A 2005 presentation on the shift from discrete sites to the flow, aggregation and composition of utterances. It was difficult to see then that these flows would 5 years later mostly be happening within a few huge, winner-takes-all social websites. Contains capsule presentation of an embryonic Underskog with attending social graphs which may be interesting to some. The presentation was given in a seminar held by a research group at the University of Oslo. http://underskog.no/kalender/135_even-westvang-from-sites-to-flows-designing-for-the-poro/forestilling/2599

1. From Sites to Flows:
Designing for the Porous Web
Even Westvang
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5

2. Outline
• An Example
• A Tentative Vocabulary
• Enabling Technologies
• Underskog (a work in progress)

3. First an example

4. Say I have a website
www.site.com

5. Say I have a website
and I turn it into a weblog
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
www.site.com

6. Say I have a website
and I turn it into a weblog
and I decide to let Blogger host it for me
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
www.site.com

7. Say I have a website
and I turn it into a weblog
and I decide to let Blogger host it for me
and Blogger offers me commenting
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
www.site.com

8. Say I have a website
and I turn it into a weblog
and I decide to let Blogger host it for me
and Blogger offers me commenting and trackback
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
www.site.com

9. Say I have a website
and I turn it into a weblog
and I decide to let Blogger host it for me
and Blogger offers me commenting and trackback and a feed
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
www.site.com

10. Say I have a website
and I turn it into a weblog
and I decide to let Blogger host it for me
and Blogger offers me commenting and a feed and trackback
posting every day, I start writing in Ecto
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
ecto sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
www.site.com

11. and I turn it into a weblog
and I decide to let Blogger host it for me
and Blogger offers me commenting and and a feed and trackback
posting every day, I start writing in Ecto
my digital snaps are on ickr, but also on my site
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
ecto sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
www.site.com

12. and I decide to let Blogger host it for me
and Blogger offers me commenting and and a feed and trackback
posting every day, I start writing in Ecto
my digital snaps are on Flickr, but also on my site
Flickr offers feeds of many aspects of their site
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
ecto sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
www.site.com

13. and Blogger offers me commenting and and a feed and trackback
posting every day, I start writing in Ecto
my digital snaps are on Flickr, but also on my site
Flickr offers feeds of many aspects of their site
I combine it with that from my site with Feedburner
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
ecto sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
www.site.com

14. posting every day, I start writing in Ecto
my digital snaps are on Flickr, but also on my site
Flickr offers feeds of many aspects of their site
I combine it with that from my site with Feedburner
and I use Uploader to get images to Flickr
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
ecto sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
www.site.com
uploadr

15. my digital snaps are on Flickr, but also on my site
Flickr offers feeds of many aspects of their site
I combine it with that from my site with Feedburner
and I use Uploader to get images to Flickr
but sometimes also my phone
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
ecto sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
up
www.site.com
lo
ad
r
ca one
ph
(m m
)
ail

16. Flickr offers feeds of many aspects of their site
I combine it with that from my site with Feedburner
and I use Uploader to get images to Flickr
but sometimes also my phone
the resulting feed may be viewed in a newsreader
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
ecto sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
reader
up
www.site.com
lo
ad
r
ca one
ph
(m m
)
ail

17. I combine it with that from my site with Feedburner
and I use Uploader to get images to Flickr
but sometimes also my phone
the resulting feed may be viewed in a newsreader
or on Bloglines
re
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
a
de
in
attempt to ingratiate
r
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
ecto sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
up
www.site.com
lo
ad
r
Bl
og
neli
s
ca one
ph
(m m
)
ail

18. and I use Uploader to get images to Flickr
but sometimes also my phone
the resulting RSS feed may be viewed in a newsreader
or on Bloglines
and oh, I’ve started using del.icio.us
re
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
a
de
in
attempt to ingratiate
r
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
ecto sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
up
www.site.com
lo
ad
r
Bl
og
neli
s
ca one
ph
(m m
)
ail

19. and I use Uploader to get images to Flickr
but sometimes also my phone
the resulting RSS feed may be viewed in a newsreader
or on Bloglines
and oh, I’ve started using del.icio.us
Perhaps a question:
re
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
a de
in
attempt to ingratiate
r
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
ecto sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
up
www.site.com
lo
ad
r
Bl
og
lin
s e
ca one
ph
(m m
)
ail

20. and I use Uploader to get images to Flickr
but sometimes also my phone
the resulting RSS feed may be viewed in a newsreader
or on Bloglines
and oh, I’ve started using del.icio.us
Perhaps a question: do I still have a website
re
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
a de
in
attempt to ingratiate
r
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
ecto sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
up
www.site.com
lo
ad
r
Bl
og
lin
s e
ca one
ph
(m m
)
ail

