Recent Posts276
Living Room / Re: Beyond Gamification. Designing up Maslow’s Pyramid.
« Last post by Paul Keith on November 05, 2011, 10:28 AM »I don't see what's confusing.
The topic was gamification/Maslow.
You then raised points why buzz words are bullshit.
I then raised points why buzz words have some influence.
We went into social curation which has a stronger and more concrete history of design because there are web apps released that claim that tag/had been branded that tag by the digital media and each of those websites are different but have a unifying pattern of what they are trying to introduce.
You use a Dilbert cartoon as your argument point.
I then use your Dilbert cartoon as your argument point.
Teachers/students/philosophers/forum users/logicians/grammarians, I sincerely hope none of those groups try to raise evidence by referring to a Dilbert cartoon much less use it as a set up to say the counter reply to a Dilbert cartoon only serves to confirm curation as still being a Bullshit Bingo buzz word.
The difference with "social curation" (two words, not just the word curation) and the colour of the wings of those non-existant fairies is that even for myth believers, the colour of the fairies does not help expound any of their beliefs as even in those times the women who revealled the fairies were considered liars even in such an innocent age and it is only Doyle's status that lend it credibility and later on as desire to look for evidences backing the unknown went on, it became an urban legend that was brought up not because the biologies or even the appearances of such fairies would back up the rationale of the fairy believers but because it would back up this idea that there was truly something paranormal about this world that science can't explain but fantasy can. In short, even in concept, the fairies even if they were real would be useless. They would simply be like the myth that managers are not bullshitters that's why they get payed more.
In contrast, social curation is like the CEO. There's still a lot of bullshit in that position. The justification of high salaries. The instigator of bureaucracies. The manager of managers. The guy who saves the company by simply inspiring the workers and knowing how to out-wit the lesser politicians of the company. Yet at the same time, done right - social curation/CEOs do provide something intangible. They have nearly the same role as managers but because of their greater responsibilities, if they pull it off, they introduce something new. If they're shit, the company sinks. In this case, the same goes for buzz words. Digg's dead but Reddit still lives. Social curation is in a similar scenario. It lived. It died. It got a temporary ressurection in things like Mashable follow where the Web finally understood something as simple as the usability behind the follow button. It went low. It then pops up from time to time with newer social networks like G+ but under the wrong assumption that it needs to be "private data backed" in order to "recommend" circles/fans/friends/etc. (An old model that failed except for Facebook and even then Facebook did it right because of it's userbase not because of it's design) But whichever the case, regardless whether the word social curation even survives or not, there are tangible examples of apps in a social curated mold. There are tangible examples of designs following social curation showing it can have an impact.
Take the recent workflowy thread. I've become cynical of outliners because they don't adopt something as basic as Tree List's hotkeys or things like Onenote becomes popular but few (even among notetaker/outliner circles) mention/adopt some of the design of YeahWrite until OneNote but Workflowy wows people because it can filter branches thanks to it's search. That's a core element of social curation, bullshit or not. That's why even in the workflowy thread no one can find quite an alternative example because even though the design should be somewhat obvious (we do have software like Evernote banging the idea of personal search notes for years now) it wasn't until Workflowy appeared that we finally have a pseudo-free and simple implementation of that concept in a total package.
At the same time, the bullshit factor of buzz words here is that Workflowy doesn't state it is a social curation tool. The designers might not even be thinking of social curation when they design the app. Yet here's the flip side though. Is Workflowy better off because of it? I say no. A big part of social curation is the social. Actually social here doesn't mean sharing except that it can be shown to the public/friends that get permission. What in reality it is hinting at is that export and import can be cool.
...but in order to be cool, it has to be personalized to more casual needs and layed out in better ways. Bullshit buzz words or not - there's nothing confusing about that especially for technical people. Export/import and presentations was always an important and controversial issue in all walks of life but software developers have often tacked it on if not been slow to adopt to this. Web developers focus too much on mobile. Desktop developers focus too much on caged databases. Had Workflowy been more of a social curation tool maybe it would have focus on a desktop compliment already. Maybe.
