Category: Uncategorized

Well, maybe NSFW is a bit of an exaggeration, but I don’t want to get anyone in trouble with a prudish employer. For everyone else, you can find out the size of your Twitter e-Penis here. Feel free to brag about the size of your Tweet-hood in the comments.

When I woke up this morning to a post on Advertising Age entitled “Media Giants Want to Top Google Results“, I braced for a whining sense of entitlement from an oligopoly that, by all accounts, isn’t aging well. But this part of the article caught my attention:

[Publishers] don’t just want “We’ll fix it.” They want more insight into Google’s black box of data and decision making.

Me too. As a consumer, I might have a slightly different goal than the publishers–I want to control how my results are presented, rather than to simply peer insider the black box in order to optimize content for it. Nonetheless, I’m glad to see more calls for transparency all around.

I’m also intrigued by the Automated Content Access Protocol, mentioned in the post. A big reason that publishers are in such a bind now is that they sold their birthright to Google for a mess of pottage, inviting traffic from Google at the expense of commoditization. It’s probably a bit late to lock the barn door, but at least publishers seem to be reflecting on their strategic mistakes.

Just read this post at Portfolio.com suggesting that there’s been a sudden bout of “blogophobia” at the paper of record, from their own bloggers “to capture the debate rather than taking sides in it”, to trying to shut down the Apartment Therapy blog using a DMCA notice. I thought the New York Times was going open; I hope this recent behavior isn’t indicative of their changing their minds.

Not sure these are scarce anymore, but you can join as part of my Aardvark network by clicking here. Offer good while invites last!

Read about Twitter’s new premium accounts. Then read this.

I owe you all a post about my impressions of Aardvark, but in the mean time wanted to highlight a post today by Gene Golovchinsky about social search. He in turn points to work  by Colum Foley and Ed Chi. Check it out!

Meanwhile, I’ve beseeched readers (you know who you are) to write a guest post about social search. Worst case, I’ll write something myself, and you’ll have to do even more work to set me straight in the comments!

Usability guru Jared Spool has a great piece explaining a single feature he calls “The Magic Behind Amazon’s 2.7 Billion Dollar Question“: the fact that they ask user “”Was this review helpful to you?”. It’s a great story about the power of good design.

Yes, that’s a provocative title. But check out this far more provocative statement by Emil Protalinski in an Ars Technica article entitled “Why Microsoft continues with search: it’s still not solved“:

What Microsoft is saying here is that everyone should be able to find what they are looking for on their first attempt, every time.

I hope that’s not what Microsoft Live Search director Stefan Weitz, whom Protalinski interviewed, said or meant. Even Google, to the best of my knowledge, has never made so bold a claim. Not all information needs are amenable to one-shot queries, even using a divinely inspired search or “answer” engine.

I’m glad to see that Microsoft is taking search seriously, and I hope that their latest Kumo efforts create more credible competition for Google. But let’s not chase delusions.

For more details, check out my presentation on reconsidering relevance.

Search green, green, green!

I just noticed a post by Peter Morville today about a flex track session he’s trying to organize at the IA Summit this week to discuss challenges and brainstorm about the relationship between practice and research in information architecture. I’m not attending the summit myself, but if anyone here is, I hope they’ll participate and report back on what they learn.