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To paraphrase Navin R. Johnson from The Jerk, the new faceted search books are here! I received my author’s copies this weekend, and I’ve heard from a few people that they’ve received theirs. It even features a blurb from Peter Morville that made me feel warm and fuzzy.

So how do you get a copy? The simplest way may be to order directly from the publisher. Evidently no one has received their pre-orders from Amazon and Barnes & Noble yet. 😦 Alternatively, if you’re attending SIGIR, I understand that Morgan & Claypool, one of the SIGIR sponsors, will be bringing a bunch of copies, so you can pick one up there.

Check out Panos’s extensive live blogging from what, as far as I know, is the first Human Computation Workshop (HCOMP  2009). You can also see the associated #hcomp Twitter activity.

Evidently Luis von Ahn used his keynote to unveil MonoLingo, a human-powered system for translation, but only using people that know one language (no idea if he used the old joke).

According to Panos:

Monolingo relies on the fact that machine translation is pretty good at this point, but not perfect. So MonoLingo starts by by translating each word using a dictionary, giving multiple interpretations for each word. The human then (who is a native speaker of the target language) selects the translation for each word and forms the sentence that makes most sense.

I’m curious to hear more: as of this writing, the site is password-protected with no further information.

Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, offers a scathing review of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, the recently written book by Chris Anderson. He doesn’t even mention the plagiarism scandal. Instead, he attacks the book’s thesis, which he characterizes as “an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that ‘information wants to be free.'”

Some choice excerpts concern YouTube as a case study:

Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.”

“close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number.

If [YouTube] were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

Ultimately, Gladwell dismisses Anderson as a “technological utopian”. That’s harsh, but I think it’s on target. There’s nothing new in proclaiming that we all wish everything were free. But there’s a lot of hand-waving in Anderson’s argument that cheap is “close enough to free to round down”. I encourage you to read Gladwell’s eloquent and entertaining review here.

I’m hoping to see many of you at SIGIR 2009 in Boston next month, and specifically at the Industry Track on July 22nd. I wanted to make sure that students were aware that there is a discount available for the one-day Industry Track registration: $150, half off the regular $300 fee (which itself a bargain). Just register as a student, and there’s an option for the one-day registration.

As noted before, full-conference attendees can attend the Industry Track at no extra charge.

Check out Marti Hearst’s new book on Search User Interfaces! You can read my review here. Thanks to Christina for the heads up.

Thanks to Gene for letting us know that the JCDL 2009 proceedings are now available to ACM Digital Library subscribers. Hopefully authors will make their posts available to those who don’t have DL subscriptions. For more information about the conference check out Gene’s posts at the FXPAL blog and Judie’s at Curious Judith.

As an MIT alum, I take a special pride in having published a short article in the July/August issue of Technology Review. It’s entitled “To Search, Ask” (with credit to Richard Feynman as due). The cover story, David Talbot’s “Search Me“, is a report on Wolfram Alpha.

Between this issue, the recent issue of IEEE Computer with a “beyond search” theme, and of course the Google / Bing marketing battles, it’s great to see an increased (and more mainstream) focus on thinking beyond the ten blue links. Go HCIR! Go exploratory search!

Great post from our commenter-in-chief Jeremy Pickens on his own blog, Information Retrieval Gupf, about comments from Google Director of Research Peter Norvig at a recent semantic technology search panel (at the same Semantic Technology Conference where the New York Times announced that it will be publishing its index as Linked Data).

Asked what he thought of Bing, Norvig answered (in Jeremy’s paraphrase):

Norvig’s first answer to the Bing question was to say that he likes the idea of innovation in the user interface. He thinks that there is a lot of room for more such innovation, and for a lot of different reasons.  Historically, there has been too much emphasis on getting the ranking right, at the expense of all else.  Of course (he added) a quality ranking is something that you absolutely must have.  But for too long it has been the only thing that has been worked on, and that needs to change.  He thinks Bing has made some good steps, and that there are a lot more that can be made as well.

Great stuff! Read the rest over at IR Gupf.

I still don’t buy that Google is “gripped with fear“, but I agree with Danny Sullivan’s analysis that Google’s new “Explore Google Search” page (with a link in the usually sacrosanct real estate on the home page) is a reaction to Microsoft’s campaign to market Bing. I’d be curious to know what fraction of Google’s users are aware of the features Google enumerates on that page–perhaps users will actually benefit from the education. But more likely Google is simply disgruntled to see Microsoft getting press for an allegedly different approach that, in most cases, looks a lot like what Google (and, as Sullivan points out, Yahoo) already does.

I’d like to see competition over actual innovation, rather than over perceived innovation through marketing. I suppose I can’t blame Google for tooting its own horn. But the timing does make Google look a bit defensive–or at least reactive. I’m sure it at least put smiles on the faces of the Bing team to have drawn out a reaction.