While Burlington’s traditional print media outlets (the daily Burlington Free Press and the alternative weekly Seven Days) are strong and well-written, there are also good online sources of news and information. A huge number of people subscribe to their neighborhood’s Front Porch Forum and voice their opinions through that venue, for instance, and our city government does a fairly good job making information available. There’s local politics weblogs: BurlingtonPol.com, the Vermont Daily Briefing, and She’s Right to name a few. And we have CCTV, our local government-access television channel that also streams live on the web during big events.

It’s no surprise to me that the combination of a strong IT sector and easy access to lots of quality information and debate leads to a vibrant and involved community. This was demonstrated well yesterday on Vermont Town Meeting Day 2009, the day when towns across Vermont hold their town meetings and elections. Last weekend, Bradley Holt of Found Line put together a website to aggregate social media feeds related to this annual Vermont political process. tmdvt.net pulled in content from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Del.icio.us, and weblogs via Technorati, collecting loads of real-time news and thoughts in one central location. Word of the site spread quickly, and the local news sources joined in, both contributing to the feeds and pulling them onto their own Town Meeting Day news pages.

But beyond the “official” news sources, local community members also took part, tagging their tweets and photos and blog posts appropriately so that they’d show up, and it was their contributions that really made the project take off. By harnessing and encouraging the enthusiasm of the people of Burlington and the rest of Vermont, tmdvt.net instantly became the go-to site for live election coverage. To describe this effect, I’d like to coin the term townsourcing: a localized form of the popular social-web concept of crowdsourcing. I look forward to seeing how it can and will be used more and more to encourage participation in local politics, media, and culture.

Thanks, Bradley, for putting together such a neat experiment, and thanks also to everyone who took part. May next year’s tmdvt be even better!

The point is that almost every piece of information we collect has a trail to other bits of information. Right now we can’t see those trails. And so, our data spaces, be they our Gmail archives, or our hard drives, or our Delicious tags, etc., are really more like old attics with years of junk covered in thick dust. Modern software technology can and should do better.

• Production
• Creation
• Relaxation

The “real world” analogues to these categories are art, craft, and (for lack of a better word, since I don’t want to just reuse “relaxation”) entertainment. All life pursuits have elements of these categories. Art is driven by imagination. Craft implies more hard work and focus on technique. Entertainment is of psychological value, as a de-stressing agent, and can fuel both art and craft.

So, on your computer. Writing an email to your mom? Creation and relaxation. Looking up a recipe? All three. Doing your taxes? Production. Editing a home video? All three. Making graphics for the website your boss needs? Creation and production. Playing a videogame? Relaxation. Making weekend plans with a friend? Production and relaxation.

What does this mean for interaction design? How can programs understand what activity you’re engaging in and optimize its suitability for that activity? This gets back to context, which I’ve written about before and will write about again. If I’ve been chatting with a friend and then switch to my web browser and look up movie times, my computer should know that I’m in relaxation mode with a hint of the production, and make subtle changes to how it reacts to my activities: if I then start to look for someone’s email address, it should know to suggest friends, and preferably local ones, before coworkers. If I’ve been writing work-related code for a solid hour and then switch to my IM buddy list, it should know that I probably want to talk to my coworkers about something and, perhaps, enlarge their names in the list slightly. These are subtle touches, but easily doable, and if enough of them are consistently added across your entire computing platform, the overall enhancement to usability and simplicity could be tremendous.

Obviously this requires a level of computer “understanding” of your data and actions that hasn’t been reached yet, but there are strides in that direction. Social networking tools and community websites are making your relationship data available for programmatic access, so determining who’s a friend and who’s a coworker is becoming easier. By watching your calendar and work-related activities throughout each day, your computer can learn when you’re generally working, and take that into account when making schedule-related suggestions. By checking the location of your geotagged photos and matching the photo’s descriptive terms (tags, title, etc.) with other items in your data-profile, software can guess where certain people live or where certain activities take place.

