Lately, I’ve been musing about the Herb Simon quote that launched–or at least popularized–the concepts of information overload and attention economics:

in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its [...]

[Read more →]

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is one of my favorite examples of leveraging the internet for innovation:
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human intelligence directly into their [...]

[Read more →]

I’m back from vacation, and still digging my way out of everything that’s piled up while I’ve been offline.
While I catch up, I thought I’d share with you a demo that Eric Iverson was gracious enough to share with me. It uses Yahoo! BOSS to support an exploratory search experience on top of a general web [...]

[Read more →]

Just letting readers know that I’ll be on vacation for the next week. If you are starved for reading materials, check out some of the blogs I read.

[Read more →]

Note: this post is cross-posted at BLOG@CACM.

Today is the last day of WSDM 2010, and I unfortunately spent it at home drinking chicken soup. But I’ve been following the conference via the proceedings and tweets.
The day started with a short session on temporal interaction. Topics included clustering social media documents (e.g., Flickr photos) based on their association with events, [...]

[Read more →]

Note: this post is cross-posted at BLOG@CACM.
Unfortunately, I woke up this morning rather under the weather, so I’m having to resort to remotely reporting on the second day of WSDM 2010 conference, based on the published proceedings and the tweet stream.
The day started with a keynote from Harvard economist Susan Athey. Her research focuses on the design of [...]

[Read more →]

Note: this post is cross-posted at BLOG@CACM.
Today was the first day of the Third ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2010), held at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU in Brooklyn, NY. WSDM is a young conference that has already become a top-tier publication venue for research in these areas. In contrast [...]

[Read more →]

Note: this post is cross-posted at BLOG@CACM.
It is my pleasure to report on the 3rd Annual Workshop on Search in Social Media (SSM 2010), a gathering of information retrieval and social media researchers and practitioners in an area that has captured the interest of computer scientists, social scientists, and even the broader public. The one-day workshop [...]

[Read more →]

I’m delighted to report that I’ll be blogging about the Search and Social Media Workshop (SSM 2010) and the Web Search and Data Mining Conference (WSDM 2010) for Communications of the ACM.
Of course, I’ll cross-post here. I also encourage folks to follow the live tweet streams at #ssm2010 and #wsdm2010, as well as Gene and Jeremy’s [...]

[Read more →]