content creators (6 out of 6)

URIs for content creators and content

Generating unique IDs

In a centralised system, I could generate my own unique IDs by whatever means, assign them, and be done with it.

I thought briefly about trying to generate human-readable unique IDs, but this article made me decide that that will all end in tears.

Maybe for now I assume that people won't need to remember their OnlinePersona URI... Dangerous? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it's more likely that someone will be searched for by all the properties of their OnlinePersona, but the OnlinePersona itself doesn't matter directly. We shall see.

So on that note, Python's UUID will do. They're long and horrible. But I'll get over it.

Power to the people

How do I persist creator and content URIs in a non-centralised, user-owned network?

People would need the option to change their URI to whatever they felt represented themselves, like their personal 'about me' page. Trying to enforce content negotiation and a Document != Person mentality here might be difficult.

Ultimately it doesn't really matter what their URI is as long as it resolves and persists, right? And if it doesn't resolve, or even disappears entirely, it's kind of rubbish, but not Web-breaking. Kind of the reason the Web still holds up, and the reason the Semantic Web is an extension of that.

Assuming a distributed, Diaspora*-esque 'Pod' structure for this network, if a user moves to another Pod and as a result must change their URI, the protocols involved essentially need to require leaving a 'forwarding address' to their new URI. Maybe, in this scenario, URIs are handled differently altogether. Separately from the Pods. You can get a URI from the Pod you just joined, or you can use your own or generate one from a provider.

How do you authenticate changing of a URI? Someone could essentially steal someone else's identity by switching out their URI... so... that can't happen.

Maybe I'm thinking too much. I might need to talk to someone smarter about this.

🏷 http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Doing http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Doing content creators content network phd semantic web social network uri uris

Fri 8th of November 2013 at 4:16pm (+00:00)

Last modified: Fri 8th of November 2013 at 4:16pm (+00:00)

Network of creator profiles

I'm trying to automatically find connections between accounts on different networks - social networks, content hosting sites, other? - that are held by the same person Agent. I'm starting with YouTube, because that's a good source of content creators.

Who?

I haven't figured out a way to reliable pick channels at random (and have since decided that wouldn't be a good way of doing it anyway due to the long tail of people who don't upload anything at all, let alone are 'active' content creators), so I'm starting with the 'standard feeds'. These used to, more sensibly, be called Charts. They're RSS (or Atom or JSON) feeds of statistics about content or channels. They no longer appear on the frontend of the site, but are available if you know where to look. They are mentioned in some of the API documentation, which is referred to in the YouTube Help about generating your own RSS feeds from YouTube content. The standard feeds are:

• Most recent videos
• Most viewed
• Top rated
• Most discussed
• Top favorites
• Most linked
• Recently featured
• Most responded

Most of these are useful in finding popular videos, which means there's a good chance the uploader has a wide network of connections within YouTube (which I can follow to get more information). Many, though, will be one-hit wonders. I've picked Top favorites as a list that intuition says will be more likely populated by videos from channels to which viewers have some kind of loyalty. These days everything you do on YouTube shows up in your friends feeds, so people may favourite a video as part of building their own identity on the service, as well as to support the content creators they love. It demonstrates an active, positive, reaction to the video. It's the content creators who produce content that is received in this way that I'm ultimately aiming to support. Most viewed, discussed, linked and responded could simply be controversial. Recently featured is some YouTube-inner-circle conspiracy, no doubt. This is all my opinion; if anyone has any better insights on these charts, please do let me know.

I'm also limiting the charts to 'this week', to get a fairly - but not too - rapid turnover of data. 'Today' might give me too many less-established one-hit wonder, viral of the moment types; longer term establishes some sort of consistent enjoyment of the video by the masses. 'All time' is a fairly unchanging list, and would mean all my research is based around Charlie Bit Me. (Although this in itself might be an interesting study of content creator evolution; the original video was aimed at close family and friends, went viral by chance, and since the parents and children involved have built a many-$ content creation empire, with sequels and merchandise and all sorts. They've easily made enough from ad revenue to put both kids through college. But that's another discussion).

