Archive for February, 2010

Shortest post ever

Enjoy!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAtBki0PsC0

There are more than 400.000 results on Google for „social media addiction“. It is about people who have more than 10.000 friends on Facebook, for whom tweeting is a way to share their opinions and who can’t enjoy the news if they don’t post them on Facebook, Foursquare, or on other Social Applications. Some fun videos about it are posted on YouTube, e.g. this one.
The interesting analysis of social behavior incentives was made by Robert Scoble on his Scobleizer-Blog. Robert Scobler grew up in Silicon Valley , works at Rackspace, builds a community for people fanatical about the Internet called Building43 and is best known for his Blog at http://scobleizer.com.
He analyzed incentive systems of Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare and pointed out 9 principles how to make your own application addictive:

1. Serve your users’ narcissism. Daniel Carnegie has already said that the sweetest word in all languages is your name. It is one of incentives exploited by Twitter. Anytime someone uses your @name in a Tweet you see it.

2. Measure behavior and report it. Foursquare gives points every time the person checks in. You are also shown when someone of your friends or people from your area check in. Foursquare reports how big a loser you are because there are 34 people from your area who’ve checked in more than you this week.

3. Add status for behaviors. Show how many times the person has checked in, what his achievements at this app are, etc.

4. Make multiple status reports. Foursquare reports how much status each person earned, but it also tells who is the mayor in some area. That is two ways you can see status, and get addicted.

5. Make undesired behavior seem lame. “Why is everyone finally putting their photos into Twitter? Because if you don’t have your photo in Twitter the icon it puts there looks, well, lame. So, Twitter is putting a subtle enticement to all of its users to upload a photo”.

6. Make it easy to share success with others. Information about your mayorship or changes in your status can be shared also per mail, per tweets, they are shown on your wall and on the main page on Facebook

7. Make an API for studying behavior. Developers love to build apps to study data and report that.

8. Make it easy to join in other users. Facebook makes it very easy to tag your friends in a photo. If your friends aren’t in the system it makes it easy to invite them.

9. Give people more “hooks” to addict their friends.”Facebook, for instance, asks you what your relationship status is, and what your political persuasion is. Why does it ask you those? So you’ll force your friends to join!!!”

I have just found a very interesting paper about the application of semantic annotation into the medical domain from 2008.

Here you are the abstract of the paper:

Radiological images contain a wealth of information, such as anatomy and pathology, which is often not explicit and computationally accessible. Information schemes are being developed to describe the semantic content of images, but such schemes can be unwieldy to operationalize because there are few tools to enable users to capture structured information easily as part of the routine research workflow. We have created iPad, an open source tool enabling researchers and clinicians to create semantic annotations on radiological images. iPad hides the complexity of the underlying image annotation information model from users, permitting them to describe images and image regions using a graphical interface that maps their descriptions to structured ontologies semi-automatically. Image annotations are saved in a variety of formats, enabling interoperability among medical records systems, image archives in hospitals, and the Semantic Web. Tools such as iPad can help reduce the burden of collecting structured information from images, and it could ultimately enable researchers and physicians to exploit images on a very large scale and glean the biological and physiological significance of image content.

You can find the complete paper at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2655990/?tool=pubmed.

Phrase Detectives is a “Game with a Purpose”, meaning that the data we collect will be used to help improve computer systems. The data will be used to train anaphora resolution systems that can be used to improve text summarisation and search engine indexing, which will ultimately lead to a better Web experience for you.

Players of Phrase Detectives have submitted nearly 1 million relationships between phrases, with over 200 documents completed – a total of 60,000 words. From this point, a panel of expert linguists analysed a selection of documents and in most cases the top answer from Phrase Detectives (i.e. the answer that most detectives agreed with) was correct. This is great news as it shows that, by collaborating in a group, players make the right decisions in the end.

This month’s competition is a daily prize draw where you could win an Amazon voucher just by playing the game. The more you play each day the greater chance you have of winning. Winners will be updated on the homepage and contacted via email. More details are on the website…

On the other hand, there have also been updates to the game. You can now see all the completed documents – maybe you were the one who made the final decision on a document? There are also more hints and tips about playing the game. And remember you can score points for signing up new players, just email the link on your player homepage to your friends.

More info at: http://anawiki.essex.ac.uk/phrasedetectives/