This is all part of your computer being context-aware. Once the intercommunication between applications and (secure) exposure of your data to approved applications is comprehensive, your computer will be able to use its knowledge to make whatever aspect of computing you’re engaging in — creation, production, or relaxation — simpler, faster, and better.

Score isn’t everything

When I look at the TV and a game’s on, there are a handful of key data points I want to gather as quickly as possible so that I’m up to speed with the game and can pay more attention to the action than to the numbers. That’s the supposed purpose of the infographics: to provide a quick snapshot that I can instantly parse into a game state, to mentally construct a symbolic understanding of the game so far, which I will then use to fully understand the meaning of the teams’ current actions in the larger context of the entire game. These are the data points that I believe any football fan needs to build an accurate mental snapshot:

• Quarter: how far along is the game?
• Time left: are we nearing a break?
• Score: who’s winning, and by how wide a margin?
• Possession: which team has the ball?
• Down and Yardage: is the offense running out of chances to make progress?
• Ball position: how close is the offense to scoring?

Additionally, the graphic needs to be designed to take the following accessibility factors into consideration:

• Obtrusiveness: is there a good balance between readability and screen coverage?
• Contrast: is the graphic readable by viewers with poor vision?

How they do it

The three major networks that broadcast NFL games—Fox, CBS, and NBC—each have their own style of infographic, although Fox and NBC use a similar design, and while theirs are better than CBS’s, they’re still not great. Here’s why.

CBS

CBS chose to go with a shape-shifting graphic that hovers in the upper corner of the screen. Its default layout shows the Quarter, the Time left, the Scores of the two teams (using abbreviated team locations), and Possession is indicated by a tiny yellow dot. Occasionally, a black bar appears at the bottom of the graphic that shows the Down and Yardage, but this information comes and goes seemingly at whim. At other times, a yellow “Flag” indicator appears at the bottom, and sometimes other information about drive length, possession time, individual player statistics and such appear at the bottom or at the end of the “arm” of the graphic. Ball position is never shown. Occasionally, the information-rich arm disappears, leaving only the “NFL CBS” logo. Woe to the viewer who tunes in when that’s the only thing displayed on-screen!

The CBS graphic is somewhat Obtrusive, since it hovers in the corner of the screen, set well away from the edges, obscuring a portion of the camera’s view of the field. However, it does have good Contrast: the text is all white on black or black on white.

One nice subtle touch is that the arm switches direction to indicate the direction of the current offensive drive; unfortunately, doing this requires the graphic to swap from the top left to the top right of the screen, an inconsistency that I think is harmful; consistency is key.

NBC

NBC’s graphic lies Unobtrusively along the bottom edge of the screen. It reads naturally left-to-right in a single line, and you can immediately figure out the Score and the Quarter and Time Left. The section containing the Down and Yardage, however, is dynamic. Sometimes it shows nothing, sometimes the Down and Yardage, sometimes a yellow “Flag”. Nowhere is Possession indicated, which strikes me as a major oversight. The text has good Contrast, however, and the inclusion of the team logos is a nice addition.

Fox

Fox takes a similar approach to NBC, only their graphic stays almost at the top of the screen, and is narrower than NBC’s, making it very Unobtrusive. Contrast is decent, although the small fonts hurt readability. Scores, Quarter, and Time left are all constantly displayed and easy to find, but once again, the Down and Yardage displayed here is in a section of the graphic that is constantly in flux. The rightmost third of the graphic (showing “Playoffs – Divisional”) is unchanging, and could be put to better use providing more contextual information, such as the Ball position. Possession is indicated with a bold, high-Contrast outline, making it easy to tell which team has the ball.

How it should be done

The (fictional, of course) Yin Yang Network takes a similar approach to that of NBC and Fox, but enhances it by adding all the necessary information that the others leave out. On the left, we have the Scores, including team logos and team location abbreviations. Possession is indicated by a colorful highlight around one team (and on the bar above it), and Ball position is listed next to the team currently in possession. In the center is the necessary network logo. On the right is the Down & Yardage, beneath which can appear a conditional “Flag” marker (but never anything else). To the right of that can occasionally appear the play clock, when it is close to running out. And finally, on the far right, we have the Quarter and Time Left, fulfilling all our informational needs.

