In response to a meeting sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America about “Models to Monetize Content” (i.e., how to charge for online news), Scott Rosenberg writes that charging for articles could hobble the future of journalism. His main argument is an appeal to analogy: the classifieds business: In at least one area, the newspaper [...]

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I hesitate to cite Valleywag as a news source, but I did read there that Sergey Brin is crediting fellow Google co-founder Larry Page with “Page’s Law“, the assertion that software gets twice as slow every 18 months, and thus outpaces Moore’s law. Fortunately for Page, he is already assured of a solid entry in [...]

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Everyone is talking about Bing today–well, everyone who isn’t too busy watching Google do the Wave. If you haven’t been paying attention, Microsoft is about to spend $100M to market an upgrade of its web search engine, rebranding it from Live to Bing (by way of Kumo). I’m reserving judgment about it until I have [...]

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I just noticed that the 2009 edition of the Enterprise Search Sourcebook is now available. Published by Information Today, it’s a nice way to survey the landscape. Of course, it goes without saying that you to take vendor claims with a grain of salt, but you have to start somewhere! Of course, if you’re interested [...]

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Cited as “amazing” by the master of hype, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington, it’s…Topsy: “The first index is based exclusively on Twitter statuses and the wonderful people who write them.” Apparently they have been in stealth mode for three years! I’ve only played around with it a little, but I think I have a feel for the [...]

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What’s a social media editor? I have no idea, but the New York Times now has one! As reported in ReadWriteWeb, paidContent.org, and of course Valleywag, the paper of record has appointed Jennifer Preston, former editor of the regional sections, as its first social media editor. I agree with Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb that We [...]

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I’ve been known to spar with Jeff Jarvis about Google’s role in the present and future of journalism, but I readily admit I’m something of an amateur. Thus I’m delighted to see a thoughtful post from Josh Young, a more serious and informed media junkie, entitled “Not by Links Alone“. In it, he does a great [...]

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Long-time readers may recall that I participated last year in an NSF Information Seeking Support Systems Workshop at the University of North Carolina, organized by Gary Marchionini and Ryen White. Some of the output of that workshop recently surfaced in a special issue of IEEE Computer. It’s a great issue, and I recommend it to [...]

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I couldn’t think of a better way to start a holiday weekend than by uploading the revised chapters of my faceted search book to the publisher. It was the first–and hopefully last–time that I have hand-edited pdf files (download a trial version of Acrobat here if you’re jealous). Barring some unforeseen event, the publishers will [...]

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When I first heard that Vivek Kundra was on the short list to be the CTO of the United States, I was very excited about the possibility that he would implement information sharing at a national level like he had in DC. Today I’m happy to read that that the Federal CIO Council has launched [...]

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