RSSTwo more Athens Startup Weekend ideas
Put together on November 28, 2008 12:07 pm by Dimitris
The Athens Startup Weekend that I wrote about in my previous posts did not result for my part in just what I think is a great implementation of an idea (given the constraints). Prior to that weekend and caught in the everyday life (yes, we have at last officially found a house!) I didn’t have time to prepare pretty much anything for SUW - and obviously that’s the idea. An hour or so before the opening of the Microsoft Innovation Centre doors where the event was to be hosted I found myself sitting at a cafe nearby trying to think of something that could combine 3 basic elements: a. be useful b. be feasible in 2.5 days c. be low in required expertise (as you can’t really foretell what skills you will be teaming up with). I also could not help but adding that I wanted it to be relatively innovative - otherwise I’d have no drive in making it.
That’s how I came up with 3 ideas - the howsocial.ru one and these two:
TwitterTraffic is a simple project to ask Twitter users (or any sms user if possible) who are stuck in traffic to send a tweet (or an sms) to a service saying something like ‘the #traffic at Syndagma Sq is bad’. All this information would be collected at a single place where everyone could see what the traffic is like in a city - hopefully mashed up on a Google Maps website. Also, a user could tweet ‘#traffic at Syndagma Sq’ and be sent what other people had recently said as a reply for his question. Some revenue for the service could come by providing ads on the main website and location-based ads on the replies users get sent. Furthermore, to encourage incoming tweets, points could be awarded for each one which can then be cashed in for sponsor’s items. The whole concept can be given a green approach as well as it can be assumed to alleviate congestion and pollution while at the same time attract companies which are willing to improve their brand as sponsors. That was the idea I pitched at the Athens Startup Weekend and I was pleasantly surprised when a couple of people approached me with their view for it - an approval nod of sorts to look more into it.
VirtualPointsExchange the idea with the rather bad name came about as a continuation of the previous idea. Why should users bother sending in contributions to a service? My answer was to earn ’service points’. But what use are ’service points’ if they refer to a single limited service like TwitterTraffic? Wouldn’t it be great to have a way of exchanging points between online services? So you could spend some ‘points’ or currency you have e.g. in a recycling project running online to buy TwitterTraffic points. And if after that you get bored of TwitterTraffic just move over to the next thing - by buying points there. The main thing to get right here is an exchange rate - which would probably be the result of what the people using both services think the prices of each particular service’s points should be. A bit complicated but seems to fill a need.
(Photo by Polifemus)
tags: idea
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Athens Startup Weekend II
Put together on November 26, 2008 3:11 pm by Dimitris
Meanwhile, back in the real world, lunch had come and gone (healthier than I expected) and sometime after that, in the midst of looking for information about how to include blogs in our process, tinkering with the crawlers and developing the back end we decided it was time to pick a name. That way we could register the domain and have it ready before the next day’s deadline while also making the logos and design the website could start.
After spending perhaps too much time on it (although I’m the first to say how important such a process is) and after discarding some very attractive options because we were unable to find a satisfactory Albanian registrar (.al is excellent for adjectives) we were already into the afternoon and had to make a decision to keep moving: we went for howsocial.ru! And with that in place we were in business - web design could start. At the same the blog crawler started being developed and a business plan was set up based on a template which Alexandros G started to work on.
Towards the end of the day Vicky who had been pulling the main weight of web design worked us through some decisions on it - how many pages we’ll have, homepage real-estate and content, colouring and font etc. We also registered our brand with the main services out there to secure it. And we also started giving some more thought to monetisation plans. The main concept was to have a 3-tiered service:
1. Free: Any user can visit the site, enter their usernames in the platforms we support and we give him an impact factor - no authentication is required. That’s just a percentile number representing what fraction of the users he or she belongs to in terms of his impact - e.g. a very influential person could be in the top 5%.
2. Standard: We produce reports on a monthly or weekly basis that include impact indices of lists of people we choose broken down by topic or keyword. This is offered for a premium.
