Week 2 - Information Foraging

Week 2 - Foraging for Information

Notes on Information Foraging

I began week two reading an older academic report (1999) by Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card entitled, "Information Foraging," which was cited in another periodical I read recently. It was a very slow read, but I think I was able to "mine" some good information from it to support some of my findings that I am going to put forth in my white paper.


Of interest was the following:


"Not only do people adapt  to core complex information environments, but environments of information to which people adapt are themselves complex and dynamic." And D.C. Dennett in "Consciousness Explained" has aptly characterized this scenario as using the notion of cultural knowledge units or  "memes."   Richard Dawkins made "memes" famous in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene."  The strange coincidence here is that I have been doing alot of reading lately where the notion of "memes" keeps coming up, and I read Dawkins book as an undergraduate many, many years ago — and it always amazes me when what comes around goes around.


I guess more about memes later.

I have also been looking at the concept of "attention" alot lately.  In my marketing class I have students focus on the concept of permission marketing and I try to get across the importance of attention.  What we give our attention to is incredibly important to us and to those we share that resource with.  If it happens to be a marketer, then that makes their day.

So as part of my reading period I re-read Winnifred Gallagher's book "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life." The reason that I first was interested in this book was that she wrote it as the result of her battle with breast cancer and I read it as the result of my battle with prostate cancer.  But as I started to read the book, I realized that this book was so much more than that.  Gallagher says. "Your life is run ... by a group of bickering agents with different motives. (The voices in your head.) Where sticking to a goal is concerned, you can reduce the conflict by focusing on the most supportive voice and suppressing the distracting, counterproductive ones." There's much to think about there.

Clay Shirkey's book: "Here Comes Everybody," is so much fun to read.  Well, fun I guess if you are a social media geek, that is.  But interesting if you are anyone else. Honestly, if you read this book and don't like it, or don't find it interesting — drop me a line, I want to talk to you.  The first chapter alone gets you completely hooked. He tells the amazing story about how a woman loses her Blackberry device in the backseat of a New York City cab, and figures out who found it because they took pictures of themselves using the Blackberry.  Somehow she still could access her account and see what was going on. The story is amazing and frightening at the same time.  Frightening if you have a Facebook or Linked-In account with pictures, and you do something wrong, because you can be found! 

I am totally enthralled by this book and I know I will have much more to say about it here, and in future lectures.

That's all for this week, below is a summary of the past week.

Calendar of Events for the Past Week 

Friday, September 18, 2009 

• Email catch-up 
• Project Management
• Set new schedule
• Reading: Started going through "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life" by Winifred Gallagher for notes
• Reading: Started to Read Clay Shirkey's "Here Comes Everybody." (Chapter 1)
  
• Editing: "Freelance Guide."

Monday, September 21, 2009 

• Email catch-up 
• Downloaded Joomla! Manual (This took longer than I thought --- Yikes!)
  
• Training: Joomla! (Sections 3 & 4)
  
• Reading: Information Foraging by Pirolli and (This is very academic, but I thuink there is great stuff within it; see my comments below.)
• Readinig: "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life" by Winifred Gallagher
  
• Reading: Clay Shirkey's "Here Come Everybody." (Chapters 2- 4)

Tuesday, September 22, 2009 

• Training: Joomla! (Sections 5, 6 & 7)
  
• Reading: Information Foraging by Pirolli and (Finished --- have to re-read sections)
• Reading: Re-reading "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life" by Winifred Gallagher for notes
  
• Reading: Clay Shirkey's "Here Come Everybody." (Chapters 4- 8) 
  

  Wednesday, September 23, 2009 

• Editing: "Freelance Guide" up to page 50.

Thursday, September 24, 2009 

• Editing: "Freelance Guide" up to page 51-100.

