So why is this a big deal to me?

Last weekend was the third OggCamp conference, OggCamp 11, at the Farnham Maltings in Surrey. Two years ago, at the first OggCamp (a one-day event at the Connaught Hotel in Wolverhampton), we invited Andy Stanford-Clark (@andysc) to be our opening keynote speaker. Andy co-invented the MQTT messaging protocol about 10 years earlier and, while there was a server implementation of MQTT (Really Small Message Broker; RSMB) that you could download for free from IBM’s website, it was proprietary and there was no open source implementation available.

Andy wrote a new presentation, especially for OggCamp, describing the geeky innards of his Twittering house (as seen earlier that year on the BBC). The presentation was a fantastic kickstart to the day and (somewhat predictably for a conference with its foundations firmly in the open source world) Andy was questioned about what bits of his home automation system were built on open source software and open standards. The one significant part of the system that was proprietary was RSMB (the core part that enabled all the parts of his house to communicate).

Then OggCamp started, we had a good time, and we went home exhausted but happy.

And then, just two weeks later, Roger announced that he’d registered a new project called Mosquitto (as in MosQuiTTo) on Launchpad. He’d been inspired by Andy’s talk at OggCamp to write an open source alternative to RSMB. Within what seemed like days he had a working bit of code which was taken up and tested by others in the open source community and hardware-hacking communities like Homecamp.

I cannot claim any credit at all for all the hard work that Roger and others put in developing and testing Mosquitto. I’ve always been proud, though, that Mosquitto was born at OggCamp – we played our small part in helping connect the previously mostly corporate/business MQTT with the open source communities.

That Facebook announced they were adopting MQTT for their new messaging system the day before OggCamp 11 meant we could vicariously revel in Roger’s glory while we tried to find out just whether Facebook had adopted his code or their own implementation. The answer seems to be somewhere between the two.

And while I’m proud for OggCamp (of course), I’m also excited for Roger in his own right that his name is now in the licence agreement of apps from the mighty Facebook – that kind of recognition for your hard work must be such an amazing feeling!

In the past…

Traditionally, you would probably publish papers about your idea in peer-reviewed academic journals so that people interested in that area would read about it and think “that’s a cool idea; I must adopt that approach too”. Similarly, you might present about it at conferences where your audience of like-minded people would listen and think “that’s a cool idea; I must adopt that approach too”. If you had teaching responsibilities, you likely also taught your students about your new approach, explaining the weaknesses of the old approach and why this new approach is better so that when they come to doing their own research projects they think “that’s a cool idea; I must adopt that approach too”.

Except (I’m guessing here) it probably doesn’t always work like that. Especially if your cool new research idea is a statistical method. Especially if your new statistical method requires its users to sit down with a calculator and manually work through an equation instead of just opening a data file and pressing some buttons in SPSS, the statistics package popular with psychologists, marketing people, and others.

The unfortunate upshot is that your cool new statistical approach just doesn’t really get off the ground, no one else writes about using it (so you don’t get the all-important citations in other people’s publications), and it just slides quietly away into the ether.

In the 21st C…

If you are as cool as your cool new research idea, you might also embrace the wonders of the world of social media and online communications. Obviously, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, presenting at conferences, and teaching your students are all good and necessary things to do. But they’re probably not enough in some cases–and I’d guess that statistical methods is probably one of those cases.

I don’t know whether Hayes & Preacher (or Preacher & Hayes) went through that exact thought process when thinking about how to promote their cool new statistical methods to psychologists and other social scientists, but it seems that usability was one of their aims (for example, Andrew Hayes suggests that people have tended to stick with the older methods, rather than adopt the newer and better methods, because the old ones are “simple and widely understood”; Hayes, 2009, p 411).

