Month: December 2008

Tonight I had the good fortune to attend a talk by Ben Fry on Computational Information Design at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Ben Fry is one of those rare human beings whose work spans from the heart of academia (he’s worked with Eric Lander on visualizing genetic data)  to popular culture (he work appears in Minority Report and The Hulk). And he’s an outstanding speaker.

The content of his talk reflected his dissertation work at the MIT Media Laboratory, his postdoc work the Broad Institute, and some of his more recent work  as a designer and consultant. I can’t do justice to the talk, which unfortunately is not available in any recorded form. But I do suggest you seize the opportunity to hear him speak, should it come your way. He communicates the power of visualization through examples, in a way that conveys both their practical value and their beauty.

The Q&A session was almost as long as the talk, and probably could have gone on indefinitely if the organizers hadn’t finally cut it off. Suspecting that I was one of the few non-academics in the audience, I asked two eminently practical questions: how do you know that a visualization is effective, and how d you guard against a visualization skewing your perception of the data?

Fry’s answers were incisive. He judges the effectiveness of a visualization based on whether people give up their previous tools to use it. And he selects problem areas where he sees a significant opportunity to improve the state of the art. That way, the difference in adoption is so obvious that you don’t need to perform user studies to observe it.

As for concern with visualization skewing perception of the data, he acknowledges it as a valid concern but points out that we don’t seem to raise the same concern with non-visual (e.g., textual) data presentation. Somehow we are especially suspcious of aesthetic representation, a sort of “don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” bias. He adds that the risk of design skewing our perception is dwarfed by the cost of not designing at all.

Visualization is a tricky subject, and I’ll freely admit that I’m underwhelmed by much of the work I’ve encountered. Perhaps my past work in information visualization makes me a particularly harsh critic. But Fry presents a compelling picture–or rather, a compelling video, since his work is full of motion. My only complaint is that he hasn’t explored the world of search and information retrieval. His work seems to beg for application in that domain. Food for thought.

To paraphrase René Magritte, ceci n’est pas un blogue corporate (this is not a corporate blog).

Why do I bring this up? Because today I saw a post by Richard MacManus on ReadWriteWeb entitled “Report: Corporate Blogs Not Trusted” and a similar post by Joe Wilcox about how to “Make Your Corporate Blog Believable“. They cite a report from Forrester that company blogs represent the least trusted information source, down at 16%. Actually, personal blogs don’t fare much better at 18%, but I’d like to use this report as a pretext to talk about what it means to blog as an industry professional.

Frankly, I don’t think corporate blogs, at least as they are conventionally understood, are a good idea. Companies put out press releases that no sane person would trust as an objective information source. A corporate blog is just a repackaging of a press release web page, trying to masquerade as something more hip. I don’t think it fools anyone, and I’m not aware of any corporate blogs other than the Official Google Blog that have significant readership.

Bloggers are people who speak with individual voices. And industry professionals are still people, regardless of their corporate affiliations. I am no more the voice of Endeca’s public relations department than Greg Linden is the voice of Microsoft’s or Matt Cutts the voice of Google’s.

Of course, I have my point of view, which unsurprisingly has some alignment with my employer’s overall vision. When I advocate for HCIR, I don’t make excuses for the fact that HCIR underlies Endeca’s approach to information access. But I speak as an individual and in my own voice. When I blog, I put my own credibility on the line, and I cultivate a reputation that extends beyond my corporate affiliation.

I think the interesting question for companies is not whether they should publish corporate blogs, but rather whether they should encourage their employees to publish personal blogs that relate to the work the company does. As someone who has been involved in the development of Endeca’s core intellectual property, I understand the reservations that companies have about letting their employees publish. But I think that companies are often too conservative, and incur an enormous opportunity cost in the name of protecting trade secrets. Letting employees blog (and, more generally, publish) not only provides the companies with free marketing, but also provides employees with an avenue for personal development.

I’d be curious to hear perspectives from readers here who work for companies. Perhaps I’m lucky to work for an enlightened employer; do most corporate citizens get the memo from Legal saying that blogging is something only the marketing department should do?

Normally, I don’t post about press releases that people email me. But in this case, the title, “Half of Americans Are Overwhelmed by E-Mail“, hit far too close to home. Having spent the day catching up on a week of email, I’m feeling more than a little overwhelmed. And it’s made me think hard about imposing more discipline on how I manage email. 

I’m in no immediate danger of declaring email bankruptcy, but I have reached a point where my ad hoc approach to managing email–particularly to checking email as it arrives–costs me so much in productivity that I am considering reducing the frequency with which I check email to once or twice a day.

One might ask if there’s anything unique about email as a source of context switching. Don’t the same issues apply to news feeds, Twitter, etc? And there’s instant messenger–which is intended to trigger an immediate context switch. Why single out email?

My suspicion is that email satisfies an unholy mix of properties:

• A substantial fraction of email is personal and important, and there are no reliable automatic ways of identifying this fraction.
   
• The sender’s expectation of how long to wait for a response varies widely–from as soon as possible (e.g., one-line bodyless emails used as instant messages) to days or even indefinite (e.g., an FYI email that does not require a response).
   
• The typical sender sees email as the least invasive way to communicate, and therefore uses it as the default means of doing so.

The result: you (or at least I) end up with a relentless queue of email, faced with a choice of looking at all of it frequently, or likely deferring something urgent.

Of course, there are conventions, like marking emails as urgent, that are intended to sort out some of the above. But it isn’t realistic to expect everyone to use these consistently, at least not this late in the game.

Perhaps the answer is, as was suggested in an earlier post, to make it public. Specifically, Tantek suggests to “Move as much 1:1 communication into 1:many or 1:all mediums.” At some level, that is counterintuitive–after all, doesn’t that just make my problem everyone’s problem? But the key is that public communication sets different expectations. I might know the answer to your question, but so might any number of other people, so let’s balance the load.

It’s a nice idea, though it’s not clear how anarchic 1:many and 1:all mediums can accomplish this load balancing efficiently. But arguably that just an implementation detail. The first step is to calibrate the specificity of distribution to the specificity of the information / communication need.

Where does this leave me and others who are overwhelmed by email? For now, stuck with heuristics like disciplined management. For the long haul, advocating for more scalable social norms.

p.s. Ironically, this post is a public response to a private email.

I had a conversation the other day that raised a conundrum: what is *not* search? What do I mean by that? Well, as Stephen Arnold points out in a recent post, “search” can be anything from a “find-a-phone number problem” to a “glittering generality” that encompasses end-to-end information processing.

Language is imperfect, so is it really that important to define what is and isn’t “search”? It certainly matters when you’re trying to sell search technology! But, more importantly, we need some shared understanding in order to make progress.

At the very least, I propose that we distinguish “search” as a problem from “search” as a solution. By the former, I mean the problem of information seeking, which is traditonially the domain of library and information scientists. By the latter, I mean the approach most commonly associated with information retrieval, in which a user enters a query into the system (typically as free text) and the system returns a set of objects that match the query, perhaps with different degrees of relevancy.

Beyond that, we need to recognize that search exists within the context of tasks. It is easy to lump every task that involves information seeking as “search”, but doing so oversimplifies a complex landscape of activities and needs. I believe we are headed for a world where end users think about tasks rather than about the search activities that form part of those tasks. In that world, search technologists provide infrastructure, not the end-user destination.