We started by discussing the origin of mashups in music. My description was potentially to generalized. An example of a popular mashup is Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album. I need to reference the source for my mashup definition.
A theme that would be interesting to introduce in the discussion chapter would be that of the relation between The Semantic Web and The Social Web. Why have not The Semantic Web taken off? There are nearly zero examples where Web 2.0 products have adopted semantic web technologies. The Semantic Web is not about sociality, one of the cornerstones of Web 2.0, but it seems to be about enabling creation of ontologies. The open data provided by several web services today are normally not as formal as dictated by semantic web technologies such as XML and RDF. It seems like the loosely structure of the available data could be a reason for the rapid adoption of such services and flourishing of new mashups. One could maybe compare and contrast the Social Web against social navigation and the Social Web. This is not directly related to my master thesis as is, and should not be the main theme.
Web 2.0 as a project is based on social navigation. New social navigation examples bubbles up all the time. The interesting thing is that it seems like the creators of Web 2.0 products don’t know about the social navigation term and does not design for social navigation explicitly. Social navigation seems to be a by-product of creating social places and designing for social interaction. It would be interesting to question some developers of Web 2.0 offerings if they are familiar with social navigation and if they’ve ever thought of designing such systems with navigation in mind.
Such as my thesis stands now the background chapter is a bit to much reeling off from secondary literature. In need to summarize, conclude, and introduce some discussion. An ideal place for this would be the discussion chapter. An interesting theme would be: “From Social Navigation to the Social Web”. I write a lot about the Social Web and social navigation. The motivation for this should be clear. One reason is to use it in my practical prototype. Others could be discussions as mentioned above.
We discussed my prototype of a activity feed for Urørt. There are several possible ways to improve the results the user is given by giving criteria of the selection of items to display:
- Filtering by people. If you dislike a person and his actions you can disassociate yourself from him or her.
- Filtering by content. If you dislike a certain genre of music you can disassociate yourself from it. Amazon have similar functionality in that you can tell it that a recommendation it gives you are inappropriate.
- Filtering by activity. If you don’t mind a certain activity you can disassociate yourself from it.
The feed needs a cut-off point if the activity list is sufficiently large. The simplest solution is just to display X number for activity items. A improved solution would be to display X number of items for the given day. An even better solution would be to display X number of new items since your last log-on. One could go even further by using graphs/matrices and finding larger relations. Such an implementation could prove to be to complicated to implement.
Another idea is to provide the activity feed as an RSS feed straight from the server. The data is already there, available as JSON. It just needs to be serialized to RSS/Atom.