Adrien’s blog
Stuff I like, stuff I do, stuff I make

I think that, in our transition from hierarchical structures to folksonomies (tags) for indexing our stuff (e.g. videos, bookmarks, songs…), we might have forgotten something important: the control of visibility of our stuff. Let me explain my thought.

Let’s say you have a photo which is very personal and that you only show to very close friends and family only. Will you put it in your main photo album? Maybe not… Instead you would probably hide it in some secret place which is hard (or at least not obvious) to find (e.g. in an enveloppe inside your drawer, under your bed…).

Let’s move to the digital world, before the flickr and the web 2.0, we used to store our photo files in hierarchical structures: folders and sub-folders which most file systems rely on. This structure was efficient to organize your photos with a personal indexing scheme. For example you could decide to make one folder per event. For each event you would make one sub-folder per person who took the photos. This is a two-degree hierarchical structure. One characteristic of hierarchical file structures is that it’s easy to lose files, by not remembering where we had put it. This characteristic also applies to your appartment (or your bedroom) because it contains several objects (pieces of furniture) that can contain objects and so on… This makes it easy to hide stuff, and to make some stuff more visible (by not hiding them).

Now, by using tags (like on flickr, delicious, and other “web 2.0″ sharing platforms), we’re flattening our indexing structure, we cannot hide stuff inside other stuff. Instead, we just put sticky notes on a big mess of objects that have the same level of visibility. It’s like if we put all our photos on the ground, there is no furniture nor photo album to hide them.

Some intuitive way must exist for us to make our shared stuff more or less visible… For me, manipulating “privacy settings” is a brutal function for end users. Any thoughts?

Just a thought I wanted to share: have you ever been frustrated of not being able to bookmark a file of your computer on delicious? …to find the URL of a file (e.g. an image) you downloaded, in order to share this URL instead of sending the file? … or event to be able to work seamlessly on any document from any computer, with or without installed software? and I won’t even talk about synchronization of files between people, computers and devices… (is that the actual last version of the document?)

If feel so, you’re just like me! Wouldn’t it be nice that we only work with URLs instead of OS-specific and computer-specific local file paths? That way we could leverage thousands of cutting-edge tools available on the internet, in order to better manage, annotate, visualize, share and thus better browse through information!

Of course putting everything on the internet is scary because we’re not always online, and because some stuff sometimes disappear from the web (e.g. older versions of software which are not free anymore)… But what if we “cache” our web-stored information on our computers instead, and assume that the web-hosted version is the reference of the resources (with an Unique Resource Identifier… URI!). This URI could lead to several hosting spaces, including private storage (e.g. computers, devices, portable hard drives), that would keep synchronized.

I promise that, if such a system exists (and works well of course), I would never have to keep downloaded research papers on my computer any longer!

Last week, my PhD supervisor and 2 fellow PhD students (Julien Subercaze and Johann Stan, also under his supervision), participated to two seminars. The first seminar was in Universität Karlsruhe (Germany), and the second seminar was in Universiteit Twente (Enschede, the Netherlands).

In the frame of these seminars, I presented some slides on my current PhD work: Awareness Without Overload.

This presentation introduces existing approaches for improved enterprise communication and collaboration (including social web platforms and research works on Computer-Supported Collaborative Environments), which motivates a convergent framework of real-time contextual notifications based on employees’ work context. The framework is presented and current research issues (work in progress) are introduced.

As usual , I’m happy to welcome your comments

My homepage needs some freshing up but I have so many ideas (sometimes conflictual) that I don’t know where to start!

Firstly, I must define what I understand by “homepage”: it must be the web page that I will spread around to represent my identity on forum/email signatures, on wikis, etc… So, it must provide some personal introduction and links to several facets of my identity (e.g. the researcher, the musician, the technology enthusiast…) on the web.

I considered using one of my existing public social profiles (netvibes, friendfeed, my lab profile, my wiki, or even this blog) as homepage. But:

• those public profiles are either too specific (representing only one of the facets of my identity) or too messy when too general (e.g. netvibes);
• my homepage is very well referenced on Google, so I’d better leverage that;
• …and I would like to manipulate some code!

So, let’s share some thoughts on what I’d like to make:

• The homepage must be nice looking on a computer and adapted for easy navigation on a mobile device => should I make a WAP version or use some generic HTML instead?
• I would like my page to be machine-understandable, by adding some semantics (RDFa, FOAF…)
• I want to be able to edit quickly and precisely (no WYSIWYG please!) the content of my homepage directly on the web.
• The content must be backed up on every change, so that I can revert a change, either accidental or malicious.
• I want the page to be lightweight and respectful of W3C standards.

Err.. this sounds like a neat semantic wiki, doesn’t it?

And now, some more precise ideas I’ve had:

• In order to have a self-contained homepage for all the facets of my identify, I’m thinking of a unique HTML file with fragment anchors for each facet (e.g. http://joly.adrien.free.fr/#music would only display the “music” part of my homepage). It would be nice to display a menu/tabs to switch from a facet to another, without having to load another page. The nice thing about this solution is that legacy web browsers (including MS Pocket Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile “smartphones”) that do not support modern javascript will still be able to render the full page and leverage anchors.
• I want to include some lifestreaming on the page. For that I could deploy Noserub to federate my feeds, or simply embed a friendfeed gadget. The possibility for visitors to comment lifestream entries directly on my homepage (incl. through Facebook/Google friend connect) is a plus.
• EditArea seems like a great way to make my page editable online.
• Concerning the semantics, I see two possibilities: the simple one is to embed some RDFa and/or microformats directly in the HTML code and to have a separate FOAF file that I would have to maintain separately; the geeky solution is to store the content of my homepage (mostly links, anyway) in a FOAF file (in RDF) and to render it as HTML pages using stylesheet-based transformations (e.g. XSLT). As a geek I obviously prefer the second option! However it is also a quite heavy solution, and I’m not sure that its complexity is worth the result, and it might not comply with all the requirements I expressed above…

Do you have any thoughts to share on this?

On this blog post, Ori introduces current works of the MIT on augmented reality. Instead of having to wear goggles, the originality of their approach is to project the display directly on walls, hands or objects. Check out this video:

I want a smart watch like this one:

This concept was one of the finalists of the NextGen PC design competition endorsed by Microsoft.

Hopefully it vibrates instead of my phone when I’m receiving a call or a message, it tells me if one of my friends is around and it shows me walking directions on the move!