• Written macros to extend SPSS
  Users can use the macros to (fairly) easily run the tests using SPSS, an environment they’re already familiar with. Macros are a bit fiddly to work with so, for one of their tests, they’ve even written a custom dialog that you can install in SPSS which adds a new entry to the Analyze menu so that you can just open a standard-looking dialog box to select the appropriate variables names and run the test. All this is available for free download from their website.
• Created a Facebook group to answer questions
  You can start a new topic (thread) to ask a question or describe a problem, or you can browse the existing 1636 (and rapidly rising) topics (at least, I’ve been able to before but today it seems the back/forward links have gone walkabout). You can also use Google to search for specific topics. Both Preacher and Hayes typically respond to questions and problems within a day. When I was having some technical problems, they asked for a my data file and ran the test on their own machines to check whether it was just my installation of SPSS that was the problem (it was).

Benefits for users

As a student trying to understand the statistical procedures by reading and re-reading their journal papers multiple times, it was invaluable to be able to ask the authors themselves (via Facebook no less) to clarify specific details as they applied to my particular experimental design. Browsing the 1000+ topics of discussion was also very educational as I came across answers to questions that I hadn’t even thought to ask yet.

Benefits for them

The benefits for them are surely great too. Obviously they have to spend time writing, testing, and supporting their macros etc, and they also have to spend time responding to help requests on Facebook. In return, though, they vastly improve the ease of using their statistical procedures, while also giving you (the user) a warm and fuzzy feeling about the procedures (the power of positive affect) and that there are many other people out there trying to use the procedure too (the power of social norms), all in all making you (I would guess) more likely to keep trying and to talk about the procedures to others. Those are the intangible and difficult-to-measure benefits of a good user experience.

In addition, they’re getting loads and loads of feedback from their users on where their procedures or explanations are difficult to understand, or where users commonly have problems, so that when they write a book on it, they’ve got valuable material to respond to and include which should make the book incredibly useful to users. We’ll see if that’s true when their book, and accompanying new macro, comes out next year. And there’s another thing, while they’ve got you in a discussion on Facebook, it’s practical (but also good promotion) for them to refer you to one or other of their papers, or to mention the book coming out next year. And there’s a list of up-coming events at which they’ll be conducting workshops on these statistical procedures. It all helps to boost citations.

Everyone wins

I think it’s brilliant. Not just because they helped me by answering a question within a day and diagnosing the problems I was having running their macros. But because they’re tapping into resources that are free and much of their target audience already use. And by doing this, they’re making their cool ideas as accessible as possible, which can only really be a good thing for everyone concerned.

References

Hayes, A. (2009). Beyond Baron and Kenny: Statistical Mediation Analysis in the New Millennium. Communication Monographs, 76(4), 408-420. doi:10.1080/03637750903310360

Disclosure

I work for IBM, who own SPSS.

So you can comment away, to your heart’s content!

Please.

Do.

p.s. Notice too that my del.icio.us tag cloud (below) is now Snap-icon free – thanks Erik (thanks also for persevering beyond my broken site to let me know – yay for Facebook!). If you too want to know how to prevent Snap icons appearing on specific bits of a post, see the Snap Shots FAQ (note to self: RTFM).

Rather nicely, after installation, it launched a wizard that stepped me through importing my bookmarks from my local Firefox file. They imported okay and were saved as private. I then did some spring-cleaning and deleted out-of-date bookmarks, then tagged and re-tagged others. The imported bookmarks were automatically tagged according to the bookmark folders they’d been in, which was helpful.

So, anyway, here are my delicious tags. If you click through a tag, you’ll see the bookmarks that I’ve classified with that tag.

I was Chairing the HCI Practice Day (the Thursday) of the conference so it was all a little bit hectic but still, as usual, a lot of fun.

This year, in line with the times I guess, there was a fair number of papers on Second Life and other virtual environments, including one about BDSM in Second Life. In fact, there was definitely a bit of a trend this year for erotic HCI… (that, as a statement, either makes HCI cool, or it just goes to show that academics can make *anything* boring ).

There also seemed to be a fair amount about emotions – that is, how we engage with technology; eg why we happily waste an entire evening on Facebook or watching random videos on YouTube. Web2.0 was also in there, of course.

There were also some papers on bluetooth, several (as usual) on eye-tracking, and stuff about Accessibility, usability of the Web, methods of evaluating interface usability, and so on.

