Ideally, a search engine would read the user’s mind. Shy of that, a search engine should provide the user with an efficient process for expressing an information need and then provide the user with results relevant to the that need. From an information scientist’s perspective, these are two distinct problems to solve in the information [...]

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Last week, I had the pleasure of talking with CMU professor George Loewenstein, one of the top researchers in the area of behavioral economics. I mentioned my idea of using prediction markets to address the weaknesses of online review systems and reputation systems, and he offered two insightful pointers. The first pointer was to the [...]

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I like Twitter. Yes, I know that a lot of its content is noise. But I’ve found Twitter to be a useful professional tool for both publishing and consuming information. Publishing to Twitter is the easy part: I publish links to my blog posts and occasionally engage in public conversations. Consuming information from Twitter is more [...]

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