3. Extended: Clients can contact us to create customised reports on lists of people or topics.
Apart from the sporadic and mainly vanity checks of (1), packages (2) and (3) can be an essential tool for marketeers but also of startups and individual professionals. Such parties using howsocial.ru can easily identify the primary channels to get their message across without wasting time and losing in reliability trying to identify the appropriate ‘megaphones’. A key item in our approach is that the premium packages are rankable in cost depending on what section of the impact pyramid one is interested in: top 5% is more valuable than top 10% (or isn’t it?).
With that figured out and the crawlers left to do their thing we stopped for Saturday at about 22.00.
The following morning, having reached a semi-finalised design, we had to start fleshing it in with content. Yes, this means those little (or not so little as it turned out) texts that explain everything your site is about to visitors. They sometimes can make the difference between returning to it or forgetting all about it: who we are, what we offer in terms of packages and of course what exactly is it that our website and algorithm does. That last bit is significant to share with our users (at least to some extent) in order to prevent people from using howsocial.ru in every conceivable comparison between people online. It is meant to give an idea what we mean by the social impact index.
Unfortunately, we had to make do with only sporadic and remote support from one of the developers who could not make it due to a review he had to have in on Monday - back in the real non-SUW world, that is. Moreover, crawling had to start anew to accommodate the changes made since these programs started working - one of the problems in trying to work fast to fit everything in 2 days. With these developments in mind we decided to also do away with crawling blogs and instead focus on Twitter and FriendFeed (which anyway does have some blogging information) to provide at least a proof-of-concept for the combination our service does. So during most of the morning the algorithm we had came up with the previous day was integrated into the code and following that George K and Vicky worked together to connect the front-end with back-end.
I was not feeling very productive overall in the second day and seemingly all I could do was help people with some website bugs and jumping from minor problem solving to minor problem solving here and there. In the afternoon George T started creating the presentation that was due later that evening while at the same time people from the GIVE fund overlooked the teams to hear about what everyone was doing.
As we learned later from Andrew Hyde, the Athens Startup Weekend, apart from being the largest in Europe, was one of the few - if not the only one - where a prospect of an investment had been announced. The startup that delegates of the GIVE fund would be most impressed about would get a chance to have a more serious collaboration with them. Such discussions where therefore of mutual gain: these possible funders offered advice to the startups while intimately learning about how they work.
And just as we were filling in the last details of the business plan and George T was rehearsing the presentation the crowd that would listen to the talks started to file in and a bit past 8 in the evening the culmination of the weekend had arrived. Everyone would present what they had done and the funders would choose. In order of appearance (excluding howsocial.ru) they were:
pettycards - a business process that allows micropayments using mobiles and scratch cards. I’m not sure I grasped the idea but my business sense was tingling from the initial Friday pitch.
Digital Rights Protection - a site to collect all patents from various worldwide legal systems and allow search to look for infringements. That presentation seemed promising even though a bit complicated to implement and use. I bet that it would be greatly improved by aiming it to the lay people too - not just lawyers and patent firms.
rentawife.gr - using which you can outsource household chores to others. Political correctness aside it tackles a favorite project of mine matching a job with someone who wants to do it and in free-time starved culture like the Greek one it definitely has potential.
blognudge - a widget on your blog so people can that you write something (including a topic or adonation). A simple idea so useful that you kind of wonder how it hadn’t been done before. Plus, en excellent weekend project too.
mobcommerce.com - a website that allows e-commerce store owners to get a mobile store version automatically. It is based on existing e-store generators like shopify which already have 20Kstores online.
freecycling - a Facebook app to give stuff you don’t want to others instead of throwing them away.
mydoulapa - another FB app that organises your wardrobe or helps you donate some clothing items to charity while at the same time giving access to fashion houses to connect with their demographic.
beeshopper.net - a one-page website that presents an array of e-shops collected categorised per field with its main innovation being an easy to navigate single-page interface.
uArt - a deviantArt clone website which however allows artists to earn money from their work
betcafe - an online gambling house (?)
To be honest I wasn’t terribly excited by most of the talks - but maybe that’s just me. I thought the concept of rentawife.gr stands out and could offer some real relief to many people - although not terribly innovative. Mobcommerce.com is sound business-wise and I’m sure it has monetisation potential. And pettycards can solve a real pain - especially in Greece - by addressing to some extent how backward-looking telco’s are.
