Peoplicious: The People of Google

I’m visiting Google to talk about peoplicious next week, so I thought I’d set up a peoplicious site for The People of Google. Right now only I, the developer of peoplicious, can create a new domain. I do this by modifying a couple database tables and it takes a couple of minutes.

One thing I’m contemplating is allowing domains to be created by end-users. By domain, I mean a separate site, a separate people directory, where all the lists are subordinate to, e.g., The People of Google. Kind of like PeopleAggregator allows for social networks. Prior to setting up the Google site, I set up a domain for techies in general, for my university, USF, and for politicos.

Google, as an example of a corporation with highly skilled employees, is an interesting case. They have some incentive to not have their people well known (Microsoft might poach them!!!). Peoplicious, unlike most social networking tools, allows a user to create virtual people other than herself, and tag those people (put them in lists). So it could be used for a research (team) to create a map of google employees. Because its not hierarchical and you can put people in various lists, it could show all the formal and informal communities in the organization. Not sure if this is something a Google would want.

I’m still working out how domains will work (peoplicious is a working prototype). The way it works now, people are in a single general table for the whole world, and can be part of various domains. Each domain has its own lists. There are no links between domains, so one believes they’re at a completely separate site (and domain names could be setup for this). One question is: when someone peoplemarks a document to a person, should that document appear in all domains for that person. If the answer is no, we in some sense are setting up personalities, i.e. split people…but there needs to be some way to integrate a virtual person.

SYBIL: Multiple Personalities on the Web

Denis McDonald has an excellent comment on peoplicious and other aggregators/expert systems, concerning the fact that a person/blog is often about many topics, and most tools don’t allow for multiple personalities. Here’s an excerpt:

Weaknesses include possible deficiencies in tagging the content of individual entries that are read into Peoplicious via the RSS feed that supplies the source blog’s information. For example, all my recent blog postings are included in the entries under “expert systems,” even those that have nothing to do with expert location or expertise management.

The flip side of the above is that the reader is exposed to things he or she might not otherwise be exposed to; making “people tagging” the basis for the grouping of items is a valuable approach.

Blog input tools provide categories to help organize one’s multiple personalities. However, aggregators, at least peoplicious, only let a user tag an entire person into a list, and there is no way to specify that a person has multiple areas of interest.

So we might think of allowing a single person to be subdivided, different feeds be set for the different personalities (given their blog input tool allows for different feeds for different categories), and then allow personalities instead of full persons to be added to lists (tagged). Then I could put Dennis McDonald:Expert Systems into  the Expert Systems folder.

Would this be too complicated? Are people not ready to admit multiple personality disorder? If only Freud were alive…

PeopleAggregator and more on users creating domains

Pete Cashmore notes that PeopleAggregator allows for users to create a whole new domain, a custom social networking site, for some topic or community. As I wrote  last week, I think a move in this direction, both in the public and enterprise realm, is  going to hit big and drive a lot of revenue for social networking and folksonomy sites.

Expert Location Systems

John Tropea has an excellent survey of expert location systems and ideas. Just for the hell of it, I created a list in peoplicious with some of the people John mentioned who were interested in the subject. Check out http://peoplicious.com/Technorati/lists/Expert%20Systems Please add to it or add yourself if you are interested in the subject.

There are people hidden in the web

There are people on the web, and they’ve mostly been hidden. The web has been based on documents, and the fact that people create those documents and those documents are usually about people was ignored in the original design. We all google for people, but google returns us documents, and then we all filter through those to learn about the person we’re googling. Its a lot of work, and even when we’re done there is no person to latch on to. People are second class citizens on the web.

Social networking sites have triggered the beginning of the emancipation of all those people hidden in the web. As always, sex is the driving force!

As with all evolutionary movements, it takes awhile to sort out and decompose the important elements of what is happening, and as ideas progress and new systems are developed, they sometimes are restricted by their parents– the new system grabs all the old stuff, even stuff that could be left behind.

So let’s say that our goal is to reengineer the web and excavate all those hidden people so that it is easy to find them and learn about them, so that each of our virtual identies is not scattered all over the web. One step in this direction is to provide a place where a person’s feeds and identities can be collected– blogs, bookmarks, profile information. ziki allows this, as does tagalag and peoplefeeds. Technorati’s blog claiming and profiling is doing the same thing essentially.

