No, I’m not recruiting for my team–though I’m always open to research collaborations. But I wanted to call readers’ attention to at least two places that are hiring folks with expertise in information retrieval.
The first is Panjiva, a startup that I’m advising. You can read more about them here. They are looking for a hands-on [...]

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I hope you’ve been enjoying my recent posting frenzy, because the noise will be a bit think in the next couple of weeks. I’m about to head to Providence, where I’ll be attending SIGMOD 2009 and presenting an invited talk on “Design for Interaction“. Yes, database people care about HCIR too! I don’t know what [...]

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To paraphrase Navin R. Johnson from The Jerk, the new faceted search books are here! I received my author’s copies this weekend, and I’ve heard from a few people that they’ve received theirs. It even features a blurb from Peter Morville that made me feel warm and fuzzy.
So how do you get a copy? The [...]

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Check out Panos’s extensive live blogging from what, as far as I know, is the first Human Computation Workshop (HCOMP  2009). You can also see the associated #hcomp Twitter activity.
Evidently Luis von Ahn used his keynote to unveil MonoLingo, a human-powered system for translation, but only using people that know one language (no idea if [...]

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Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, offers a scathing review of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, the recently written book by Chris Anderson. He doesn’t even mention the plagiarism scandal. Instead, he attacks the book’s thesis, which he characterizes as “an [...]

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One of the best words we’ve inherited from the ancient Greeks is hubris (ὕβρις), defined on Wikipedia as “overweening pride, superciliousness, or arrogance, often resulting in fatal retribution or nemesis”. Homer used hubris to drive the plots (and moral lessons) of  both of his famous epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Hubris is, of course, a [...]

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Until recently, I’ve noticed the occasional incdent where a Twitter “trending topic” was socially engineered by a spammer, usually by an application which auto-tweets on sign-up. But the problem seems to be getting noticeably worse.
Just a few days ago Habitat, a furniture store, used the trending topics as hashtags–including one associated with the disputed Iran [...]

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I just received an email from Max Ventilla, CEO of social search startup Aardvark, to let me know that Aardvark is now open to anyone who wants to sign up. Well, anyone with a Facebook account–but I can’t imagine that there are many people who are curious to sign up for a service like Aardvark [...]

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It’s unusual for HCIR to make it into the mainstream business press, so I was delighted when Pete Barlas reached out to me in connection with an article he published Wednesday in Investor’s Business Daily, entitled “Bing Feature Has Many Fathers; Rivals Lining Up To Take Credit“.
The genesis for the article was a dispute between [...]

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Many people (myself included) have said that Bing’s strongest vertical is travel. And a number have noted the striking similarity between Bing’s travel search and Kayak.
David Radin:
This feels so much like Kayak that without asking, I assumed Microsoft licensed the technology from Kayak. Can you say “eerily similar”?
David Weinberger:
Bing’s ripping off of Kayak.com has me [...]

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