This presentation by Paul Adams, lead for User Research for Social at Google, has been making the rounds in the blogosphere. It’s long (over 200 slides!) but well worth the time to read it, even if you’re already familiar with the ethnography of online social behavior. It touches on all things online and social, from [...]

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One of the big challenges of working with heterogeneous data is curating it. Below are introductions to two tools for doing do: Gridworks, developed by David Huynh, Stefano Mazzocchi, and their colleagues at Metaweb, the company behind Freebase. Needlebase, developed by Justin Boyan and colleagues at ITA Software, the company powering travel search for Kayak, Orbitz, and [...]

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Just a reminder to all of you HCIR people out there that the submission deadline for the HCIR 2010 Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval is rapidly approaching! Research papers and position papers are due on Monday, June 14th, and HCIR Challenge reports are due on Monday, July 9th. We’re looking forward to an exciting workshop [...]

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If you like faceted search and are interested in design patterns for it, I encourage you to check out Moritz Stefaner‘s work on elastic lists. Here is his description: Elastic lists allow to navigate large, multi-dimensional info spaces with just a few clicks, never letting you run into situations with zero results. They enhance traditional [...]

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I was just looking at LinkedIn and found myself pleasantly surprised by a minor UI improvement in the “People You May Know” widget: as you delete people you don’t know, the widget now updates without your having to go to another page or refresh the home page. Curious, I looked to see if LinkedIn had [...]

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This is just so brilliant that I had to post it here. I’ve blogged in the past about alerting spam, but this guy took the idea to a new level, with great return on investment. Perhaps the news about this story will make the tactic more popular and thus less effective through dilution. Still, it’s [...]

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Earlier this week, I mentioned that my colleagues here at Google New York were working cool stuff. Today some of them officially blogged about it! Check out today’s official Google blog post about “Understanding the web to find short answers and ‘something different‘” by engineer John Provine, which talks about Google’s latest work in question [...]

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For those keeping track of TunkRank, I encourage you to check out FluidDB, which just added TunkRank scores to its feature set. That lets you do cool things like find out which users I follow have a TunkRank score over 40. You can also read what Jason Adams has to say about it here. Speaking [...]

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I wish I could take even a gram of credit for this! I’m really proud of my colleagues for rolling out this new design that encourages and facilitates exploratory search. Go HCIR!

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If you are interested in participating in the HCIR Challenge, please let me know as soon as possible–and in any case by April 30th. The New York Times and the LDC are graciously providing access to The New York Times Annotated Corpus for free (waiving the usual $300 fee), but we need to let the [...]

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