And as for accessibility, the graphic is thin, partially translucent, and sits at the very top of the screen, making it as Unobtrusive as possible. The fonts are big, bold, and Contrast well with the background, making them easily readable by even viewers with poor vision or colorblindness.

While I have no illusions about any network adopting my design, I figured it was a good exercise to compare what’s being done and see how it could be improved. What do you think? Is my design better or worse than the others? Have I missed any considerations? What would you have done differently?

It’s a little bit exciting. It’s sort of like experiencing what the Y2K bug might have been like a tiny bit. Sort of.

What is tagging?

Tagging is classifying things by adding simple, descriptive words or short phrases to them. Ideally, the tags you add encapsulate the key ideas and attributes of something. For example: if I were to tag my pants, I would add “jeans” to all the jeans, “shorts” to the shorts, and “cargo” to the cargoes — some of them would have combinations, like “jeans” and “shorts” — and then I might add colors, like “blue” or “black” or “khaki”. Then when I want to put pants on (which rarely happens, but bear with me) I would tell my robot butler “Show me the pants tagged ‘shorts’ and ‘khaki’,” and the robot butler would pull out the pants that match those tags, and I would be able to choose from that selection, instead of having to look through all of my pants at once.

Figure 1: Pants with appropriate tags

How do I decide if a particular tag is appropriate?

Here is a simple guide to deciding if a tag is appropriate. Place the tag into the blank in each of the following sentences. If it makes sense in any of them, it is appropriate.

• “This item is a/an ________.”
• “This item is ________.”
• “This item has to do with ________.”

For instance, I am looking at an alarm clock. I am considering tagging it with the term “bonobos”. Let me see…

• “This item is a/an bonobos.” FALSE: IT IS AN ALARM CLOCK
• “This item is bonobos.” ALSO FALSE: IT IS NOT BONOBOS
• “This item has to do with bonobos.” FALSE AGAIN: BONOBOS ARE AFRAID OF ALARM CLOCKS

Hence, I can be fairly certain that my alarm clock should not be tagged “bonobos”. Let’s try again, this time with the term “waking”.

• “This item is a/an waking.” WHAT
• “This item is waking.” NO
• “This item has to do with waking.” DING DING DING WE HAVE A WINNER

How do I use tags on this particular website I am looking at?

I don’t know, because chances are I have not used that particular website, since there are currently umpty-bajillion websites that support tagging. But, smart person you are, I bet you can figure it out if you look around a little. Does the website have a “help” or “FAQ” link? That might tell you. Or maybe near the “tags” area is a little question mark you can click on to learn about their tagging function.

That said, here are some things to pay attention to:

• When you type in tags, do you use spaces to separate them (like “cargo shorts khaki”) or commas (like “cargo, shorts, khaki”)?
• If you want to use a multi-word tag, do you surround it with quotes like “hulk smash”) or do you use underscores (like hulk_smash)?

Exercises

1. So there’s this guy, right? Let’s call him Bob. He reads a story on a website. The story is about robots and flying turtles and the end of the world. It’s a really great story, so he adds it to his bookmarks on a particular social bookmark website. The website says “For multi-word tags, use underscores between the words. Separate multiple tags with spaces.”

Which set of tags should Bob type?

1. robots flying turtles apocalypse
2. robots, flying turtles, apocalypse
3. robots flying_turtles apocalypse
4. bear hunny christopher_robin

The answer is 3.

2. On the system above, Bob wants to tag something so that his friend Alice knows it’s something she would be interested in. He types the tag for alice. What’s wrong with this?

Answer: Since the system separates tags with spaces, typing for alice will result in two tags, “for” and “alice”. What the heck does the tag “for” mean? It means nothing! You can tell because the three-sentence test for the tag “for” gives us three nonsense sentences. Bob should have typed for_alice.

3. Bob has read a news story about global climate change and Al Gore. He has saved it and tagged it “godzilla atlatl phonetic_spelling”. What should we do?