The relevance of the latter startup to the Greek reality as well as it’s solid foundation in familiar concepts make it no surprise that it was elected as the most promising one - many congratulations to everyone in their team! I sincerely hope they are successful in passing the funds evaluation and take off to make the mobile situation better in Greece - and why not abroad too!
And with that and lots of thanking going back and forth between the organisers and the participants, 2.5 days of very successful work and starting up came to an end.
tags: report, idea |
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Athens Startup Weekend I
Put together on November 24, 2008 7:42 pm by Dimitris
When the Athens Startup Weekend was first announced I wasn’t really sure what to expect. It was a totally foreign idea to me and I could never imagine a group of strangers forming a team and managing to go from conception to prototype in 2.5 days. The event was to take place in a 3-story building which was only recently put to use by Microsoft but which proved very handy for the job. I got there at 16.30 and met with George Tziralis, Efthimios Mpothos of askmarkets and George Kasselakis hoping that we could all use the opportunity of the SUW to make something useful. By 17.15 when the event started the ground floor seats were pretty much all taken - a pretty impressive turnout.
After an intro by Patrick Malone, the Microsoft host, Alexandros Pagidas, the organiser, and Andrew Hyde, who conceived SUW, the idea pitches started. Hesitantly, at first but quite confidently eventually, more than a dozen ideas were laid in front of us on a slide. George K took on pitching the nugget of an idea I had suggested earlier to them: ‘a metric of how popular or social or influential one is by measuring the impact they have not just on one platform like in Twitter (where such services do exist - albeit being very simplistic) but in all major social networks: both individually but also combined in a single index’. I pitched another one (hopefully to be written up at a future post) and George T yet another.
And once the pitches had ended the chaotic and difficult to follow forming of teams started. After a bit of talking around eventually we decided to go with the social impact thing. Somehow apart from George K, George T and Efthimios, another two people joined us around the white-board where we had started scribbling some first notes about the idea. That was Vicky Kolovou of Netwire and Alexandros Georgiadis of wiredpot. The team seemed suited for the project and its scope: we had two data mining/analyst people, two developers, a web designer and a technical/project manager, respectively.
Our first task for the day which was quickly drawing to an end was to basically think through the idea and identify what we would focus on qualitatively and draw some specs or paper prototype the project so that in the next morning we would be ready to start working on it. Part arbitrarily and part due to some already known technical characteristics of those services we initially selected Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and blogs as the platforms we would calculate the combined social impact of users for.
The rest of the evening up until 9 or so was spent scouring the web mainly for technical information as to what could be done and could not be done using the API in these platforms as well what scripts have been written by the developer community that would be useful to us. Eventually, we ended up with a list of a few parameters per platform that would be available to us to use in our algorithm that would calculate a user’s impact factor. Having settled on them we called it a day and agreed to reconvene the next day at 9.
The following morning we got down to work right away. Us ‘analysts’ started looking for previous efforts in quantifying the impact people have in their communities online while the developers looked in detail into the APIs starting with Twitter and Friendfeed and started the coding of the crawlers based on the variables we had agreed we wanted. We needed basically two elements for our project. Primarily, it was necessary to have the social graph of users for each platform we were to include and its associated data. Secondarily, we wanted an algorithm to process the data on the graph. It was important get crawling as soon as possible so that when the algorithm was ready there would be enough data to work on.
We were fortunate to confirm both our guesses. Indeed, we had two very competent coders in our team who before noon had written a first version of a crawler for Twitter and FriendFeed and set them running. Moreover, from what we could find in a cursory search at least, most attempts to monitor what the social impact of people online were rather oversimplifying things. We had to - and it seemed straightforward - to have a more sophisticated go at the problem.
A major problem we had was that different online platforms handled people and their interaction differently and in order to be able to combine the impact a person had online you had to have a common method that could be applied/adopted on most platforms out there. The following day I wrote up a detailed description of what we do to calculate the social impact someone has online but the main concept we ended up with George Tziralis in the first day can be summarised in the following principles:
1. For technical purposes (mainly computational power, time limitations and API restrictions) we need to process only a few and cheap variables. That excludes text processing (e.g. what a tweet says exactly) and going moving way back in time.