First Full Week of SabBOBical

The following is a summary of the events of the past week, at a very high-level. I am trying to be as transparent as I can be with my account of time with the hope that this can be helpful to someone else in the future as they try to decide what they will do with sabbatical time. This current log of the daily events from the past week are very high level and don't take into account all of the "stuff" you have to do to prepare for this. The scheduling, preparing, planning, travel and accounting.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

• Twitter Conference, Boston, MA — Really excellent conference and I was very proud to have two of the speakers come directly from my department at NEiA: Lauri Stevens and Sean Fitzroy.
  

Friday, September 11, 2009

• First meeting for development of the “Freelance Guide” Website with Steve Rudolfi
  
• Type up notes from Twitter Conference --- will place them on the blog when I figure out how
  
• “Notebook” Software Training - awesome new software
  

Monday, September 14, 2009

• Read periodical article “Metaphors We Surf By” by Peter Maglio - See comments below
  
• Read Chapters 1-4, David Weinberger, “Everything is Miscellaneous” - See comments below
  
• Joomla! Training – (2 hours) This is a great open source software!
  

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

• Freelance Guide Editing - 7 pages down, 100 to go
  
• Read Chapters 5-7, David Weinberger, “Everything is Miscellaneous”
• Student CD-ROM Work --- Will it ever be done?
  

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

• Travel to Boston for Student CD-ROM Staff Presentation
• PPAR Evaluation
  
• Meeting with John Lay RE: Freelance Guide - Meeting went well.
  
• Meeting With Steve Rudolfi RE: Student CD-ROM and Freelance Guide

Thursday, September 17, 2009

• Microsoft Office 2007 – Word Training (2 hours)
• Joomla! Training (2 hours)
• Finish reading: David Weinberger, “Everything is Miscellaneous”
• Read periodical: “Microsoft Research and Digital Rights Management Talk” by Cory Doctorow - See comments below

Reading Notes:

The readings this week have been enlightening and yet simply logical.  Starting from Paul Maglio and Teenie Matlock’s periodical: “Metaphors We Surf The Web By” we learn that “newbie’s” or novice users to the world wide web tend to think of it in a more physical way than experienced users do.  They report verbiage or web vernacular such as “click on,” “move to,” “type in,” “go to there,”and “come from here.” Whereas experienced users employ verbal descriptions in a more subtle and referential way that are less spatially action oriented.

In reading Cory Doctorow’s (co-founder of Boing-Boing) speech to Microsoft in 2004 regarding “Digital Rights Management” — I was stopped in my tracks thinking about the following:

“New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at.”
 
I was immediately put to thinking as to what he was thinking about.   Can you think of an example?

 
I finished reading David Weinberger's wonderful book “Everything Is Miscellaneous” and I cannot think of anyone I know who would not enjoy this book. There is much in it that I need to dissect and layer-in to my lectures for both my Information Architecture and E-commerce courses, but here are some tidbits from it that should give you much to think about. It is a wonderful book for anyone to read who is interested in information organization, and the processing of information and how it is progressing through the Web 2.0 process.

Some words of knowledge from Weinberger:

“The remarkable fact is that we have built systems for understanding the universe using the same technique we use for putting away our laundry: Split the lump of cleaned clothes by family member, split each family member’s lumps by body part, then perhaps by work or play, by season or by color.”

and

“Reality is multifaceted. There are lots of ways to slice it. How we choose to slice it up depends upon why we’re slicing it up.

Weinberger makes the following point in a chapter that he titles “Social Knowing:”

“But just about every industry that creates or distributes content — ideas, information, or creativity in any form— exerts control over how that content is organized . . .This creates a conundrum for businesses as they enter the digital order. If they don’t allow their users to structure information for themselves,*  they’ll lose their patrons. If they do not allow patrons to structure information for themselves, the organizations will lose much of their authority, power and control.


* My comment: see Dartmouth University’s Quick-Link main page for an excellent example of doing this right.

And just when you think wiki’s are a waste of time, Weinberger says:

“The CIO of the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, J.P. Rangaswami, found that wikis reduced emails about projects by 75% and halved meeting times.  Suzanne Stein of Nokia’s Insight & Foresight says “group knowledge evolves” on wikis.