21. and I use Uploader to get images to Flickr
but sometimes also my phone
the resulting RSS feed may be viewed in a newsreader
or on Bloglines
and oh, I’ve started using del.icio.us
Perhaps a question: do I still have a website, or do I maintain a series of ows
re
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
a de
in
attempt to ingratiate
r
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
ecto sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
up
www.site.com
lo
ad
r
Bl
og
lin
s e
ca one
ph
(m m
)
ail

22. and I use Uploader to get images to Flickr
but sometimes also my phone
the resulting RSS feed may be viewed in a newsreader
or on Bloglines
and oh, I’ve started using del.icio.us
Perhaps a question: do I still have a website, or do I maintain a series of ows,
in an ecology of services?
re
. monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
a de
in
attempt to ingratiate
r
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
ecto sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
up
www.site.com
lo
ad
r
Bl
og
lin
s e
ca one
ph
(m m
)
ail

23. A Tentative Vocabulary

24. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity

25. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity
• Lent from pragmatics (Austin, Searle)
• “An utterance is a complete unit of speech in spoken language.”
• Adapted for this context
• A distribution system centric definition:
• ‘Utterance’ denotes the atomic unit of
expression (image, music, text) which
may move through one level of a
distribution chain

26. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity

27. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity

28. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity

29. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity

30. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity

31. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity
• The value of an utterance depends on
context
• What if one may multiply the contexts
an utterance appears in?
• Infrastructures for media diffusion
• Example: where an editor may
syndicate and aggregate from sources

32. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity
• News agencies and the telegraph
• Led to local press taking market shares
from big city papers
• Multiplication of contexts led to the
robust language of news (Fang 97, p.82)
• Nothing new in the why, but rather the
how and the who

33. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity
• Additionally: what if utterances may be
managed machinically...
• so that they may appear where relevant
(to discourse)

34. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity
• An utterance may have metadata
(location, time, author, ...)
• A much talked about strategy for finding
sets of relevance (or at least
similarities) is tagging
• Others: bayesian filtering, collaborative
filtering, ontologies and controlled
vocabularies (Dewey)

35. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity
• Montage: spatial and temporal
• Proximity eases cognition along axes of
relevance in different contexts

36. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity
• The central point: flow enables
expression through multiplication of
utterances...
• like a smart megaphone with relevance
criteria

37. An Utterance in Contexts with Relevance and Proximity
• These developments are happening
within personal media
• At times enabled by CC-licensing
• Little friction: only users wishing be
heard, not trying to protect their rights
or make money out of their weblog
posts

38. Enabling Technologies

39. Technologies of Flow
• A set of standards
• Built on other standards (HTTP / XML)
• Fixed by darwinian processes &
negotiation
• Small pieces... loosely joined
• An ongoing process

40. Starting point: personal publishing
• Personal publishing software
• Hosted (Blogger - Livejournal)
• On your own server (Movabletype, ...)
• Weblogging as genre dependent on
publishing technologies (updating)
• Only a few technology providers needed
agree (they didn’t though)

41. Speci c Standards
• Trackback
• RDF Site Summaries (RSS)
• Web Services / APIs (over XML-RPC,
SOAP, REST)

42. . monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
Trackback
in
attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
• Attempts discourse across weblogs /
offers bidirectional linking
• Commenting by proxy
• Example: Mena Trott’s introducing
pricing structures to Movabletype
• Two contexts – joined

43. . monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
RDF Site Summaries (RSS) attempt to ingratiate
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
• Or Really Simple Syndication
• A means of knowing that a resource has
been updated
• Or simply obtaining a list to other
resources
• Enables syndication and aggregation (in
other RSS feeds or on web sites)

44. RSS
• Yes, it may just be a way of reading the
morning paper...
• and yes it is just a list of links with
descriptions and pithy metadata
• (while keeping in mind: HTML is only a
document format)

45. RSS Enables
• News readers (which do not only read
news)
• Confluence of information sources on
web sites (Blogger + Delicious + Flickr
+ ... )
• Podcasting (RSS Enclosures)
• Broadcatching (silly term – RSS
Enclosures + BitTorrent)

46. . monday: went to the
shop to get dog food
in
attempt to ingratiate
Web Services
myself with land lady.
. saturday: skype
sessions
fewer and fewer as
XMAS
approaches.
• Simple ways of asking a service
questions about its content
• Moves structured data from one context
to another
• Examples: Flickr API, Google maps,
Yahoo (flickr, delicious, search, sematic
networks)

48. Underskog
Social Calendaring for Oslo

49. Underskog
• Social calendaring
• find out what is happening as a function
of what your friends are up to
• maintains a global calendar of events
everyone is interested in
• Collaborative weblog
• for richer disclosure & common scope

50. Design
• Uses a relatively recent set of design idioms for
web applications
• Explicitly Social
• Collaborative
• Dense
• Situated (at least half the work is social - ref.
upcoming.org)
• Porous
• Firefly, Six degrees, Flickr, Livejournal, Orkut,
Myspace, ...

