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A few people have commented that the events I advertise here tend to be expensive–or, worse, require a lot of work to get into! So I’m glad to announce a freebie that I hope will be as much fun for me as for attendees.

I’ve been invited to participate in a webinar on the ethics of blogging that will take place Thursday, September 24th at 1 PM EST. It’s free to attend; just register online here.

Maggie Fox, founder and CEO of Social Media Group, will moderate. My two co-panelists are Augie Ray, who blogs at Experience: The Blog) and is Managing Director of Experiential Marketing at interactive and social media agency Fullhouse, and John Jantsch, who blogs at Duct Tape Marketing and is a marketing and digital technology coach.

Among the topics to be discussed:

• Transparency: How and when should a blogger reveal revenue sources?
• Pay for play: Blog posts, tweets, and more as marketing tools
• Online privacy
• Astroturfing: Organizations creating artificial “grassroots” campaigns
• Compliance and Legal: What should a corporate blog policy look like? What are a blogger’s legal obligations?

I hope some of you will be able to attend! Regardless, please use the comment thread make suggestions here about topics you’d like me to cover or concerns you’d like to see me address. I know that a lot of you have thought hard about these issues, and I’d like to ethically exploit your collective wisdom.

The two biggest academic conferences for information retrieval are SIGIR and CIKM (a site which, sadly, is still hacked). Hopefully some of you enjoyed my coverage of SIGIR 2009–or, better yet, attended and experienced it for yourselves.

Anyway, thanks to Jeff Dalton for alerting me that the CIKM 2009 accepted papers list is now available. I don’t plan to make it to Hong Kong this November, but I hope that those who do are kind enough to blog about it!

Also, I see mention of an industry track, but not of an Industry Event like the widely acclaimed one held at CIKM 2008–which inspired my own organization of the SIGIR 2009 Industry Track. I’m curious whether such industry events will prove to be one-time phenomena or will become a staple of these  conferences. I hope for the latter, but I am admittedly biased, given my industry-centric perspective.

John Battelle has a pair of posts on BingTweets (yes, I know, horrible name) entitled “Decisions Are Never Easy – So Far“. In his second post, he sums up the problem with conventional search engines in a nutshell: “I don’t know what to ask about”. His describing the need for a “decision engine” is a bit too obvious a nod to his sponsor, but he is nonetheless right in calling for information seeking support tools based on HCIR.

Just noticed that the Web Ecology Project has published “The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter“. The blog post includes a link to their full report.

Their approach strikes me as a generalization of measuring retweets, but perhaps I’m giving it too cursory a read. I did compare their results to TunkRank: we at least agree that mashable is more influential than CNN–though even as simple a measure as follower count would confirm that judgment.

Anyway, I am delighted to see serious researchers looking at this problem. I’m still hoping to investigate hypotheses regarding TunkRank and friend:follower ratios.

Gene Golovchinsky at FXPAL has written a great series of posts on medical literature search, specifically looking at how MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) has been used to augment conventional text search, and whether its use improves the overall effectiveness of information seeking.

Here are the posts:

• What a tangled MeSH we weave
• Open-source queries
• Have queries, want answers

Even if you’re not specifically interested in medical literature search, I recommend you check these posts out. Much of the interesting work on information seeking is taking place in specialized domains like this one, where the value of getting it right offers far more promising returns than incremental improvements to general web search.

I’ve started reading a few different blogs in the past months, and one that I particularly like is Chris Dixon’s, which has the simple (if uncreative) title cdixon.org.

Chris has an interesting history that includes heading R&D at a hedge fund, co-founding SiteAdvisor, investing in a number of technology companies (including Skype and Postini), and most recently co-founding Hunch (which I’ve blogged about here a few times). As a karaoke junkie, I can’t help noting that he developed the software that became MySpace Karaoke.

Not surprisingly, Chris brings the combined perspective of an investor and a technologist to his blog. Here are some examples of recent posts that illustrate his range.

Thoughts on machine learning:

• To make smarter systems, it’s all about the data
• Machine learning is really good at partially solving just about any problem

Career advice for entrepreneurs:

• The worst time to join a startup is right after it gets initial VC financing
• Why you shouldn’t keep your startup idea secret

And of course he occasionally blogs about Hunch, his current venture.

Chris has a strong personality that comes through as a blogger. I think that’s critical for making a blog both informative and entertaining, and I try to channel my own personality (which I’m told, for better or worse, is quite distinctive) through this blog.

In short, check out cdixon.org if you’re interested in the perspective of a practical (and successful) technologist-entrepreneur.

