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Interesting Article on eBay Community
by Chris Modzelewski 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

Hi Everyone, I just came across an interesting article about eBay's Feedback System and the dynamics of the eBay community. A business-focused article, but one with some interesting insights into eBay's community. Here's the link: http://www.forbes.com/2007/01/02/ebay-smallbusiness-feedback-ent-sales-cx_a… All the best, Chris -- Chris Modzelewski Emerging Analysis Corporation

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Kelvin Grove Urban Village design competition
by Marcus Foth 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

Kelvin Grove Urban Village design competition The Kelvin Grove Urban Village Project Team is conducting a design competition, seeking ideas and proposals for an installation (or multiple / distributed installations) at the Kelvin Grove Urban Village that will “display visual evidence of connectivity within the community”. This competition aims to attract students and professionals who have an interest in the visual and multimedia applications of Information and Communication Technology. The competition has two streams. The student stream is available for full-time or part-time Australian secondary or tertiary students and offers a prize of AUD 2,000. The open stream is available for everyone including businesses and offers a prize of AUD 5,000. The indicative budget for creation and installation is AUD 40,000. The competition commences on 1 January 2007 and closes on 31 May 2007. For further details or to obtain an entry form visit the Kelvin Grove Urban Village website. http://www.kgurbanvillage.com.au/news/design_comp/ Please consider entering this competition and please distribute widely. Thank you. Dr Marcus Foth Kelvin Grove Urban Village Information and Communication Technology Committee -- Dr Marcus Foth Australian Postdoctoral Fellow Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation Queensland University of Technology (CRICOS No. 00213J) Creative Industries Precinct, Brisbane QLD 4059, Australia Phone +61 7 313 x88772 - Fax x88195 - Room Z6-511 m.foth(a)qut.edu.au - http://www.vrolik.de/ http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Foth,_Marcus.html

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Fw: E-Media Tidbits - Need Local Blogs? Check Out Placeblogger
by Hugemusic 01 Jan '07

01 Jan '07

For Pamela and the others interested in location-specific blogs, Placeblogger (as mentioned by Daisy) has launched. Cheers and best wishes for the New Year. Hughie ----- Original Message ----- From: "Poynter Institute" <newsletters(a)poynter.org> To: <hmusic(a)ozemail.com.au> Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2007 8:08 AM Subject: E-Media Tidbits - Need Local Blogs? Check Out Placeblogger Poynteronline E-Media Tidbits Monday, January 1, 2007 Posted by Amy Gahran 4:33:23 PM Need Local Blogs? Check Out Placeblogger What's happening in Pearlington, Miss. or Bozenman, Mont.? Sure, you could check local news outlets -- but to get a deeper slice of life you might peruse nearby placeblogs. Finding placeblogs just got a whole lot easier. Today, Lisa Williams debuted Placeblogger (http://placeblogger.com/) , an online resource that lists and showcases placeblogs -- so far 713 from around the U.S., with a few scattered elsewhere around the globe. What's a placeblog? Williams defines (http://placeblogger.com/faq) it as "an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time. It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that's open to community contribution. It's not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism. It's about the lived experience of a place." Her own community site for Watertown, Mass, H20town (http://www.h2otown.info/) , is an example of a placeblog. While many placeblogs focus on hyperlocal news and citizen journalism, others are more personal views about life in that town or region. Placeblogger allows you to find and list placeblogs. Each placeblog listing includes a map, link, and other information. I know Lisa is a major fan of OPML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML) , so expect some sophisticated feed options later from Placeblogger. Apparently, wikis will be part of the mix. And there's already a discussion forum for placebloggers. Many news organizations already offer lists of local blogs or even syndicated content from them. Also, more and more news organizations are blogging about local issues. Why not add these blogs to Placeblogger, if they're not already listed? And if you're covering unfamiliar locations, why not check for nearby placeblogs to add color and context? See Jay Rosen's Pressthink (http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2007/01/01/placeblogge…) today for more about Placeblogger.