2. Taking a few parameters into account - just the most important ones - helps in ensuring, to some extent at least, that all platforms will have an equivalent across them. All platforms have the concept of friending in one way or another, for example.
3. It is very important to understand about a certain user whether they are surrounded at the 1st degree mostly by ‘black hole’ connections (sucking in information but not retransmitting it) or ‘megaphone’ connections (retransmitting a large fraction of what comes their way thus amplifying the message)
4. A measure of how effective one is in attracting attention is what comes back to them as an answer once they have said something. And although it’s too expensive computationally and usually of dubious quality to do a text analysis of responses or to cover the entire time after a post has been made looking for responses, you can still get some information by looking at, say, the last 20 responses (20 being a semi-arbitrary maximum) to an action and over how long a time they are spread out. For instance, when Robert Scoble twits something he will probably get some replies and they will be spread over a couple of minutes. When I say something, I may not get any replies due to my smaller following and if I do get any they are likely to be spread over a longer time - again just because my possible responders are fewer.
5. The same way of thinking can be applied for ‘likes’ or the votes of confidence people send to each other (diggs, stars in Twitter, etc).
6. Factoring everything in has to be somehow weighted of course. For one thing, these parameters are not equal in monitoring impact and for another, people are not equally active in all the platforms they have a profile. Of course, not all platforms are equally influential overall (i.e. regardless of a particular user) - for example FriendFeed has too few users to have the same overall effect as Facebook.
It took us the better part of the day to sort out these details of the algorithm, the formula to find the impact factor per service, to estimate the weights and to combine everything in a single impact factor in a way that makes sense. Considerable back and forth took place between us analysts and the developers on what exactly was computationally feasible and somewhere along the road we discovered that Facebook unfortunately had to be excluded due to their API not allowing us access to crucial information.
However, the first steps in developing our (yet unnamed) howsocial.ru had been taken…
(Photos by Andrew Hyde, Vicky Kolovou and Robert Scarth)
tags: project, report, idea |
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Greek real-estate catches up with Web 2.0
Put together on October 17, 2008 4:29 pm by Dimitris
Following up to my previous post, I think it’d be brilliant if there was a meta-site to collate all the information in the major real-estate sites in Greece and tap on their collective broad user-base and its potential. Let me explain.
To begin with, such a service would include the few basic newspaper classified sites and the major real-estate agents’ ones. As it grows, further sites could also be added although that’s not necessary. The main concept lies in the meta-service scraping on a regular basis the major existing websites and processing that information. Processing means a number of things. Firstly, it should be able to re-display all ads in a homogeneous way regardless of their originating website. That way the visitor would do a single ‘master’ search and get back what there is to be found from all major sources. Secondly, duplicates could be removed from this summarising display - but more on that later. And thirdly and most importantly useful derivative information can be made available using data mining techniques.
But before I go into the data mining, let me expand a bit on the scraping. Now, by definition, classifieds are very concise pieces of text and as such can be analysed into some basic components like neighborhood, price, square meters of land, as well as type or storey if we’re talking about an apartment, extra features (like parking availability, number of rooms, type of heating etc) and even the street (if it’s stated). All this is possible because the vocabulary is particularly limited (perhaps 100-200 different words) or definable (by looking it up in a street directory). It’s important to note that despite the random structure and display in the various sites, the vocabulary remains the same across them and although some customisation will be required to process each site differently the essence of the information will be handled identically. (So if a classified has identical fields and comes from different sites it can be flagged as a duplicate.) Moreover, due to this peculiarity with the vocabulary one can also experiment with natural language searches. A proof of concept that this approach works can probably be seen in Rento which seems able to handle search queries in natural language. (Disclaimer: I do not know how well Rento does it - just that it does it.)
Furthermore, a lot of these individual websites rely to some extent to ads and marketing campaigns to supplement their revenues so depriving them of visitors (who would be able to view the ads in the meta-service instead) would be a major faux-pas. That would eventually lead to the ban the scraping script - if not to legal measures. So, it is important to ensure that once a visitor has found a preferred classified they are transferred back to the original website and that particular piece of text - to view the complete information about it, namely the contact details (or just the form to enter the code they will retrieve via SMS). This visitor transfer could also form the basis for a revenue exchange deal between the meta-service and source-sites. This is similar to the deal between YouTube and copyright holders of videos in their site: instead of flatly taking down videos with ‘their’ content they give them the option to share the revenue.
