Trading virtual objects may sound zany, but it seems people can get motivated enough to kill for them, like this tragic incident.

Who owns virtual resources? Can there be rights over objects/artifacts in virtual gaming worlds and for that matter the Internet? Do we own email messages sent or received on Hotmail or Gmail? Is this really different from privacy? Is this DRM?

$9m trade revenues on eBay for such artifacts, gives an idea of the scope of the problem.

Lots of interesting posts on folksonomies in the many2many group blog.

Clay Shirky offers an interesting metaphor for how new ideas and technologies, folksonomies in this case, evolve and are adapted.

To put this metaphorically, we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidly and monotonically down a route determined by the environment. We have a (very small) degree of control over our course in this particular stretch of river, and that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even significantly alter the direction we’re moving in.

Liz Lawley comments (“it’s the social network, stupid!”) on the need for personalized ranking.

One of the things that I’ve tried to emphasize every time I’ve talked to people involved with search engines is the growing uselessness of ranking algorithms that take the search and linking habits of the whole world into account. I don’t want to know what the average eight-year-old calls an image. I want to know what my friends and colleagues call an image. Or a link. Or a photo.

Flickr and del.icio.us work so well for me not because they aggregate the world’s tags, but because they allow me to aggregate my social network’s tags, links, and photos. I don’t want to see everybody’s links on productivity, but I do want to see Merlin Mann’s. I don’t want to see everybody’s links on blogging, but I do want to see danah’s. I don’t want to see “research” resources from a molecular biologist, but I do want to see them from a sociologist studying online social networks.

How does each of us personalize the ranking algorithms used by information retrieval systems? We can tell Flickr who’s in the group of people whose opinions we value. But do we have to do the same for del.icio.us and technorati and the 87 other sites we visit? An obvious idea is to integrate a trust based approach with a system to aggregate and integrate RDF information on our social network (FOAF) and the objects being searched over. One problem is that the straightforward way to define a ranking algorithm is non-incremental and expensive. Even incremental approximations will be expensive for large collections of things to be ranked. Google can afford to do it for the average web user, but not for each of us. Personalized and topic-based ranking offers many challenges (see An Analytical Comparison of Approaches to Personalizing PageRank for some discussion).

RDF + trust might form the foundation for a good motor for our kayak. We’ll have to see if it’s too big.

BlogShares is a fantasy stock market where weblogs are the companies. Players invest fictional dollars on shares in blogs. Blogs are valued by their incoming links and add value to other blogs by linking to them. Prices can go up or down based on trading and the underlying value of the blog. If your blog is not yet in their database, you can easily add it.

Blogshares is a product of Santa Cruz Tech which also has QuackTrack, billed as the “The world’s largest browsable blog index”. It looks like the two sites are driven off the same database. Another interesting service they have developed is padbot. Send it simple questions by SMS or email and it responds with relevant information.

By the way, we recommend EBB as a strong buy.

Thanksgiving.

No, we’re not talking turkeys but acknowledgements. Lee Giles and friends have been mining (mostly) computer science papers to determine what people and what funding agencies get thanked the most. In an article with Isaac Councill, “Who Gets Acknowledged: Measuring Scientific Contributions through Automatic Acknowledgment Indexing” in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences he described how they automatically extracted the metadata from documents on the web and the various formulae they used for thank ranking.

The most thanked individual? Oliver Danvy of the University of Aarhus. The most thanked organization? NSF or DARPA, depending on the formula used. Eventually the information will appear on CiteSeer, but for now see these news items:

• Nature news: New Method Ranks Impact of Computer and Information Science Funding Agencies, Institutions and Individuals
• Penn State press release: Acknowledgements hit the limelight

Acknowledgement metadata on papers may become another interesting source of social network information.

Indirect Reciprocity, Assessment Hardwiring, and Reputation, A Talk with Karl Sigmund

The Edge has an interesting interview with Austrian Mathematician Karl Sigmund on the topic of indirect reciprocity — giving something back not to the person to whom you owe something, but to somebody else in society. I really enjoyed Sigmund’s book Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution, and behavior which is an accessible and very enjoyable introduction to many topics surrounding models of cooperation and competition and how they develop. Unfortunately, the 1993 book seems to be out of print.

ClickZ’s The Blogosphere By the Numbers discusses trends identified by several companies and projects.

According to David Sifry, Technorati’s chief executive, the current number of blogs is now over 8 times bigger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003. The company tracked 3 million blogs as of the first week of July, and has added over 1 million blogs to its stable since then. Meanwhile, Pew Internet & American Life reports a new weblog is created every 5.8 seconds. That roughly translates into 15,000 new blogs every day.

The article also points out that blog traffic spikes when certain “web communicable events” occur — like the Howard Dean scream and the Kryptonite lock debacle.

I stumbled across this term at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab web page. Not reading carefully, at first I thought it was a group working on Pervasive technology. But no …

The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab creates insight into how computing products — from websites to mobile phone software — can be designed to change what people believe and what they do. Like human persuaders, persuasive interactive technologies can bring about positive changes in many domains, including health, business, safety, and education. With such ends in mind, we are creating a body of expertise in the design, theory, and analysis of persuasive technologies, an area called “captology.”

B. J. Fogg, the man behind this group, seems to have coined the term. He’s interested in exploring how all kinds of computing technologies, from kiosks to web pages to mobile phones, can be designed to motivate and persuade people, especially for good, e.g., encouraging healthy living or safe driving. A related project is the Web Credibility Project which studies how people evaluate a web site’s credibility.

Captology obviously has a dark side too. Google turned up an apparently related term captation which in French law has the following definition :

CAPTATION - French Law. The act of one who succeeds in controlling the will of another so as to become master of it. It is generally taken in a bad sense. Captation takes place by those demonstrations of attachment and friendship, by those assiduous attentions, by those services and officious little presents which are usual among friends, and by all those means which ordinarily render us agreeable to others. When those attentions are unattended by deceit or fraud they are perfectly fair, and the captation is lawful; but if, under the mask of friendship, fraud is the object and means are used to deceive the person with whom you are connected, then the captation is fraudulent and the acts procured by the captator are void.

That sounds a lot more like an all too common commercial (and political) approach to persuation.