixdegrees.org
• Sun – openeco.org
• Features of social networking
services:
– Network of friends (inner
circle)
– Person surfing
– Private messaging
– Discussion forums
– Events management
– Blogging and commenting
– Media uploading
Big SNSs (in terms of total number of accounts)
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myspace.com
facebook.com
habbo.com
spaces.live.com
orkut.com
hi5.com
friendster.com
xanga.com
classmates.com
flixster.com
netlog.com
reunion.com
110,000,000
98,000,000
86,000,000
40,000,000
59,000,000
70,000,000
58,000,000
40,000,000
40,000,000
36,000,000
32,000,000
28,000,000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
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Enterprise 2.0
• Web 2.0 includes applications such as blogs, wikis, RSS
feeds and social networking, while Enterprise 2.0 is the
packaging of those technologies in both corporate IT
and workplace environments
• “Enterprise 2.0 is the use of a freeform social software
platform inside an organisation that allows them to do
things that are important”, Harvard Business School’s
Professor Andrew McAfee
• “There are direct enterprise equivalents [to Facebook].
You can ask people the status of their projects, what
they’re working on, are they travelling, things they’ve
learned. All of these things would be very valuable
inside an enterprise.”
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Fears if employees are using external SNSs
• Chief information officers from large companies (e.g.
financial institutions) block employee access to public
social networks:
– There is a fear of losing control of information in response to
the “open” ethos of the Internet; security issues
– Accounting firms need to ensure their employees don’t
provide tax or financial advice online to comply with
regulatory guidelines and disclosure legislation
• Requires safeguards in terms of tracking documents,
discussions:
– Awareness Inc.’s system tracks SNS posts and sends
potentially inflammatory posts into moderation boxes for
manager review
– Need to comply with company, legal or state regulations
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Some negative aspects for SNSs and organisations
• Can sap employee productivity?
• Potential violations / breaches of company protocol?
• Forrester Research recently found that 14% of
companies have disciplined employees and 5% fired
them for offences related to social networking
• A poll by Sophos found that 66% of workers think their
colleagues share too much information on Facebook
• 50% of companies (including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs,
JPMorgan, UBS, and Lehman Brothers) block access to
Facebook according to the same Sophos survey
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What opportunities are there for organisations?
1. A useful means for self-promotion, marketing
products online, and attracting new hires:
– Can promote products or services through targeted advertising
and viral marketing
– Get feedback (directly, indirectly) about your products or
services, especially from influential hubs / connectors
– Discover new recruits; network with peers
2. An opportunity to create an internal network for
sharing information and expertise:
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Share information within a business’ own walls
Efficient way to mine for in-house expertise (“expert finding”)
Reduce the time spent mailing docs and e-mailing comments
Encourage employees, alumni, interns, new hires, retired staff,
other stakeholders to interact with each other
The positives of SNSs for employees
• “Bosses warm up to social networking on company time”
– www.technewsworld.com/story/social-networking/59315.html
• “Corporate adoption of social networking tools, has been
considerable due to their effectiveness in cutting across
barriers in large corporations.”
• “Social networking has become a tool to drive corporate
innovation.”
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SNSs for informal learning in organisations
• Figures estimate that 75-80% of learning is done
informally, and with 40-50% of employees accessing
information and knowledge from social media sites, Web
2.0 is potentially responsible for a large proportion of this
informal learning (up to 30-40%):
– “More than 40 percent of business users consume social
networking applications like blogs, intranets and RSS [really
simple syndication] feeds more than three times a week.”
– “More than 30 percent of respondents read information in wikis,
social networks, discussion boards and videoconferences / IMs
more than three times a week.”
– “More than 20 percent of respondents contribute to blogs,
intranets, social networks, discussion boards, video conferencing
and tagging [social media sites] more than three times a week.”
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Elgg, social networking software for education
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LibraryThing, find out who else reads like you
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All Consuming, what have you read today?
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Twine, a knowledge networking tool
(In beta, ask John for an invite.)
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CiteULike, get publication references from peers
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Social networks, media and digital libraries
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A move from the Web to a “Social Web”:
– Blogs, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc.
– All powered by people and user-generated content
– The blogosphere doubles in size every six months
• Digital libraries need to participate in this ecosystem:
– Contribute metadata to the ecosystem
– Leverage the semantics being created by users
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Previously in digital content and digital libraries
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Digital libraries provide:
– Databases and archiving (storage)
– Digital bibliographic descriptions (metadata)
– Full-text search (interface)
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Advantages:
– Content is accessible online
– Federations of libraries, have to visit less places
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Disadvantages:
– Lonely users!
– If we need to find the right keywords, there is no one to ask when
we do not know them (e.g. “man without an ear” paintings)
– Still many problems with connecting to other sources
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Possibilities with today’s interlinked social media
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Towards social semantic information spaces:
– Semantic descriptions (interconnected metadata)
– Annotations provided by users (social metadata)
– Collaborative search and browsing (interface)
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Features associated with this:
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Search and browsing based on semantics empowers users
Users contribute to the classification process
Users can understand community-driven annotations
Users enhance digital content using blogs, wikis on the side
Library can interact with other Internet services
JeromeDL, DERI’s social semantic digital library
• Integrated social networking with user profiling
• Enhanced personalised search facility
• Interconnects meaningful descriptions of resources with
social media
• Extensible access control based on social networks
• Collaborative browsing and filtering
• Dynamic collections
• Integration with other Web 2.0 services
• Open source!
Metadata and services from JeromeDL
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Search and browsing based on semantics
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Natural language templates:
– Perform complex queries using natural language
– Can be created and modified based on the needs of users
• Semantic query expansion:
– Refines query based on current context
– Extensible context definition: user profile, history of queries,
current query, etc.
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Search beyond a single JeromeDL installation:
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Distributed search via extensible library protocol, HyperCuP
Federated search via hierarchically-ordered JeromeDLs
OAI-PMH, to import from or export to other libraries
Browsing via facets, tags and treemaps, place and time
Identity, access control, social semantic
collaborative filtering
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Identity management based on social network standards like FOAF
Extensible access control to resources and services, based on IP or
position within the social network
Social semantic collaborative filtering in JeromeDL:
– Acquiring knowledge is often done via informal communication (“word
of mouth”)
– Most people classify (filter) their information in bookmark folders (useroriented taxonomies)
– Peers can then share (and collaborate on) the information (communitydriven taxonomies)
– As a result, knowledge “flows“ from the expert through the social
network to the user
– System also amasses a lot of information on user / community profiles
(context)
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Towards “Library 2.0”
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Users become active producers of the content and
metadata
JeromeDL can turn a single resource into a blog post:
– Users can then annotate it
– Users can also rank it
– Metadata about user annotations is exported for other services
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Community annotations for multimedia:
– Region of interest (ROI) tagging in photos
– Time-tagging of video streams
• Other Web 2.0 services can easily hook up to the
information and services provided by JeromeDL
– e.g. notitio.us
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Questions and answers
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