We now have two more weeks of usage data on authenticated D.O. users from 7/28/2008 to 8/11/2008. The data shows a steady pattern of usage overtime. Please refer to the attachment for a brief report. We are now quite confident that the pivots block has certain values to users in terms of module recommendation.
drupal
Switching "related projects" pivots algorithm
Thu, 08/07/2008 - 18:03 — Daniel ZhouPreviously we computed the "related projects" by using the frequency of project co-mentions in discussions. For example, if the module Fivestar and CCK were mentioned together in 33 different discussion threads, whereas Fivestar and jRating in 10 threads, then we would think CCK was more relevant to Fivestar than jRating because it has more co-mentions.
However, that algorithm ignores the fact that some very popular modules like CCK simply have more chances to get mentioned, even if it's not that relevant in the context.
Drupal users welcome the Pivots recommendation block
Mon, 07/28/2008 - 19:37 — Daniel ZhouThe pivots system was enabled on D.O. to all authenticated users on 2008-07-22. This analysis report is based on the data we collected from 2008-07-22 midnight to 2008-07-28 midnight (6 days in total). There were 10454 distinct user IDs from 14701 distinct IP addresses participating during this period.
Pivots recommendation system for Drupal.org: Help people find modules
Mon, 07/21/2008 - 16:53 — Daniel ZhouGreetings all,
From now on, I'm going to report the project progress of the "pivots recommendation system for drupal.org" on this blog.
The "pivots" project is an attempt to generate module recommendations to D.O. users. The idea is to display on a module page the related forum conversations and related modules that are referenced in the same conversations. We think it could provide useful information to users when they evaluate the modules.
We have deployed the system on D.O. to site maintainers and CVS account holders since June 1, 2008. More than 900 users has tried using the system since then. Statistics shows that the conversation pivot block got a 2.76% click-through rate, the double pivot block got a 1.25% click-through rate. Survey shows that 73.8% feedback on the conversation pivot was positive, and 77% positive feedback on the double pivot. To see the brief report, please click here. To see the full report, please click here.
The study gives us reasons to believe that pivots would be helpful to D.O. users in finding module recommendations. And we are now planning to make it available to more users. In the meantime, we will continue to make the algorithm works better. People's feedback and suggestions would be much appreciated.
Lastly, I'd like to thank Kieran Lal and my advisor Prof. Paul Resnick for their constant support.
Thanks!
--Daniel
Day 3,4 @ Drupalcon
Thu, 03/06/2008 - 21:33 — Daniel ZhouDrupal is AWESOME. That was my opening comment addressing to the "D.O. Redesign Panel" audience. I gave a 10-min presentation during the session and introduced the "Conversation Pivots" to the community. Hopefully, it will go live on d.o. soon.
To prepare the presentation, I didn't go to bed until 3:30am, and I'm tired now. So I'm not going to write a lot in the blog. Paul really helped a lot during the session. Learned a lot from my advisor. We had dinner together Wednesday evening.
Day 2 @ Drupalcon
Tue, 03/04/2008 - 23:34 — Daniel ZhouThe second day of the conference was interesting too. I went to 2 site building sessions and 2 programing sessions. The "Best practices in development environment..." session and the "Performance tuning" session seemed to be particularly useful. I met with Angela Byron, Nedjo Rogers, Derek Wright, and Tiffany Farriss, and we had dinner together. They are going to lead the d.o. redesign panel on Thursday.
Day 1 @ Drupalcon
Mon, 03/03/2008 - 21:09 — Daniel ZhouThe first day of Drupalcon was exciting! There were so many people from all over the world and the sessions were well arranged. I learned quite a lot from it. And I met Kieran finally (he was quite busy coordinate the sessions, and we didn't talk too much). And my new friend Ben made a 10-min presentation on his RelatedContent module in the Knight Foundation session, in which he mentioned our pivots module.
The three things that impressed me most in Day 1 were:
