More Hits?

In response to my question, Prof. David Lankes said a few words about gaining more "hits" on the websites in class on Thursday.

A lot of websites are using tricky approaches to gain more hits. For example, a single image is divided into five sub images, when the page is being loaded, all the image files and CSS file will be reloaded again and the division earned five more hits for the website every time.

While page view is also one of the criteria to decide the web usage/popularity. Some websites, especially news site divides a piece of news into multiple pages to earn more page views. For a lot of times, the news could be displayed well on a single page.

Some bloggers, set the RSS feed to output only the digest post instead of the entire blog post, hoping people to visit the blog instead of reading it in RSS reader.

I'm not sure if all the above activities truly help the website to advertise and to promote, anyway, I despise them. Such activities create inconvenience for web visitors and blog readers. Page loading may be slower and users have to click more times than the desired rates. For RSS digest output, not only require the reader to visit the website directly, it also causes redundant effort in saving and returning to the post. For example, I can use "star" to label the blog post if I think it's interesting and well written and can return to it anytime I want. If the RSS feed only offers the digested post, I will have to save the post manually and maybe I have to save it as a copy in my hard drive and cannot access them while using other computers. (Online bookmarks could help me with such issues, but sometimes, the URL changes and it will be very difficult to find the correct one.)

Survey Design

Last week, in IST 613, Library Planning, Marketing, and Assessment, Prof David Lankes let us to conduct an informal research about collections in Bird Library. We were required to:

• Choose research question.
• Identify documents to be gathered.
• Talk to people, including librarians and students.
• Conduct observation.
• Identify other methods to gather data.

We went to the library at 7pm, the weather was snowy and stormy. Usually, at this time of the day, the library is packed with students. However, there were few students in the library, and even people from our class were more than students.

There was only one librarian on the first floor, so several groups went to the circulation desk to ask him questions and finally he got really annoyed. When Olivia went there and said:"Hi, my name is Olivia", the librarian looked at her and asked:"Are you from the library class?" and he kept silent, refused to answer more questions.

For the observation, we had been sitting there for 15 minutes and observing the circulation desk distantly. Total number of patrons went there was three, and one of them was Nichol from our group to get an ILL book.

Is it the common scenery in Bird everyday, every hour? Obviously not.

When we reviewed our last week experiences today, Prof. Lankes pointed out that he kind of intentionally let us conduct research in BLIZZARD. For there are factors affecting survey results. Very limited number of students in a night with bad weather, it was only the second week of the semester, etc.

The phenomenon is easy to understand but what is important is to take multiple related aspects into consideration while applying surveys to let the data be more accurate.

Fake Followers on Twitter

I mentioned fake followers while discussing 新浪微博(sina mini-blog)，a mini-blog service in China, and I recently realized that there are also many fake followers on Twitter, you can buy 5000 followers with $20. However, those followers will not interact with you, will not reply or retweet any of your tweets, they are only a fancy number displayed on the right side bar of your screen.

I think you have to distinguish between real followers and fake followers (maybe Twitter could start a Verified Follower service), and how engaged those followers are. Do they retweet a lot and engage in conversation, or never tune in at all? Follower counts don’t tell you that. Just as all Website visitors are not worth the same, neither are all Twitter followers. But you can’t buy real followers. They come to you.

As I have described, the significant difference between fake followers on Twitter and sina mini-blog is, sina itself is generating these fake users. However, I have no evidence, my conclusion is drawn on the following observations:

1. Almost every time, right after I post a message, I will have a new "follower". If the follower is a human user, he/she shouldn't follow me right after my message is posted. The natural scenery for a real user is: he/she sees my message somewhere, and spend a couple of minutes discovering what else I have posted and decided whether to follow me or not.
2. Most of the fake users are following EXACTLY 30 people.
3. The users are from the same region as the region listed in my profile. I changed my location several times, and so the location of the fake followers.
4. Most of them do not a profile picture nor posted a single message.

In a recent study of RJMetrics, research shows some surprising statistic:

about 25% of accounts have no followers and about 40% of accounts have never sent a single Tweet. Also, "About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times" and "Only about 17% of registered Twitter accounts sent a Tweet in December 2009, an all-time-low."

Even think about people who are curious of Twitter and then register an account and forget it when they find it not that interesting, to me, it is still unable to explain why "About 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times" and "buy Twitter followers" service successfully explains the phenomena.

Prof. David Lankes, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University has been doing research on participatory librarianship and conversation theory. One of the ideas is "Knowledge is created through conversation". Twitter provides an efficient way for conversants to exchange views and ideas. Tweeting will be meaningless if there is no interaction involved. And fake followers could be easily detected.

Oh, for the interaction, I feel so sad there is almost no comments on this blog. Comments! Comments! Comments! Please let me know what you think, share your viewpoints with me!

HCI Awareness and Infrastructure for Disabilities

After submitting my HCI awareness assignment for IST 649, I realized that my awareness are very intuitive, on an initial stage of user experiences through interactions of computer software/applications. What can be learned and currently we are learning from the course are the reasons behind all these interfaces/designs that we interact with. For example, the human visual ability decides the best way for the output color scheme, the understanding of human physical limitations help engineers to design mouses, etc.

After I came to U.S, I've been very impressed of the pervasive infrastructure for disabilities in U.S. Every building I’ve been to, even small snack bars have restrooms for people using wheelchairs. While discussing it with my friends in China, they tell me that some buildings also have such restrooms. However, some of those special designed restrooms are useless because there is no way for people on wheelchair to get into the buildings. There are only stairs for people who can walk freely, no ramps for wheelchairs. What is more impressive is the equipment on Centro buses helping people to get on the bus by themselves. For most of the time, the entrance of the bus is common stairs for people to get on, when a person on wheelchair wants to get on the bus, a special platform will be used. The driver controls the platform to let it reach the ground and wait for the wheelchair to get on the platform. Then, the platform will be elevated to reach the bus floor. After that, the driver will help the passenger on the wheelchair to move to the space specified for them and secure the wheelchair with belt. With such equipment, people on the wheelchair could go to distant places all by themselves without accompanied by others. Although wheelchairs do offer people the ability to go outside, many of them still prefer to stay at home for they don’t want to require assistance by other people.

One thing we have discussed in class is the color design for color-blinded people, which possess more than 10 percent of the world population. Being asked if web designer should take color blinded people into consideration, Prof. Zhang said it was their own choice to decide the community the website aimed to serve. And Ashley, a student said what was interesting here was her instructor from a web design class said the web designers should meet the needs of the majority, which are non color-blinded people, since it is impossible to serve every niche of the population.

To me, the discussion with color-blinded people leads to another question. In China, students with visual disabilities will not be accepted in some specific majors. One of my best friends chose to study economics instead of science or engineering was because she has color deficiency and it would be limitations for her to study in such majors. My experiences in U.S makes me think that there might be some better solutions than simply closing the doors for such people. So, here comes the question, what is the situation in U.S?

Two months ago, in November, 2009, two universities, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse University refused to buy more Kindles because the device does not support visually impaired students to use it. The universities will take the stand until accessibility have been improvement have been by the company.