Why though?

I'd like to know which other networks are most commonly linked to by active content creators. This might indicate what kinds of interactions are meaningful to them. Social networks for interacting with fans? Other content host sites for different versions of their content, or different media types? Independently run websites and portfolios? Online merchandise stores? Other peoples' content they want to share with their viewers (friends and collaborators)?

It might also be interesting to try to find out how often people reuse the same username across sites. And do people link to profiles on other sites that aren't their own? Either profiles they share with collaborators or friends, or just other peoples' profiles entirely? How can I reliably differentiate?

YouTube's provisions for external account linking

YouTube allows people to put links on their channel. They can choose up to four 'social' links to display icons for over their channel banner, plus one 'custom' link. They can also input as many custom links as they like which show up in a list in the About section of their channel.

The predefined list of 'social' links from YouTube is:

• Google+
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Myspace
• Tumblr
• Blogger
• deviantArt
• WordPress
• SoundCloud
• Orkut
• Flickr
• Google Play
• iTunes
• Pinterest
• Instagram
• Zazzle
• CafePress
• Spreadshirt
• LinkedIn

There are crucial things missing from this list, I'm sure - Bandcamp, Newgrounds, off the top of my head - but if this is what YouTube thinks its users want to connect to, then it seems like as good a place to start as any. And of course, if a chosen profile doesn't appear on this list, they can add it (labelled however they want) in the custom links section. The custom links section is also often used for listing secondary (or tertiary or group) YouTube channels, which are fairly commonly found amongst active YouTubers.

Getting these links programmatically

The YouTube API (v3) is balls when it comes to giving me information that is useful in this regard.

Scraping time!

Code is on Bitbucket.

Currently all of these links, regardless of banner, social, or custom, conveniently reside in <li>s with a class of custom-links-item. I BeautifulSouped them out. (Why I can't get this information through the API, I don't know).

Linked Data-ing things

So I'll use FOAF's OnlineAccount to hook all the accounts together as Linked Data, which in theory is a perfect fit. SIOC's UserAccount is also an option, but I'll keep it simple for now.

In related news, YouTube is phasing out usernames. New YouTube channels are now created directly through Google+, with a Google+ ID as the unique identifier. It's trying (to the outrage of YouTubers with any kind of branding or well-known identity) to encourage people to hook up their channels to their G+ profiles, and lose their old username. Once done, this cannot be undone. I'd still expect to be able to find out someone's username if they have one though, given the unique channel ID. The API doesn't return this. You get a channel 'title', which is just a display name. For some people (those with established branding) this will be their ye olde username, but for many - most, I suspect - it's their G+ (supposedly real) name.

It just means that for YouTube channels I have to use the gibberish long unique ID instead of a nice human readable username for the foaf:accountName. This goes against what I feel accountName means, but is compliant with the spec, so I guess I'll leave it there.

Everything else at that point is straightforward:



Once the links are got, broken down into their constituent parts with urlparse, I can use rdflib to turn them into, eg:



And store them somewhere ... to be continued.

OnlinePersonae

I'll probably subclass Agent with OnlinePersona (inspired by K. Faith Lawrence's FanOnlinePersona) and have the accounts belonging to that. Eventually OnlinePersona will have more properties which it won't necessarily share with all Agents.

Note: SIOC doesn't have a notion of this type. SIOC has UserAccount which subclasses foaf:OnlineAccount, and thus defers back to a foaf:Agent as the account holder.

Sooo... what do I use as URIs for my OnlinePersonas?

This merits a tangent in the discussion, so I'll make another post about URI issues.

URI locations

Months ago (probably) I thought it would be a good idea to make a PURL for all of my content creation ontology related stuff. I couldn't find any existing sensibly named domains that are public at purl.org... things like '/ontology' are selfishly private. So I created '/content-creation' as a (public!) top-level domain. It's still 'pending approval'. Which means I can't do anything with it. Is purl.org even looked after any more? Grumble.