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new reviews in cyberculture studies (january 2007)
by David M Silver 31 Dec '06

31 Dec '06

folks, a new set of book reviews [ http://rccs.usfca.edu/booklist.asp ] for january 2007: 1. From 9/11 to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy Author: Douglas Kellner Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003 Review 1: Robert Tynes 2. Media Access: Social and Psychological Dimensions of New Technology Use Editors: Erik Bucy & John Newhagen Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004 Review 1: Cheryl Brown Editors response: Erik Bucy & John Newhagen 3. Media Debates: Great Issues for the Digital Age Editors: Everett E. Dennis & John C. Merrill Publisher: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006 Review 1: Tim Dwyer 4. No Safety in Numbers: How the Computer Quantified Everything and Made People Risk Aversive Author: Henry J. Perkinson Publisher: Hampton Press Inc, 1996 Review 1: Robert Whitbred coming very soon: Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect Christina Garsten & Helena Wulff, New Technologies at Work: People, Screens and Social Virtuality Andreas Kitzmann, Saved from Oblivion: Documenting the Daily from Diaries to Web Cams Lev Manovich & Andreas Kratky, Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database Bradley Quinn, Techno Fashion Richard Rogers, Information Politics on the Web T. L. Taylor, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture Joseph Turow & Andrea Kavanaugh, The Wired Homestead: A Sourcebook on the Internet and the Family also coming very soon: a massive list of new and exciting books looking for reviewers. stay tuned. PEACE in 2007, enjoy. david silver university of san francisco http://silverinsf.blogspot.com/

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Workshop "Social Network Analysis and Conceptual
by Josep Vives 31 Dec '06

31 Dec '06

Cross-post... ########################################### Apologies for cross-posting -------------------- ICFCA 2007 Workshop "Social Network Analysis and Conceptual Structures: Exploring Opportunities" -------------------- http://snafca.free.fr February 16, 2007 2nd CALL FOR PAPERS The recent years have seen a renewed interest in an interdisciplinary effort aiming at analyzing social networks, in which both mathematical sociology and computer science play a notable role, relying altogether extensively on graph theory. This effort has mainly been fueled and supported by significant advances in computing capabilities and electronic data availability for several social systems: scientists, webloggers, online customers, computer-based collaboration-enhancing devices, inter alia. In particular, knowledge networks, i.e. interaction networks where agents produce or exchange knowledge, are the focus of many current studies, both qualitative and quantitative. Among these, community- detection issues such as finding agents sharing sets of identical patterns are a key topic. Social network analysis is proficient in methods aimed at discovering, describing, and plausibly organizing various kinds of social communities. The aim of this workshop is to investigate the opportunities for formal concept analysis in social networks by proposing possible bridges between these frameworks and by presenting issues of mathematical sociology which could benefit from conceptual structures, so as to eventually facilitate collaboration between the two fields. Therefore, we particularly welcome submissions of the survey type describing the state of the art in any of the fields listed below along with submissions specifying a concrete problem that still needs an efficient formal solution. Submissions may but do not have to address the possible use of formal concept analysis in these fields. TARGET AUDIENCE Social scientists using or willing to use formal techniques in any of the fields listed below; researchers in discrete structures and formal concept analysis interested in applications in social sciences. TOPICS Knowledge networks / epistemic networks Collective construction of knowledge, social cognition Social epistemology applied to social networks Social network analysis of communities of practice Information diffusion in social networks Affiliation networks Social network-based methods for community detection Web communities, open-source development communities Weblog analysis Social networking websites Collaboration-enhancing tools (in organizations, on the web, inter alia) Knowledge exchange devices Semantic web and social networks Knowledge management using social data Building semantics from collaborative environments Taxonomies and ontologies for scientific domains Network analysis for folksonomies Systems for folksonomy building Evolution of network structures ORGANIZERS Sergei Obiedkov (Higher School of Economics, Russia) - sergei.obj(a)gmail.com <//sergei%2Eobj(a)gmail.com/> Camille Roth (University of Modena, Italy & CREA/CNRS, France) - roth(a)shs.polytechnique.fr <//roth(a)shs.polytechnique.fr/> ################################################### Papers about similars topics in Online Congress of Observatory for Cybersociety ( www.cibersociedad.net) In Spanish: http://www.cibersociedad.net/congres2004/grups/grup.php?idioma=en&id=65 (deep Link) In various languages: http://www.cibersociedad.net/congres2006/gts/gt.php?perfilpagina=comunicaci… ------------------------------------------------------------------ Josep Vives Jounou Board Committee. Observatory for Cybersociety www.cibersociedad.net jvives(a)cibersociedad.net <//jvives(a)cibersociedad.net/> josep.vives(a)gmail.com <//josep%2Evives(a)gmail.com/> Barcelona. Catalonia. Spain ------------------------------------------------------------------- -- ------------------------------------------------- Josep Vives Jounou jvives(a)cibersociedad.net josep.vives(a)gmail.com -------------------------------------------------

