Bernardo Huberman, Hewlett-Packard's director of the HP Social Computing lab, and fellow researcher Gabor Szabo have published a highly detailed report (PDF) on "predicting the popularity of online content." Focusing on content submitted and popularized on popular social sites Digg.com and Google's YouTube, the two concocted not one but three ways to predict how much traffic and overall user interaction a story or submitted video will receive well after it hits its initial popularity.
To do this the pair kept an eye on 7,146 videos from YouTube's recently added section, and every digg from registered digg users between July 1, 2007, to December 18, 2007. From this data, they found that stories on Digg got more votes and views during peak traffic hours than those at nights and on weekends (duh), and that YouTube videos tended to get more and more views a month into being submitted--and in many cases well beyond the initial 30-day evaluation.
HP's research shows the usual daily spikes in Digg traffic compared with story submissions and promotions.
(Credit: HP Labs)To dig a little deeper into this data, they were able to figure out which time of day story submissions on Digg had the most chance of getting attention, right down to the hour. The data also showed how many diggs a story would get after being promoted to the front page depending on both what time that story hit and when it was originally submitted. The lesson: submit, and hit the front page early.
The prediction models, which you'll have no problem understanding if you paid attention in your grad school numerical analysis class, outline three different ways to guess any one submission's popularity. All three depend on any number of variables, as dictated by Huberman's research, including what time of day you're submitting compared with how many others are submitting at the same time.
One thing that slightly outdated the research done on the Digg-side is the somewhat-recent introduction of the recommendation engine. Digg has been quite vocal with the success of its engine, both in terms of additional traffic and higher user interaction levels.
Also, at the time of the survey Digg was just two weeks out from a redesign that put more emphasis on friends activity--a precursor to the mid-September overhaul of user profiles, which made the site resemble a social network. Neither of these things changed Digg's overall method of having popular stories roll off the front page in a matter of hours--something that hasn't changed during the lifetime of the site, but it's worth noting nonetheless.
I've embedded the paper after the jump. You can also track some of HP Labs' other projects on this page.
... Read moreGenetic analysis start-up 23andMe, known for its star-studded "spit parties" and a controversial investment from Google, announced Thursday the debut of a new initiative to bring together women who have been affected by breast cancer or who may be genetically at risk.
October is the 23rd annual National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Using its Web-based social network, 23andMe hopes to "reach out to, and build a community around, women who have encountered breast cancer, thereby increasing the scientific understanding of the inherited aspects of a disease that affects 200,000 newly diagnosed individuals per year." Women who purchase the $399 testing kits will have the option to participate in surveys, and the start-up's research arm, called "23andWe," will build a community for the swapping of knowledge, advice, and support.
Representatives from 23andMe said that the project does not yet have any external research organizations as partners, and remains "primarily a social-networking community" at the time. The genetics community has been reluctant to embrace consumer DNA-analysis companies, and the state of California asked 23andMe, along with other companies in the same field, to stop selling tests until they could be fully compliant with health regulations.
At the end of August, 23andMe announced that California authorities had granted it a license to continue selling its tests. In a blog post, 23andMe's founders described the agreement as "only the start of the dialogue between regulators and genomics companies that offer direct-to-consumer services."
This post was updated at 1:04 p.m. PT to clarify the state of 23andMe's negotiations with the state of California.
On Steven Spielberg's rumored social network, maybe you can discuss whether that ghost was really a ghost or just the creepy old caretaker from the abandoned amusement park.
(Credit: Hanna-Barbera)Who wants to believe? TechCrunch reported Monday night that Steven Spielberg is developing a new social network where people can talk about their encounters with the paranormal and extraterrestrial.
Spielberg, creator of sci-fi classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Men in Black, and the War of the Worlds remake a few years ago, is reportedly himself a believer in paranormal phenomena. In creating a social network for fellow enthusiasts as well as people who claim to have encountered the otherworldly, Spielberg is tapping into a lifelong passion.
But its exact ties to tech and entertainment are unclear. "The project may have originally been associated with Yahoo but the project was killed off before launch," TechCrunch's Michael Arrington wrote. "But if our sources are right, the idea has lived on and a team in Los Angeles is working to launch it in the next few months."
Here's another theory: What if this is in conjunction with some kind of upcoming Spielberg project, a sort of uber-viral meta-campaign along the lines of the HBO Voyeur Project? (Whatever happened to that, anyway?)
