Comment Interesting and useful for Slashdot (Score 4, Interesting) 136
I only skimmed the paper briefly but it is interesting in that:
- User clicks a wordcloud keyword/hashtag that draws lines from it to multiple florets (individual nacelle-like microflowers in a sunflower head), each of which represents a tweet in recent portion of a feed.
- Repudiates the idea of filtering to meet viewer expectations so everyone can see the same content.
- A cuteness factor (or what they say is "organic" being like a flower) apparently reduces gut reaction to tweets you do not agree with
- Viewer is able to actively pick tweets to read. Presumably as the sunflower head image is mathematically generated and each floret's color could be tweaked to match a positive/negative sentiment score, allowing the user to pick only items that agree/disagree with them but to do so consciously.
This last point would seem to be ideal and I'd like to see slashdot include something more than the slider ("read only above this score"), particularly for a topic that has over say 500 or 800 replies. How about a data visualization that shows all the posts/threads for an article and lets the user select based on where in this chart a post is? At the very list, something 2-dimensional not 1-dimensional.