Archive for November, 2008

I’m feeling bloody-minded and have been re-reading Don Norman‘s “Design of Everyday Things.” I got on this kick because I was annoyed at Norman’s article in the latest Interactions: in discussing “social signals” (indicators of status left by human activity–for example, an empty train platform indicating you’ve missed your train) Norman has unkind words regarding […]


Moderator: “Nothing says 8:30 a.m. on the last day of the conference like a math and theory-heavy session.” Can Markets Help: Applying Market Mechanisms to Improve Synchronous Communication CMU People. Natch. Basic upshot: Sender does not now how costly interruption is to the receivers, and the receivers do not know how important the communication is […]


Coordinating High Interdependency Tasks in Asymmetric Distributed Teams Petra Saskia Bayerl and Kristina Lauche, Delft University of Technology Challenges of remote teams Coordination of tasks and processes Technology restrictions Process and motivation losses Conflicts and trust Whoah, they looked at offshore oil production teams and the control people onshore. Study aim: coordination for highly interpendent […]


Linguistic Mimicry and Trust in Text-Based CMC Lauren Scissors et al, Northwestern University In face to face settings, people establish rapport through behavior mimicry, to get people to like them. Lack this in text. Is there linguistic mimicry? Previous research indicates that f-to-f speech patterns, people tend to adopt partner’s speach patterns. Also, research on […]


Microstructures of Social Tagging Need to get name of presenter…University of Illinois What are microstructures? Relatively invariant behavioral patterns emerged from user-environment interactions. At a functional level, cognitive processes tend to be stable across individuals. Why do we care? Provide explanations that cut zcross levels of activities: social levels (minutes, hours, weeks), cognitive levels (seconds, […]


I’m taking notes as the sessions go… Mopping up: Modeling Wikipedia promotion decisions Moira Burke and Robert Kraut – CMU (Bob is a failry big figure in CSCW and CHI) How are promotion decisions made? Large groups of strangers colaborate to choose caretakers known as administrators We model successful candidates based on simple metrics that […]


I spent the day yesterday in a roomful of supersmart people discussing Social Networking in the Organization. Below you’ll find a not-especially-coherent splash of notes on the whole thing. Big thanks organizers of the workshop, who made it an interesting day and patiently tolerated my industry-skewed blathering. Joan DiMicco – IBM Research David Millen – […]


In the last few posts I’ve introduced the issue of how one’s work and social life can collide in social networking applications, and reviewed a few of the UI controls that enterprise companies demand from social-media providers to make sure their populations behave appropriately. But in this post I will argue that, by and large, […]


I’ll be part of a workshop on “Social Networking in Organizations” at Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2008, next week in San Diego. CSCW is the premiere academic conference devoted to collaborative work, sponsored by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). The workshop is hosted by several people from IBM’s Center for Social Software and another […]


Amusing article by Scott Brown in Wired discussing how maintaining constant contact with a ton of friends, and being meticulously updated as to all their activities on Facebook, isn’t necessarily a good thing. What about people you want to kind of fade away, like that kind of annoying guy from high school? Scott Brown on […]