JasonMorrison.net

Google Maps for Mobile will soon include a GPS-like ability to find your current location.  A little while ago Gizmondo wrote about an iPhone hack that allows almost, but not quite GPS functionality.  The hack itself sounds a lot like the way phase II of the wireless E911 service works, and my guess is that Google Maps is fairly similar.

If you take a look at this map, you can see than many states have > 80% deployment.  On the FCC site you can find reports of the e911 deployments completed by cell phone companies.  Any company that doesn’t have over 95% of their customers with E911 capable handsets is currently getting fined.  So it’s a shame that Google and random iPhone hackers have to reimplement all this.

I’ve never worked on E911 support (or anything cellular, for that matter), but it seems to me there is an incredible opportunity here.  One of the great things about the iPhone is that it drives adoption of data plans.  How about including psuedo-GPS capability in nearly every phone as soon as you sign up for a data plan?  That would be a huge incentive.

Here’s an even more radical idea:  why not come up with a standard way to communicate presence and location data so users can do things like local search?  It might take use years and millions of dollars to develop proprietary systems to do this, but if we use an open standard perhaps this could be adopted as quickly as things like the web and email.

Even better, operating under an open standard will allow geeks in garages all over the world to develop new social software systems we can’t even dream of.

Are you Jason Morrison?  Do you know a Jason Morrison?  If so, please take a look at the new Jason Morrison Dot Net Project.  My goal is to get in touch with all the Jason Morrisons in the world and ask them five questions about their lives.  Eventually, we’ll build up a social network of Jason Morrisons.

Here’s the video of a presentation I gave at the Cleveland Web Standards Association last month (at the time of this posting the website is a little bare, check out the Meetup page for more details).

In this video I talk about the same topic as myTagging and Folksonomy article in the ASIST Bulletin. What are the different kinds of uses for social tagging and folksonomies and what are users’ motivations for tagging?

Jason Morrison – Tagging Systems & Folksonomies from Cleveland Web Standards on Vimeo.

I’m pretty happy to have been the next presenter after Eric Meyer. In this month’s meeting Brad Colbow talked about CSS positioning.What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below.

If you’ve gone to any of my Category pages on this blog (my Academic papers, for example), you might have noticed I have a tag cloud with just the tags related to that category.  After I figured out how to do it I packaged it into a WordPress Plugin, called Altocumulus.

This goes along with my research interests into folksonomies and information retrieval.  I haven’t had the chance to study tag clouds empirically but my guess is that one giant tag cloud for an entire web site or blog might be more cool looking that useful for navigation.  I think that making use of tag relationships a bit more might show the strength of folksonomies for navigation.  So now, if you click to see my design pages, you can see the kinds of topics my designs cover.

For another example of this in action, take a look at Unsought Input, for example the Innovation page.

Go ahead and download version 0.1 now.   It requires WordPress 2.3 or higher.  This is my first WordPress plugin so I’m sure I’ll figure out ways to make it better over time.  If you have any bugs, pointers, or suggestions please leave them in the comments below.

  The issue has been our for a little while now, but I thought I would note that I have an article about The use of tagging systems in this month’s issue of the ASIST Bulletin. Take a look at Why Are They Tagging, and Why Do We Want
Them To?

Almost everyone has a tagging system the web is facing serious weather with tag clouds on every site. I think it’s interesting to explore the uses of folksonomies and why users bother tagging things in the first place. Here’s an excerpt:

When thinking about adding tagging to a site, the first question should be: What do we want to get out of this? Does the site need something to improve search results or a new navigational facet to better connect related pages? Is the goal to classify lots of multimedia objects with minimal cost or to get users to interact with the site a little more?

Friedman, B., & Nissanbaum, H.  (1996). Bias in computer systems.  ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 14(3), 330-347.

In this article Friedman and Nissenbaum look at bias in software systems. Although the word bias can cover a number of related concepts, the definition used here is something that systematically and unfairly discriminates toward one party or against another. The authors see three main classes of bias in computer systems: Preexisting bias, when an external bias is incorporated into a computer system, either through individuals who have a hand in designing the system or via the society the software was created in; Technical bias, where technical considerations bring about bias (from limitations, loss of context in algorithms, random number generation, or formalization of human constructs); and Emergent bias, where bias emerges after design when real users interact with the system (for example, when new information is available but not in the design, or when systems are extended to new user groups). A number of illustrative examples are given, and the authors look at a number of specific software systems and point out existing or potential biases. One of the systems is the The National Resident Match Program (NRMP), used to match med school graduates to hospitals. In this system, if a student’s first choice of hospital and hospital’s first choice of student do not match, the students’ second choices are run against the hospitals’ first choices. Overall, the result favors the hospitals. Two steps are proposed to rectify bias – diagnosis and active minimization of bias.

This is an extremely interesting subject, and and I doubt most users and programmers are any more aware of it now than they were in 1996. One more recent article, (http://web.mit.edu/21w.780/Materials/douglasall.html) which sought to turn literary criticism toward video games by pointing out cultural biases, also mentions the lack of study in this area. With so many people spending so much of their day interacting with software, why do these kinds of articles seem so few and far between? On the other hand, the particular examples chosen are illustrative but not very current. All three of the systems were large-scale, mainframe-type software that users interacted with in a very small sense. Would the risk of bias be even greater for a system which is largely a user interface?

One clear implication is shown in the diagnosis stage of removing bias—to find technical and emergent bias, designers are told to imagine the systems as they will actually be used and as additional user groups adopt them, respectively. So the charge is one-third ‘know thyself’ and two-thirds ‘know the users.’ The very notion of looking for bias is probably foreign to many user interface designers (in fact, few of the programmers I’ve met are even aware that accessibility guidelines exist for blind, deaf, and other users). The authors’ proposal that professional groups offer support to those designers who detect bias and wish to fight it is a nice thought but doubtful. Few programming or UI organizations can exert any kind of pressure or drum up much bad publicity, or if they can, I haven’t heard of it (which I suppose means they can’t).