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July 2009

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THWONK: Re-inventing email lists
by Mike Bennett 01 Jul '09

01 Jul '09

Since the Chronicle article has kicked off a bunch of conversation about the death of e-lists, I thought I'd take this opportunity (a little earlier than planned) to make an announcement about our new very relevant research project. Our new project is called THWONK, with the tag line "Where You Design The Rules Of Online Communcation!" @ www.thwonk.com THWONK is a research tool for enabling people to invent new kinds of online communication systems, and create new variations of existing ones. Initially we're focused on mailing lists and mail. Its still in the very early days and rough around the edges but the core functionality is in place. With THWONK you can create an e-list where message length is limited to 140 characters, or only allow people to contribute so many words to a mailing list per week, or force people to contribute otherwise they are automatically unsubscribed, or enable distributed moderation, or perform realtime analysis of message content with stats generation, etc. Our aims with THWONK are: 1. Enable user generated social structures 2. Enable discovery of new generalisable social structures for online communication 3. Create a flexible and innovative new tool for Human-Computer Interaction / Computer Mediated Communication research 4. Build an innovation community inventing new CMC systems THWONK is at: http://www.thwonk.com In the longer term we are going to simplify the creation of new styles of lists, ideally to the point where no programming knowledge is required at all. If you have suggestions for features, or you have an ideal for collaboration please let me know :) To use THWONK you can use a simple web wizard (there's lots more features we're adding to it), or you can write simple and short Javascript programs, which run on our servers. When a mail comes into a destination address on the server, the Javascript associated with the destination runs on the server. The Javascript implements whatever mailing rules and constraints you like, e.g. create a Twitter like email list where message length is limited to 140 characters, etc. There's a tutorial for Javascript coders at: http://forums.thwonk.com/read.php?4,20 and some API documentation in place: http://forums.thwonk.com/list.php?4 ...but there needs to be a lot more documentation written, which is ongoing. All the best, Mike Bennett (& Jonah Brucker-Cohen) -- Postdoctoral Researcher CLARITY Centre, University College Dublin, Ireland - email: mike.bennett(a)ucd.ie - blog: http://www.user-designer.com - web: http://www.stressbunny.com/mike

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SMS and law use of comm (was : Re: in dis-praise of the Chronicle)
by Peter Timusk 01 Jul '09

01 Jul '09

On 30-Jun-09, at 9:10 PM, Barry Wellman wrote: > Altho I wonder if IM has mostly given way to texting. Haven't > checked the > data, though. > > Barry Wellman I think certain Canadian tech business persons like Michael Copeland ( Corel) tried to make money from sms. Apparently he is loosing money on this venture. So while we can debate this, others risk their money on which is more popular. Then there are the workers in the computer firms who must learn these applications so they can provide them to us. I have used IM in law enforcement work as a late night security guard. There is a need for communication in law enforcement and in my security work we had phones, radios, pagers, and IM and bulletin boards and email. There were of course tasks for each one. We did not officially use cell phones but often we had these privately as a back up for dead radio batteries. This was in a high tech industry setting. Peter Peter Timusk, B.Math statistics (2002), B.A. legal studies (2006) Carleton University Systems Science Graduate student, University of Ottawa. just trying to stay linear. Read by hundreds of lurkers every week. Kiitos Paljon, Merci, and thank you.

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