Conversation maps

THE NET, besides the e-mail service, provides many tools - Newsgroups, Instant Messengers and Discussion Boards - that facilitate collaborative tasks. Newsgroups, whose data get archived and can be studied by anybody at anytime, present immense possibilities for scientists, sociologists and marketers. This column discusses a research project that attempts to evolve a mechanism to understand the various aspects of conversations that take place in the Newsgroups.

Newsgroup data

Net Newsgroups comprises hundreds of newsgroups and thousands of persons who actively participate in discussions that take place in the groups in their respective interests. In fact, one of the best ways to get the latest trends or developments on a particular area is to subscribe to a newsgroup related to one's subject and go through the postings. Many ideas emerge through the newsgroups and by just watching the mails that flow in the group one will get a lot of inputs on the requirements, aspirations and attitude of the newsgroup participants.

As all the postings in a newsgroup represent basically some observations/opinions/statements of persons with similar interests, it will be a worthwhile exercise to analyse the mails. This kind of Newsgroup archive analysis can produce a wealth of information such as the major subjects discussed (newsgroup threads), main activists of the group and how ideas evolved and. Though mining the archives of newsgroups will produce invaluable information products, doing the analysis manually is definitely a laborious task. Some attempts are being made to automate this process and the research project named 'Conversation maps' being undertaken by Warren Sack - media.mit.edu/wsack/ - of MIT Media Laboratories is an attempt in this direction.

Thousands of messages are being exchanged through the newsgroups between persons who would never have communicated had there been no Net. These `many-to-many' conversations create new relationships between persons across the globe. The conversation map system attempts to analyse the contents of messages and tries to spot the various relationships among them.

Once these parameters are computed, the system presents a four- panel graphical interface that depicts some features of the newsgroup `conversations' that may give more insights on the participants and the evolution of their ideas.

A small description of the conversation map's interface is as follows:

Social network that explains who conversed with whom - nodes of the network are labeled with the names of the people who were involved in the conversation. - Themes - terms mostly used in the conversation.

- Semantic network - linking terms with similar meaning and message.

- Threads - graphical representation of all the messages that have been exchanged for a specific period.

To know more about the 'conversation maps' and view a demonstration of it, check out the site at: media.mit.edu/wsack/ CM/quick-start.html.

Most of you must be using a two-button mouse. When you scan a big document or a lengthy web page, in order to go to the next page you usually move the mouse to the scroll bar and press at its up or down arrow depending on the direction in which you need to scroll the page. This process is quite irritating especially if one has to move back-forth several times over many pages.

Here is a small program that may smoothen your mouse dependent tasks. The program MouseImp (available at: oxxomedia.com/mouseimp/) helps you reduce the mouse movements through its `DirectScroll' feature. After installing the program, just move the mouse pointer over the window you want to scroll and press the right-mouse key. At this point you will see a 'hand' symbol and now start moving in the required direction - so whenever you want the screen to scroll, just right-click the mouse and simply drag it in the direction you want the scrolling to take place.

Ad-free web browsing

Banner advertisements, flashing animations, pop-up windows that appear all of a sudden into the monitor, web bugs that are planted to send some information on browsing habits to persons who are curious about it and the like are some of the unpleasant web entities that take away some of the charms of the Net life. In the previous issues in this column we discussed about these issues and had already mentioned some utilities that can help you from getting into these trouble spots. Here is another filtering product that is capable of providing a more smooth Net sailing. The program WebWasher (available free for home and educational users at the link:

webwasher.com/ en/products/ wwash/download-license.htm) filters out advertisement banners, pop-up windows, animations, web bugs and cookies. The program can also be used to filter unwanted web sites. After installing the program properly, access the test page provided at the link: webwasher.com/en/ products/ wwash/ testpage.htm.

A few weeks ago, this column featured the software StarOffice (staroffice.com), that can be considered as a complete free alternative to the Microsoft Office. One major obstacle in using this product is its size that deters many persons with slow speed Net links from downloading the package. Here is another Office suite with a reasonably manageable size as a free alternative to MS Office.

The software '602 Office Suite' contains four major applications such as word processor - fully compatible with MS Word, spreadsheet - similar to Excel, graphics editor and digital photo organiser. With all these features this product (14 MB), which is available at: software602.com makes a good download. Besides free office suite mentioned above, the site hosts many other priced products.

J. Murali

(The author can be contacted at: murali27@satyam.net.in)

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Section  : Science & Tech
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