donturn.com

If anagrams are fun, then the Internet Anagram Server is more fun.

Well, to me.

I’m in San Jose, California presenting a Works-in-Progress paper at the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Computer-Human Interface (CHI) 2007 conference. I’m showing off some of the interface design issues related to encouraging valid, fluid participation for a community-based internet content filter we’re developing at the University of Texas at Austin called OpenChoice.

Here’s the abstract for the paper:

The OpenChoice system, currently in development, is an open source, open access community rating and filtering service that would improve upon the utility of currently available Web content filters. The goal of OpenChoice is to encourage community involvement in making filtering classification more accurate and to increase awareness in the current approaches to content filtering. The design challenge for OpenChoice is to find the best interfaces for encouraging easy participation amongst a community of users, be it for voting, rating or discussing Web page content. This work in progress reviews some initial designs while reviewing best practices and designs from popular Web portals and community sites.

I’m also making it available to download: Turnbull, Don (2007) Rating, Voting & Ranking: Designing for Collaboration & Consensus. Works-in-Progress Paper presented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference. San Jose, CA. May 2, 2007.

Google Desktop for Macintosh.

Goodbye Spotlight?

Gene Smith has some good points and an outline or a tagging paper he’s working on: Taxonomy of tagging systems (Atomiq)

It’s worthwhile to think about how the interfaces, features and even the incentives (”it’s the user stupid”) can influence a tagging system’s design and use.

The Tagging 2.0 panel I organized at South by SouthWest 2006 in March is now a Tagging 2.0 podcast among the many SXSW 2006 podcasts you can download.

Some highlight quotes from the panel you really shouldn’t miss:

• “Explicit refactoring affordances” - Adina Levin
• “Razor-sharp, small pieces of metadata” - Thomas Vander Wal
• “What happens in the brain… in your cortical areas” - Rashmi Sinha
• “Dual-folksonomy triad” - Thomas Vander Wal
• “What we need is Tagginess” - Prentiss Riddle
• “More math is always the answer” - Don Turnbull

How can you pass up quips like that?

The Tagging 2.0 panel was one of the “highly-rated panels” this year, tied for first place with a number of other entertaining and informative panels, so check out their podcasts as they become available as well.

Prentiss Riddle has built a quick and easy search for finding panels and speakers at SXSW Interactive.

Check it out.