Category: Uncategorized

Thanks to Gwen Harris at Taxonomy Watch for calling my attention to James Kelway’s two-part article on creating user-centered taxonomies. It’s a great introduction to the subject.

A colleague of mine just pointed me to an article in Freedom to Tinker by Luis Villa entitled “Cloud(s), Hype, and Freedom“. It’s a nice analysis of some of the ideas that motivated two of my recent posts: “The Future is Mostly Cloudy” and “2.0 Means Give-to-Get“. Enjoy!

Thanks to Greg Linden for alerting me to a talk by Google Fellow Jeff Dean on Research Challenges Inspired by Large-Scale Computing at Google. Click through the link to stream or download the talk in your favorite media format.

Just saw a post from waxy.org by Andy Baio entitled “Memeorandum Colors: Visualizing Political Bias with Greasemonkey“. Here’s a quick excerpt:

With the help of del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, we used a recommendation algorithm to score every blog on Memeorandum based on their linking activity in the last three months. Then I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull that information out of Google Spreadsheets, and colorize Memeorandum on-the-fly. Left-leaning blogs are blue and right-leaning blogs are red, with darker colors representing strong biases.

To install it, you’ll need Firefox (not a problem for 61% of you, according to my analytics) and optionally the Greasemonkey extension:

• Greasemonkey users: memeorandum_colors.user.js
• Standalone Firefox Extension: memeorandumcolors.xpi

After it’s installed, go to any page on Memeorandum and wait a second for the coloring to appear. For details of how they used Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to score the blogs, check out the post.

It’s a nice application, and it reminds me of a 2004 CIKM paper by Miles Efron entitled “The Liberal Media and Right-Wing Conspiracies: Using Cocitation Information to Estimate Political Orientation in Web Documents“.

I just saw Michelle Manafy’s notes in EContent about the recent Enterprise Search Summit West.

A great quote from IDC analyst Sue Feldman: “One of the problems we have with search is that people ask such lousy questions…anytime tools hand people clues, it helps.” Sue has been pushing conversational interfaces for a while, and I agree with her that, as an industry, we need to keep working on the tools to support query elaboration and interaction in general.

I do take issue with Stephen Arnold’s advice at the same conference to vendors to get on the Google-enhancement gravy train and “build solutions that sit on top of Google and make it work better.” Dare I say that the writer of Beyond Search is being a bit reactive?

Thanks to Marco Neumann, who runs the New York Semantic Web Meetup, for alerting me to this presentation by Nova Spivack, whom Marco aptly describes as Chief Director of Sales of the Semantic Web. Enjoy!

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1062481&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
Nova Spivack at The Next Web Conference 2008

For the benefit of readers using RSS, I just wanted to point people to great discussion going on in the comment thread for this post.

This post from Kevin McDonald triggered all of my web alerts, so I thought I’d share it. It’s an interesting thought.

On a friend’s advice, I enabled permalinks for posts here. The good news is that the links will be more SEO-friendly and attract oodles of traffic. The bad news is that all posts may appear in your reader as unread. Sorry.

Thanks to David Fauth for calling my attention to this news release from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence: New Policy Makes Information Sharing a Factor in Employees’ Performance Reviews.

It’s certainly a step in the right direction. But what will determine the success of this effort is the implementation of Information Sharing Environment to connect federal, state, local, and tribal governments, the private sector, and foreign allies. The security challenges alone are daunting, but I’m just as concerned about the challenges of getting the right information to the right people. Anyone who thinks that search is 90% solved should think about problems like these!