IBMers featured quite heavily in the HCI Practice Day (as you might imagine):

• Mark Farmer (IBM Warwick) introduced the IBM Task Modeler tool that he develops (the link takes you to the Task Modeler page on Alphaworks where you can download a copy to try yourself).
• Colin Bird (Master Inventor and Information Architect at IBM Hursley) followed up Mark’s introduction with a presentation about how you can (and we do) use Task Modeler to support information architecture: to model user tasks and create the navigation for information centres.
• Ben Fletcher (Senior Inventor at IBM Hursley) did a great presentation on deafblind technologies, including the possibilities of virtual worlds in supporting deafblind (and deaf or blind) users.
• Me (Technical Author at IBM Hursley) – I was raconteur for Alan Dix‘s panel discussing the HCI issues in Web2.0 technologies.

The keynote speaker for HCI Practice Day was Jared Spool (the usability guru who isn’t Jakob Nielsen – and is much better and more credible, IMO) who moved heaven and high water (kind-of) to get here. He did a fantastic presentation that was very very funny and entertaining while being relevant and interesting too. He also attended as many of the other conference sessions as he could and participated by asking questions and making suggestions.

In fact, all the keynote speakers were great this year. Sometimes keynotes fly in, do their thang, then collect their expenses and go. All three (the others being Stephen Payne from Manchester Uni and Elizabeth Churchill from Yahoo!) all got involved in the conference, especially Elizabeth who was able to stay for the whole conference and seemed to be on every discussion panel going!

You can get the full proceedings of HCI 2007 (and, at some point, previous HCI conferences too) from the BCS eWIC site.

As a delegate, I also got the full proceedings as pdfs on a funky little USB drive, which I like.

It’s not long now until the call for papers will go out for HCI 2008 (to be held in Liverpool, City of Culture). If this blog is still active by then, I’ll post the call here. I encourage you to get involved in HCI – it’s more than user interface design or usability; it’s also about being innovative in how to design technologies for human beings.

Last night, I finally disabled the Snap Preview Anywhere feature (now know as Snap Shots) on my blog (I actually used the Snap Preview Anywhere WordPress plugin). It seemed like a good idea when I first installed it. Every external link on my blog had a little icon alongside it that you could hover over to get a thumbnail preview of the site you’d go to if you clicked the link. At first, however, it didn’t work – I just got a message saying that there was no preview available, for any link. That could have been the plugin not working properly because, after a WordPress update, some of the link previews started working, but only those that pointed to high-profile sites like Wikipedia and Flickr. Which is a bit crap because the majority of my links were still just saying that the preview wasn’t available.

Looking at the Snap website now, the description only really says that such high profile sites will be previewed. The original descriptions that I read when I first installed it on my blog suggested that the previews would work on any site as long as Snap Preview Anywhere knew about the link – and that they’d go preview new links within a short time. Maybe that was too much of a commitment for them to honour. It’s a free service so I’m not too bothered but it seemed like a good idea that’s not really happened.

Tag cloud

I’ve been thinking that although my blog/website is pretty and red, it is actually a slightly old-fashioned design now. So I was trying to work out what would be better without being dull. One of the things I wanted to do was make it a bit more Web2.0 – not that I particularly want loads of flashy drag-and-drop – more that I’d like to have fewer static-looking lists of links. Having a tag cloud is one of the things that I wanted. Partly because the categories that I had for my blog posts were pretty bad, and they have a fairly static, hierarchical feel about them. Although it’s a difficult mind-switch to make, I’d like to get away from thinking in hierarchies.

I once attended a task analysis tutorial given by Dan Diaper and one thing he said that stuck in my mind (bearing in mind my job as a technical writer) is that although we impose hierarchies on many many things (in order to categorise them), the real world isn’t hierarchical – that is, as soon as something belongs to more than one category, the hierarchy breaks down, and this happens frequently.

One thing that new, tagging-based sites like Flickr have shown is that we need to be more free with how we classify things for retrieval. On Facebook, for instance, although you post your photos in albums, you and your friends can tag the people in the photos so that it’s possible to retrieve all the photos containing a given person from across multiple albums. You aren’t restricted to a strict hierarchy of albums and sub-albums to locate an individual photo.