Back to the data mining features, there is a large amount of value that can be derived from these data. To begin with, simply the number of items for sale or rent is a useful figure - especially if known per location. Another type of result could come about by combining the location (which will vary in detail from neighborhood to exact street - depending on what’s available) and the price. For example, the most expensive and cheapest locations and their average prices can be determined. Conversely, alerts can be issued if any outliers from the average (i.e. possible bargains) have surfaced. Furthermore, accurate price ranges can also be calculated per square meter for each location. In addition to this, the meta-service can accumulate data over time (it should be able to remember when an ad has first appeared) and it can compare how different (or neighboring) location prices and other features evolve.
This meta-service can this way provide real-time statistics and become an as accurate as possible platform for the whole industry in a relatively easy way. This processed information can form the basis of a premium package that can be used to monetise the website. Such packages could be offered in conjunction with a free functionality - that would e.g. have limited features or would not go as back in time as the premium. An ad campaign can also be included in the website as well as an API offering access to the information - possibly for a charge if used for commercial purposes.
Now, scope-wise, an online real-estate business may be one of the few examples where going local instead of global is probably a better idea. Interest for a piece of land or site either either with the aim of living in it or housing a business usually comes from within the country - instead of from an individual or a company who has little knowledge of the culture and the geography. For example, large US sites like trulia and zillow, which admittedly, have considerable markets on their laps already, operate by focusing on the internal market. So, one could say the scope of such a meta-service should be mainly Greece.
However, there are some exceptions to the rule obviously and the first that comes to mind is tourism - a field where Greece is strong. The Greek islands but also the mainland have long been an attraction for foreigners (esp. Western Europeans) and a small fraction of them have settled in Greece. Indeed, lately a growing trend has been to transform rural Greece according to the model to other Mediterranean countries (e.g. Spain and Italy). This means turning large areas full of hotel complexes and villas, that are either put up for rent for the summer or the whole year or bought by foreigners (for instance, Russians, Germans, French etc). In the longterm therefore a niche global - or at least European - market may also develop that this meta-service could tap on.
What do you think overall - is this a good idea for a start-up?
(photo by oldyankee)
tags: idea |
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Talking Greek online real-estate
Put together on October 15, 2008 8:28 pm by Dimitris
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post I’ve been looking for a house and since it’s been a couple of weeks since that post and I’m still looking for one, you can tell it’s been a long and tiresome search. The search for a (good) house in the past couple of weeks was done partly online and that has provided me with some initial insight on that business sector.
Although real-estate and construction are major industries here, their online presence of those businesses is still strikingly web 1.0 for the better part. There are noteworthy efforts - e.g. Rento and GreekEstate - but they haven’t really took off yet content-wise.
The rest of the real estate sites are split into two categories. The first category - which has the most members - consists of simple websites usually put together by real-estate agents as a portfolio of their clients. Such sites are also created by independent wanna-be power players in the field - who don’t understand the amount of effort and man-hours they require: the common feature of this category is that they have ‘out-of-date’ written all over them. Their online business model is basically free: it costs nothing to look for an ad and if the house seems interesting you arrange for an appointment with the real estate agent. You only then learn of the exact location of the property and if the deal takes place the agent takes a fee.
The second category are the big players: another powerful industry in Greece, the newspapers, have created an online presence for their classified section. The model here is somewhat simpler: you can view the classifieds - apart from the telephone numbers. You need to either buy the newspaper or send an SMS to have a code sent back to you - in order to unlock the contact details for a day or two.
It’s odd that online real-estate has been left behind in Greece as real-estate is an industry very fitting to the Web 2.0 approach. Lots of people are constantly on the lookout either for a purchase or a rent opportunity while at the same time owning property and renting it in Greece is a source of income for a considerable number of households. Construction and selling land or housing is another common line of work - as well as that of the real-estate agent. A booming industry overall with many small players - an ideal example of the so-called long tail. (The other end of the spectrum - large pieces of land or large buildings - follows a different path to monetisation.)
