[Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 54, Issue 2 responses

Murray Turoff murray.turoff at gmail.com
Sat Jan 3 00:30:24 PST 2009


Some wonderful comments.  Let me touch on a few things.  EIES was a
self contained garden because it had to be as most things were not
easy to get otherwise.   However, besides the Well, Planet by harry
stevens, and some other systems were directly influenced by EIES and
built by people who had used EIES directly even though some never
admitted it.  We did, for example, build for example a complete user
information marketplace and i wanted to turn it on for real money but
NJIT ruled we would have to pay state taxes and they did not wnat to
get involved so we turned it on as grand monopoly game to sell any
piece of information for play money where the provider was a person
and he or she could set the price for the joke, poem, recommendation
or what have you.  However, anyone who paid the price had the right to
attach an opinion on whether it was worth the money and the seller
could not remove that from the original ad used for selling.   It was
great fun and still does not exist because of the lack of micro money.
  At the time everyone was assuming information providers were
companies and not people.  To some extent the investment business
still has that blinder on.   Collaboration still has a long way to go.
The complete design does appear in the literature.  It was a fore
runner to ebay and recommender systems in a very real sense.

Peter and Trudy Johnsen Lenz who built the "topics" system on EIES,
using the language that was a virtual browser between our users and
the back office system, wrote a wonderful article on the "rhythms of
conferences" where they pointed out that participation is a series of
peaks and valleys rather than a stable average.   People shift around
among different topics in different conferences and a critical mass at
the right time triggers a major peak.   Topics by the way supported
200 users exchanging information on scientific questions facing state
legislatures and had a flow of over 200 comments a week where
questions were limited to 5 lines and answers to one page and you
could choose which questions you wanted to track answers to.   When we
turned it on everyone was asking questions and only professionals
representing professional societies were answering.   We created a
membership list which tracked for all the users how many questions
each user was asking and how many answers they had made and all of a
sudden most people started to answer questions.  The exchanges were
archived in a database for future use if someone became interested in
the questions and their answers later.  Questions ranged form things
like How do you define and antique? to things like Standards for
burying power lines?   There was usually about 15 such questions every
week.

Having this ability to tailor for any individual or group led to a lot
of interesting things.  We even had a fun feature where every user
could tailor their own interface by replacing all the prompts.  We had
users tailor "English butler"  "insults" etc.  Not having the web we
could meausre the time and what people did direclty and learned a lot
of general things about user behavior summarized in part in a couple
of CACM articles by Roxanne Hiltz including the one first major
article on information overload in this technology.  One of our most
popular conferences, which you had to have permission to join, was one
where everyone liked to insult each other.

I do urge some of you to look at hte NLM report on my website on
information overload.  Ignore the body and just go read the 60 page
appendix of the raw comments on the 34 professionals in Emergency
Management on their problems on gathering and using information on the
web.  This is the most significant part of the report with respect to
meaningful evidence.  While they do not state it directly it becomes
clear that they want a user controlled recommender systems even though
they do not realize such a thing can be done.  But clearly they as a
"community" want to nominate the material to be included and to
evaluate it collectively.   There is alot of "communities" they have
already built with volunteer newsletters and websites and about a
dozen are described in our report.  These are places where a lot of
professionals are putting in a lot of effort for free to beneift one
another using only simple tools like websites and editors.  They list
about 300 links they are using and the sites are active in the text of
the appendix.  There biggest problem is dealing with the "gray
literature" which  is what NLM calls non journals, but is what the
practitioners want the most.    An awful lot is happening among
communities of practice and i think the word "communities" is still a
good one.




Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Information Systems, NJIT
homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff



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