All these sites have one thing in common– only the person herself can specify profile information or feeds. The people in the system are restricted to the users in the system, and guess what: this is a very small subset of the people in the world, a very small subset of the people whom we google to find out about.

people != users

An interesting question is: why are these systems being designed so that users can only create info about themselves, and specify their own blogs, etc.? Perhaps there are two main reasons: 1) notions of privacy/big brother, and people getting their feelings hurt and suing the site/poster of a peopletag,  and 2) in the social networking world, users=people makes sense. Ziki and others are children of social networking tools, and so they inherit this restriction.

I’ll address only (2), and say this: social networking is only a facet of making people first class objects on the web. The other facet is people research– collaborative tools to reorganize the web so a person’s info is not scattered, and search/associative tools to help in the process of finding. For people research, it is crazy to restrict users from specifying information about others, akin to restricting a person from saying, “Milan Kundera wrote the Unbearable Lightness of Being”. The re-engineering will take place much faster if the restriction is removed.

And note that there is another element to a person’s virtual data besides profile information and their blog/bookmark posts: all the non-blog web pages by or about them! The majority of the world doesn’t have a blog or belong to del.icio.us or myspace, but if you google them and sort through a bunch of links, you can come up with the pages by/about them. This collection is useful just as the collection of links for some del.icio.us tag is helpful, and can save everyone time filtering through search engine results. Even when searching for people with not so common names, like myself, you get a bunch of noise (you wouldn’t believe how many David Wolber’s there are!).

The collection of personmarked links, along with a person’s posts, provide a ‘personal web’ which can be analyzed, mined, etc. You might also consider the links around a personal web, a ‘personal web neighborhood’. Would it be interesting to search in the  personal web neighborhood of some expert?

In summary, I want to explore the idea of a research system where people and documents are both first class objects, and where people can help build the personal web of themselves or other people. Where any user can insert data about any person, with perhaps veto power by the person. peoplicious  is my first draft, and I’m looking for feedback and collaborators. Thanks to John Tropea for his comments and referring me to Ziki which is the best people-research site I’ve seen.

Virtual Identity

Each of has an identity that is scattered across the web and also volatile. Joshua Porter writes about MySpace users and how they’ve invested a lot in creating their identity there:

That’s the pain point where identity comes in. When a new,   cooler hang out spot comes along, they’ll be gone, and all of their messages and profile information will be lost. Unless that information is stored in their identity domain…

For others, instead of myspace their blog page is their virtual identity, with links to all their sub-identities (other blogs, homepage, rss, delicious name, technorati name, friends in their blogroll).

Plaxo is a service which allows people to keep their contact info in a centralized place so when they change it their contacts all know. But their data, I think, is old-style address info, not virtual modern address info like rss feeds and delicious names.

Thinglinks is somewhere in this space, with a goal of providing permanent identifiers for things including people.

Microformat enthusiasts might argue for people having a homepage but marking it up with identity info (HCard, xfn) and then let crawlers come around and collect it up. In other words, store yourself in one place, not at myspace or some other world. Then theh question is ‘what is that place?’ Your work server? As we know, our workplace and/or webspace domain can change…might be a role for some organization like the Internet Archive.

My other thought on this is: do we restrict identity building to self-identity building, i.e., can only you specify information about you? This seems limiting– in the real world we construct our perceptions of people all the time. And in the virtual world, for some people, keeping track of all the things about them (articles, blog entries, etc.) could be a full time job.

Anyway, the system I’m buildling, peoplicious, is about letting the masses construct virtual identities for people. You can add a person, set their blog urls and delicious name, tag them (put into lists) and peoplemark documents onto them. I found Joshua’s article because I’d added him into peoplicious, set his blog, and put him in the folksonomists list.

Now the problem is peoplicious points directly at his blog, instead of somewhere permanent which lists his current blog(s) and which he can change (this is the idea with plaxo I think).

Plaxo’s distributed address books

Plaxo is a distributed address book. You keep your contact list on their server, you get your friends/colleagues to put their data there, and then when someone updates their info, your address book is auto-updated. A level of indirection and centralization goes along ways.

people-marks

One of the fundamental ways in which users could help re-engineer the web is through associating people with urls. del.icio.us allows this– when you bookmark you associate yourself (and some tags) with a url.

But when you bookmark, you only specify one type of person-url association, that of tagger-url. In general, we should be able to associate a person with a url with various association types: author_of, about, referred-to-in, interviewed-in etc.

