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 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.
I’ve learn a lot from what Herb Simon, Danny Kahneman, and others tell us about the fallacy of assuming that human behavior conforms to unbounded–or even bounded–rationality. But it’s always nice to see reminders in real-world scenarios, especially ones where real money is at stake.
If you enjoy this topic, I recommend Greg Linden’s post: “Are advertisers rational?“. Or, if you’re up for it, read the original paper by Jason Auerback, Joel Galenson, and Mukund Sundararajan: “An Empirical Analysis of Return on Investment Maximization in Sponsored Search Auctions“.
One of the great things about blogging is that its public nature helps keep me honest. For all that I talk about “give to get,” I could do a bit more of it myself. One way I’d like to try is by adding a new category of posts called Blogs I Read to talk about other blogs that appeal to me and, I hope, to readers here at The Noisy Channel.
To inaugurate this series, I’m starting with Jeff’s Search Engine Caffe, published by Jeff Dalton. Jeff is a grad student in the PhD program at UMass Amherst’s Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval. He’s a bit more practically minded than your average PhD student in information retrieval, perhaps owing to his previous experience as a software engineer at Globalspec, where he worked on vertical search for engineering and manufacturing.
It’s thanks to Jeff that I’m blogging in the first place. I first met Jeff at SIGIR 2006 in Seattle, but it was at ECIR 2008 in Glasgow that he persuaded me to start a blog. Moreover, his advertising my blog on his own was a critical factor in helping me build up a critical mass of readers.
But I hardly need gratitude as a pretext to read Jeff’s blog. Jeff does a great job of keeping up with happenings in information retrieval, particulary those that span academia and industry like Yahoo BOSS and developments in blog search.
I know that graduate students aren’t exactly encouraged to blog, since the currency of the realm is peer-reviewed publication. But I hope that Jeff keeps up blogging as a way to share his ideas with a broader audience.
I’ve been excited to see some of the material from this blog making its way into the wider world. Here are some recent mentions I’ve found:
Sharing ideas is what blogging is all about, and I’m delighted that others are finding some of these ideas worth citing.
The Noisy Channel 