Digital Information Interfaces: problems and limitations

I was reading Kerne's definition of interface ecology, and I thought of my own experience with information interfaces. For me, information interfaces are pathways of information from a public medium to the personal space and visa versa. These interfaces suffer from a certain rigidity that may hamper the flow of information's intensity, much like an entangled web of pipes squeezing on the flow of water.

Thomas Juan and Leon Sterlin have defined dynamic interfaces in their paper as "mutable", whereas traditionally the dynamicity refers rather to graphical dynamics. In my point of view, information interfaces's dynamicity lies in their ability to dynamically present the information related to the content of their usage. such definition of dynamic information interfaces is rather new and suggests not only a dynamic form of presenting information, but also dynamic content.

Dynamic information interfaces address the web on several levels. First, they may provide a solution for overloaded interfaces such as web pages with scrolling. They also provide information in the same context where they are needed. Finally, they follow the evolution of the actor's understanding and interactivity with inherent information, following his/her interests dynamically and non-linearly as they change or progress. such ability frees the actor from any ontological or semantic commitment prior to interaction with the interface.

In my previous experiences, I have addressed the issues of providing help information on the same page where needed by using dynamic annotations, I also investigated layout problems such as scrolling, and finally I developed the Expression Wall in an attempt to use different sections of a web page's utile space to dynamically present related information in the actor's peripheral attention while he/she devotes attention to a piece of information.

Retrieving the content of a blog site: finding the right crawler.

A Web crawler is a program that scans parts of the web in search for information. the crawler can be used to retrieve accessible information from a site, build a navigation index, or search for a particular element.

Our current goal lies in the full retrieval of a blog site's content, that of Slashdot in particular. We would like to store the content of Slashdot on an offline drive, parse it, and analyze the inherent structure of links. Then we will try to visualize this structure in a dynamic manner using a Radial Tree.

The current crawlers that we considering are WIRE andGNU Wget. There is also the BAILANDO Project at Berkeley where some developed tools such those of the WebTANGO sub-project could be of great use. WebTango has an online crawling tool that is currently not working, but its site announces its return in a few days....

The thing is that we need first to differentiate between the blog's infomative content, such as posts and comments, and other stuff such as links, advertisement, and admin functions. Parsing RSS might be of great help since RSS syndicates the content in a more structured manner than HTML. RSS feeds are usually devoted for informative content only, but that remains to be tested.

The first steps that we are taking is to identify the source of informative content to be crawled, here RSS is a primary candidate, then we need to identify the method for crawling, or in other words the crawler to be used for content retrieval.

PAPER: The first noble truth of cyberspace: People are people even when they moo
Diane Schiano, Sean White

(1998) CHI

keywords: Cyberspace, MUD, virtual communities, social computing


DEF: MUD -- is a multi-player computer game that combines elements of role-playing games, hack and slash style computer games and social instant messaging chat rooms.

-- Paper on large research project designed to characterize life on a MUD.
-- Results in terms of 4 categories: 1) Users and use 2) identity 3) sociality 4) spatiality

Lotus Feel is launched for free academic exploration. The aim is to explore sporadically the interests that arouse in the discourse of my PhD thesis. Lotus feel that address interests in Information Visualization, Data Mining, Calm technology, Interface design, and others. Part of the aim of Lotus feel is to explore the boundaries of interaction with digital information space and construct means of navigation.

It's going to be soooooooo chaotic....