It’s all about who you know, and this week I was lucky to meet one of the investors in Hunch, a decision-making tool from Flickr founder Caterina Fake that “gives you its best hunch” of what you would like when you’re feeling indecisive. It made a big splash today and is the top story on [...]

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Just saw via this article on Techmeme that my friend Vitaly Shmatikov co-authored a paper on “De-anonymizing Social Networks“. Here’s the abstract as a teaser: Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially sensitive information about users and their relationships with advertisers, application developers, and data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically protected by anonymization, i.e., [...]

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I’m trilled at the discussion that my call for devil’s advocacy has incited. Keep bringing it–and let me know if you’d like to contribute a guest post. But it’s also nice to find strong views elsewhere in the blogosphere. This morning I saw a post at The Findability Project entitled “Metadata Schmetadata, Relevance and Reality“, [...]

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Ron Miller has just published his first volume of interviews with content management experts in a digital book, which he’s made available for free online. Since I’m featured in this book alongside Google Search Appliance product manger Nitin Mangtani as the experts on enterprise search (see the history of our sparring match here), I thought [...]

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I blog a lot about the virtues of exploratory search and the narrow-mindedness that Google and others exhibit in their focus on ranked search result lists, as well as about my skepticism about the value and longevity of the ad-supported model. I think it’s safe to say that I’m largely preaching to the converted–if anything [...]

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I tried out the Google Wonder Wheel today–it’s being rolled out as an experiment, but you can enable the cookie yourself by entering the following into the address bar after a Google query: javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=4a609673baf685b5:TB=2:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1227543998:LM=1233568652:DV=AA:GM=1:IG=3:S=yFGqYec2D7L0wgxW;path=/; domain=.google.com”); As I blogged yesterday, I’m glad that Google is giving exploratory / HCIR approaches a shot. But I’m shocked at [...]

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We’re still a week or two away from officially announcing the 3rd Annual Workshop on Human Computer Information Retrieval (HCIR ’09), but there are some details I wanted to share now, as well as a favor I’d like to ask of the community. First, the details. The workshop will be held on October 23, 2009 [...]

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Just a reminder that readers here can, at no extra charge, ask to be part of The Noisy Community. It’s a great way to reinforce that so much the value of this blog comes from you, the readers, who collectively contribute far more content to it than I do!

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Fresh news, hot from the Official Google Blog: Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search [...]

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Well, maybe NSFW is a bit of an exaggeration, but I don’t want to get anyone in trouble with a prudish employer. For everyone else, you can find out the size of your Twitter e-Penis here. Feel free to brag about the size of your Tweet-hood in the comments.

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