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unesco young scholars program
by Jeremy Hunsinger 29 Dec '06

29 Dec '06

(sorry for the u.s. bias, i'm reposting it from someone on my blogroll) UNESCO's Young Professionals Program (YPP) is extremely competitive. However, However, the United States is an "underrepresented state" in that we have fewer than our proportionate number of employees on the UNESCO staff (due largely to the fact that the United States had withdrawn from the organization for so many years). Each under- represented member state is allowed to submit twelve candidates for further consideration by UNESCO. U.S. candidate applications are reviewed by the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO. This year there were some outstanding candidates from the United States, and their applications have been forwarded to UNESCO with the endorsement of the National Commission and the Department of State. Alex Zemak, the Deputy Executive Director of the U.S. National Commission informs our editor that "Americans for UNESCO's representative Andre Varchaver contributed greatly to our Young Professional Review panel this year". http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php- URL_ID=11714&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html Jeremy Hunsinger School of Library and Information Science Pratt Institute () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.aoir.org The Association of Internet Researchers http://www.stswiki.org/ stswiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ LI-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series

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JITP Referral Request
by Stuart Shulman 28 Dec '06

28 Dec '06

{Apologies for cross-postings} Based on the advice of the Senior Editorial Board, I am writing to ask for your input as I personally solicit submissions from scholars working in the areas relevant to the Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP). If there is someone you would like me to invite to prepare a manuscript for submission to JITP, please visit the referral page at the link just below. https://surveyweb2.ucsur.pitt.edu/jitp/db/ Based on your referral, I will write a personal e-mail invitation inviting the scholar to consider JITP as a publishing outlet. The message will also list the person (or persons) who made the referral and it will include attachments with the Call for Papers, Instructions for Authors, and our Referee Guidelines. The referral web page will have fields for the first and last name of the person you are recommending, as well as their e-mail address. It will also ask for your first and last names and e-mail address. It should take only a minute or less for each referral you send. Please send as many as you can! Reading v.100 n.4 of the APSR (the flagship journal of the American Political Science Association), I was struck by the fact that 100 years ago, the inaugural editor of that journal struggled to get the flow of good manuscripts started. Perhaps in the year 2106, longtime JITP readers will marvel at the fact that this journal went through similar early growing pains. With your help, I'm sure we can get the word out (and the manuscripts in) to make JITP a long term success. Many thanks, ~Stu -- Dr. Stuart W. Shulman Assistant Professor School of Information Sciences Graduate School of Public and International Affairs Director, Qualitative Data Analysis Program http://qdap.ucsur.pitt.edu University Center for Social and Urban Research University of Pittsburgh 121 University Place, Suite 600 Pittsburgh, PA 15260 412.624.3776 (v) 412.624.4810 (f) http://shulman.ucsur.pitt.edu Editor, Journal of Information Technology and Politics http://www.jitp.net

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Re: [Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"? (Dr. T. Michael Roberts) / Research Survey
by Peter Ryan 27 Dec '06

