After talking about minor details that could be improved on (added to my task list) we talked about collaborative filtering being a central part of social navigation. I’ll have to reference systems as GroupLens. The interestingness algorithm of Flickr is interesting in this vein (no pun intended). Several people have tried to reverse engineer it and understand how it works. Whats striking is that comments and favorite attributions from friends counts less than from strangers. Flickr’s reasoning must be that friends is biased and easier to persuade. There is third party applications like Scout that enables you to track your interestingness score over time.
One interesting thing about Flickr is how it separates family and friends. You share you personal photos with your family and share your obscene party photos with your friends. You don’t want these to correlate.
When discussing and analyzing Flickr I need to refer to and use my content inventory more clearly.
I need to establish the broad lines of my thesis:
- Introduction
- Background
- how the literature was collected (describe it pragmatically)
- literature review (summary, analysis, and comparisons)
- introduction to terms as folksonomy, tagging, geotagging, etc
- paragraph or two about my subject related to popular literature (search Amazon or Library of Congress and say something like: there were X books about this subject, the first was published in 2001 but the majority of books were published the last two years, and maybe show a graph)
- Methodology
- how data was collected, the methodology
- content inventory in computer science context (Morville and co), not as detailed as in media studies
- Data chapter
- the collected data of Flickr, Facebook, Amazon, etc
- huge tables from content inventory should be in the appendix
- should provide aggregate data from data in appendix
- screenshots is probably best included here and not in the appendix
- discuss the collected data
- would be my content analysis chapter as it stands now
- Synthesis (or discussion)
- with base in the analysis the larger lines are presented
- present a new and refreshed terminology for the field
- would be nice to find patterns of navigational use that can be named and presented with working examples (group pools is a type of patterns that we will call X and is also found in product Y and Z for example)
- create a taxonomy of the field
- place examples from the analysis into these taxanomical categories
- Reflection and further work
My working title and working in the introductory chapter is using *web services* and this is currently associated with APIs as REST and SOAP and so on. Web sites is probably a better description than web applications since the latter is more increasingly being used to talk about specific task related applications for end users, leveraged on the web (Google docs, etc).
When writing my literature review it would be sufficient to reference the most recent or the most representative article where there are several from the same authors with the same application and theme.
Lastly it would be beneficial to use the comments field in BibTeX to annotate my readings and thereby be able to create an annotated bibliography for my own use.