(Andrei Sambra suggested I use prefix.cc to give my ontology a pretty name. Which looked briefly promising, before I realised it doesn't redirect automatically to an ontology... it's good for humans searching for vocab prefixes, but not for machines by any stretch. Mo validated my feeling that ontology URIs ought to resovle to machine- and human-readable descriptions).

I had been going to use data.inf.ed.ac.uk as the base, but the server that pointed to melted down last month. I dunno when it'll be back. So I'll stick to something I, personally, control. At some point I might buy a more suitable domain specificially for it, but I should discuss the options with some people who know what I'm doing before making a decision by myself. Available candidates right now though include: creativecontent.info, webcontentdb.com/info, internetcontentdb.com/info.

Oh, I just found out that purl.org isn't unfailingly reliable. In that case, forget it.

So for now I'll use:

• rhiaro.co.uk/vocab/oocc# for the ontology spec for any terms of my own (when I write it)
• rhiaro.co.uk/cc/onlinepersona/ for OnlinePersonas
• rhiaro.co.uk/cc/content/ for content, when I get that far.

Next

1. Follow the links to find more connections and/or verify ones I've already found. For common social and content sites, I can manually scrape useful information or use their APIs. For independent websites or things I haven't come across before, I shall devise some means to not ignore them altogether...

2. Grab other stuff from the YouTube profile and handle it in the same way. Featured channels may link to other channels the content creator is involved with. Subscriptions and mutual friends may be a good place to go for building up the network.

3. Put more into the graph than just the FOAF OnlineAccounts. Start on content..

🏷 http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Doing http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Doing api content creators hacking learning musings network analysis phd python semantic web social networks youtube

Wed 6th of November 2013 at 4:29pm (+00:00)

Last modified: Fri 8th of November 2013 at 3:26pm (+00:00)

Vague thoughts about content creators and the Semantic Web

I had two meetings with Dave Robertson, my second supervisor, about what on earth I'm doing, and here is a vague summary of my thoughts afterwards.

I came to the realisation between meetings that I need to scrap the term Amateur Creative Digital Content, because amateur doesn't really apply by its true definition and creative is too subjective anyway.

Focus on content creators, not content (so previous point doesn't matter so much anyway; maybe just need to look at existing ways people are describing types of users to make it clear who I'm concentrating on).

In terms of emphasis of the thesis, I need to make a choice between taking a cognitive science/sociology perspective and a tecchie/engineering perspective (I choose tech because that's where I'm most comfortable, but the sociology side of things is still important).

(Therefore) I need to think concretely now about technology architecture.

Not to get too hung up on the Semantic Web; the technologies are a vehicle for testing theories, rather than an end in itself (though I still think facilitating a big linked data set of this sort of data is useful in the long run for research and practical applications, I didn't labour that point).

Social machines, and how Dave's process modelling language fits in, which I think I get in theory but not practice (I'd probably have to look at a working application and code to understand really). Some of the principles may be useful further down the line, but probably not the language itself or anything.

Technology-wise, I'm not thinking about anything novel or new, but more new ways for how various Web and SW technologies are combined and applied to this domain. (?)

So maybe the novelty is in marking up various things about content creators and using this to infer information about the processes they're involved in (or want to be involved in) in order to then facilitate these processes, without (necessarily) ever explicitly representing these processes (because from the content creators' perspective, they're certainly not thinking in terms of formal representations of processes, and in many cases won't know what they're trying to make until it's done, for example).

How to represent the inferences made might be novel and exciting, but I don't know.

Hmm, I still don't think I've figured out how to evaluate .. anything. Beyond comparing activities of users with magical-new-system vs without magical-new- system. And maybe, going back to the this-big-dataset-is-useful idea, by finding questions we can now ask about these kinds of communities that we couldn't before because they were so fragmented.

🏷 http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Doing http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Doing active content creators brainstorming content creators notes phd semantic web

Fri 2nd of August 2013 at 2:03pm (Z)

Last modified: Tue 3rd of September 2013 at 2:07pm (Z)

Week(s) in review: #SSSW2013, figuring stuff out and annotating YouTube

8th - 14th July

Semantic Web Summer School, much heat, much fun, much learning... Here's an index of my posts.