If such people-associating was provided in a tool like delicioius, we would start to build a directory of people and one could view, for instance, all the urls authored by a person or all the urls about a person (and not just all the urls tagged by a person). It would be an improvement on google, for people searching, as it would in some sense allow us to share our googling work, the work of filtering through the links that are returned when we search for the name of a person.

So what do we call it? People-mark? Peoplemark? Personmark? Thinking about this led me to think about the term ‘bookmark’. It comes from the bookmarks we used to use to keep a place in a physical book. On the web, it really means a web-mark, that is, the ‘book’ is the web and we are marking a url in it as important.

In this sense, peoplemark would mean to mark a person as important out of the set of all people, i.e. if you could somehow grab a ‘person’ and tag it, you’d be peoplemarking. This is different than associating a person with a url. And there is already a term, peopletag, for this type of operation.

Perhaps the term ‘personmark’ is better suited, and we might say that someone has ‘personmarked’ a document.

So when you peopletag, you mark a person as important and provide some tags describing the person. John Tropea has discussed peopletags and also the idea of allowing tag-value pairs to a person, e.g., language: Chinese or workplace:IBM.

When you personmark, you mark a url as important and associate a person with that url, along with an association.

One reason I’m interested in all this is that I’m developing peoplicious.com, a system that allows browsers to both peopletag (put people in lists) and personmark urls. You can also associate blogs and delicious names with people as well.

XFN for person-url associations and third-party assertions

xfn is a microformat (html-based semantics) method for specifying person-to-person relationships, e.g.,

<a href=”http://cs.usfca.edu/~benson” rel=”friend”>Greg Benson</a> is my buddy.

The subject of the relationship is implicitly the author of the page where the link resides. The link itself should be a homepage.

The idea is that a crawler could read pages and through the xfn tags deduce a social network. In essence you have a ‘distributed social network’ as opposed to one where all the data is entered and stored on a central site. The idea of having semantic data scattered over the web is central to the concept of microformats (scattered in html documents) and the Semantic Web (scattered in rdf). Its a democratic concept and one that could take off if the culture changes or tools arise which get users to spend five seconds to add semantics to their data entry.

I have two questions concerning a generalization of xfn. First, what if I want to associate two persons, and I’m not either of the people. O.K., warning, whoh boy! Nobody should do that! Right? Well, think about real life, people assert associations between others all the time. “They’re married”, or “they’ve been doing the deed since day one”. Its a fact of life. But it seems that xfn, because of the subject implicitly being the author of the page where the link resides, doesn’t allow third-parties to make associations.

The second generalization that interests me is the person-document association, as opposed to person-person. p-p and p-url seem like the two fundamental associations of the web, the two most important ones in terms of semantically reshaping the web. I want to know the author of a url, the subject or subjects of a url, the annotator/bookmarker of a url. Is there an xfn or microformat for such person-url associations?

xfolk with cite and rel?

The other seemingly fundamental semantic info that we should be shooting for is typing of urls. Is the url a blog, an article, a podcast, a video (or a casing for such)?

I think a  key is that we don’t want to leave it to the page authors and Meta tag– this doesn’t work. But perhaps with the help of the masses…though delicious showed that only a system which understands the extremely low threshold of web taggers in terms of effort can succeed, and asking them to type as well as tag is perhaps too much.

Commongate communal blog service

commongate is a service for creating communal blogs (thanks to John Tropea for the link). Perhaps its nicest feature is that you can post to various gates (topics), and then view/feed gates and view/feed the collection of all a person’s posts: topics and people are both organizing elements.

So right now I’ve set up two blogs at wordpress: research2.wordpress.com and opencampaigns.wordpress.com. I can have a web page or profile that points to both, but there is no collated place to view all my posts, for me or someone else.

commongate’s basic setup is more in-line with the sybil-nature of all of us: we have multiple personalities. If we set up one blog, its too noisy. If we have multiple ones, its too schizoid.

Its nice to view posts by topic or person, and if you like a person’s posts on baseball be able to check out their posts about football.

peoplicious, the system I’m building, has a similar goal but works on top of the existing setup. Its organized by people, and you can specify a person’s blog. Then you can create lists of people, and in effect, you create a communal blog, because when you look at the list, you see the posts collated.

So you can create a ‘gateway’ from existing blogs, as with a blog aggregator.

Peoplicious is designed to allow more than one blog per person, but that’s not yet implemented. It does allow delicious name to be set, and then it collates a person’s posts and bookmarks.