Wow!  (75%)

 
And finally, in a chapter called “What Nothing Says” Weinberger takes delight in the following:
Some labels are so dumb they’re famous:

• On a Sears hair dryer: “Do not use while sleeping.”          
• On the packaging for a Rowenta iron: “Do not iron clothes on body.
• On a Nytol sleep aid” “Warning: May cause drowsiness”    
• On Sainsbuy peanuts: “Warning: Contains nuts”                 
• On a child’s costume: “Wearing of this garment does not enable you to fly.”
  

This chapter goes on to discuss metadata and how we are all surprisingly subtle readers of all forms and types of metadata.  This is a great book for anyone to read, it’s actually quite fun. It is truly required reading for anyone who is involved in creating content strategy for websites. 
  
See you next week!       
 

In the beginning . . .

My name is Bob Griffin and I am a full-time faculty member in the Web Design and Interactive Media Department at The New England Institute of Art, in Brookline, MA. This is the beginning record of my sabbatical period and I hope to detail the major accomplishments as well as daily work completed regarding my web development project, training and research.

The first item I had to accomplish was giving this "blog" a name. I have learned in teaching a course in E-commerce and Marketing Communication that one of the most important things you can do for an online product is to name it wisely and accurately. There are actually eight key factors to consider for online naming, and they are:

1. The Name Should Be Short
2. The Name Should Be Simple
3. The Name Should Be Suggestive of the Category
4. The Name Should Be Unique
5. The Name Should Be Alliterative (Cocal Cola, Dunkin' Donuts, SabBOBical )
6. The Name Should Be Speakable
7. The Name Should Be Shocking
8. The Name Should Be Personalized
   

So, I gave all of MY suggestions to my friends, and those suggestions were greeted well. As my friend Stephanie said, "It has to be more Bobish." And those that did like what I suggested gave their support in a lackluster way. But a few of these creative geniuses followed the above criteria (without knowing about it ) and came up with a great moniker.

http://www.sabBOBical.blogspot.com

So, now when someone asks, "What's Bob(Rob) Griffin doing?" You can say he's on his sabBOBical.

OK, enough with the levity. Now, I'll tell you what I am really going to be doing over the next several months.

My sabbatical boils down to three main areas: web development, training and research.

Web Development

I am going to be working with a team to put up a website for free-lancing artists and developers. This is going to be a "how-to" site and its intent is to assist our student body when they go out to free-lance. I hear students talking all the time about these free-lance experiences, and I honestly think some of them are going about it all wrong.

The information that has been amassed for this site is about 150 pages long. It was originally put together by a group that I worked with back in the early 00's. It was updated again in 2004, and then shelved due to obsolescence. I am going to put the content through a "vetting" process, and then try to do additional research, specific to each industry that we grant degrees.

In the process of creating the website, I am going to learn a new content management software system, called Joomla! I will post progress here and those of you reading the blog will know what the site will be called to check it out. Maybe we'll have another "Name Game!"


Training

The life of a professor at The New England Institute of Art is very busy. More so than at other colleges because of the number of classes we have to teach in a given year. As the result of that, there is very little time for training and re-training, and when you are the one who is responsible for the training — well, it's not a good thing.
 
As I said, I will be learning Joomla! and also updating my Photoshop skills, increasing my DreamWeaver skills, and doing a thorough review of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint (for both the Mac and PC). Additionally, I'd also like to learn InspireData and the Mac Office Suite: Pages, Numbers and Keynote. I am going to be a busy guy!

Original Research
After doing a comprehensive reading period (bibliography to come) — I am going to try to interview as many corporate decision-makers in the Boston area about web development, specifically in the area of content strategy.  I'd like to know how their future marketing and marketing communications will be affected by "Twitter," which I believe the marketplace has not fully embraced yet, but this is coming. I plan on writing a "white paper" summarizing this information.

That's it for the first blog, please keep the good thoughts and comments coming!