SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

Digital Ethnography for Social Interaction Design

I was invited to speak at the Yahoo Research Group seminar last week (December 9, 2009) about the research methods I’ve used to study online communities. I called the talk “Digital Ethnography for Social Interaction Design” to capture the essence of what I wanted to cover. There are a number of challenges in studying online communities (the “social interaction design” part) — most notably that you cannot “shadow” someone’s day-to-day activities in ...

Social shopping: Putting the emotion back in e-commerce

This was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb on December 4, 2009, as a guest author. What are you going to buy this holiday season? Gift cards aren’t very personal, but friends’ recommendations can be. Richard MacManus recently covered the trends in e-commerce over the past decade. He noted that Amazon and eBay have dominated the online retail market with their model of using implicit user data to generate recommendations for others. Although this model will surely remain a centerpiec...

Designing for Sociality in Enterprise Search

Will Evans beat me to the punch in getting this post out! Earlier this month, we collaborated on creating a presentation for the Enterprise Search Summit West on “Designing for Sociality in Enterprise Search.” It went over pretty well and was fun to deliver! Here is more info for your enjoyment: This is the description of the presentation: Social search has the potential to improve search practices beyond what is possible with traditional informational retrieval algorithms. Two dif...

Three Flavors of Social Search: What to Expect

This was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb on November 12, 2009, as a guest author. With Google’s Social Search experiment, Bing’s integration with Twitter, and with Yahoo!’s partnership with One Riot—it’s clear that social search has both potential and momentum. But what will social search look like, and will it help us search better? And if it will, how? I’ve written previously about how social search won’t replace traditional search, how social relevancy rank may b...