Brynn Evans

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Brynn Evans commented on Do your friends make you smarter? Exploring social interactions in search @xian - it is! It’s still there when I view the homepage, weird? 6 months ago
Brynn Evans commented on Do your friends make you smarter? Exploring social interactions in search Here’s the narration (video of the talk): http://www.vimeo.com/5099353 6 months ago
Brynn Evans commented on Exploring the Cognitive Consequences of Social Search That’s a great question for follow-up work. Our work can say only a little about this: Replies shared in social networks tended to be fact-light, meaning they tended to be conversational, silly/goofy, or off-target. Our subjects learned little from social networking replies that helped them answer their question. While this is unfortunate, it is likely due to the nature of interactions in online social networks. People go online (to FB and Twitter) to socialize (as well as to share information). It could be that we’re in the early stages of social networking where people are still engaged in more conversational (than informational) activities. Follow-up work should look at motivations for answering questions from friends in these contexts beyond what we were able to see with N=8 in this study. In contrast, replies from targeted contacts (one-on-one conversations) were pretty decent. It does seem like what’s going on here is that, of all the possible information to be found on topic X, friends can point out salient bits of information here and there to be used as a starting point for a search. In other words, they are social information filters. This model may or may not help weed out incorrect data, though, since identifying what’s "incorrect" will depend on having some knowledge of the search domain. Such scope may still be better achieved through traditional search or algorithmic manipulations of social metadata (tag clouds, etc.) 8 months ago
Brynn Evans commented on Exploring the Cognitive Consequences of Social Search Thanks for pointing that out! Here’s an easy link to the associated paper: http://brynnevans.com/papers/Cognitive-Consequences-of-Social-Search-WIP.pdf 8 months ago
Brynn Evans commented on Bookmarks, Babies, Barack... and other social objects I actually disagree that social networks are increasing *Dunbar’s* number (which I interpret as referring to very tight-knit communities where everyone could stay apprised of everyone’s gossip, essentially). Social networks do change who we can connect to (which is powerful), but I’m not sure we’re generating more strong ties, but merely more weak ties. And there is a lot of strength in weak ties :) 2 years ago
Brynn Evans commented on A BarCamp talk on Social Search For the record (in addition to Friendfeed), Delver.com also has a great model of social search that fits my notion of using a social network as an information resource. 2 years ago
Brynn Evans commented on Towards a Model of Understanding Social Search A short summary of the talk is here: http://brynnevans.com/blog/2008/10/15/user-needs-during-social-search/ A few comments have cropped up here: http://brynnevans.com/blog/2008/11/12/cscw08-talk-on-social-search/ 2 years ago
Brynn Evans commented on Distributed Cognition and The Social Web For more information on the content of the talk, see my summary of it here: http://brynnevans.com/blog/2008/07/06/summary-of-reboot10-talk-distributed-cognition-the-social-web/ 2 years ago
Brynn Evans commented on Augmented Information Assimilation: Social and Algorithmic Web Aids for the Information Long Tail Hey Jerry, The "other" activity didn’t reveal any subgroupings or other particularly interesting activity. We mostly wanted to account for all activity when we were coding the data so we could have an accurate sense of what percentage of time users spent in each category of actions. So "other" was all activity that we couldn’t account for as browsing, reading, annotating (saving, tagging, etc), or direct sharing with other individuals. It ended up being time spent waiting for pages to load, opening files, doing "housekeeping" tasks (closing browser tabs), or starting/stopping the recording. Some users appeared to be pretty efficient--so they did other tasks while pages were loading or never got into a position where there were multiple tabs open. We couldn’t say much else about the "other" activity since it did vary among our users (as did all the other categories). Note: the pie chart is showing activity breakdowns across all users, all sessions, just to provide a high-level sense of which activities were most prevalent. Thanks! 2 years ago

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