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Re: [Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 54, Issue 2 responses
by Murray Turoff 03 Jan '09

03 Jan '09

Some wonderful comments. Let me touch on a few things. EIES was a self contained garden because it had to be as most things were not easy to get otherwise. However, besides the Well, Planet by harry stevens, and some other systems were directly influenced by EIES and built by people who had used EIES directly even though some never admitted it. We did, for example, build for example a complete user information marketplace and i wanted to turn it on for real money but NJIT ruled we would have to pay state taxes and they did not wnat to get involved so we turned it on as grand monopoly game to sell any piece of information for play money where the provider was a person and he or she could set the price for the joke, poem, recommendation or what have you. However, anyone who paid the price had the right to attach an opinion on whether it was worth the money and the seller could not remove that from the original ad used for selling. It was great fun and still does not exist because of the lack of micro money. At the time everyone was assuming information providers were companies and not people. To some extent the investment business still has that blinder on. Collaboration still has a long way to go. The complete design does appear in the literature. It was a fore runner to ebay and recommender systems in a very real sense. Peter and Trudy Johnsen Lenz who built the "topics" system on EIES, using the language that was a virtual browser between our users and the back office system, wrote a wonderful article on the "rhythms of conferences" where they pointed out that participation is a series of peaks and valleys rather than a stable average. People shift around among different topics in different conferences and a critical mass at the right time triggers a major peak. Topics by the way supported 200 users exchanging information on scientific questions facing state legislatures and had a flow of over 200 comments a week where questions were limited to 5 lines and answers to one page and you could choose which questions you wanted to track answers to. When we turned it on everyone was asking questions and only professionals representing professional societies were answering. We created a membership list which tracked for all the users how many questions each user was asking and how many answers they had made and all of a sudden most people started to answer questions. The exchanges were archived in a database for future use if someone became interested in the questions and their answers later. Questions ranged form things like How do you define and antique? to things like Standards for burying power lines? There was usually about 15 such questions every week. Having this ability to tailor for any individual or group led to a lot of interesting things. We even had a fun feature where every user could tailor their own interface by replacing all the prompts. We had users tailor "English butler" "insults" etc. Not having the web we could meausre the time and what people did direclty and learned a lot of general things about user behavior summarized in part in a couple of CACM articles by Roxanne Hiltz including the one first major article on information overload in this technology. One of our most popular conferences, which you had to have permission to join, was one where everyone liked to insult each other. I do urge some of you to look at hte NLM report on my website on information overload. Ignore the body and just go read the 60 page appendix of the raw comments on the 34 professionals in Emergency Management on their problems on gathering and using information on the web. This is the most significant part of the report with respect to meaningful evidence. While they do not state it directly it becomes clear that they want a user controlled recommender systems even though they do not realize such a thing can be done. But clearly they as a "community" want to nominate the material to be included and to evaluate it collectively. There is alot of "communities" they have already built with volunteer newsletters and websites and about a dozen are described in our report. These are places where a lot of professionals are putting in a lot of effort for free to beneift one another using only simple tools like websites and editors. They list about 300 links they are using and the sites are active in the text of the appendix. There biggest problem is dealing with the "gray literature" which is what NLM calls non journals, but is what the practitioners want the most. An awful lot is happening among communities of practice and i think the word "communities" is still a good one. Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff

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Re: [Air-L] the growth of some groups and not others (Murray Turoff)
by Larry Press 03 Jan '09

03 Jan '09

Tom Abeles wrote: Tom, > We see the conflict clearly with the asynchronous systems like Blackboard where choice is a zero sum game for the owners of the SN. I'm not sure what you are getting at here -- can you elaborate a bit? > Incidentally others of us had "conferences" on EIES and The Well in those days as well as Caucus. But these were early and most of us were stuck with 300 baud modems and long distance dial up costs to participate. For me, the good news was that I was using EIES at USC Information Science Institute, which was a local call from my home. The bad news was that I had a 100 bps Teletype with an acoustic coupler. If you look at the report we produced, all of my contributions are in capital letters because the TTY did not do lower case :-). Lar

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Re: [Air-L] the growth of some groups and not others
by Denise N. Rall 02 Jan '09