15th - 21st July

Friends visited. Progress included writing notes to myself to figure out just what my PhD outcomes really are, and why. Came up with:

1\\\\. Recommending how to usefully describe diverse amateur creative digital content (ACDC) using an ontology.
a) What are the parts of ACDC that need to be represented? Identify and categorise properties. How do these differentiate it from other similar content?
b) What existing ontologies can be used to do this, and how do they need to be extended?

2\\\\. Building an initial set of linked data about ACDC, and providing means for its growth and use.
a) Manual annotation of ACDC, and refinement (to test ontology).
b) Tools for automatic annotation of the parts of ACDC that it is possible to automatically annotate.
c) Tools for manual annotation by the community of content creators and consumers for the parts of ACDC that cannot be automatically annotated.
d) Tools to expose the linked data for use by third-party applications.

3\\\\. Create and test an example service which uses the linked data to benefit content creators and/or consumers.
eg. Unobtrusive recommendations for collaborative partners (most likely); content recommendation; content consumption analysis (like tracking viral content); community building / knowledge sharing in this domain; ... .

22nd - 28th July

Brainstormed with Ewan about stage 3 (above), and came up with the idea of an interface that allows content creators to allocate varying degrees of credit for roles played by different people when collaborating on a project. This would serve to both gather collaborative bibliographic data, learn things about how different segments of the community allocate credit, and provide a potentially useful tool for content creators. With the future value that, if we can learn enough to estimate role inputs from different people, it could be used for things like automatic revenue sharing.

Then spent the rest of the week in London, frolicking amongst the YouTubers (including attending a meeting at Google about secret YouTube-y stuff), and annotated some ACDC. Write-up coming soon.

🏷 http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Doing http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Doing acdc amateur creative digital content annotation content creators google ontology phd semantic web summer school semantic web sssw2013 week in review youtube youtubers

Sun 28th of July 2013 at 9:00pm (Z)

Last modified: Tue 30th of July 2013 at 2:58pm (Z)

[Notes] Lynda Hardman at #SSSW2013

RELEVANT.

Users (consumers?):

• Finding content
• Media types * mostly text at the moment, little integration of different types
• Specific tasks - not much connection of results with user tasks.

More data than just what you seen in the media (cue my Venn diagram).

Plus, eg. paintings - lots of 'cultural baggage'.

Care more about the story than the media.
Interpretation by end users. Hopefully message that the author intended.

Meaning of combination of assets.
eg. Exhibition of artists work.

Interacting further with the media.

• Search - serendipitous or focussed around a theme (or both). Different search goals.
• Sharing, passing it on.

(SW and multimedia community need to work together).

-> Raphael Troncy on Friday - attaching semantics to multimedia on the Web.

Need mechanisms:

• to identify (parts of) media assets.
• associate metadata with a fragment.
• agree on meaning of metadata.
• enable meaningful structures to be composed, identified and annotated.

Workflow for multimedia applications

• Canonical processes of media production
  • Reduced to the simplest form possible without loss of generality.

Heard of MPEG-7? Don't bother.. very much from a media algorithms perspective.

Applications:

• Feature extraction.
• News production.
• New media art.
  • An interactive exhibit that responded to audience present.
• Hyper-video.
  • Linked video.
• Photo book production (CeWe).
  • (Using this example for explaining processes).
• Ambient multimedia systems with complex sensory networks.

Canonical processes overview...

There's a paper.

CeWe photobook - automatic selection, sorting and ordering of photos.
Context (timestamp, tags) analysis and content (colours, edges) analysis.

Things from these you want to represent your digital system (ie with LOD):

• Premediate, eg.
  • remember to take your camera on holiday.
  • write scripts, plan shots.
  • place a security camera in the right location.
• Construct Message (not really in the chain, appears all over the place); what to conveny with media? Intention? eg.
  • show people a great holiday.
  • sell a product.
• inform/advise.
• Create (method of creation might be important, so record in metadata), eg.
  • take photos.
  • make video.
• Annotate, eg.
  • automatic or manual. Stuff that is embedded by device vendors (but there's so much more...)
  • domain annotations: landscapes/portraits, timestamps, face recognition.
• Publish, eg.
  • compose images into photobook.
• Distribute, eg.
  • print photo book and post.
  • cyclic processes online.

