Intro to experiment 3

Got distracted by still trying to embed dynamic ‘things’ like a Wordtree visualisation on wiki pages - think I’ve found a way to do which haven’t done yet -on Google Sites wikis. Just to make it confusing for anyone unfamiliar with Java (programming) and JavaScript (browser scripting) they are not the same, but the Java applet visualisation in Many Eyes can be embedded using JavaScript. You can use with Google Gadgets API as per this explanation on Google groups by embedding in an iframe which lives like a floating box on top of your regular web page. iframes are not great from an accessibility point of view, but you can use them on various wikis. Don’t have time to look at an API right now but will return to…

Whilst I’m going completely off topic, if you ever want to know more about JavaScript, there’s a nice friendly tutorial that explains it using wild bears.

Profiles
If you have an enterprise wiki solution, there is a possibility that your wiki will be talking to other applications you use, maybe all linked so the chances of having more information other than your name is more likely. However for public free hosted wikis, it is more likely that the profile information is not likely to be as detailed because it partly depends on the person who has filled it in - with the multitude of things we sign up for, filling in profile information each time into different boxes in forms is less and less appealing. Or in some cases it is little more than a contact details form e.g.

With some wiki software, they give you the option to add tags to your profile - this could be about areas that you might be interested in. So if someone is using a wiki for the first time and would like to find other people as well as content with similar interests, the tags can be really helpful. You could then create visualisations of tags, in the same way as many of the delicious add-ons that have been created e.g. in Malinka Ivanova’s great post earlier this year.

However, this is starting to stray into social graph territory which is way beyond simple visualisations of who is doing what on a wiki and the additional visualisation of other areas in which a person might be social, could be distracting rather than helpful - will it actually make a wiki more social / does a wiki need to be more social?

Bearing that in mind, will attempt to do experiment 3 - soon. This series of posts is as usual, my attempt to throw some ideas out there - I know a whole bunch of stuff about web pages and wikis, I’ve been playing around with charts, formulas in spreadsheets (can’t really do anything in egovernment without being buried occasionally spreadsheets !) and some visualisation stuff for several years but do not consider myself to have expertise in either of these when it comes to extraction of data of any kind. I’m kind of hoping / dreaming that anyone who comes across these posts with more experience in a particular area can point me in a useful direction…

Likewise for experiment 5 when I try and put some of this into a 3D environment, I have until now purposely avoided things like Lindenscript (and no room to think with all the other programming languages I am attempting to do stuff with) and I have not built anything other than a media and web page ’screen’ in Second Life so far. I’m really hoping someone else has already found a way, there is a wikiHUD for Second life wiki which may be a starting point.

This entry was posted on 20/10/2008 at 10:14 pm and is filed under wiki, visualisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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