Author: Daniel Tunkelang

I just discovered that the User Interface Design group at MIT has started blogging. Here’s the mission statement from their opening post:

The sharing of knowledge and ideas is of fundamental importance to the advancement of technology. With this goal in mind, MIT’s User Interface Design group meets once a day at Tea Time to brainstorm new ideas, review new technologies and ideas, and share their experiences working in the field.

If we hope to herald innovation by sharing ideas with a research group , then there’s a boundless value to sharing ideas and thoughts with the world at large. With this goal in mind, we will post a daily log of the musings and observations we discuss in our tea time meetings, and welcome your thoughts and comments about Human Computer Interaction, User Interface Design, and increasing the value and effectiveness of how we use technology.

I’m psyched whenever I see academics blogging, and even more psyched to see a collective effort like this one.

The “long tail” is one of the most abused buzzwords of recent years, and I hesitate to use it myself in respectable company.

Nonetheless, SEO veteran Dustin Woodard has a nice guest post at the Hitwise Intelligence blog entitled “Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search“. Here are some statistics he cites about the distribution of search term frequency for web search data collected by Hitwise:

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

It’s nice to see concrete data to validate conventional wisdom. Of course, I’d be curious to see the corresponding distribution of ad revenue associated with terms.

Thanks to Jeff for writing up notes on the annual IR Facility Symposium 2008. Related links:

• IR Facility Symposium 2008
• Jeff’s Notes on the IRF Symposium Closing Session
• Patent Information Retrieval workshop at CIKM ’08

Daniel Lemire has a great post today entitled “Understanding what makes database indexes work“. There’s nothing that should be surprising for folks who live and breathe this stuff, but it’s a great introduction for those who don’t. Here are his bullet points:

1. You expect specific queries: restructure your data!
2. You expect specific queries: materialize them!
3. You expect specific queries: redundancy is (sometimes) your friend
4. Use multiresolution!
5. Your data is not random: compress it!
6. In any case: optimize your code 

Paul Ogilvie just started blogging at mSpoke, and his first post asks “What makes a blog post popular? Part I: Comparing popularity and reading difficulty“. Specifically, he explores “whether well-written feed items are more likely to receive attention than poorly-written ones”. At the risk of stealing his thunder, I’ll deliver the punchline: he found no correlations between surface features of reading difficulty and popularity. Fortunately, he’s not planning to give up on writing quality!

Like Paul, I find that the absence of correlation goes against common sense wisdom. I’m curious whether the problem is the measures he’s using (which he admits are crude), or other factors that confound the popularity statistics.

Via Jon Elsas.

Kudos to Lynda Moulton at the Enteprise Search Practice Blog for a post entitled “Apples and Orangutans: Enterprise Search and Knowledge Management“. She criticises some commentary in CIO Magazine that “search is being implemented in enterprises as the new knowledge management”. Her thesis in a nutshell is that “knowledge management (KM) is not now, nor has it ever been, a software product or even a suite of products”. If that’s not enough to get you to read the full article, here’s an excerpt:

Because I follow enterprise search for the Gilbane Group while maintaining a separate consulting practice in knowledge management, I am struggling with his conflation of the two terms or even the migration of one to the other. The search we talk about is a set of software technologies that retrieve content. I’m tired of the debate about the terminology “enterprise search” vs. “behind the firewall search.” I tell vendors and buyers that my focus is on software products supporting search executed within (or from outside looking in) the enterprise on content that originates from within the enterprise or that is collected by the enterprise. I don’t judge whether the product is for an exclusive domain, content type or audience, or whether it is deployed with the “intent” of finding and retrieving every last scrap of content lying around the enterprise. It never does nor will do the latter but if that is what an enterprise aspires to, theirs is a judgment call I might help them re-evaluate in consultation.

I haven’t gotten to look at it from my wi-fi connection on the Amtrak Acela (which is clearly a work in progress, but nonetheless a very exciting development), but here’s a link to the video.

Note that you’ll have to install Microsoft Silverlight to view it.

Alternatively, you can watch the slideshow below, but I’m not sure how much sense it will make without the voice-over.

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=set-retrieval-20-1225903234513602-9&stripped_title=set-retrieval-20-presentation