Confusability

More Bloglines Analysis: Wendy Johnson is the knitters knitter

It's official: Wendy Johnson is the most popular knitter on Bloglines.

There are 10,657 public bloglines subscriptions to 1,741 knitting feeds, sorted into 61 different categories by 145 different bloglines users.

Note: These figures only refer to public subscriptions where bloglines users have categorised their subscription as a knitting feed by placing them in a knitting folder.

If you are interested in knitting then why not visit one of these 1,741 knitty sites.

You could try the "Yarn Harlot" from Canada,  "At My Knits End", "Poetic Purl" or "Stitching For Sanity".

After looking at the names of these sites I have decided that someone should study the tribe of net knitters more deeply than I have as there in an interesting story there.

See Also: del.icio.us references

Usersaurus, Folksonomy and the abdication of responsibility for design

I spend a lot of my time studying the tracks and discarded waste of passing users. I pore over intranet searches that didn't return any results, I also analyse click patterns to see if there is a relationship between the position in a menu and its popularity. I scrape thousands of web pages in my quest to unearth hidden meaning in the electronic grafitti left by virtual nomads.

A bloke with a famous beard once said "the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point, however, is to change it".

You can spend as much time as you want analysing how people tag links and pages,  how many words they type into a search box, or looking for evidence of the popluarity of knitting. All of this analysis will help you to see what people have done, but it won't help you to understand anything about their motivations and desires.

If you want to be more than a passive observer you have to take some risks and try to change behaviours by offering  solutions that are based on experience, expertise, intuition and inspiration.

Social tagging and mass card sorting exercises are not an answer. By all means we should understand what is happening now as well as learning from our histories. But we cannot abdicate our responsibility for designing robust information architectures that enrich and enliven the user experience by pretending that mob tagging is much more useful that the rubbish left behind in the cow fields after the Glastonbury Festival.

I love studing the footprints and fossilised excrement of passing users, but it only helps me to understand what has gone on in the past, it doesn't help me to change the future.

Because I liken my research to the work of a fossil hunter, I would like to offer the term "Usersaurus" as an alternative to "folksonomy".

What's a usersaurus?

This is a usersaurus:

as is this:

and this:

as well as this:

See Also: del.icio.us references

How many RSS feeds can one person consume?

Here is the data for the 16,121 bloglines user who have more than ten public subscriptions.

I come in at number 1,582 with 149 subscriptions in 24 categories (folders).

Mark Fletcher, the founder of bloglines comes in at number 2,281 with 121 subscriptions in 11 categories.

The scobleizer come in at number 14 with 1,086 subscriptions in no categories other than alphabetical.

See what interesting data you can liberate.

bloglines_users.csv (243K)

Death by 10,000 categories

For anyone who want to do some analysis on the 10,000 bloglines categories that contain 10 or more items then you can download this tab delimited data file that contains the name of each category and the number of subscriptions that have been placed in a folder of that name.

bloglines_folders.csv (179K)

Bloglines users are a load of knitters

A few weeks ago Louise Ferguson wrote about how her City Of Bits feed was being categorised by bloglines users.

This got me thinking. It wouldn't be too hard to write a scraper that took all of the publicly available subscription and folder information from bloglines, do some analysis on it and produce some reports on how people were categorising feeds on bloglines. This would fit in well with my other data liberation projects.

Four weeks later, after a few late nights I have got the first results from my analysis, and I have made a very important discovery.

Bloglines users appear to like knitting!

After producing a list of the top 100 folder names subscribed to on bloglines I found the usual suspects at the top "Blogs, news, tech, people, politics" etc. etc. But then at number 37, I found a folder called "Knitting" that had been used for 2,085 feeds.

This is only the first delivery of bloglines stats and I will be producing a lot more stuff in the future.

Growth

The data I have scraped covers the period from 1st July 2003 to 8th April 2004.

Bloglines was launched on 1st July 2003 and you can see the founders public subscriptions here.

I have got data on 32,415 public subscribers and their 1,059,140 public subscriptions.

Activity

I have looked at the data on subscriber activity as well.
The chart below shows how many days subscribers are active for. I am defining activity as being the process of subscribing to feeds.

6,880 (21%) of all public subscribers were only active for one day. This means that these people subscribed to one or more feeds on a specific day and then never subscribed to any more feeds again. Of course they may have been reading those feeds since, but I can't get any data on reading activity.

Categorisation

324,319 (30%) of public subscriptions not in a folder.
734,821 (70%) of public subscriptions are in a folder.

Users have created 29,279 differently named folders.

This chart shows the relationship between number of subscriptions and number of folders.

And of course, don't forget to look at the list of the top 100 folders. (I have still got to do something with the other 29,179 folders).

I will be producing charts that show what subscriptions are in a particular folder, so the chart for the "Knitting" folder will look a bit like this:

There will also be reports for specific feeds showing which folders they appear in:

Here is one for Louise Ferguson (City Of Bits):
(The top entry is for people who have subscribed to it without categorising it. The number is the number of times it has been categorised in that folder.)

Tom Smith (OTHER Blog):

John Rhodes (Webword):

Lou Rosenfeld (Bloug):

Peter Merholz (Peterme):

Edward Tufte (Ask ET):

Nick Finck (Digital Web):

And I may even have some time to generate some unfashionable tag clouds as well.