A similar example is some Adobe software that my Mum uses to organise her photos. She tags each photo with things like the names of the people in the photo, the location of the photo, the event taking place, and so on. The software can order the photos along a timeline so that you can pick a particular date in time and see what photos were taken on or around that day. You can also sort by tag; for example, show all the photos of pets, which is great because the software dynamically creates an album starting with the family dog when she was young, the pony she had from when she was about 15 years old until I was 15 years old, the dog she and Dad had for 17 years from before I was born, the various cats through the ages, up to their present dog and our two-year-old cats. Tony’s recently found a similar piece of Open Source software, F-spot, which aims to do something similar and which I’d like to try using to organise our photos.

So, anyway, information is all about retrieval. It’s no good me using logical but useless categories (like ‘Personal’ and ‘Opinion’) to organise my blog posts (they’re more useful for me than for other people). The trouble is that I find that when I’m thinking hierarchically, it’s difficult to decide which category or categories a post fits in to. Also, the site design that I use just lists the categories down the side of the page so the more categories I have, the longer and more boring the list. Tagging is a bit more natural an exercise, I think.

The SimpleTagging WordPress plugin provides what I want. I imported my existing categories (then decided they were terrible and deleted them all anyway), and then went through my existing blog posts and created and renamed tags to describe them. The tag cloud is a visualisation of the frequency with which each tag is used. The more popular tags (ie the topics on which I have written most) are shown in a larger, brighter font in the cloud.

What does the tag cloud show the reader? Well, apart from looking pretty, I think it gives the reader an idea of what the blog is about and, by extension, what I’m interested in writing about. I was a little bit disconcerted (though not terribly surprised) to discover that my interests seem to mostly revolve around cool or geeky stuff, though it’s nice to see that HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) is top at the moment.

On a bigger scale (though not here), the tag cloud can show what’s popular across a group of bloggers. For instance, a lot of IBMers have internal blogs at work. On there, a tag cloud can show what topics are of most interest to the IBMers who blog across the world.

What my tag cloud doesn’t show is the popularity of the posts with readers. In some ways, it might be interesting to show the relative number of comments on each post, or something like that. Though on a low-traffic blog like mine, that probably wouldn’t show enough to be that interesting.

Another interesting use of clouds is on the Nabaztag support website where the popularity of search terms is shown in a cloud so that you can just click a term in the cloud to retrieve the information instead of entering a search term. The more people who have searched on that term, the more prominently the term is displayed in the cloud. I guess the idea is that whatever problem you have, someone else has already had it and searched for a solution so you may as well benefit from their experience.

Anyway, take a look at my tag cloud, to the top-right of this post.

Archive calender

Before: an increasingly long list of months of blog archive.

After: a neat little calender in which you can click a date to view that day’s post (if there was one).

No plugin required for this one; just paste this bit of php in the right place in the WordPress theme and WordPress does the rest: <?php get_calendar(); ?>

Good eh?

Facebook badge

Finally, the last addition to my blog website today was my own personal Facebook badge – the photo of me and my Facebook status to the top-left of this post. Tony had made one of these and he showed me how. Just go to your Facebook profile page and scroll right to the bottom where there’s a link to create your Facebook badge. You get to customise the badge a bit, according to what information you want it to show. Facebook then generates the bit of HTML code that you need to paste into your blog page. And that’s it.

Much more fun than linkedin.com which I also joined a while back but never did much with.

I never joined Facebook before now because I’ve not been that interested in ‘social networking’ as reason for using the Web. I use the Web for buying things and looking things up. I do use instant messaging…a lot…including using Sametime avidly at work (for work and for friends).

I’ve been on Friends Reunited for ages, though never paid the subscription. I’ve had one person contact me (which was great) but mostly I’ve just used it to keep track of what people from school are doing now.

Facebook is just a more fun way of doing that. And you don’t have to pay money to do interesting stuff!

Ah well, I’ll wait and see how many people accept my invitations to be their friend.