I recently joined Twitter and asked the twitterverse for opinions about DreamHost vs. GoDaddy as a platform to host this blog on WordPress. I was shocked when I noticed today that I’d gotten this response from the President / COO of GoDaddy (or perhaps a sales rep posing as such).
Seems like a lot of work for customer acquisition!
Just read this article citing a number of studies to the effect that email is a major productivity drain. Nothing surprising to me–a lot of us have learned the hard way that the only way to be productive is to not check email constantly.
But I am curious if anyone has made progress on tools that alert you to emails that do call for immediate attention. I’m personally a fan of attention bonds approaches, but I imagine that the machine learning folks have at least thought about this as a sort of inverse spam filtering problem.
As someone who’s long felt that the iPod’s clickwheel violates Fitts’s law, I was delighted to read this Gizmodo article asserting that the iPod’s clickwheel must die. My choice quote:
Quite simply, the clickwheel hasn’t scaled to handle the long, modern day menus in powerful iPods.
Fortunately Apple recognized its mistake on this one and fixed the problem in its touch interface. Though, to be clear, the problem was not inherent in the choice of a wheel interface, but rather in the requirement to make gratuitously precise selections.
Now I’m waiting to see someone fix the tiny minimize/maximize/close buttons in the upper right corner on Windows, which I suspect have become the textbook example of violating Fitts’s law.
Props to Michael Arrington for calling out this snippet in an interview with Marissa Mayer, Google Vice President of Search Product and User Experience on the occasion of Google’s 10th birthday:
Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95% of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10%.
I agree with Michael that search isn’t even close to being solved yet. I’ve criticized the way many web search start-ups–and even the giants Yahoo and Microsoft–are going about trying to dethrone Google through incremental improvements or technologies that don’t address any need that Google does not already adequately (if not optimally) address. But there is no lack of open problems in search for those ambitious enough to tackle them.
A colleague of mine at Endeca recently pointed me to a post by John Ferrara at Boxes and Arrows entitled Applying Turing’s Ideas to Search.
One of the points he makes echoes the “computers aren’t mind readers” theme I’ve been hammering at for a while:
If the user has not phrased her search clearly enough for another person to understand what she’s trying to find, then it’s not reasonable to expect that a comparatively “dumb” machine could do better. In a Turing test, the response to a question incomprehensible even to humans would prove nothing, because it wouldn’t provide any distinction between person and machine.
While I’m not convinced that search engine designers should be aspiring to pass the Turing test, I agree wholeheartedly with the vision John puts forward:
It describes an ideal form of human-computer interaction in which people express their information needs in their own words, and the system understands and responds to their requests as another human being would. During my usability test, it became clear that this was the very standard to which my test participants held search engines.
It’s not about the search engine convincing the user that another human being is producing the answers, but rather engaging users in a conversation that helps them articulate and elaborate their information needs. Or, as we like to call it around here, HCIR.
Just another reminder that I expect to migrate this blog to a hosted WordPress platform in the next days. If you have opinions about hosting platforms, please let me know by commenting here. Right now, I’m debating between DreamHost and GoDaddy, but I’m very open to suggestions.
I will do everything in my power to minimize disruption–not sure how easy Blogger will make it to redirect users to the new site. I’ll probably post here for a while after to the move to try to direct traffic.
I do expect the new site to be under a domain name I’ve already reserved: http://thenoisychannel.com. It currently forwards to Blogger.
I spent Thursday at the Endeca Government Summit, where I had the privilege to chat face-to-face with some Noisy Channel readers. Mostly, I was there to learn more about the sorts of information seeking problems people are facing in the public sector in general, and in the intelligence agencies in particular.
While I can’t go into much detail, the key concern was exploration of information availability. This problem is the antithesis of known-item search: rather than you are trying to retrieve information you know exist (and which you know how to specify), you are trying to determine if there is information available that would help you with a particular task.
Despite being lost in a sea of TLAs, I came away with a deepened appreciation of both the problems the intelligence agencies are trying to address and the relevance of exploratory search approaches to those problems.
Just a quick note to let folks know that I’ll be migrating to WordPress in the next days. I’ll make every effort to have to move be seamless. I have secured the domain name http://thenoisychannel.com, which currently forwards Blogger, but will shift to wherever the blog is hosted. I apologize in advance for any disruption.
One change I’m thinking of making to this blog is to introduce “quick bites” as a way of mentioning interesting sites or articles I’ve come across without going into deep analysis. Here’s a first one to give you a flavor of the concept. Let me know what you think.
I just read an article on how courts will tolerate search inaccuracies in e-Discovery by way of Curt Monash. It reminded me of our recent discussion of transparency in information retrieval. I agree that “explanations of [search] algorithms are of questionable value” for convincing a court of the relevance and accuracy of the results. But that’s because those algorithms aren’t sufficiently intuitive for those explanations to be meaningful except in a theoretical sense to an information retreival researcher.
I realize that user-entered Boolean queries (the traditional approach to e-Discovery) aren’t effective because users aren’t great at composing queries for set retrieval. But that’s why machines need to help users with query elaboration–a topic for an upcoming post.
I’ve gotten a fair amount of feedback suggesting that I switch blogging platforms. Since I’d plan to make such changes infrequently, I’d like to get input from readers before doing so, especially since migration may have hiccups.
I’ve just posted a poll on the home page to ask if folks here have a preference as to which blogging platform I use. Please vote this week, and feel free to post comments here.
The Noisy Channel 