The other day, when I was blogging about Google’s news cluster timelines, I lamented their lack of a unified approach towards visualizing news over time. Their launch of Google News Timeline thus gives mixed feelings: it’s a cool interface, but it still doesn’t unify their approach to this space. First, the good: the interface is [...]

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I spend a fair amount of time critizing Google for not embracing exploratory search. But today’s launch of a similar images feature is all about exploration, and I’m impressed with what I see. One of the applications is clarification of ambiguous queries. Rather than using cliche examples like jaguar or apple, let’s try some original [...]

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I discovered belatedly that the Microsoft Word template my publisher had given me was suppressing spelling correction. My bad, I should have realized something was up as I was putting the draft together. In any case, if you are one of the people reviewing the manuscript, please return to the download page and grab the [...]

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Mathew Ingram at The Nieman Journalism Lab wrote a post today entitled “Google helps newspapers — period” , intended at least in part to rebut two of my recent posts on the subject: “Is Differentiated Content Enough To Save Newspapers?” and my earlier “Yes, Virginia, Google Does Devalue Everything It Touches“. He cites a proposal [...]

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On Friday, shortly after sending a copy of my Faceted Search manuscript to my publisher, I put out a call for volunteer reviewers. The response has been overwhelming, and I am personally overwhelmed to see this validation that my online “friends” and “connections” truly live up to the meaning of those words, volunteering their offline [...]

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The Guardian headline sums it up: “Big newspaper sites ‘erode value of news’, says Sly Bailey“. Sly Bailey is the  chief executive of the Trinity Mirror, one of the UK’s largest newspaper publishers. Here’s what she has to say: A consumer is now as likely to discover newspaper content on Google, visit our sites, then [...]

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SIGIR 2009 will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, at the Sheraton Boston Hotel and at Northeastern University. The conference will run from July 19-23, 2009. Even if you are not a researcher and shy away from academic conferences, I urge you to take a look at the Industry Track. I may be a bit biased [...]

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By now, #amazonfail seems like old news (yesterday’s detwitus?), though apparently Amazon’s PR folks are still doing damage control. But what intrigues me was something in Clay Shirky’s nostra culpa post comparing the collective outrage against Amazon to the Tawana Brawley incident. While the post on a whole did not move me (perhaps because I [...]

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To my delight–not to mention the delight of my family, colleagues, and publisher–I’m almost done with the book! I went into this project suspecting that book writing wouldn’t be quite like blogging, and that suspicion is now a certainty. I know that the manuscript is short by book standards (not quite 100 pages), and that [...]

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While I’m all for eco-friendly goods and services, I don’t usually think of my work as helping to save the environment. But this post from Vivisimo Chief Scientist Jerome Presenti about “Recycling the Information Wastelands” reminded me that making information more accessible is like recycling on steroids: The same piece of information can be consumed [...]

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