51. Development
• Simen Skogsrud & Even Westvang
(Bengler) feat. Alexander Staubo
• Interdisciplinary team
• No specification (contrast w/ Sone2)
• Stories and to-do lists
• 1 month (300hrs) part-time effort from
first planning meeting to release

52. Personal media in collective contexts
• Service must be valuable for the
individual
• Collect utterances on shared artifacts
• Design for disclosure
• Remember the lesson of Six-Degrees:
reflecting a personal network is fun for
2 days, but not sufficiently valuable (oh,
fright)

53. • 643 comments
• 5000 private messages
• 219 events
• 720 recommendation or attendances

54. Underskog is a Gift
• No plan to monetize
• We want it ourselves and think it may
make Oslo better for our friends, their
friends and their friends and their
friends (everyone)

55. Underskog is Research
• Explicitly an effort to learn to design
social software (reverse engineering of
observations + domain specific solves)
• Almost impossible to find data on
usage : build something to see how it is
used

56. 2
2
2 domstol_no 2
2
2kongehuset_no
5
akademika_no
2
2 135
secretariat_efta_int 16
europaportalen_no
lnu_no
21 2 4
2 samediggi_no
2 3
onen_no 5 2
2 2
2
4
23 2 4
norge_no
2 2
3
2 150
stortinget_no 2
senterpartiet_no
87 2
4
gronnstat_no 2
2 7 2
4 175
7
2
2 2
2
3
4
2 2 2 3
5
m_com 8 6
2
5 3
5 19 2
2
4
2 2
2
4
2 5 2
2 2
3
5
2
14
26 13
2
nrk_no
3
3
3 11
europakom
4 3
2 3 5 dep_no
3
38 5
4
2 sv_uio_no
47
2
7
4 2
bifinans_dep_no 91
33 4
40 2
nb_no
statsbudsjettet_dep_no 81
2
4
16
54 2 49
frp_no
25 odin_dep_no
125 12
8
3
lovdata_no
2
2
2 8
7
2
7 7
16
52
8
11 3
adobe_com 180 13
47 5 30
adobe_no
2
2 27 6
26
2 2 2 3 3
2 6
statsbudsjett_dep_no
179
10 2
6 173
49 3
2 18 3 sft_no
oed_no
7 2
5
3 18

57. 01.12.05

58. 14.12.05

59. 14.12.05
no founders

60. The Porous Underskog

61. The Leaky Forest
• RSS
• iCal - events > calendars (example)
• My events on my web page
• Flickr integration
• Parasitic relationship across tag
spaces

62. RSS
• Updates
• Tags have RSS feeds
• A user (Jørgen) has requested: I need a
RSS feed of objects I have contributed
to which have updated

63. My events on my web page
• Can we use Underskog for our
calendaring?
• Yes, you can, but not without
participating and inviting your friends
and telling everyone what you are doing

64. iCal
• Calendaring feeds for you or your circle

65. iCal
• Calendaring feeds for you or your circle

66. Underskog Needs Images
• For coverage of past events
• And to lend a general feeling of
placeness

67. Integrating Flickr and Underskog
• Flickr has an API and tags
• Underskog has tags
• First thought explicit namespace
joining: underskog.no as tag
• Then: how about just Oslo + (whatever)
• Rights management: Creative
Commons + click wrap

68. Flickr + Underskog
• Allows us to offers thousands of
contextually relevant images
• Encourages our users to use Flickr
• While giving our users the possibility of
having these images used in other
contexts (43places.com)

69. Plans...
• Two-way SMS alerts and status
notification (swipe message rating of
concerts in progress through RFIDs in
toilets)
• Location based through IP or
positioning
• Finding ways of getting Underskog into
other contexts like the physical & public
(PDF, newspaper, the video billboard
outside Oslo S)

71. Designing for the Porous Web
• What contexts may each utterance be
valuable in?
• How may utterances be allowed to flow?
• How may meta-data allow this to
happen automatically?
• What is the role of vernacular
development literacies in this picture?