Pete Bell and I delivered the seminar today, and it was a blast! We had over 150 registered listeners–and I found out that at least one of those registrations corresponded to a roomful of 20 people at an online retailer that is a thought leader in web usability and design!

Since we didn’t manage to get to all of the questions (over 40–possibly over 50 counting the activity on Twitter!), we’re going to do a follow-up podcast that will be available even to people who didn’t attend the seminar. And, since even that might not be enough, I’m saving all of the questions as blog fodder.

To all who attended–and to Jared, Adam, and all the folks of UIE–thanks from me and Pete for giving us this great opportunity to connect with folks interested in faceted search and user experience.

I noticed recently that, when I sent out an invitation to connect to someone on LinkedIn, there wasn’t the usual slot for including a free-text note with the invitation. I thought it might be a glitch–and I even considered the possibility that this was only happening to my account because I’m a bit of a networking junkie.

But I noticed on Twitter today that Mark Williams (aka @Mr_LinkedIn) had noticed the same change and followed up on it with LinkedIn’s customer service department. I never assume any site behavior on a freely provided service is permanent, but it is starting to look like this is a deliberate decision and not a transient bug.

If so, it’s an annoying change, though I can see the merits. I’ve made heavy use of the connection message, especially when inviting someone I don’t know all that well–or don’t know at all. A personal message can be what distinguishes a welcome cold call from spam. But I’m guessing that others have abused that capability, filling it with spam or worse. Still, I feel like LinkedIn may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Will follow up if / when I hear more.

UPDATE: Just saw this message on the LinkedIn site via Twitter:

Unable to Personalize Invitation Message

Why can’t I personalize the message in my Invitation?

We are aware of an issue preventing some members from customizing their Invitation messages. There is no need to contact Customer Service as our team is reviewing the issue to determine the best overall solution.

As a temporary workaround, the following message (with your name in the signature) is being sent when you click on the ‘Send Invitation’ button: ‘I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.’

As long as you approve of this message, you may continue to take advantage of this feature. If you prefer a more customized message to be sent, you may delay sending your Invitations until the functionality has been restored.

UPDATE #2: Looks like the problem is resolved.

My colleague, Endeca co-founder Pete Bell, and I are giving a virtual seminar on faceted search for User Interface Engineering (UIE) this Thursday, August 20th at 1:30PM EST. We’ve heard that there are over a hundred sign-ups already–which may actually correspond to more people, since a sign-up may mean a group of people watching in a conference room. We’re very excited about the opportunity to share our insights on a topic that draws such interest.

Jared Spool, who invited us to give this seminar, will be moderating. Indepedendent of the seminar, you you check out his work (and the UIE site) if you are interested in web usability.

The regular price is $129, but Noisy Channel readers who are interested in attending can get a $30 discount by using TUNKELANG (yes, all caps) as a promo code. Attendees also receive a free copy of my book, Faceted Search. That’s a a total value of over $150 for just $99! And it slices and dices!

In an interview with CNET’s Tom Krazit, Google Chief Economist Hal Varian made a nice argument regarding the relative advantages of scale to a search engine:

On this data issue, people keep talking about how more data gives you a bigger advantage. But when you look at data, there’s a small statistical point that the accuracy with which you can measure things as they go up is the square root of the sample size. So there’s a kind of natural diminishing returns to scale just because of statistics: you have to have four times as big a sample to get twice as good an estimate.

Another point that I think is very important to remember…query traffic is growing at over 40 percent a year. If you have something that is growing at 40 percent a year, that means it doubles in two years.

So the amount of traffic that Yahoo, say, has now is about what Google had two years ago. So where’s this scale business? I mean, this is kind of crazy.

The other thing is, when we do improvements at Google, everything we do essentially is tested on a 1 percent or 0.5 percent experiment to see whether it’s really offering an improvement. So, if you’re half the size, well, you run a 2 percent experiment.

For those unfamiliar with statistics, I encourage you to look at the Wikipedia entry on standard deviation. Varian is obviously reducing the argument to a sound bite, but the sound bite rings true. More is better, but there’s a dramatically diminishing return at the scale of either Microsoft or Google.

However, I do think there’s a big difference when you start talking about running lots of experiments on small subsets of your users. The ability to run twice as many simultaneous tests without noticeably disrupting overall user experience is a major competitive advantage. But even there quality trumps quantity–how you choose what to test matters a lot more than how many tests you run.

What does strike me as ironic is that the moral here is a great counterpoint to the Varian’s colleagues’ arguments about the “unreasonable effectiveness of data“. Granted, it’s apples and oranges–Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira are talking about data scale, not user scale. Still, the same arguments apply. Sampling is sampling.

ps. Also check out Nick Carr’s commentary here.