As some of you may know, I’m not a big fan of advertising, and I made a decision when I started this blog to keep it free of ads. In particular, I assumed that the tiny amount of revenue I might generate via AdSense would not offset the cost of annoying or even losing readers. [...]

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I just read about an experimental storefront from Amazon called WindowShop. It takes exploratory search to its extreme, not providing users with any means to search or navigate beyond scrolling and zooming. Here’s a screenshot, though you need to go the site to get the full immersive experience.     I’m usually a fan of [...]

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Extra, extra: The Christian Science Monitor is abandoning its weekday print edition and fully embracing an online publishing model. This may not seem like big news to readers here who probably abandoned print newspapers long ago. But the Monitor is the first national newspaper to make such a move. Monitor editor John Yemma says: “We have the [...]

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Business intelligence analyst Boris Evelson wrote a nice post on the Forrester Blog entitled ”… we had the data, but we didn’t have the information…“. It’s a good read, but here’s the punchline for the impatient: Many large enterprise Business Intelligence vendors have robust, scalable, function rich products, and many management consultants and global systems integrators [...]

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Today LinkedIn officially anounced the launch of its new search platform. It’s slick, and it’s certainly an incremental improvement on their previous search functionality. But I still think they would benefit tremendously from faceted search, or from any approaches that enable exploration of large result sets, such as this one:

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I see that Greg and Iadh are attending CIKM 2008, and I hope they’ll find the time to blog about it. I’m particularly curious to hear any reports from the Workshop on Search in Social Media. p.s. If anyone knows who mantains the CIKM site, please inform them that it’s been hacked. I tried to report this a while ago, [...]

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Just say this piece in the New York Times: “You May Soon Know if You’re Hogging the Discussion“. A quick excerpt: The inventor of this technology is Alex Pentland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has developed cellphone-like gadgets to listen to people as they chat, and computer programs that sift through these conversational [...]

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Well, I suppose it can’t be personal (or so they claim), but at long last this blog has achieved something I never thought possible–it’s achieved a higher ranking than Shannon on a Google search for noisy channel. And even Google Suggest seems to be showing some love: Noisy chickens? Well, my thanks go out to [...]

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Ever since I started blogging, I’ve wondered why academics don’t embrace blogs and other social media. In fact, I just blogged about it earlier today. But a great example of an academic who gets blogging is Daniel Lemire. Daniel has been blogging since May 2004. He is a professor of computer science at the Université [...]

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I just read a nice piece in the New York Times entitled “If No One Sees It, Is It an Invention?“. The gist: then CMU PhD candidate Johnny Chung Lee drew over six million views to a five-minute video he posted on YouTube showing how to use a Wii remote to transform a normal video screen into [...]

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