Science can produce some very cool things on the Web. One of them being this ridiculously useful Web version of the periodic table of the elements--a staple for chemists and scientists at large. The chart, found at Ptable.com, is completely dynamic, letting you adjust nearly every aspect of the data to see what each element does at various temperatures, and even turn back the hands of time to see which parts of the chart were missing before being discovered by scientists.
The table is hooked up directly to Wikipedia, letting you view the encyclopedia entries as small pop-ups that are skinned to match the site. You can also drill down on any element's info and view the data with color coding based on which group the element resides.
I'll be honest, the last time I saw this thing I was taking a prerequisite chem class back in college, but it's far more utilitarian than anything you'd find in a text book, which makes it a great tool for students. There are some other Web-based tables out there, but none of them I've seen look and function nearly as well. It's also one of the oldest, having launched back in 1997.
Related: All the glory of the universe, in a single Flash app
Wondering what the heck hafnium is, and when it burns? Check out this snazzy Web version of the periodic table to figure it out.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Google.org's technology project to help save lives in the event of natural disasters or public health threats is set to launch Thursday.
The project, called Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster (InSTEDD), is a nonprofit organization that ambitiously aims to help communities around the world use Web and communications technology to identify and warn others of outbreaks like Avian flu or disasters like Hurricane Katrina. That technology, which will include social software Twitter and Facebook, will be used to coordinate rescue responses and help save lives, according to Eric Rasmussen, president and CEO of InSTEDD.
"We're not talking about pulling the red phone out of the bottom drawer here," said Rasmussen, a former adviser to U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, referring to Twitter and Facebook. "We're talking about using ubiquitous, free software that is repurposed when necessary to fit into a humanitarian need."
Google, through its charitable foundation Google.org, has invested $5 million in the project. InSTEDD has also received $1 million from the Rockefeller Foundation, and another six-figure amount from a foundation associated with venture capitalist and Google investor John Doerr, according to Rasmussen.
Dr. Larry Brilliant
(Credit: Google)InSTEDD is the brainchild of Google.org's executive director, epidemiologist Dr. Larry Brilliant, who conceived of it nearly two years ago when he won the TED prize, a grant-making wish foundation that helps raise funds for humanitarian projects.
At the time, Brilliant said: "My dream for InSTEDD (a name that plays off the TED conference) is to fulfill the much-needed role of an independent agent bringing the technological, medical, and organizational skills necessary to help the humanitarian aid community accomplish (early detection of public health threats and disasters), and ultimately help them to make the world a safer place."
With the help of Google.org, the project turned into a nonprofit organization in May 2007. But it officially started in October when Rasmussen came on board and began hiring people and reaching out to the aid community. Now with nine employees, InSTEDD will launch its Web site on Thursday with early versions of open-source software that can be downloaded and tested.
One such application will be the so-called Twitter bot framework, which bridges the Web service and phones with a location-detection feature that can link to a layer in Google Earth, Rasmussen said. That way, for example, Rasmussen could send a message about a patient with untreated symptoms in Laos via SMS on his phone, which might only have one signal bar of service. That message could then be broadcast to anyone subscribed to his messages, including aid workers at UNICEF or InSTEDD's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., which could show his location and note on a Google Earth map.
"We can send an SMS message onto Google Earth in an emergency center, and it sees a dot with a color-coded response, with my name and date. Right underneath that, there's a button that says reply, and (aid workers can send a note that says) we have the resources you need 2 miles north...Suddenly there's a two-way conversation using nothing but a cell phone with one bar," he said, adding: "We've done this."
The application will also let people query for friends nearby via SMS, he said.
At its launch Thursday, the InSTEDD Web site will also feature blogs and a directory of aid workers, where professionals can register and regularly update their locations. That way, people can easily locate others in the event of a disaster.
Rasmussen said that the nonprofit is working with nations to develop the software among people who will use it in the field. One such project involves five countries in Southeast Asia. "We will eventually put the software out for release, free and open source," he said.
One other application it's working on is a modification of Facebook that would allow aid workers to see where all their nearby contacts are, as well as reach out to all their "friends of friends" in the humanitarian community in the case of a crisis.
"We've learned that going one layer in social networking is reliable (for finding helpful resources), but two layers isn't," Rasmussen said.
He added: "Social networking in the humanitarian space, that's something you're going to see."