COMM - Core Ontology for Multimedia.

Premediate and construct message - human parts, she doesn't expect them to be digitised any time soon.

Using Semantics to create stories with media

Can we link media assets to existing linked data and use this to improve presentation?

How can annotations help?

• What can be expressed explicitly?
  • Message (somewhere between a html page and poetry).
  • Objects depicted.
  • Domain information. <\\\\--- li="">
  • Human communicaiton roles (discourse). <\\\\--- li="">

Vox Populi (PhD project)

Traditionally video documentary is a set of shots decided by director/editor.
vs.
Annotating video material and showing what the user asks to see.

interviewwithamerica.com

Annotations for these documentary clips:

• Rhetorical statement; argumentation model (documentary techniques).
• Descriptive (which questions asked, interviewee, filmic).
  • Filmic: continuity like camera movements, framing, direction of speaker, lighting, sound - rules that film directors know.
• Statement encoding (eg. summary what the interviewee said):
  • subject - modifier - object statements.
  • Thesauri for terms.
  • Can make a statement graph, finding which statements contradict and which agree.
  • (He encoded this stuff by hand - automated techniques aren't good enough).
  • Argumentation model - claims, concessions, contradictions, support.

Automatically generated coherant story.

• Are we more forgiving watching video? (Than reading these statements as text). Peoples' own interpretations strongly affect understanding of the message.

Vox Populi has (not for human consumption) GUI for querying annotated video content.

User can determine subject and bias of presentation.
Documentary maker can just add in new videos and new annotations to easily generate new sequence options.

User informatio needs - Ana Carina Palumbo

Linked TV. Enhancing experience of watching TV. What users need to make decisions / inform opinions.

• Expert interviews (governance, broadcast).
• User interviews - what people thought they need (215 ppts).
• User experiments - what people actually need.

Experiment - oil worth the risk?

• eg. people wanted factual information from independent sources; what the benefits are; community scale information.

Published at EuroITV.

Conclusions

• We can give useful annotations to media access, useful at different stages of interactive access (not just search).
• Clarify intended message. Explicity with annotations.
• Manual or automatic.
• Media content and annotations can be passed among systems.
• No community agreement in how to do this. <\\\\--- li="">
• How to store?

Questions

Hand annotations are error prone - how to validate?
Media stuff - there can be uncertainty, people don't always care.

Motivating researchers to annotate...
Make a game.

Store whole video or segements?
W3C fragment identification standards - timestamps via URLs.

🏷 http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Done http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Done annotation content creators digital media media notes ontologies phd semantic web

Tue 9th of July 2013 at 12:30pm (Z)

Last modified: Wed 17th of July 2013 at 7:48pm (Z)

Week in review: VidFest

20th - 26th May

Continued to work on literature review. Nothing much to report.

Went to MCM Expo in London and managed to find time (around non-stop merch selling for TomSka and Eddsworld) to ask between 30 and 40 content creators - a wide variety of ages, experience, types of content - about their process and collaborative practices. The thing they all had in common (I randomly picked people as they were waiting in the two hour long queue to get autographs from Tom) was that they all do what they do because the love it, want to entertain people, and if the could earn a living from it too that would be amazing; but that's not why they do it. For many it's the dream, but not one they expect realistically to achieve.

That is why this is important to me. Because everybody should be able to make a living from doing what they love*, and the technology exists to allow it. How exciting.

• Unless they're really bad at it. There's only so much technology can do. But they should definitely have the chance to get good before caving in to a ninetofive that they're not totally passionate about.

🏷 http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Doing http://vocab.amy.so/blog#Doing amateur creative digital content content creators convention events film and comic con london expo mcm phd week in review

Sun 26th of May 2013 at 11:13pm (Z)

Last modified: Sun 26th of May 2013 at 11:13pm (Z)