27 Dec '06

Dear all, This is my first post to the AoIR listserv, although Ive been lurking for a few months now. Im currently completing by doctorate in an interdisciplinary graduate research program, and I find this discussion of methodology interesting in that the pedagogy of my university definitely supports the view that methodological issues should be approached from the perspective of using the "best" methods for addressing and observing a researchers object of study. For example, if Im researching best practices for how people interact with and use a particular software, perhaps an ethnographic or qualitative usability study would better serve my needs, rather than a quantitative study that captures the order of icons that a user selects while using the software (and other such statistically measurable items) -- although the survey would definitely add extra elements to the research story if it were well designed, as Dr. T. Michael Roberts is describing. Similarly, on-line content analysis and textual analysis tools are now often helping reduce narrative reports to numbers with ease. In other words, new on-line tools and communities like TAPoR, for example, are adding to the ease with which quantitative analysis can now be conducted. Often it is an issue of simply adding an automated survey, or other form of reporting, that could lend itself to later quantitative analysis, for an added perspective to a qualitative study story. For example, heres a shameless self promotion, if anyone has any free time this holiday break, Id greatly appreciate anyone interested in the topic of how literature affects research and development filling out my quick little doctoral research survey which can be found at the following link: * <a href="https://www.runner.ryerson.ca/PRSurvey/survey.cfm">https://www.runner.ryerson.ca/PRSurvey/survey.cfm</a> * https://www.runner.ryerson.ca/PRSurvey/survey.cfm *Please take the time to fill the survey out, especially if you are either 1) a published author or 2) employed in the information communication technology sector. The survey should take about 15 minutes of your time, depending on your level of involvement. I appreciate any and all comments and feedback the more information recorded here, the better because it will help both my quantitative and qualitative research analysis in the long run. *Also, if you know any other interested networks or listserves that might not mind this type of research circulating on its servers, I would appreciate the survey being forwarded on... More information on my research can be found by following the link above. At this point, I hope that the survey will travel far and wide like a stolen garden gnome that will one day come back to its owner. *Importance of this Research* I hope that you will take the time to help this research because of its importance in the following listed areas of study. Specifically, this research aims to develop: 1) a better understanding of how to improve the potential of networked research via the use of computers. Computers have been called the imagination machine, but are we using our new abundance of information effectively and imaginatively? 2) an interdisciplinary understanding of how the two cultures of the Arts and Computer Sciences do in fact work together (if they do at all). 3) recommendations for economic policy that is being led by the creative sector. In particular, funding for the Arts have been cut in recent years, despite the huge economic impact that the cultural industries have on local economies; while the funding for ICTs continues to increase without any apparent regard for the environmental problems caused by the development of the infrastructure that is required by a technological society how can these two policy arcs be realigned in a focused and mutually beneficial way? 4) maps of ICT networks that emphasize and link these two cultures. If we can visualize how research networks overlap with artistic and literary capital, then perhaps improvements can be made to the systems of communication between the agents of these two cultures. Such an analysis can also be used as a valuable case study for other communities. Thank you for your time and consideration of this message, and I hope it helps add to this conversation of methodological considerations. Sincerely, Peter Malachy Ryan ------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter Malachy Ryan, PhD Candidate Rogers Fellow, Communication and Culture Ryerson University Blog: www.cprobes.com/pr ************************************************************************************ Today's Topics: 1. Re: Community "Critical Mass"? (Dr. T. Michael Roberts) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Mon, 25 Dec 2006 08:08:13 -0800 (PST) From: "Dr. T. Michael Roberts" <dr_haqiqah(a)yahoo.com> Subject: Re: [Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"? To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org Message-ID: <701748.35560.qm(a)web36804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Mary-Helen, I am one of those rare birds thoroughly trained in both qualitative and quantitative Research Methodology. I started out with degrees in philosophy and literature and was drawn into the Department of Educational Psychology, Counseling and Special Education by an interest in Transpersonal Psychology. I was told once admitted that I would have to take at least four courses in Statistics and Research Methodology to become a doctor and was a damn fool if I did not take every course offered by the department in number crunching. Qualitative Research Methodology was not mentioned during this conversation or, at the time, in the catalog of courses. The folks over in Psychology looked down on the folks over in the education school but granted us the left-handed compliment of being better statisticians than they were and better trained in Psychology than the average math nerd. I had never taken Algebra. I took business math with Coach Vickers in high school and then majored in Philosophy at a small, liberal arts college which cross-listed logic courses as both PHIL and MATH. So, you can imagine how splendidly self-confident I felt as I stood in Dr. Donald Ary?s office explaining to him that I would be taking his Educational Statistics 1 next term because I really had no choice. I had dropped by to apologize in advance for the ineptitude I was sure I would display and, perhaps, to convince him that I was, when allowed to speak English rather than being forced to express myself through numbers, at least slightly brighter than a turnip. I enjoyed Dr. Ary?s course tremendously and took every course offered by the department in number crunching for the pure joy of it. I realized at some point that much number crunching is done for the pure joy of it and developed a bit of a habit in that direction myself. I spent so long finishing the degree I started while doing another simultaneously that I passed comps and became officially ABD the same term the department?s first semiotican was hired. I did a quantitative dissertation but probably would not have if the semiotican had burst upon the scene a year earlier. Upon graduation, I began teaching Psychology for a community college. My greatest success came teaching Psychology 2317 (Basic Statistics) both online and in the traditional classroom. I never got a single math nerd in that class in all the times I taught it. My classes closed shortly after opening every term after the first, filling up quickly with would-be nurses told by the State of Texas that 3 hours of statistics were required for licensure. These nurses genuinely loved my Education School approach to teaching statistics, an approach that involved dealing with statistics at the level of concept rather than getting bogged down with all those elaborate formulas and tricky computations. You can get away with that if you have them buy SPSS ($80.00) instead of a text-book. Anyway, I now teach English rather than Psychology. I miss my nurses but enjoy working with my composition students even more. I was always a story-teller. My fascination with statistics was an attempt on my part to embrace my opposite. That fascination began during a time in my life when I felt that I was drowning in an ocean of competing stories and desperately needed to feel something solid beneath my feet, something that was there before anyone started interpreting and which refused to be interpreted away. Will that do as a definition of reality? Patterns in numbers that were just numbers standing in abstract relationship without anything being defined except within the web of those relationships felt like solid ground to me. Later, I faced the awful fact that these patterns only come to mean when you turn them into a story by saying that 17i is the length of Jessica?s nose which is why Roger and Jessica eloped to Vegas. The truth is ?out there?, as Fox Moulder used to say, but can only be lived ?in here? in the form of a story that must go beyond the information given in order to become a fit place for human beings to live, love and occasionally try to jump out of the story like cat nipped kitties chasing their own lovely tails. I hope I have made all this perfectly clear. My students tell me that my learned discourse holds together at least as well as jazz and that they do profit in some vague way by exposure. Then again, I tell them that their essays will make fascinating reading if they just capture themselves in a net of words. I try to be kind and, perhaps, they do also in return. T. Michael --- Mary-Helen Ward <mhward(a)usyd.edu.au> wrote: > But why? Why reduce people's words, thoughts and > emotional responses > to mathematical coding? Why not use qualitative > methods to capture/ > represent/investigate the interactions? I understand > that it's still > a reduction; a distillation from the original, but > it speaks in clear > ways too. > > Theory can be developed from life using many > methods; maths is only > one of them. Maybe when we talk about the 'body of > knowledge' we need > to think about its blood and guts (the messy stuff) > and well as bones > and ligaments. > > M-H > >