If you think this post seems ‘inadequate’ after such a long wait, you’re right. It’s a warm up for the follow-up post where I’ll present an idea about how Greek online real-estate can be taken to the next level.
(image by sloth_rider)
tags: analysis |
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The making of a name
Put together on September 17, 2008 12:28 pm by Dimitris
Now that WebSource.it has launched (with unexpected success) it’s perhaps an appropriate time to post about a project that was created ‘on the side’ of that website.
It was just when we had started thinking about WebSource.it and well before any line of code had been written that we realised that a key factor that would make the difference between success and failure would be its name. Since the functionality is extremely simple (and basically already available in many other places) it was necessary to get right two things. Firstly, we had to design and fine tune the whole experience so that WebSource.it goes unnoticed and is fast in order to encourage people to just use it: switch tab, get the information and return right back to work. I think we were successful in that - although there’s room for improvement.
Secondly, picking a name that was easy to remember, descriptive, useful and appealing would mean that users actually come back and even tell their friends about it. Anything too obscure or complicated would throw them off, as would anything that was too unusual or too experimental. In other words, the concept behind the name had to be well thought-out in order to avoid any pitfalls that would limit its virality and popularity.
So, while we were having a go at different names, I thought that all this effort in coming up with a name that suits the project ‘brand’ we had in mind should not go to waste. That’s how I decided to write my version of a short guide on how to come up with a name - WebSource.it is used as the case study.
You might say that a guide about names is next to useless as there can be no recipes for things like that. Either you sit down, think and come up with a good one or not. This is in part true, I guess, but having a recipe of sorts can at least help to jumpstart the process when you start working on the brand. In fact, a number of people have written on that - for instance, check out Guy Kawasaki’s guide on the issue.
And of course always bear in mind that even after such a process has finished and you’ve come up with something that looks perfect on all accounts, something better can still appear. That happenned in our case, when after registering a domain we eventually concluded that WebSource.it was better - and we were more than willing to scrap (the admittedly little work already done) for the new domain.
So, head over to the Downloads section, get the guide (with a bonus section ‘the making of WebSource.it’) and let us know if it comes handy. Depending on the feedback I get from people, I will update it accordingly.
Image by rkimpeljr
tags: project |
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New Service: WebSource.it
Put together on September 9, 2008 7:16 pm by Dimitris
So summer came and went and now we’re back home. Even though I’ve been back already for more than a week, I found lots of stuff waiting for my attention that have kept me from blogging: looking for a new house, having to work my way through the National Land Plan online forms (both due in a month or so) and generally getting my post-military-service life in order has more or less kept me quite busy.
House hunting and bureaucracy aside, all is not quiet on the creativity front however. Along with George and Thimios, I am proud to present a little web service we put together: WebSource.it!
The idea is pretty simple: with WebSource.it you can compare two or more (up to 5) words or phrases in terms of the results Google returns.
WebSource.it can be used as a quick way to find what’s the correct spelling of a word or the correct grammar for a phrase. I think most of us have done that already: not being sure if it’s ‘ellaborate’ or ‘elaborate’ we put both in Google and let it decide for us. Now WebSource.it makes it just a bit easier. Plug in the terms and outsource the answer to the web.
Or, alternatively, you can use WebSource.it to find out what’s more popular. For example, you can run through it your name and the names of your competitors - or the names of some of the stock you want to buy. The highest result indicates more buzz about that term. And if you want to stretch it you can even add an adjective in the question. For instance, to find out if the iPhone is considered expensive compare “iPhone expensive” with “iPhone cheap”.
I bet there are also other uses to be discovered for WebSource.it - that’s the beauty of making something simple. Feel free to use it and maybe send us some feedback - or just subscribe to our blog for sparse updates of developments in the service.
tags: project |
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Summer hiatus
Put together on August 8, 2008 8:00 pm by Dimitris
The next few weeks will mean (even more) sparse updates by me to this blog due to holidays I will be taking in the Greek islands. This happy occurrence (the holidays, not the blogging break) is amplified by the fact that at last the 9-month period of my military service has ended. Can’t complain, it wasn’t that bad and it could have been much worse. Hopefully, by the fall time things will have returned to a more regular routine here.
