2003
DecemberBest tunes
Bonnie Prince BIlly is a tough one to pin down, certainly prolific and somewhat dodgy, but Master and Everyone gets my vote for best of 2003.
December What do you mean by that?
What it means | what it looks like. I have always played with Legos. When my kids were young, I brought out my treasured box with thousands of bricks, only to be disappointed that my kids lusted after the 'kits' and ignored the 'basics'. After buying one of these kits it was a pleasure to have them go through dutifully and create the rocket/vader/escape vehicle with all of the specialized shaped bricks and detailed instructions. But for me, it loses something from someone who creates that same experience out of the 2 shapes and 4 colors we had in the past. Creating semantic web sites are much the same challenge, and thus appeal to me. There are a handful of tags and you have to carefully analyze your content and find the right tags to describe that content in the most meaningful way possible.
Some decry that you lose flexibility, but I think the semantics are just about right for most material, lists, paragraphs, headings. These things are the building blocks of information. Gradients, alignment, styles, these tweak the meaning. While style is perceived first, it's substance that makes the web the resource it is. It's all just data, after all. Update - the recommendations of HTML 5.0 are out, and its a real treat - <header><footer> - well you get the idea.
VotingOctober
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Having worked on getting everyone to vote (early and often) for their professors, and doing the paper on the voting (tamagotchi) algorithm for the meme system really has me thinking of how the main interaction on the web is to vote. This can be by referencing, by literally casting a vote, adding a comment, etc. So if the web was semantic, and people could vote, you could come up with a map of what people consider important. Now, this would change moment by moment, but as I write, looking over my stock ticker, this voting thing seems a clue to the future. It certainly didn't hurt American Idol.
AugustOnline evaluations
The challenge, take a manual process where people went door to door and asked students to evaluate the teachers. Those sheets were scanned, tallied (data corrected when the sheets were unreadable) then comments were typed. All in all about 500 hours a quarter. When all this was completed the results were put in front of the deans, and certain people had a talking-to, or people were promoted. This of course happened months after the fact, so there was a bit of chagrin. The team brainstormed a bit, but what seemed clear to me was there was no real value proposition for the people completing the task. Why should they bother? Because we asked?
Turned out asking (nicely) paid off fine. But to sweeten the deal, give them a place to find the evaluation links. Since it only happens for a week or so a quarter, have to have something to look at in the meantime. How about a 'portal' - they're popular. But a portal that is both personalized and prioritized, unlike everything else called a 'portal' out there? With actual info, instead of links to info that may or may not be there? So MyCTI was born. It also gave us the key bit of information to make the email reminding system work - the students real email! This was the magic ticket to give us 87% compliance in the first quarter then 94% from then on. For those who like to straggle, the automated emails turned out to be the key to convince them that they were the 'last person' not to enter their opinion. Nice!
Unexpectedly, having real time access to the evaluations (I even put a ticker on the homepage to tally the results) there is a even more shocking value add - comments. The old hand written comments used to be typed (for anonymity) but most people didn't fill them out. Now, its a bonanza, forget quantitative info - I even was able to set up a carrot situation for the faculty, who were understandably eager to get their results, as soon as they submitted the grades, the comment/eval was made live. Total hours spent for the new system - 4. Who said this web thing was worthless?