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Over the past five months, this blog has grown from a suggestion Jeff Dalton put in my ear to a community to which I’m proud to belong.

Some milestones:

• Over 70 posts to date.
• 94 subscribers, as reported by Google Reader.
• 100 unique visitors on.a typical day.

To be honest, I thought I’d struggle to keep up with posting weekly, and that I’d need to convince my mom to read this blog so that I wouldn’t be speaking to an empty room. The results so far have wildly exceeded the expectations I came in with.

But now that I’ve seen the potential of this blog, I’d like to “take it to the next level,” as the MBA types say.

My goals:

• Increase the readership. My motive isn’t (only) to inflate my own ego. I’ve seen that this blog succeeds most when it stimulates conversation, and a conversation needs participants.
• Increase participation. Given the quantity and quality of comments on recent posts, it’s clear that readers here contribute the most valuable content. I’d like to step that up a notch by having readers guest-blog and perhaps going as far as to turning The Noisy Channel into a group blog about information seeking that transcends my personal take on the subject. I’ve very open to suggestions here.
• Add some style. Various folks have offered suggestions for improving the blog, such as changing platforms to WordPress, modifying the layout to better use screen real estate, adding more images, etc. I’m the first to admit that I am not a designer, and I’d really appreciate ideas from you all on how to make this site more attractive and usable.

In short, I’m asking you to help me help you make The Noisy Channel a better and noisier place. Please post your comments here or email me if you’d prefer to make suggestions privately.

Regular readers may have noticed the lack of posts this week. My apologies to anyone who was waiting by the RSS feed. Yesterday was the submission deadline for HCIR ’08, which means that today is a new day! So please stay tuned for your regularly scheduled programming.

Props to Jeff Dalton for alerting me about the new book on information retrieval by Christopher Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schütze. You can buy a hard copy, but you can also access it online for free at the book website.

The call to action I sent out a couple of weeks ago has generated healthy interest.

One of the several people who responded is the CTO of one of Endeca’s competitors, whom I laud for understanding that the need to better articulate and communicate the technology of information access transcends competition among vendors. While we have differences on how to achieve this goal, I at least see hope from his responsiveness.

The rest were analysts representing some of the leading firms in the space. They not only expressed interest, but also contributed their own ideas on how to make this effort successful. Indeed, I met with two analysts this week to discuss next steps.

Here is where I see this going.

In order for any efforts to communicate the technology of information access to be effective, the forum has to establish credibility as a vendor-neutral and analyst-neutral forum. Ideally, that means having at least two major vendors and two major analysts on board. What we want to avoid is having only one major vendor or analyst, since that will create a reasonable perception of bias.

I’d also like to involve academics in information retrieval and library and information science. As one of the analysts suggested, we could reach out to the leading iSchools, who have expressed an open interest in engaging the broader community.

What I’d like to see come together is a forum, probably a one-day workshop, that brings together credible representatives from the vendor, analyst, and academic communities. With a critical mass of participants and enough diversity to assuage concerns of bias, we can start making good on this call to action.

John Langford just posted a list of seven ICML ’08 papers that he found interesting. I appreciate his taste in papers, and I particularly liked a paper on Learning Diverse Rankings with Multi-Armed Bandits that addresses learning a diverse ranking of documents based on users’ clicking behavior. If you liked the Less is More work that Harr Chen and David Karger presented at SIGIR ’06, then I recommend you check this one out.

I sent the following open letter to the leading enterprise providers and industry analysts in the information access community. I am inspired by the recent efforts of researchers to bring industry events to major academic conferences. I’d like to see industry–particularly enterprise providers and industry analysts–return the favor, embracing these events to help bridge the gap between research and practice.

Dear friends in the information access community,

I am reaching out to you with this open letter because I believe we, the leading providers and analysts in the information access community, share a common goal of helping companies understand, evaluate, and differentiate the technologies in this space.

Frankly, I feel that we as a community can do much better at achieving this goal. In my experience talking with CTOs, CIOs, and other decision makers in enterprises, I’ve found that too many people fail to understand either the state of current technology or the processes they need to put in place to leverage that technology. Indeed, a recent AIIM report confirms what I already knew anecdotally–that there is a widespread failure in the enterprise to understand and derive value from information access.

In order to advance the state of knowledge, I propose that we engage an underutilized resource: the scholarly community of information retrieval and information science researchers. Not only has this community brought us many of the foundations of the technology we provide, but it has also developed a rigorous tradition of evaluation and peer review.

In addition, this community has been increasingly interested in connection with practitioners, as demonstrated by the industry days held at top-tier scholarly conferences, such as SIGIR, CIKM, and ECIR. I have participated in a few of these, and I was impressed with the quality of both the presenters and the attendees. Web search leaders, such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, have embraced these events, as have smaller companies that specialize in search and related technologies, such as information extraction. Enterprise information access providers, however, have been largely absent at these events, as have industry analysts.

I suggest that we take at least the following steps to engage the scholarly community of information retrieval and information science researchers:

• Collaborate with the organizers of academic conferences such as SIGIR, CIKM, and ECIR to promote participation of enterprise information access providers and analysts in conference industry days.
• Participate in workshops that are particularly relevant to enterprise information access providers, such as the annual HCIR and exploratory search workshops.

The rigor and independence of the conferences and workshops makes them ideal as vendor-neutral forums. I hope that you all will join me in working to strengthen the connection between the commercial and scholarly communities, thus furthering everyone’s understanding of the technology that drives our community forward.

Please contact me at dt@endeca.com or join in an open discussion at http://thenoisychannel.com if you are interested in participating in this effort.

Sincerely,
Daniel Tunkelang

My colleague and Endeca co-founder Pete Bell just pointed me to a great post by Kevin Kelly about what may be the earliest implementation of a faceted navigation system. Like every good Endecan, I’m familiar with Ranganathan‘s struggle to sell the library world on colon classification. But it is still striking to see this struggle played out through technology artifacts from a pre-Internet world.

Max Wilson, a colleague of mine at the University of Southampton who has contributed frequently to the conversation here at the Noisy Channel, just started a blog of his own. Check out Max’s blog here.

His post on exhibiting exploratory behaviour (that’s the Queen’s English to you!) raises an issue at the heart of many of our discussions on this blog: what is exploratory behavior? Is it clarification or refinement? Are users exploring in order to resolve imperfect communication with the information retrieval system, or are they exploring in order to learn?

These are burning questions, and I look forward to learning more about how Max, m.c. schraefel, and others are addressing them.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be participating in an invitational workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation on Information Seeking Support Systems at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. The participants are an impressive bunch–I feel like I’m the only person attending whom I’ve never heard of!

So, what I’d love to know is what concerns readers here would like me to raise. If you’ve been reading this blog at all, then you know I have no lack of opinions on research directions for information seeking support systems. But I’d appreciate the chance to aggregate ideas from the readership here, and I’ll try my best to make sure they surface at the workshop.

I encourage you to use the comment section to foster discussion, but of course feel free to email me privately (dt at endeca dot com) if you prefer.

After seeing what the Noisy channel readership has done to improve the HCIR and Relevance Wikipedia entries, I was thinking we might take on one or two more. Specifically, the Exploratory Search and Exploratory Search Systems entries are, quite frankly, in sad shape.

Between the readership here, the folks involved in HCIR ’08, and the participants in the IS3 workshop, I would think we have more than enough expertise in exploratory search to fix these up.

Any volunteers? For those of you who are doing research in exploratory search, consider that those two Wikipedia pages are the top hits returned when people search for exploratory search on Google.