If this is still confusing, here's the bottomline. Curator as a word especially in a digital world? Yeah, there's a lot of bullshit in that. The average blogger can be a curator simply by blogging. You won't know whether he's a good or bad curator at that. You might not even sniff it because blogging is based on popularity and niche circles much like social networks. Social curation though - you can see a bit of the person's identity through that as it's their personal collection. Not in an entirely privacy invading way but like a well researched blogger making a blog post. The difference between the potential of social curation design and blogging is that blogging asks for the reader to have an interest in skimming through archives with little way of organizing a story except maybe via chronological and tag based random clickings. Social curation could potentially adopt the concept of stumbling upon data that Stumbleupon originally popularized before that service was hijacked into a social media category and combine it with the innovations of annotations (PDFs/Diigo), personal website scraping (Scrapbook+/Surfulator) and combine it with the bundles of an e-book.
Example imagine if dotepub was one day not based on an old version of readability but like website scrapers can edit and curate and mash up contents into an e-pub. It may not be a revolution unless e-book readers become cheap (for third world countries) and take off but the combination of those results could one day fuel the "true" death of mainstream newspapers and open up the culture for journalistic challenges where the best daily e-pub subscriptions are judged rather than the popularity of a newspapers' brand. On top of this, it may not be for everyone, but imagine the filter failure stress relief from no longer having to juggle between reading something later or reading something now but taking the perspective into that between a decision of those two plus the option of reading a collected set of articles like wikipedia but without the need to click through every next link or hope the other link is not a red herring. All these without having tabs stored in browsers or suffering in collection problems or being slaves to con-men who claim they scraped the free information around the web and then "curated" it into a paid PDF/video. Not to mention the lack of need to distribute this with an internet connection.
Again, I'd like to emphasize that the above is merely hinting at the potential of social curation and not saying this will be the reality.
The topic was gamification/Maslow.
You then raised points why buzz words are bullshit.
I then raised points why buzz words have some influence.
We went into social curation which has a stronger and more concrete history of design because there are web apps released that claim that tag/had been branded that tag by the digital media and each of those websites are different but have a unifying pattern of what they are trying to introduce.
You use a Dilbert cartoon as your argument point.
I then use your Dilbert cartoon as your argument point.
Teachers/students/philosophers/forum users/logicians/grammarians, I sincerely hope none of those groups try to raise evidence by referring to a Dilbert cartoon much less use it as a set up to say the counter reply to a Dilbert cartoon only serves to confirm curation as still being a Bullshit Bingo buzz word.
The difference with "social curation" (two words, not just the word curation) and the colour of the wings of those non-existant fairies is that even for myth believers, the colour of the fairies does not help expound any of their beliefs as even in those times the women who revealled the fairies were considered liars even in such an innocent age and it is only Doyle's status that lend it credibility and later on as desire to look for evidences backing the unknown went on, it became an urban legend that was brought up not because the biologies or even the appearances of such fairies would back up the rationale of the fairy believers but because it would back up this idea that there was truly something paranormal about this world that science can't explain but fantasy can. In short, even in concept, the fairies even if they were real would be useless. They would simply be like the myth that managers are not bullshitters that's why they get payed more.
In contrast, social curation is like the CEO. There's still a lot of bullshit in that position. The justification of high salaries. The instigator of bureaucracies. The manager of managers. The guy who saves the company by simply inspiring the workers and knowing how to out-wit the lesser politicians of the company. Yet at the same time, done right - social curation/CEOs do provide something intangible. They have nearly the same role as managers but because of their greater responsibilities, if they pull it off, they introduce something new. If they're shit, the company sinks. In this case, the same goes for buzz words. Digg's dead but Reddit still lives. Social curation is in a similar scenario. It lived. It died. It got a temporary ressurection in things like Mashable follow where the Web finally understood something as simple as the usability behind the follow button. It went low. It then pops up from time to time with newer social networks like G+ but under the wrong assumption that it needs to be "private data backed" in order to "recommend" circles/fans/friends/etc. (An old model that failed except for Facebook and even then Facebook did it right because of it's userbase not because of it's design) But whichever the case, regardless whether the word social curation even survives or not, there are tangible examples of apps in a social curated mold. There are tangible examples of designs following social curation showing it can have an impact.