02 Jan '09

Dear AIR-ers - As I recall the early days of BBSs, there were clearly communities - intersecting and overlapping. But some of the most 'valued' activity - sharing passwords,, breaking servers, etc. was covert or even illegal (not me of course). Those who were REALLY in the loop even had phone numbers of other crackers that were used quite sparingly. But it was a clear sign of 'arrival' or status in the covert community that one had acquired voice access to another member - as some things clearly could not be sent by email - despite interesting encryption programs available. Also, hackers could be directed to a site to use a specific comm protocol that was not generally available to others. So there were levels of access that happened offline - How the illegals interacted with others was pretty standard. They didn't pass on details about your activities except to those in the loop - At one point we thought of making a "Hacker Hero's" calendar - with a short bio and pic of each hacker and why they were 'heroic' - mostly to do with circumventing various systems. Naturally it couldn't be done. fun idea though! Cheers, Denise Denise N. Rall, PhD. Internationalisation Project Officer Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Office: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/esm/staff/pages/drall/ Presenter, Internet Research 9.0, 15-18 October 2008, Copenhagen, DK Stay connected to the people that matter most with a smarter inbox. Take a look http://au.docs.yahoo.com/mail/smarterinbox

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Re: [Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 54, Issue 1
by Murray Turoff 02 Jan '09

02 Jan '09

Tom, fancy meeting you here as we usually interact on the Sloan list. Computing, whether it is called IS (systems), IS (science), CS, IT, ECE, MIS, etc is not what I would called a mature academic field like Physics (where I came from). In one of the papers I have I listed about 20 different names for Computer Mediated Communications under which related work was published in the 20 years since 1975 including things like CSCW, Groupware, Group Decision Support Systems, etc. It seems every application of computers to a particular application for using the computer for human communications has a different name even though the fundamental requirements and supporting theories are common to all the applications. The real problem is that we are part of a commercial field and each company building a new system wants to come up with name for what they are doing to make it sound like it is a completely new concept. Unfortunately the young members of the academic community are quick to jump on the band wagon and use the terminology even if it duplicates older efforts. In physics there was always a strong emphasis on and recognition for those that did careful state of the art reviews of the literature and had the knack to point out what had been accomplished and where the uncertainties still existed. We do not have much of a tradition in computing for that sort of emphasis. I think Poole's classic in the 60's on the growing proliferation of journals and the ultimate swamping of the capacity of professional communities to keep up with their fields is truer today as a major problem than it was then as our National Library of Medicine study shows form the Emergency Management community of practice. We have too many publishers who are pushing almost a vanity press excess since electronic publishing and publishing on demand make cheap publishing by individual item cost effective. The attempt my many academic libraries to go electronic is now forcing them to cut out electronic subscriptions because of growing costs rather than decreasing costs which the technology would allow but the current printing industry is not going along. I think those disciplines like physics and many biological and medical ones that have gone open source for all academic publications in the wave of the future. I also think that the sooner we can get a true universal mico-money systems on the total Web so individuals can be their own publishers with a cent for a poem and where the writer sets is own fees and the provider gets only a 10-15% as opposed to the author getting only 10-15% is far more inline with real economic costs. I have said this in papers twenty years ago. Researchers on the web need to take a normative view the future of the Web. The Web and its evolution is the process of designing social systems (Also in earlier papers). Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2008 23:30:57 -0600 > From: tom abeles <tabeles(a)hotmail.com> > Subject: Re: [Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 53, Issue 27 > To: <air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org> > Message-ID: <BAY108-W271099AF0FE805C943354EA7E50(a)phx.gbl> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > > Hi Murray > > You raise a critical issue about government "memory". We were contacted > several years after we did a report for the USEPA. A consulting firm had a > contract to do what we did as a separate publication under a broader > contract. We gave the caller the document number in the EPA publications > list and never heard from them again. > > A parallel experience happens in The Academy when professors assign > research papers. Now with analysis programs, many of these plagerized papers > are spotted. But, still, it is clear that: > > a) that there is a lot of duplication, including papers in scholarly > journals by academics who should know better > b) with the proliferation of materials in all media, good searching is hard > to do even if the searchers wanted to take the time to plumb the depth of > what is out "there". I was once booted off a listserv on ICT's for pointing > out both the insufficient searching for materials and the trivial nature of > much of the published works. In the past, one would collect and verify > before publishing. With pressure to pub/perish today, the publication of a > data point and the further publishing of a second point or a deepeer > analysis would count as two papers while the past lies buried waiting for > some archivist to uncover. In fact it was specifically pointed out that a > new journal was needed because the academics needed the space. It is > estimated that there are over 20,000 academic type journals extant. Open > access databases are now also expanding. > > This becomes critical for internet researchers given the increasing ability > for "bots" or intelligent search engines to scour the entire literature, > both formal and informal, mainstream and fugitive which sits outside the > traditional search stream. This changes the roll of the researcher. It > should also change the form and substance of an academic publication since > it is no longer necessary to have documents which have less than 10% new > material. All should only need a hot link to the past history. This should > reduce a publication to a single page, reducing the literature and turning > most publications into a "note". The problem is that The Academy doesn't > know how to deal with pub/perish for promo and tenure without the default to > a count of annual publications, many of which could be footnotes in the > scheme of the universe. > > tom > > tom abeles, editor > On the Horizon > http://www.emeraldinsight.com/oth.htm > > -- Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff

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the growth of some groups and not others
by Murray Turoff 02 Jan '09

02 Jan '09

The standard design philosophy currently being used in many social network systems is to encourage the user to sign into the site and duplicate functions like exchanging messages in different formats. For many users this is too much a waste of time in that most important things are carried out by the user in their current message environment. The addition of groups that social networks finally recognized (they existed in some systems in the 70's) as a key valuable addition to communication systems will spread and be better integrated in message services. I also note that some social networks are making it easier to handle social network functions without signing in and leaving your normal environment. Like many of you I currently am in 4 different network social systems and within groups within those. It gets to be a real mess when one cannot easily move through the different environments by being able to do the same function in one way in one place. > > Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff

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Re: [Air-L] the growth of some groups and not others (Murray Turoff)
by Larry Press 02 Jan '09

02 Jan '09

Murray Turoff wrote: > The standard design philosophy currently being used in many social network > systems is to encourage the user to sign into the site and duplicate > functions like exchanging messages in different formats. The duplication goes beyond message formats and exchange -- one may have different image or video collections, identities/profiles, reputations (formal and informal), etc. in each system. Perhaps we will see standards that let us abstract this sort of thing and associate it with a user independent of the system being used. > The addition of > groups that social networks finally recognized (they existed in some systems > in the 70's) as a key valuable addition to communication systems will spread > and be better integrated in message services. I used EIES in the 1970s -- a group of around a dozen people conducted a "Teleconference on Teleconferencing" over a period of several months, but, as I recall, EIES was a "walled garden." In what ways did it interoperate with other BBS or messaging systems? (There weren't many things to interoperate with in those days :-). Larry Press

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Re: [Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 53, Issue 27
by Murray Turoff 01 Jan '09

01 Jan '09

Thanks William, it has been some time since we talked and it is good to hear from you. Groups in EMASARI was very weak, and it was really EIES the electronic Information Exchange System that had groups as a fully integrated structure including group messaging as in 1976 we had to buil EIES with its own internal message system. As an R&D system we could tailor individual interfaces wiht unique cababilites for each user group. We could transfer prividledges or access rights by distributing them to teh group. Any content could be references in any communication with a type of html we had in the system to provide hypertext linkages that could either be displayed wihtin the text or left to be triggered by teh user. It also had a full chat cabablity as did EMIASARI in 1971. The Network nation was reprinted in 1993 by MIT press and is still available from MIT press or Amazon. We established in the past few years on the NJIT libaray an archive for all our early research reports including controlled expeirments and field trails evaluations as well as user manuals for the many altenraive subsystems we built. A complete EMISARI manual is there too. This will get you there http://library.njit.edu/archives/cccc-materials/ if you dont record this go to the library at njit and lookd at service and collections and one of them will be the archive of the Computer Conferencing and Communications Center from 1975 though 1999 if you look at some of the evaluation studies these reports contain all the scales used and the procedures and represent some interesting resources for phd students. Besides the scientific networks that used eies there were a lot of social network type things going on at the same time between teh different communties. Things like poetry writing conferences, collaborative story writing using eies pen names, and discussions of a lot of popular subjects. The first real public social sysetms which evolved from EIES by Staurt Brand who wrote teh whole earth software catablog using groups on eies to collaborate on material, was the Well which he developed commerically and had the many social network groups inlcuding a number of bands and their follers like the Grateful Dead. The Well still exists i believe. Since 2003 i have been going back to my EMISARI work and doing Emergency Management Information Systems. The government has no organizational memory about what it once could do very well and how it was done back in OEP in the 60s and early 70s. The paper on DERMIS on my website (in JITTA also) tells why i went back to this area to try and show what can be done with the right approach the emergency management problem. On my website is a recent report roxanne and i did for NLM on the information overload that the emergency management community is facing on the Web. That full report of 169 pages (a one round delphi) is on my website and make interesting reading for some of you i am sure. We could not suggest solutions in the report as that was not allowed by the sponosors but I just gave a paper at WEB2008 during the ICIS meeting in paris and it has a suggested solutions in terms of user controlled recommender systems of a specific nature. If anyone is interested I will send it to you. Springer is publishing it in teh near future. A group of us started a professional community of practice in this area called ISCRAM, check out iscram.org for four years of proceedings and it is now an affilated AIS conference as well. Roxanne and i are sort of amazed about how little many current researchers know about anyof this early work and many findings that are still relevant for current reserach issues. Message: 3 > Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:55:30 +0000 > From: William Dutton <william.dutton(a)oii.ox.ac.uk> > Subject: Re: [Air-L] the growth of some groups and not others > To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org > Message-ID: <153BFE27-DF1F-439F-A488-B03EBC11794C(a)oii.ox.ac.uk> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed > > I think Murray Turoff is referring to the system that he pioneered, > called the Emergency Management Information Systems And Reference > Index (EMISARI). See: Hiltz and Turoff, (1978), The Network Nation: > Human Communication via Computer (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley), > also see: http://www.livinginternet.com/r/ri_emisari.htm Murray > Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz had a vision that was decades ahead of the > times. > > Bill > > Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff

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request for studies concerning Senior's use of the net and Happy New Year
by Peter Timusk 01 Jan '09

01 Jan '09

happy new year, now or when you celebrate this. I am not asking you to do my work and hopefully this is sharing that will help others. I am trying to find studies concerning senior's use of the Internet. I am doing this for my new job in the information society statistics section of Statistics Canada. I have read a lot about e-inclusion and so forth but am really looking for the opposite about seniors. One, in terms predicting who uses the net, age is inversely related. The older you are the less likely you are to surf the net. Of course this generation gap may be closing. Has anyone found it closed? I am interested in any studies using logistic regression models predicting Internet use/access or even better a more refined definition of use with age as one predictor variable. My employer has published a number of studies like this. Also we know now that use/access of the net is not where it stops, so I am interested in other studies looking at broadening this idea of access or use as long as these involve seniors and preferably are statistical studies. I would like to look for comparable studies in term of hours on line, or intensity of use, or activities online. Somethings that look possible are "More seniors use pharmacies online than other age groups" but is there anything else out there. Lots of game playing? Some seniors it was found in the past spent long hours online and the explanation suggested was that they had free time. We want to learn more about these seniors who use the net a lot. Or can you simply suggest alternative keywords for "intensity of internet use" so I can better search journals and google scholar.

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tripleC 6 (2): Special issue on "ICTs and society: PhD Students' Transdisciplinary Research Projects" published
by Christian Fuchs 31 Dec '08

31 Dec '08

tripleC 6 (2): Special issue on "ICTs and society: PhD Students' Transdisciplinary Research Projects" published http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/issue/current This special issue, edited by Christian Fuchs, documents selected papers that were presented at the doctoral students conference "ICTs and society" that took place at the University of Salzburg on June 20-21, 2008 (see http://www.icts.sbg.ac.at/content.php?m_id=1012&id=1012&newsdetail=555&ch_i…) tripleC (Cognition, Communication, Co-operation) is an open access journal that focuses on transdisciplinary research in information science and communication studies. Contents tripleC (Cognition, Communication, Co-operation) -- Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 6 (2): http://triplec.at Christian Fuchs Introduction to the special issue on "ICTs and Society: PhD Students' Transdisciplinary Research Projects" i-viii http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/80/74 Muhammad M. Abdul-Mageed: Online News Sites and Journalism 2.0: Reader Comments on Al Jazeera Arabic 59-76 http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/78 Robert M. Bichler: The dawn of the information age in least developed countries (LDCs): lessons learned from four case studies 77-87 http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/79 Randall B. Kemp Public participatory GIS in community-based disaster risk reduction 88-104 http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/81 Alice Mattoni ICTs in national and transnational mobilizations 105-124 http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/82 Pedro Pereira Neto Internet-driven changes in environmental NGO action 125-133 http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/83 Alberto Pepe Socio-epistemic analysis of scientific knowledge production in little science research 134-145 http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/84 Andraž Petrovc(ic( Reconfiguring socialities: The personal networks of ICT users and Social Cohesion 146-166 http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/85 -- --------------- Christian Fuchs Associate Professor eTheory Research Group ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research in Information and Communication Technologies & Society University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18 5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs(a)sbg.ac.at Phone +43 662 8044 4823 Fax +43 662 6389 4800 http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at/fuchs/ Blog: http://christianfuchs.wordpress.com Co-Editor of tripleC - open access online journal on cognition, communication and cooperation for a global sustainable information society http://triple-c.at New Book: Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge. 408 Pages. http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/i&s.html

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One Million Community Builders Facebook Group
by Steven Clift 30 Dec '08

30 Dec '08

I'm experimenting on ways to pull people from the "private life" dominated Facebook experience into "public life" exchange. Check it out from: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=121232780528 Have others here researched how people actually *use* Facebook groups? Why some groups take off and grow and other serve as virtual lapel pins? My sense is that with limited functionality and no notification/e-mail alert option, they are mostly pseudo-petitions. Cheers, Steven Clift E-Democracy.Org

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