And just in case anyone is still reading, I have come up with an alternative to "Folksonomy", as I really don't like the term very much. After a few weeks thought the alternative I have come up with is "Usersaurus". It works for me on many levels.

(Oh, and I also need to sort out the 'duplicated' feed issue of more than one bloglines ID for one site feed).

See Also: del.icio.us references

Vote for the most significant technological innovation since 1800

The BBC Radio 4 programme "You and Yours" is carrying out a survey to find the most significant technological innovation since 1800.

The voting will continue until midnight on Friday 22nd April 2005.

The winner will be announced on Thursday 5th May 2005.

The nominations are:

Bicycle
Heinz Wolff

Communications satellite
Sir Arthur C Clarke

Computer
Listener nomination

Electro-magnetic induction ring
Baroness Susan Greenfield

Germ theory of infection
Professor Ian Wilmut

Internal combustion engine
Listener nomination

Internet
Listener nomination

Nuclear power
Listener nomination

Radio
Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe

Transistor
Listener nomination

> Cast your Vote

BBC News Item or Death Race 2000 Remake?

Every working day for the past ten years I have travelled between Bristol and Swindon on the M4 motorway.

Today I had to extra careful with my speed as cameras had been placed along the section of the M4 I use every day which would be used to automatically fine people £60 and give then three penalty points on their license if they followed the majority practice of travelling at 80 or 90 miles an hour.

There was a story on the BBC News site entitled "Cameras stem from huge death toll", which explained that the cameras were being introuduced to try and reduce the number of fatalaties on that section of the M4. The story stated that "240 people died on the M4 in Wiltshire last year ".

That meant that almost five people died every week on my route to work in 2003. Now I may be a bit forgetful, but I am sure that I would have noticed if hundreds of people were being killed in motorway accidents. There was obviously something wrong with this story, but when I read the next sentence I was even more bemused to read this quote from Saira Khan a spokeswoman for the Swindon & Wiltshire Speed Camera Partnership where she said "If those 240 people had been wiped out in one day there would have been an outcry."

Yes Saira, and there would also have been an outcry if 240 people had died in dribs and drabs over twelve months let alone all in one go. After a quick google search I found an article from The Times that "There were 18 deaths, 69 serious injuries and 641 slight injuries between junctions 15 and 17 between 2001 and 2004."

Now this was evidence that the BBC story was way off the mark, perhaps they had added a zero to 24 by mistake, or perhaps they were talking about the number of badgers that had been killed on the M4 last year.

After e-mailing the BBC with my concerns the story was changed very, very quickly.

The title was changed to "Cameras used to slow drivers down" and the fatalities statement was changed to a more reasonable "240 people died or were seriously hurt on the M4".

But the change that shocked me was the change to the quote from Saira Khan which had been changed from:

"If those 240 people had been wiped out in one day there would have been an outcry."

to:

"If those 240 people had been involved in in one incident in one day there would have been an outcry."

You can see captured images of the two stories side by side by clicking on the image below:

http://usability.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/montage.jpg

I can understand that a reporter might had mis-read the statistic about the 240 people, but how did they mis-read or mis-hear the quote from Saira Khan?

Trust is very hard to earn, but it can be damaged very easily.

BBC News Story : Cameras used to slow drivers down - 13 April 2005 10:24 GMT

I then noticed that there was another version of the story on a different section of the BBC site that had a more reasonable title of "Speed cameras target M4 drivers". It contained almost the same content as the other story, the number of deaths and injuries were described as "more than 200 people had died or were seriously injured on the M4 in the past year", but the Sahira quote was still "240 people died on the M4 in Wiltshire last year ".

These two stories hadn't even been changed in a consistent manner and it changes the view I have of BBC journalists as being ethical and measured in their reporting.

BBC News Story : Speed cameras target M4 drivers - 13 April 2005 10:56 GMT

I will pass this complaint onto the BBC and see what happens.

Event: Ethical Design and Usability : Can we make the small print bigger? (12 April 2005)

Ethical design is the magical element that can be added to user centred design and usability testing to turn merely good designs into insanely great designs.

From internet fridges to mortgage illustrators we will look at designs that look beyond the user and attempt to address the wider social aspects of designing for humans.

We will talk about ethical designers like Henry Dreyfuss, Bill Buxton and Jef Raskin who approach ethical design as a starting place rather than an optional extra.

South West Usability Group (Bristol, UK)

Isidore of Seville: parton saint of the Internet

4th April is the birthday of Saint Isidore of Seville, the proposed parton saint of the Internet.

Isidore's most important work was his encyclopedia, the Etymologiae. The work takes its title from the method he used in the transcription of his time's knowledge. The encyclopedia as a whole was a huge compilation in 448 chapters, devoted to transmitting a condensed epitome of the learning of antiquity. The depository of classical culture in Isidore's compendium was so highly regarded that in a great measure it superseded the use of the individual works of the classics themselves, and many were not recopied and are lost. The book not only was the most popular compendia in medieval libraries but was printed in at least 10 editions between 1470 and 1530, showing Isidore's continued popularity in the Renaissance. Until the 12th century brought translations from Arabic sources, Isidore transmitted what western Europeans remembered of the works of Aristotle and other Greeks, although he couldn't understand Greek further than single words. This work was much copied, particularly in the medieval bestiary.