So starting from the first week of August and until the end of the month when I get back the internet remains safe for a bit more. In the meantime you may catch me Twittering or maybe even Powncing (RSS).
tags: Uncategorized |
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Flirting with Filtrbox: a fling?
Put together on July 28, 2008 10:00 am by Dimitris
Tom Lindstrom’s comment at my previous post on information overload led me to a relevant post of his which in turn had a comment by Flirtbox’s founder, Ari Newman. Not having heard of Flirtbox at all, I decided to sign up and take it for a spin.
Flirtbox resembles what I have suggested our mobiles should do at an earlier post of mine. It is a web service that works as a filter between a section of the social media (in this case, the blogosphere, the twittersphere and the… friendfeedsphere) and you. In particular, you ask it to monitor a number of keywords and it will return articles from a large set of feeds and microblogging content that match these keywords. The articles returned have a FiltrRank (corresponding to how relevant they are) which can be raised or lowered to decrease or increase the amount of information you receive and the service can be trained to better understand what you consider relevant. The service is based on Google Alerts to detect articles with matching keywords - not having used Google Alerts before this initially put me off somehow. When I set up some Alerts though and imported them in Flirtbox seemed to work like a charm and to deliver the goods.
However, there quite a few points that spoil the effort. For one thing, the whole thing seems written entirely in Flash (or is a similar ‘heavy’ Rich Internet Application) - I’m sure they had pretty good reasons for doing this but they escape me. For another, once relevant articles have been detected I could not immediately find a way to read them on site - I had to visit the target website in another tab. And if you would like to create more than 5 filters you need to upgrade to paid subscription mode - which seems a rather low limit. Another thing that bothers the info junky in me is that I can’t find out which content sources are being monitored and how the content eventually presented at me is selected. My point is that there is a lack of transparency in how the service works - but maybe that’s just me.
Overall, Flirtbox is a fine effort on top of a great concept but despite the pleasing design it eventually comes out somewhat clunky and too abstract - and consequently not straightforward to grasp. It’s a service worth giving a go though and paying attention to how they try to improve.
tags: product |
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What lies past information overload?
Put together on July 25, 2008 12:59 pm by Dimitris
Yesterday, I commented on this opinion post by Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani. There, she tries to tear apart the myth that we are information overloaded, overmultitasking and under constant distraction that diminishes our productivity and so on. To counter these assessments she quotes three thinkers and their arguments. The last one - and perhaps the most improbable - urged me to put in words what has been in my mind for a long time now. It was Bill Gates.
(The second is Clay Shirky - already overquoted in this blog and the first is Anne Zelenka - read Trapani’s post about her views).
So, Gates had said back in 2005 in genuine counterintuitive and perhaps somewhat annoying manner that most people really suffer from information underload:
…the information exists, but it is not in one place and cannot be easily viewed in a meaningful way using today’s software.
Although Gates was actually referring to knowledge workers not being able to collect and combine disparate but essential data from various sources, the same applies to almost everyone out there - even if knowledge and information is not part of their job - or even their entertainment.
There is information out there that ranges from critical to simply entertaining for us (in other words, relevant to us) that we simply are not aware of its existence. Our everyday experiences regularly remain misinformed and incomplete whenever we fail to learn about recent events in our neighborhood or developments in our business field or simply the latest joke. And not because that we didn’t search or didn’t bother - but because we didn’t think there was anything to be found; that is the definition of information underload.
The answer is that we need to look harder and at more places. Consult others more, interact more. Expose ourselves to more information. This quickly becomes impossible to handle (e.g. reading more than a few hundred feeds) - but we should keep adding more and find smarter ways to ‘process’ them; instead of declaring information overload bankruptcy. We should start from everything and remove irrelevant information - not from nothing and add isolated bits up to the point we can handle.
All those that have experienced and are struggling (either at a personal or at a professional level) with the so-called information overload these days should I think move in that direction. Firstly, to pave the way for the larger crowds that will soon be discovering the (over)abundance of information and secondly to embrace and eventually handle the problem.
tags: analysis |
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