Abstract: [This paper] explores the importance of designing shared browsing user interfaces to support sociability. In particular, several shared browsing interfaces were empirically tested for the extent to which they helped people achieve a sense of shared understanding--or common ground--while surfing the web. We found a) that people generally preferred a shared browser to an unshared browser when shopping online together, and b) that user interface features that enhanced common ground had a greater impact on enjoyment than did features affecting ease of use or functionality. These results suggest that web designers need to take into account supporting sociability when considering the tradeoffs in their user interface designs.

Supporting Sociability in a Shared Browser [PDF]

"How Not To Be Seen"

Published on 11 January 2002, this 16-page document from Decision Support Systems, Inc. explains the purpose of "SCOT", discusses best practices, highligts weaknesses in and attacks on SCOT, and more. There are lots of other papers listed on the company's web site (metatempo.com), including "Applications of Memetics" and "Memetic Engineering-PsyOps and Viruses for the Wetware". The "Wetware" paper was published in 1993 and is also hosted online by 7Pillars Partners. (DSSi and 7Pillars are partner firms.)

The firm is self-described in this way: "DSSi is a collective of high-tempo, multi-disciplinary, self-organizing, and experienced professionals with a wide range of cross-domain expertise, from international economics, finance, and operations, to technology development, security, intelligence, and cognitive sciences. We combine such domain expertise with a deep understanding of the rapidly evolving international environment to help clients improve the value of their operations, reframe their strategic position or brand, improve their business processes continually, and implement custom solutions in order to thrive on the increasing complexity of modern global political economies."

Secure Communications Operational Tradecraft [PDF]

"large-scale models of revolutionary information systems"

The very fabric of life in the next millennium will be dependent on the effective utility of new communications media ... [T]o prosper, [we need] revolutionary network information systems which can be deployed into mass infrastructure. ... The best way to predict the future is to invent it. ... CANIS carries out large-scale experiments on network information systems, which can serve as effective models for predicting the world of the electronic future. The motto of CANIS is Social Revolution through Information Technology. The primary activity of CANIS is the design of new network information systems and analysis of their deployment in model user communities.

... The Interspace Research Project is developing a prototype environment for semantic indexing of multimedia information in a testbed of real collections. The semantic indexing relies on statistical clustering for concepts and categories. Interactive navigation based on semantic indexing enables information retrieval at a deeper level than previously possible for large, diverse collections.

CANIS: Community Architectures for Network Information Systems

This paper is published in the January 2002 issue of IEEE Computer magazine, pp. 54-62.

The Interspace: Concept Navigation Across Distributed Communities
by Bruce R. Schatz

Abstract: With the Interspace, the global information infrastructure will, for the first time, directly support interaction with abstraction. This infrastructure uses technologies that go beyond searching individual repositories to analyze and correlate knowledge across multiple sources and subjects. The Interspace will offer distributed services to transfer concepts across domains, just as Arpanet used distributed services to transfer files across machines and the Internet uses distributed services to transfer objects across repositories. Standard protocols for the emerging information infrastructure will support searching knowledge collections maintained and indexed by specialized communities and residing directly on users' personal machines. These protocols will automatically interconnect related logical spaces, letting individuals navigate across community repositories rather than searching for interlinked objects within physical networks. The Community Architectures for Network Information Systems Laboratory has developed a working Interspace prototype that uses scalable technologies for concept extraction and navigation. They have successfully tested these technologies, which compute contextual frequency of document phrases within community repository, on discipline-scale, real-world collections. Within the next decade, semantic indexing will extend beyond concepts and categories to perspectives, which relate concepts within categories, and situations, which relate categories within collections. These more abstract semantic levels will lead to a closer matching of the meanings in the user's mind to the world's objects.

The Interspace: Concept Navigation Across Distributed Communities

The National Academy of Sciences has made available a prepublication copy of this report on "cybersecurity." David Clark, Butler Lampson, Don Norman, David Patterson, Herb Lin, and others on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board produced this report. Reviewers include Steve Bellovin, Carl Landwehr, and Fred Schneider.

Excerpts of the summary from 01/09/02 NYT: [O]ur ability and willingness to deal with threats has, on balance, changed for the worse. ... Industry needs to do more, and policy makers should finance research.

Don't you have infrastructure to secure? Read this report, and then GET BUSY!

Cybersecurity Today and Tomorrow: Pay Now or Pay Later

Lots of interesting papers are available here. This conference was held in Ireland in June 2001. Here are a few of the paper titles:
Using Dimensionality Reduction to Improve Similarity Judgements for Recommendation
Paths and Contextually Specific Recommendations
Combining Dynamic Agents and Collaborative Filtering ... for Better Recommendation Quality
Relevance Feedback for Best Match Term Weighting Algorithms in Information Retrieval
Personalization through Specification Refinement and Composition
Relevance Feedback and Personalization: A Language Modeling Perspective
Comparing Recommendations Made by Online Systems and Friends
Flycasting: On the Fly Broadcasting
Personalization and Recommender Systems in the Larger Context: New Directions and Research Questions

Proceedings of the Second DELOS Network of Excellence Workshop on Personalisation and Recommender Systems in Digital Libraries

Social navigation is a vibrant new field which examines how we navigate information spaces in "real" and "virtual" environments, how we orient and guide ourselves, and how we interact with and use others to find our way in information spaces. This approach brings a new way of thinking about how we design information spaces, emphasising our need to see others, collaborate with them, and follow the trails of their activities in these spaces. Social Navigation of Information Space is the first major work in this field, and includes contributions by many of the originators and key thinkers. It will be of particular interest to researchers and students in areas related to CSCW and human computer interaction. As a thoroughly multi-disciplinary topic, it will also be of interest to researchers in cognitive psychology, social psychology, philosophy, linguistics, sociology, architecture and anthropology.

Social Navigation of Information Space

In December 2001, Tor Books republished this cyberpunk classic, and now it is readily available from Amazon.com and other booksellers. 352 pages in paperback -- a bargain at any price! -- now yours for less than US$12! Get yours today.

Ingram's editorial review states: "In 1981, three years before publication of William Gibson's Neuromancer, Vernor Vinge's criticaly acclaimed novella "True Names" invented the concept of cyberspace. This book is the first forum to explore the blossoming discoveries and groundbreaking applications, both current and future, on the new frontier of the Internet and all its subsets."

True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

Philip S. Antón, Richard Silberglitt, and James Schneider
Prepared for the National Intelligence Council. 92 pages.

This (c)2001 RAND publication is freely available online in HTML and PDF. It provided input to the US government's Global Trends 2015 document. Here's the publisher's summary:

Various technologies have the potential for significant and dominant global effects within the next few decades. This report provides a quick look at global technology trends in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and materials technology and their implications for information technology and the world in 2015.

The Global Technology Revolution

In considerable detail, Lévy describes the ways in which cyberspace will help promote the growth of democracy, primarily through the participation of individuals or groups. His analysis is enlivened by his own personal impressions of cyberculture-garnered from bulletin boards, mailing lists, virtual reality demonstrations, and simulations. Immediate in its details, visionary in its scope, deeply informed yet free of unnecessary technical language, Cyberculture is the book we require in our digital age.

Cyberculture