Category: Uncategorized

No, I’m not talking about a faceted search interface for Wikipedia, though that would be a great idea! Rather, I’m talking about the Faceted Classification Wikipedia entry, which until recently contained a list of faceted search vendors, including Endeca. I removed this list for two reasons.

First, I’ve seen how a list of vendors on a Wikipedia entry can become something of a vendor battle for prominence. From what I understand of Wikipedia guidelines, the best approach is to have a separate entry for a vendor list, as per my recent edit to the Enterprise Search entry.

Second, faceted search is not the same thing as faceted classification, and I don’t think it makes sense to talk about “faceted classification software”. We really need a Faceted Search entry, and then we could point from there to a list of vendors, analogous to that for Enterprise Search.

I’m posting these thoughts on the talk page for Faceted Classfication. I hope that folks here will chime in and perhaps even contribute an entry on Faceted Search. This entry may have been a well-intentioned start, but we need one that meets our and Wikipedia’s standards.

GNU and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman told The Guardian that cloud computing is a trap. Like Nicholas Carr, I think Stallman is a bit late and a bit paranoid. I agree with him and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison that cloud computing is overhyped to the point that the term has lost meaning–at least I always assumed it was just a sexier term for web-based utility computing. I also think that both consumers should be wary of committing their information to proprietary platforms–web-based or otherwise.

But there’s no question in my mind that the average user benefits from divesting IT responsibilities to the cloud. After I had played my filial tech support role one time too many, I moved my mother to web-based email. I would have uninstalled Microsoft Office if Google Docs could have met her needs–and I’m sure it will someday. And what’s good for my mom is probably good for most users, whether consumer or enterprise.

The list of accepted papers for HCIR ’08 is now posted on the workshop web site.As you can see an exciting collections of topics from an impressive collection of researchers. I hope to see some of you there next month.

Google’s extended 10th birthday celebration has been accompanied by non-stop posts about Google, and I’ll confess to being part of that hype. Nonetheless, I thought Danny Sullivan’s recent post entitled “The Google Hive Mind” was one of the more informed analyses I’d read about Google of late. I don’t agree with it completely–in particular, I think it overstates Google’s openness. But still a worthwhile read.

Last week, I put out a call for help to clean up the Enterprise Search entry on Wikipedia. I decided to answer that call myself by moving the list of vendors and open source alternatives to a separate entry. I also cleaned up that list, eliminating the dubious classification scheme (which you can see on the pre-overhaul version of the Enterprise Search entry) and removing any vendors or open source software that are not notable enough to have Wikipedia entries.

Please take a look and make your own improvements! I see this overhaul as a first step. The resulting entry is a bit spartan, but at least it isn’t a disaster zone. Now we can think about fleshing out the definition(s) of enterprise search, which should be the focus of the entry.

I’m experimenting with ways to weave this blog into the broader fabric of social media. Some of you may have noticed the ShareThis links on each post. I hope some of you are using them to share material you encounter here. Today, I added the Twitter Updater plug-in, so new posts will automatically trigger a Twitter update (you can follow me here).

I’m also playing with BackType–see my comments here. Eventually I’ll figure out a way to make The Noisy Channel a central location for reading all of my public rants.

Lynda Moulton wrote a post today entitled “Taxonomy, Yes, but for What?” in which she reminds us that taxonomies aren’t just for navigation. Here is an excerpt:

Taxonomies for navigation are but one purpose for them to be used in search….In more sophisticated applications of taxonomies, the thesaurus model of relationships becomes a necessity. When a search engine, has embedded algorithms that can interpret explicit term relationships, it indexes content according to a taxonomy and all its cross-references. Taxonomy here informs the index engine.

Whether we’re talking about taxonomies, ontologies, or faceted classification schemes, Moulton is right to note that we should also keep in mind the intent of these knowledge management structures before we get too caught up in the details.

A number of folks, including Daniela Barbosa have pointed to Clay Shirky’s recent keynote at Web 2.0 NYC entitled “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.“. It’s a informative, entertaining talk, and I recommended to the readership here.

What I particularly like in his “filter failure” characterization is that it really exposes the human-computer interaction challenges in managing information flow (in both directions). It also reminds me of Danah Boyd’s Master’s Thesis on managing identity in a digital world, and of some earlier discussion here about privacy through difficulty.

Hardly breaking news, but I read in CNET this morning that Americans text more than they talk. The article cites a report from Nielsen that, in  the second quarter of 2008, U.S. mobile subscribers sent and received on average 357 text messages per month, compared with making and receiving 204 phone calls a month.

Perhaps there is a trend here towards more efficient technology-mediated communication. I know it’s a stretch, but this trend seems at odds with the claim advanced by NLP proponents that we strongly prefer natural language interfaces. Speech is surely more natural than texting, and yet we opt for efficiency over natural. Moreover, text messages are notoriously compact, shedding grammar and even vowels. It’s a bit early to extrapolate, but I’m curious where this trend will take us.

For those of you interested in the subject of enterprise search, check out this article on Forbes.com by Dan Woods entitled Why Google Isn’t Enough. The article explores “what ‘enterprise search’ means and why it is a complicated challenge that is becoming increasingly urgent for most companies to solve.” It uses examples like the ESPN and Home Depot web sites to illustrate faceted navigation, and even quotes yours truly relating the enterprise search to library science approaches for information seeking.

Unrelated: Dan Woods has done some great writing on “enterprise 2.0”–in fact, he’s one of the few people I’ve found to talk substantively about this very hyped topic. I particularly recommend the notes on the SAP International Research Forum 2007 that he edited and co-authored.