Hi, hypernarrative is a blog by Wilbert Baan about Art, Media and Technology with a focus on interactive storytelling. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Google or Netvibes. I'll post a few messages a week. Thanks for visiting!

Photo from this blog post by Michael Shanks

We have always collected things. Somehow making collections is valuable to us. Most of the media we are collecting is moving or has moved to a virtual representation. Music is moving to the web, video and games will. And I’m sure books will move to the web as well. Encyclopedia and dictionaries already did.

In the end it will probably be a mix of economics and access that make things move to the cloud of information. Why buy a more expensive cd in the store if you can listen to the song right now?

For now we create virtual representations of our physical collections. For example the books you own on LibraryThing or Amazon or your music on Last.fm.

My ‘real-life’ public profile
We use the collections to express who we are. My books and my collected music tell me something about myself. Your collection of books is like a public profile that your real-life friends see when they visit your house.

I don’t know why we collect. For some people it is an obsession, see the movie in the end of this post.

When collections move virtual we get a new type of collectors. The librarians already unite at wikipedia to collect all the information that is valuable. We see creative artists playing with public sets of information through API’s and feeds. Making interactive installations or retrieve emotions and relations from large sets of data.

For journalists the information age is like a golden age. There is so much data public available that if you know how to make valuable collections you can generate news. A good collection of information can act like a news machine. Database journalism enables people to see patterns that answer or create questions.

Video
I’m researching some things about collections for the EN.nl website. Here are some videos I found that are really interesting.

The interactive installation “I Want You To Want Me”, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, for their “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition.

I Want You To Want Me explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating. It chronicles the world’s long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, using real data collected from Internet dating sites every few hours.

The piece is presented on a 56″ high-resolution touch-screen, hanging vertically on the wall, and was installed at MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine’s Day.

My Map from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

Email became an integral part of my life in 1998. Like many people, I have archived all of my email with the hope of someday revisiting my past. I am interested in revealing the innumerable relationships between me, my schoolmates, work-mates, friends and family. This could not readily be accomplished by reading each of my 60,000 emails one-by-one.

Instead, I created My Map, a relational map and alternative self portrait. My Map is a piece of custom designed software capable of rendering the relationships between myself and individuals in my address book by examining the TO:, FROM:, and CC: fields of every email in my email archive. The intensity of the relationship is determined by the intensity of the line.

My Map allows me to explore different relational groupings and periods of time, revealing the temporal ebbs and flows in various relationships. In this way, My Map is a veritable self-portrait, a reflection of my associations and a way to locate myself.

More info: christopherbaker.net/projects/mymap/

POSSESSED from Martin Hampton on Vimeo.

‘POSSESSED’ enters the complicated worlds of four hoarders; people whose lives are dominated by their relationship to possessions. The film questions whether hoarding is a symptom of mental illness or a revolt against the material recklessness of consumerism. When does collecting become hoarding and why do possessions exert such an influence on our lives?

Last week I was reading a Wired article (March edition) about how the video rental service Netflix is awarding $1.000.000 to the person or group who can improve its recommendation algorithm by 10%.

Todays popular websites use smart algorithms to determine what we want or might like. Google is famous for its mix and so is the Amazon recommendation system. Your actions tell these systems about your behavior. And your actions make these services better in recommending you information. For example Google tracks what results people click. If most users click the second search result they make this the first result.

I love news selection
I really like how news websites, blogs and other person driven websites make a selection. Most often this works best if there is a sharp focus. A popular blog can’t be about everything. It has to be about a person or a subject to keep the blog interesting.

In the future this fragmentation might be happening to news websites as well. The traditional newspaper told you everything. It was your primary source of information. With websites we see a different pattern. People don’t just read one news website, they read many. They might have a favorite, but it is no such thing as exclusive readership. Will we see focus in newspaper websites as well? Although media operates independent it is almost always marked as ‘left’ or ‘right’ by the type of stories they focus on.

The news algorithm
Why wouldn’t news sorting be captured in algorithms? There is nothing that makes this impossible. Stories are written as closed interchangeable containers. News websites might make a selection on the frontpage, they also provide lists and rss-feeds where they sort the same information on time or popularity.

Journalists have multiple tasks, they create stories and they sort them on relevance. Maybe with this sorting we can experiment and create a more personal version as well?

Sorting news by machines
Sorting news is not just making a selection on popularity. Sorting news by systems is difficult. The presentation of what you like consists out a complex set of variables.