Take the recent workflowy thread. I've become cynical of outliners because they don't adopt something as basic as Tree List's hotkeys or things like Onenote becomes popular but few (even among notetaker/outliner circles) mention/adopt some of the design of YeahWrite until OneNote but Workflowy wows people because it can filter branches thanks to it's search. That's a core element of social curation, bullshit or not. That's why even in the workflowy thread no one can find quite an alternative example because even though the design should be somewhat obvious (we do have software like Evernote banging the idea of personal search notes for years now) it wasn't until Workflowy appeared that we finally have a pseudo-free and simple implementation of that concept in a total package.
At the same time, the bullshit factor of buzz words here is that Workflowy doesn't state it is a social curation tool. The designers might not even be thinking of social curation when they design the app. Yet here's the flip side though. Is Workflowy better off because of it? I say no. A big part of social curation is the social. Actually social here doesn't mean sharing except that it can be shown to the public/friends that get permission. What in reality it is hinting at is that export and import can be cool.
...but in order to be cool, it has to be personalized to more casual needs and layed out in better ways. Bullshit buzz words or not - there's nothing confusing about that especially for technical people. Export/import and presentations was always an important and controversial issue in all walks of life but software developers have often tacked it on if not been slow to adopt to this. Web developers focus too much on mobile. Desktop developers focus too much on caged databases. Had Workflowy been more of a social curation tool maybe it would have focus on a desktop compliment already. Maybe.
If this is still confusing, here's the bottomline. Curator as a word especially in a digital world? Yeah, there's a lot of bullshit in that. The average blogger can be a curator simply by blogging. You won't know whether he's a good or bad curator at that. You might not even sniff it because blogging is based on popularity and niche circles much like social networks. Social curation though - you can see a bit of the person's identity through that as it's their personal collection. Not in an entirely privacy invading way but like a well researched blogger making a blog post. The difference between the potential of social curation design and blogging is that blogging asks for the reader to have an interest in skimming through archives with little way of organizing a story except maybe via chronological and tag based random clickings. Social curation could potentially adopt the concept of stumbling upon data that Stumbleupon originally popularized before that service was hijacked into a social media category and combine it with the innovations of annotations (PDFs/Diigo), personal website scraping (Scrapbook+/Surfulator) and combine it with the bundles of an e-book.
Example imagine if dotepub was one day not based on an old version of readability but like website scrapers can edit and curate and mash up contents into an e-pub. It may not be a revolution unless e-book readers become cheap (for third world countries) and take off but the combination of those results could one day fuel the "true" death of mainstream newspapers and open up the culture for journalistic challenges where the best daily e-pub subscriptions are judged rather than the popularity of a newspapers' brand. On top of this, it may not be for everyone, but imagine the filter failure stress relief from no longer having to juggle between reading something later or reading something now but taking the perspective into that between a decision of those two plus the option of reading a collected set of articles like wikipedia but without the need to click through every next link or hope the other link is not a red herring. All these without having tabs stored in browsers or suffering in collection problems or being slaves to con-men who claim they scraped the free information around the web and then "curated" it into a paid PDF/video. Not to mention the lack of need to distribute this with an internet connection.
Again, I'd like to emphasize that the above is merely hinting at the potential of social curation and not saying this will be the reality.
I can't find that wiki page that listed Google alternatives at the moment, but I tried NetVibes, Pageflakes, FriendFeed, and, well, a lot of others.)