Are you a fan of Instructables or SuTree? Looking for a place with just science-related items? SciVee is a site for video clips of science experiments and processes that might be just up your alley. The service originally opened up to the public in late August but today is unveiling a newer, updated look with some new features to help users find and interact with content.
At its heart, the site has been designed with scientists (both established and fledgling) in mind, and according to an article yesterday by the Associated Press, creator Phil Bourne launched the site as a niche alternative to YouTube, so as to improve the categorization and focus of the videos for the scientific community.
Like most video-sharing sites these days, the entire operation revolves around a Flash player that provides instant gratification. What's interesting here is that SciVee breaks it down into two categories--one for standalone videos, and another for what it calls a "pubcast" which lets you link up the video to a related research paper. Viewers can watch the video in the left hand corner of the screen while the paper scrolls to match what topic the narrator is talking about. There's also a simple table of contents on the left, which lets you jump to the video and text portion at the same time.
To supplement the video and text portion of a pubcast, SciVee content creators can upload any related visual aids, along with links to the original work. There's also a place for references, and user-created tags. It ends up being a simple and effective way to cram a lot of content into a very small, but manageable amount of space.
While the pubcasts are a handy feature for publishers to get their work out into yet another channel, what's immediately more fulfilling to the casual user are the how-to videos, which are few and far between. To that end, the site doesn't do nearly as good a job at categorizing content as other popular sharing sites, with no real concrete separation beyond a search tool and user-generated tagging. I still think the pubcast is a really neat way to present a scientific concept, and offers users a chance to read, or watch science with some useful resources at their disposal--which is often more than you can say about YouTube. I'm still waiting for a research paper/video on Diet Coke and Mentos.
SciVee mashes up videos with live text science papers to help people in the science community put together a whole slew of content in a small space.
(Credit: CNET Networks)PALO ALTO, Calif.--Though the favorite metaphor to describe the Web has long been a highway, or for some, a "series of tubes," the man credited with inventing it all thinks of the Web more like the human mind.
"Lots of people are doing research around the Web...and there are interesting results, but a lack of a core curriculum in the universities," Tim Berners-Lee told a gathering of scientists at HP Labs and other Silicon Valley executives here. "I've been told the Web has 10 to the 10 to the 11 (number of) Web sites. The brain we study as a complex system." So why not the Web?
What millions of Internet users take for granted every day--using the Web as a means to download movies, read the news, or check Facebook--will look drastically different five years from now, and that calls for study of it as a science, according to Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the Web Science Research Initiative . Launched a year ago, WSRI is a partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Southampton in England, and is encouraging the study of both the social and technological implications of wide-scale use of the Web.
Tim Berners-Lee and Wendy Hall of WSRI visited HP Labs in Palo Alto.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)On a tour to encourage the adoption of Web science as a course of study at local universities, Berners-Lee spoke about what kind of challenges the increasingly social Web presents. Corralling the information about us out on the Web, identifying where it came from and who is allowed access to it are major issues that come up every day. Facebook's decision to combine user profiles with advertising is just one example.
But there are even more serious implications of a Web that is a growing collection of our personal information. Who owns it? And how do we determine how our information is used?
One example Berners-Lee gave is hospital records. It's still unclear how to be sure that doctors can have access to patient information to identify and treat you, but at the same time keep that information hidden from, say, your employer. There is no answer yet. "It's about building systems and understanding where data is coming from," he said. And though that will take time to come up with a new way of storing and organizing information on the Web, he and others are already working on it.
Phishing scams, spam, an overload of our current Web infrastructure, as well as the democracy of online communities, are each major ideas that need to be looked at with an academic eye, said Berners-Lee, rather than from a closed, proprietary, or corporate perspective. Berners-Lee has long advocated a universal and open Internet, and is one of the founders of the World Wide Web Consortium, the organization that supports open Web standards.
Though much of the future of the Web is wide open, one thing that will happen is that we won't be inputting our personal information into separate social networks, he said. In other words, we'll have one profile that compiles all information related to us and our social networks. "Right now, so many people are complaining that they have told one Web site who their friends are, and another one who their friends are...In five years time, I hope people will be programming not at the document level, but at the application level," he said. "You will have something which is an application which is consistent for looking at different aspects of people. It (will use) your role as their friend for putting together a very powerful, all-encompassing view of them (online)."
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