Science on the modern web

Are you interested in persuasive technology, or motivational design? Then please join this Mendeley group and submit articles that you have found useful. If you don’t use Mendeley I recommend checking it out.

Persuasive Technology is a group in Computer and Information Science, Psychology on Mendeley.

It is one thing to take a prototype, or finished product, and test it. It is something completely else to create two prototypes and decide on what should differ between them. I’m glad I have better tools now to try out different solutions.

Oh, and the hand is free. It hurts of course, but it is out of its cast and there will be no surgery necessary. Thanks for the finger work! :)

I’ve been working hard at getting the design decisions for the concept just right (I haven’t gone home yet). I’ve made 15 sketches probably just to get a good picture of what I want to do. But after starting on the prototype I had to revise the design decisions. Now I’m added to both in iterations as I discover mistakes and come up with better ideas. This is why prototyping is so great. It takes time though when your hand is in a cast…

There are some decisions I’m not sure of so I intend to make one more prototype at least and then test them on users. That should be interesting. Or maybe I will only make one and test on width, and then a second prototype that tests on depth.

Oh and they are removing the cast tomorrow. Fingers crossed all is well and that I wont need any surgery. Here’s some good music to listen to while you cross your fingers.

After being away for three weeks I’m back at my workplace. Two of those weeks were spent in Scotland and a jolly good time was had. One of them was spent at home with a fever and a running and sore nose, as well as a soar throat. That was not so jolly. Also my right hand is in a cast, a plastic cast but still. It makes for slow typing and is at times a bit painful.

Still with sunshine, a blue sky and music like this: 

,

a calmness is settling in that is quite comfy.

I found some interesting services for measuring the impact of scientific publications - also know as scientometrics. There are different ways of measuring the impact of a published article. One such common way is tracking citations in other articles. Another way is to use altmetrics - the use of tracking metrics for alternative sources. I’m not sure about the name since there will always be alternative metrics to the normal ones, but it is a descriptive name. It measures things like citations on Wikipedia, number of times bookmarked on CiteULike or number of readers on Mendeley. 

Check out these tools to delve in. Or click the links below for examples of what it can look like. Keep in mind that they are in development so expect bugs.

• total-impact
• ScienceCard
• ReaderMeter

I’m currently working on an analysis of a number of social network sites. I’m using the framework presented in my post from March 29. The building blocks are:

• Identity
• Conversations
• Sharing
• Presence
• Relationships
• Reputation
• Groups

I unfortunately don’t have time to describe the blocks, but take a look in the article (if it is available to you…). I’ve changed the perspective a bit and focus on how attention is shifted by those blocks, and also at how an interface makes the user aware of activity and context.

The intention was to look at seven sites that I have picked out, but after spending way too many hours finishing the first site I’m having second thoughts. :) I might try to narrow it down to five if the next site takes just as long.

Wow. I just wrote in an analysis that Facebook doesn’t offer much support for group identity compared to individual identity. A few minutes later new features appear that give better support. :)

I’d say groups became better overall. These new groups for schools that Facebook are working on sound interesting as well.

So ok, I haven’t exactly been writhing in pain but I have been pretty sick. I think it is the second or third time I have a soar throat this year. Fun times. :)

I have been writing on my report though and have given an overview of seven building blocks that were laid out by Kietzmann, J. and others. The name of their article is “Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media”. I’ll probably post a short summary in the near future.

The idea is to take these building blocks and use them to analyze how attention moves on social media platforms.

I’ve been writing some more on the topic of attention itself as well. I’ve written about it from a cognitive psychology, a behavioral science and an economic perspective. I’m not going very deep but it is still very interesting.

Now I’m trying to come up with some way of describing different graphical interfaces for attention. I’m looking for categories like activity streams and dashboards. But there are also interfaces for particular items like posts or shared videos. These interfaces present meta-data like number of likes or favorites, date of post or physical location. The name “Meta-data interfaces” doesn’t quite cut it…