Is Twitter a potential terrorist tool or the next Netscape? Amazingly–or at least amusingly–top stories on Techmeme today suggest both possibilities: Terrorist ‘tweets’? US Army warns of Twitter dangers Is Twitter the next Netscape? I actually see utility in Twitter, which makes me a bit of an oddball among my peers. But I think it’s [...]

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This blog hasn’t exactly been gushing about Google’s enterprise solutions–then again, neither have their executives. Still, I thought it fair and balanced to point to an article that Google Enteprise Product Manager Nitin Mangtani wrote in Forbes defending his group’s work.

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Thanks to Bob Carpenter for calling my attention to this nugget in an interview with Nach Waxman in the New York Times Diner’s Journal: Google is a blessing, and we all use it to locate individual specific pieces of information — including one or another recipe. However, it does not seem, in any practical way to serve as [...]

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I just upgraded to WordPress 2.6.3. Please let me know if you experience any unexpected behavior.

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I’m back from HCIR ’08 and pleased to report that it was a rousing success. We had about 40 attendees, including such HCIR luminaries as Gary Marchionini, Marti Hearst, and mc schraefel. Microsoft Research supplied us not only with space and great food, but also workshop co-chair Ryen White and keynote speaker Sue Dumais, not [...]

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Dave Kellogg has a nice post entitled “Web 2.Over?” in which he eloquently reviews the various reasons that most web 2.0 startups are “in for a reality check”. But what I liked most about the post was his defense of the spirit of web 2.0: While a swarm of eyeball-catching, oddly-named, twenty-something-led startups may get [...]

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I used a six-hour plane flight to finally take a crack at a Wikipedia entry for faceted search. I did recycle the faceted browser entry, but you’ll see that I largely overhauled it. I’ve tried my best to capture the main academic and commercial efforts in this space. But I realize that, particularly on the commercial [...]

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Just wanted to let folks know that I’ll be offline for the next couple of days, attending HCIR ’08. I’m excited about the workshop and promise to blog about it when I return.

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Nice article from Simson Garfinkel in Technology Review: “Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth“. An excerpt: So what is Truth? According to Wikipedia’s entry on the subject, “the term has no single definition about which the majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree.” But in practice, Wikipedia’s standard for inclusion has become its de facto [...]

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A while back, I promised to write about tag clouds. I’m a man of my word, and I apologize for the delay in getting to this promise. First, let’s define tag clouds. A tag cloud is a visual depiction of a set of words or phrases that characterize a set of documents. While “tag” suggests [...]

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