The Noisy Channel

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, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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The other day, I promised in a comment thread that I’d write about what I see as real use cases for real-time search. As it happens, I’m experiencing one right now.
As my wife, daughter, and I were walking home from a playground, we noticed a large number of fire trucks congregating a block away from [...]

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Earlier this week, Peter Morville and Mark Burrell presented a UIE virtual seminar on “Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences“. It sold out! And I thought Pete Bell and I had done well with our seminar on faceted search!
But I’m hardly surprised. Although I wasn’t able to attend it myself, I gather [...]

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In a recent announcement, Twitter Platform / API Product Manager Ryan Sarver tells us that Twitter is:
committed to providing a framework for any company big or small, rich or poor to do a deal with us to get access to the Firehose in the same way we did deals with Google and Microsoft. We want everyone [...]

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I discovered today that I’d been hacked earlier this week by a spam link injection attack. I’m still not sure how it happened, but I believe I’ve cleaned out all of the offending PHP from my WordPress installation. I’ve also removed most of my plug-ins in the process, and I may have broken some things [...]

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My new role at Google (yes, it still feels new after not quite a month!) has given me a professional interest in local search. I’ve adjusted my reading materials accordingly, and I’ve started reading blogs that focus on local. Here are a handful that I’ve discovered so far:

BIA / Kelsey Blog

By The Kelsey Group, a [...]

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One of the interesting challenges we face as both both developers and consumers of search technology is that social signals are a double-edged sword. On one hand, social signals have proven essential in distinguishing signal from noise–be they links, re-tweets, or any number other ways that online consumers (or more correctly “prosumers”) actively and passively [...]

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