Is Twitter a potential terrorist tool or the next Netscape? Amazingly–or at least amusingly–top stories on Techmeme today suggest both possibilities:
I actually see utility in Twitter, which makes me a bit of an oddball among my peers. But I think it’s interesting that so much of the discussion about it veers towards hyperbole.
This blog hasn’t exactly been gushing about Google’s enterprise solutions–then again, neither have their executives. Still, I thought it fair and balanced to point to an article that Google Enteprise Product Manager Nitin Mangtani wrote in Forbes defending his group’s work.
Thanks to Bob Carpenter for calling my attention to this nugget in an interview with Nach Waxman in the New York Times Diner’s Journal:
Google is a blessing, and we all use it to locate individual specific pieces of information — including one or another recipe. However, it does not seem, in any practical way to serve as an organized repository of information that can be browsed as a book is browsed. It supplies particular facts, not a rich array of possibilities.
While I wouldn’t consider a physical book as the ideal of browsability, I agree with the sentiment that there’s more to information seeking than known-item search. Interfaces that support exploratory search open up a rich and appetizing array of possiblities.
I just upgraded to WordPress 2.6.3. Please let me know if you experience any unexpected behavior.
I’m back from HCIR ’08 and pleased to report that it was a rousing success. We had about 40 attendees, including such HCIR luminaries as Gary Marchionini, Marti Hearst, and mc schraefel. Microsoft Research supplied us not only with space and great food, but also workshop co-chair Ryen White and keynote speaker Sue Dumais, not to mention distinguished attendees Ken Church and Ashok Chandra. With a group like that, it was clear we were in for a great workshop.
And a great workshop we had! Some highlights:
At the beginning of the day, program chair Bill Kules had us write up our top HCIR concerns on post-it notes. We clustered these to form the basis for four breakout groups that discussed interactivity, task / workflow integration, sharing/collaboration, and results presentation. The results of these discussions, as well as the accepted papers, will be published online soon.
The workshop room also served as a space for posters. Posters were displayed throughout the day, and attendees congregated around posters and demos during the various breaks between sessions.
We concluded the workshop by soliciting feedback on how to improve it for next year. A fair number of attendees expressed interest in making the structure less formal, reducing the time spent on presentations and increasing the time available for more informal interaction. A number of folks expressed interest in continuing the discussions online, though there was no consensus on the best forum for doing so.
All in all, I was delighted by the energy of the group, and I believe that these workshops are helping to support HCIR efforts in both academia and industry.
Finally, I was delighted to recognize a number of Noisy Channel readers among the attendees. Conversely, Raman Chandrasekar was nice enough to (inadvertently) advertise this blog by leaving this screen up for a few minutes at the end of his presentation while he took Q&A:
I’ll keep folks here posted as more materials from the workshop become available. And, of course, you’ll be among the first to know where and when HCIR ’09 will take place.
Dave Kellogg has a nice post entitled “Web 2.Over?” in which he eloquently reviews the various reasons that most web 2.0 startups are “in for a reality check”.
But what I liked most about the post was his defense of the spirit of web 2.0:
While a swarm of eyeball-catching, oddly-named, twenty-something-led startups may get obliterated — outside venture circles at least — that wasn’t the point of web 2.0. To me, web 2.0 was, is, and remains an important collection of concepts that will endure:
- A read/write web, where we can participate, update, annotate, comment, etc.
- A social web, where there is awareness of relationships that can be leveraged appropriately
- User-generated content, which is here to stay and always has been (think: radio call-in shows, Kids Say the Darndest Things, or America’s Funniest Home Videos)
- The use of the web for communication and entertainment. People are natural communicators. We will always adapt our tools to that fundamental need.
- A personalized web, that understands what we like and how we like to get it
Amen! The good news is that there is no turning back on this vision of a more interactive online medium. Today it’s blogs and tweets; tomorrow it may be something we haven’t even imagined. But, now that an increasing number of us fancy ourselves as publishers and communicators, I don’t see us giving up that power without a fight.
I used a six-hour plane flight to finally take a crack at a Wikipedia entry for faceted search. I did recycle the faceted browser entry, but you’ll see that I largely overhauled it.
I’ve tried my best to capture the main academic and commercial efforts in this space. But I realize that, particularly on the commercial front, the entry is likely to attract attention from enterprise search vendors, particularly those that may feel slighted from not being included in the entry. I also realize that, despite my concerted attempt to write the entry from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia editors may have a knee-jerk reaction that I have a conflict of interest because my association with Endeca. I do think, however, that Endeca is one of the few notable vendors associated with faceted search, and that it is appropriate for Endeca to receive particular mention in the history of its commercial application.
I respect the challenge that Wikipedia editors face, especially when they are curating content outside their areas of expertise. As before I call upon the readership here to help out. If you see anything missing, add it! If you see anything wrong or misleading, fix it! Remember: ask not what Wikipedia can do for you; ask what you can do to improve Wikipedia.
Just wanted to let folks know that I’ll be offline for the next couple of days, attending HCIR ’08. I’m excited about the workshop and promise to blog about it when I return.
Nice article from Simson Garfinkel in Technology Review: “Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth“.
An excerpt:
So what is Truth? According to Wikipedia’s entry on the subject, “the term has no single definition about which the majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree.” But in practice, Wikipedia’s standard for inclusion has become its de facto standard for truth, and since Wikipedia is the most widely read online reference on the planet, it’s the standard of truth that most people are implicitly using when they type a search term into Google or Yahoo. On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject.
A while back, I promised to write about tag clouds. I’m a man of my word, and I apologize for the delay in getting to this promise.
First, let’s define tag clouds. A tag cloud is a visual depiction of a set of words or phrases that characterize a set of documents. While “tag” suggests that the words and phrases are user-generated, the contents of tag clouds are often supplied by authors or even automatically extracted. Typically, tag clouds order tags alphabetically and use the size (or some similar typographical aspect) of a tag to indicate its frequency or relevance to the document set.
Tag clouds have been derided as “the mullets of Web 2.0” (I believe the original “mullet” critic was Jeffrey Zeldman). As someone who at least finds himself advising clients about how to improve user experience, I have seen companies clamor for tag clouds without necessarily thinking through how users would benefit from them. Indeed, while a picture may be worth a thousand words, a tag cloud may simply look like a thousand words.
The Good
My favorite example of a tag cloud interface is the ESPN website. Here is a “before” and “after” view of Roger Clemens:
Before:
After:
I know that both Red Sox and Yankees fans read this blog, so I won’t take sides on the accuracy of the Mitchell Report, But the change in the tag cloud clearly and concisely shows how the news about Roger Clemens changed when that report came out.
The Bad
Unfortunately, tag clouds that offer insight are the exception, rather than the rule. Part of the problem is that tag clouds are only as good as the tags they depict: garbage in, garbage out. Tag clouds can also be so large and heterogeneous. Ryan Turner cites Flickr as such an example in his post, “Tag Clouds Are Bad (Usually)“:
The Ugly
As Greg recently blogged, tag clouds generated by social tagging systems can be worse than unhelpful; they can be actively misleading. Since tag clouds often occupy prime real estate on web site, they are a natural target for what Gartner analyst Whit Andrews calls “denial of insight” attacks.
In summary, tag clouds are a too-often abused but sometimes useful means to communicate information about a set of documents. But sites need to avoid presenting tag clouds simply expose the poverty of their tagging.
Also, while tag clouds may be an appropriate visualization for summarizing of a set of documents, they may not be the best means of presenting users with options for refning it. My colleagues and I discuss this problem in our upcoming HCIR presentation, and I’ll blog about it when I get back from the workshop.
The Noisy Channel 