m cameron jones

I stumbled across this excellent article by Eduardo Navas. It was originally published in Vague Terrain Journal in Summer 2007, when I was doing a lot of thinking about mashups as appropriation.

http://remixtheory.net/?p=235

Some bits that caught my eye:

The complexity with web applications mashups lies in how intricate the connections become. The most rough of mashups are called “scrapings” because they sample material from the front pages of different online resources and websites, and the more complex mashups actually include material directly taken from databases, that is if the online entity decides to open an Application Programming Interface (API) to make their information available to web developers.

Ironically, what is characterized above as the “roughest” kind of mashup, can be the most brittle, and hardest to get working; while those which are characterized as “more complex”, can actually be much easier to build.

Call for Participation

CSCW 2008 Workshop (W12): Tinkering, Tailoring, & Mashing: The Social and Collaborative Practices of the Read-Write Web

November 9, 2008 – San Diego, California, USA

Workshop Website: http://mashworks.net/

Overview:
The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in CSCW interested in discussing the human-centered, collaborative and creative aspects of web 2.0 and the current internet-based experience of creative social coding – mashups, the programmable web, remix culture, game modding, copy-paste, and social programming. We invite researchers to ask: how are people sharing programming, tailoring, and modding knowledge on the internet and what are useful models of collaborative and social creativity?

Some relevant topics and themes include:

• sharing, reusing, remixing, and recycling of electronic materials;
• web mashups, mashup creation, and mashup use;
• end-user customization and tailoring;
• collaborative debugging and problem-solving;
• loose collaboration;
• hackers, hacking culture, and the bazaar;
• notions of sharability and learnability;

Additionally, we also wish to revisit many theories and theoretical constructs which have long served CSCW, and evaluate them in light of contemporary and emerging practices on the web, including: “community” as both an interpretive lens and a unit of analysis; distributed cognition; activity theory; and social network analysis. How these theories relate to the daily practices of creative life online is not clear, especially what they may (or may not) tell us about issues of personal and group expression, passion, motivation, intention, and deep engagement.

Important dates:
Friday, September 19, 2008 Workshop submissions due
Friday, September 26, 2008 Notification to authors
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 Early registration deadline
Friday, October 3, 2008 Conference rate hotel reservation
Sunday, November 9, 2008 Workshop

Organizers:
M. Cameron Jones, Yahoo! Research

Elizabeth F. Churchill, Yahoo! Research

Michael B. Twidale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Submission Details:
Participants should submit research reports or researcher position statements, up to four pages in length, by email to mcjones@yahoo-inc.com no later than, September 19, 2008. Submissions should be formatted in standard ACM SIG-CHI long paper format and submitted in either Adobe PDF (.pdf) or Microsoft Word document format (.doc, or .docx).

Ingbert pointed out that the easy request bookmarklet is broken for I-Share requests through other CARLI libraries. Here is an updated bookmarklet which should get you working again.

So, I’ve just returned from 2 conferences and thought I’d upload my slides.

4S 2007 – Montreal, QC, Canada
I was on a great panel organized by Tolu Odumosu from RPI on Technological Appropriation. Other panelists included: Tolu Odumosu, Ron Eglash, Min Suh Son, Shib Shankar Dasgupta, and Tarleton Gillespie was our Discussant. Here are the slides from my talk:
Web Mashups: Technological Appropriation in Web 2.0 [ PPTX | PPT ]

ISMIR 2007 – Vienna, Austria
I presented 2 posters and 1 paper at this year’s ISMIR. We had the MIREX DIY Service Poster, Jin Ha Lee’s dissertation research poster, and my paper on Human Judgments of Music Similarity from MIREX 2006. Here are the slides for that presentation:
Human Similarity Judgments: Implications for the Design of Formal Evaluations [ PPTX | PPT ]

I am visiting Yahoo! Research on Thursday, June 28, 2007. The slides for my talk are available here in both ppt and pptx format.

In this talk I cover some recent research I’ve been doing on the role of copying in the production of web mashups. I talk about the Yahoo! Pipes system and it’s “cloning” function. I also present some preliminary findings from a clone analysis of Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps web mashups source code. Some of this research is part of my dissertation work, where I’ll be studying cloning in open-source.

I also presented some of these findings (the Google Maps parts) in my CSNA poster from earlier this month.

I recently attended the mashup camp in Mountain View (July 12 & 13). On Wednesday evening I got motivated to create a mashup that I’ve been thinking about for a while and between Wednesday night and Thursday morning I hacked together the first version of Pledge Drive (originally called Public Radio Road-Trip Planner (TrPPR). Pledge Drive is a driving directions site which shows you public radio stations that exist within broadcast range of your route. The radio station antenna information was downloaded from NPR and I used Microsoft’s Virtual Earth application for the mapping and driving directions. I also hacked in a bit for the demo, which is currently disabled, which shows my current GPS location on the map and any public radio stations within earshot.

You can play around with the current version of Pledge Drive at http://cameronjones.com/pledgedrive/

The future development plans for this mashup are to include the turn-by-turn directions and add radio tuning indicators, e.g., “Turn right onto Main St. and tune radio to 580 AM WILL”. Also, I’d like to pull the broadcast schedules off of NPR and sync it with the estimated travel times so you can see what will be playing at each segment of your trip and pick an interesting station. And to connect this service back to the listener-supported dimension of public radio, I’d like to calculate a reasonable donation for the directions based on the amount of time you are in a station’s broadcast range and allow people to donate money to NPR or local affiliates proportionate to the amount of listening they do.

Send me your feedback, it is still an active work in progress.

The Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership at UIUC has named me one of their Graduate Scholars. I submitted a proposal titled “Mashups and Innovation: How do people create and deploy novel applications in minutes?”. The basic gist of the whole thing is to study how mash-ups can be used as a type of end-user innovation, allowing people to create customized technologies. I will be travelling to the Mashup Camp in July to check out what is going on and also to interview some mash-up developers and API providers. Then I am going to put together a workshop on Mash-ups for the CSCW Conference (I just submitted the proposal last Friday). A similar workshop will be help here on campus with more of a focus on mash-ups and the University/entrepreneur.
Stay tuned for more info.