• What do you like (personal interest)
• What you might like (if you like a subject you might like to read about)
• What do you need to know (because it is important to you, and it will dominate the media landscape for a while)
• What everyone needs to know (breaking news)
• What do you officially don’t like, but occasionally read (the stories everyone says they don’t read but always seem to get the highest click-through rates)
• What do your friends (colleagues) read (news creates conversation and small-talk)
• What do your friends recommend (you trust your network)
• What you don’t want to know (things that really bore you and are irrelevant in any way)
• Where do you like to know more about (if you are an expert in something you don’t want another article that explains it all again. You would prefer analysis and background articles)
• What is your (current) location (for large groups of people location based information has extra value)
• Surprises (they change your interests and habbits)

* If I forgot something please ad your thoughts in the comments

These are the variables that construct personal relevance of a news website. It’s a complex set, but if you can manage a good balance you are able to create a website that sorts news by personal relevance on another level than we are used to.

I don’t know if an algorithm can create a better news experience and what it should look like. I do think there is value in tracking and learning form your users behavior and return new or additional value to the reader.

Update: Concept Design

| View | Upload your own

What this could look like and how you can keep this simple for the reader. The text is in Dutch. The screens ask for your location, favorite topics, company you work or would like to work and friends.

At the Next Web conference there was an overall urge for relevancy. You noticed it in presentations and startups. Unfortunately there weren’t many speakers that had exiting answers. In his presentation Robert Scoble made clear that for most new web applications ‘The first experience sucks‘.

Why?
This is inherent to how these new web applications work. The webservices that are doing something new are often ‘connected‘ applications. Websites and widgets connect information and people resulting in a new collections and new relevancy. This relevancy will only show itself when using the service for a while. Which is - of course - difficult to explain to a user when he or she signs up.

This is a user experience problem, but not one we will not find a solution for. The friendfinder button in most new web services enables you to import your Gmail contacts or another social network. Most applications are doing something similar to a service that already exists, with the open web (API’s and feeds) technology should be able to suggest a personal social profile before you start.

When information gets fragmented
What’s more interesting about this is what this search for relevancy really means. The web was always used similar to previous media. We made pages and domains on the web. Information was reserved for one place and relevancy was made by the website editor. This can be a news website or a blog.

Now the web is evolving in something that goes beyond what we are used to. Everything gets fragmented, distributed and aggregated. Information (text, photos and video) transfer from one online place to another. Information gets distributed and duplicated. The collection made by the creator is getting less relevant.

The distributed future of this blog post
For example this blog post is distributed through RSS and it will be picked up by a dozen of spam blog that will all duplicate the entire text and distribute it again. All these blogs are indexed over and over by aggregators like Google or any other. This blog post is written in the context of my blog, but most people will probably read it in another context. Specialized companies trace discussions about brands on the web and redistribute relevant articles. Social networks are crawling the web to show articles that are personal relevant to your profile (LinkedIn).

Data is made to be duplicated
The incredible amount of fragmented information is what makes the web interesting. New social recommendation tools, networks, online friends, aggregators, feeds and widgets are breaking the web apart. This is what makes the web really exiting and work like a network.

This is difficult to understand and use by publishers, copyright lawyers and designers but more relevant for the user. The reader doesn’t care what blog or website presents a good article or where they read it, as long as they can read it. The most important value is the relevancy of the presenter, this can be a system or your friend.

Diggnation live recording with fake mustaches Photo by Anne Helmond (on Flickr)

Today I visited the Next Web conference in Amsterdam. This conference is a two day event about the near future of the web.

Unfortunately I won’t be there tomorrow, but with these conferences this isn’t really a problem. There is a very good live coverage of the event. The organization took care of a live video stream, a backchannel, a great event blog and a bloggers corner (cable internet and wifi, power supplies) resulting in serious online coverage.

My highlights today (quotes aren’t the exact words used, this is how I interpreted them and wrote them down)
In the introduction there was a really interesting sentence by I think Erick Schonfeld that triggered me.

How to make money if the web explodes?

When I make something I don’t think much about business models, I like to think about a concept and how something can be valuable for a user. I don’t really see the web as a business. Although it is serious business.

For most people making a serious business defines the success of a concept. A web that is breaking apart (widgets, feeds) creates a serious problem for people who think this way.

The guy Bryan Thatcher from Empressr said about the future of the web:

“The cloud: information (content) becomes more important websites don’t”

Store your information online and access and transfer your information online. The computer or website becomes a terminal that allows you to access and alter your information. Open systems will eventually allow you to take (or distribute) your information to other services.

Kevin Rose talked about the future of Digg.com and how to make it more relevant.

Expose the right content to the right people

This quote is not just about Digg.com, it can be used for the web in general. We will see better and more personal filters. All these social applications and social profiles enable a better and more personal selection. We are getting used to this and expecting more relevant results on other websites as well.

Nova Spivack talked about his love for the semantic web

The web is the database

This is a concept that regards the semantic web as a database. Store all your information in ‘the cloud’ in the form of metadata. Every set of information will have a complete set of metadata in it, theoretically you wouldn’t need a database because everything is in the front-end.

A smart and great concept, but somehow I’m worried about who will make the meta information? User don’t like to enter a lot of meta information, they just want to upload and share photos.

Tomorrow another day, don’t miss it in Amsterdam or online.