Answer: Either of the two answers below is appropriate.

• Politely email Bob explaining that his tagging is fallacious and giving him the URL of this post.
• Punch Bob in the face.

It’s neat to see Google working on this stuff, and speculate about how they’re planning to tie it all together into one big, happy network OS. But unless they concurrently work on strengthening the last stinkin’ mile so that customers don’t have connectivity issues that render their computers useless, I doubt they’ll manage to get many total converts.

My brother once told me that if people actually knew what a house was really like before they bought it, no-one would ever buy a house. There’s definitely some truth there; the more time I’ve spent in a place, the more little problems I’ve come across. But like he said, every house has its share of problems. Nothing’s exempt, and the best that you can hope for is that you notice the problems early enough that you can deal with them before they become major.

So right now, the housing market in this respect is almost entirely in the hands of the sellers. If you can hide the bad stuff well enough that potential buyers don’t notice it on a walkthrough, you can unload your old shack for more than it’s worth and saddle the new owners with the cost of fixing things up. And I’m not talking about major stuff here like dangerous wiring or shoddy plumbing — any half-decent home inspector will catch that before the sale is final. I’m talking about the little stuff, the fact that the molding is loose around the livingroom doors, or that the shower head is always getting clogged, or that whenever the weather’s warm you get dozens of houseflies from who-knows-where.

So, as a buyer, what’s to be done? We need some way to work together, share information about these houses that goes far, far beyond the handful of vague datapoints in an MLS listing. We need to take photos of the excessive wood-rot around the windows, the cracked linoleum behind the toilet, the gaps in the flooring that the seller is trying to hide behind his armchair, and let each other know about it. We need to do what we can to level the playing field by sharing what we can find about properties for sale and, in doing so, attempt to reveal their true values.

We need a social real-estate information sharing portal. A site that lets us say “See this listing? The actual address is 123 Main St. in Somewhereville. I went there and took two dozen photos — here they are. And you know how the realtor’s photo makes it look like an idyllic wooded lot? Yeah, they’re not showing you that it borders a busy road and has a mosquito-filled swamp a hundred feet behind it.” We need to post what we saw, what the owners told us, and what we thought, in order to let other potential buyers know exactly what they’re getting into.

Tenants can use it too. “I rented this property for two years, and let me tell you, unless you’re ready to be saddled with twenty grand in renovations it’s not worth your time.”

And eventually, if enough people share information about these properties and do their best to show the world what the properties are really like, sellers will learn that it’s in their best interests to be up front about stuff. When you decide to sell your house, you log onto the info-sharing site and say “it’s not perfect — here are the problems — but there’s lots of good stuff, too.” When people see that you’re being honest, they’ll be much more willing to work with you to reach an equitable agreement.

And then people will know what the houses for sale are like, but be able to make an honest comparison, and will still be willing to buy them because they’ll really know what they’re getting into.

If you use AudioScrobbler, do you try and show off your good musical tastes and hide your poor ones? Or do you choose to not care, like me, and just listen to whatever strikes your fancy?

1. Save my search details in a cookie.
   I keep going back to these sites and having to re-input all the flight details: airport codes, dates, number of passengers, etc. It wouldn’t be hard at all for the site designers to store this data in a cookie for me and let me recall my most recent searches with just a click. And I shouldn’t have to register an account on the site to do this.
2. Let me specify broader time ranges.
   Every site lets me choose an hour for my flights to depart. Some let me choose more vague time ranges like morning/noon/evening. But what I want to be able to specify is “10 a.m. or later,” and nobody lets me do this. Surely I’m not the only one who wants to specify a range like this.
3. Include nearby airports.
   Several of the sites have methods to include “nearby” airports in their searches. However, one of them doesn’t define “nearby,” and one limits that to “airports within 80 miles.” Why don’t I get to tell you what airports I consider nearby? Let me specify the search radius, or, better yet, show me a list of airports that I can check off.

Also, I won’t be using CheapTickets.com again.