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Phenomenographic research methodology
by 'Gail Taylor 27 Dec '06

27 Dec '06

I am currently doing a literature search to locate articles reporting the findings of phenomenographic studies of human-technology relationships. In particular, studies where the researcher had participants produce a drawing of their relationships as one of the data collection methodologies. I am doing some brainstorming on how this research methodology might be used to explore employee-technology relationships in work environments where social and technical system interactions are self-goverened or governed by policies and procedures developed and enformed by members of management. I am finding this research method is popular among researchers in the medical sciences, and looking for studies that have been conducted in other fields of practice. Any assistance and/or advice about using this research methodology would be appreciated! --------------------------------------- Gail Taylor, M.Ed. Human Resource Education Ph.D. Student University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Educational Psychology Teaching Assistant

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Searching for materials on "Cyber-friendship"
by Nurullah 27 Dec '06

27 Dec '06

Hi all, I'm from a Malaysian university, preparing for my thesis (initially) entitled 'Cyberfriendship: the patterns of virtual friendship on the internet'. Therefore, I'm looking for materials/ literature related to this topic/ theme. Please let me know if you have the source of the available materials/ literature/ researches that have been conducted in this area. Cheers !!! *********************************************************** Abu Sadat Nurullah Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology International Islamic University Malaysia Jalan Gombak, 53100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Homepage: http://nurullah786.blogspot.com/ Phone no: (+6)0192572423 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

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