Nicholas Carr (of “Does IT Matter?” fame) wrote a post a couple of days ago entitled “All hail the information triumvirate!” Here is his argument in a nutshell: what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of [...]

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Those of you who know me offline or online hopefully know that I have a very critical eye, especially when it comes to technical innovations. But every now and then I run into colleagues whose research projects that scream for productization. I’ve been talking to such a colleague and am eager to hook him up [...]

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Wow, this is quite a week for news in the enterprise search industry! Yesterday, I woke up to hear that Autonomy is acquiring Interwoven; today, I hear from CMS Watch analyst Adriaan Bloem that FAST CEO  John Lervik is resigning, with their CTO Bjørn Olstad stepping in to fill his duties. FAST had some accounting [...]

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Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg cultivated the motto, “Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube” (What others achieve by war, let you, happy Austria, achieve by marriage). This morning’s announcement that Autonomy (AUTNF) is acquiring Interwoven (IWOV) for $775M would have made Maximilian proud. Indeed, while some (including Alan Pelz-Sharpe at CMS Watch) have gone [...]

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I am proud to report that the “Reconsidering Relevance” presentation has been enjoying  a warm reception: SlideShare: made top (most viewed) presentation on the day it was posted (January 9th) and was featured today (January 21st) by the SlideShare editorial team. Viewed over 1,000 times. Interviewed by Cloud of Data blogger Paul Miller about the [...]

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“A man’s got to know his limitations,” as Clint Eastwood famously said as Dirty Harry in Magnum Force. Well, as Panos Ipeirotis reports on his blog, Turkers (the people who are paid to perform tasks using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service), actually do know their limitations. Read the full post for details, but here is the [...]

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Today is a monumental day in the history of the United States, and I suspect many readers will be too caught up in the inaugural festivities to be checking their RSS readers. But everyone has a job to do, and part of mine is to speak truth to power through blogging. A few months ago, [...]

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Just a heads up that Danah Boyd has published her PhD dissertaion entitled “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics“. Danah is a rock star in the social networking research community; you might have noitced that I cite her Master’s Thesis from time to time. I’m looking forward to reading her latest [...]

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Today was a harsh news day for Google, with TechCrunch posting a leaked thread of internal emails on why Google employees quit. The emails are intriguing if highly redundant; the schadenfreude comments are merely predictable. But the more interesting piece of news is that Google is moving beyond its initial SearchWiki efforts to offer more [...]

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Jeff Dalton recently updated articles he maintains on open-source NLP and machine learning tools and open-source search engines. Check it out, as well as the discussion about the pros and cons of open source enterprise search on LinkedIn.

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