Category

General

07.14.10

The War on Attention Poverty: Measuring Twitter Authority General, blog | Comments Off
I gave this presentation today at AT&T Labs, hosted by Stephen North of Graphviz fame. The talk was recorded, but I don’t know when the video will be available. In the mean time, here are the slides. The audience was very engaged and questioned just about all of the TunkRank model’s assumptions. I’m hopeful that as Jason Adams and Israel Kloss work on making a business out of TunkRank, they’ll bridge some of the gap between simplicity and realism.
07.07.10

Beyond Social Currency General, blog | Comments Off
A research study I like enough to have blogged about it a few times is Princeton sociologist Matt Salganik‘s dissertation work on music preferences and social contagion. For those unfamiliar with this work, here is the abstract of his Science article “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market” (co-authored with Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts): Hit songs, books, and movies are many times more successful than average, suggesting that “the best” alternatives are qualitatively different from “the rest”; yet experts routinely fail to predict which products will succeed. We investigated this paradox experimentally, by creating an artificial “music ...
01.15.10

When Is Faceted Search Appropriate? General, blog | Comments Off
Earlier this week, Peter Morville and Mark Burrell presented a UIE virtual seminar on “Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences“. It sold out! And I thought Pete Bell and I had done well with our seminar on faceted search! But I’m hardly surprised. Although I wasn’t able to attend it myself, I gather from Twitter and the blogosphere that it was a great presentation. I enjoyed serving as a reviewer for Peter’s new book on Search Patterns, and I contributed a bit to Endeca’s UI Design Pattern Library while I was there and Mark’s team was developing it. In ...
01.04.10

Search Questions for 2010: What’s On My Mind General, blog | Comments Off
Happy New Year to the Noisy Community and everyone else in virtual earshot! I hope everyone is entering 2010 well-rested and ready for great things. And I don’t just mean shiny new gadgets. For me, 2009 marked the end of a decade-long run at Endeca, where I focused on bringing HCIR to enterprises. I’m particularly proud of two professional accomplishments: writing a book on faceted search, and organizing the SIGIR 2009 Industry Track. But past is prologue. I spent the last several weeks of 2009 as a Noogler, and I launch into 2010 living and breathing search on the open web. What’s on ...
12.28.09

Faceted Web Search? General, blog | Comments Off
Researchers from Microsoft say it’s very challenging. Google is trying, but there’s a long way to go. And Eric Iverson just wrote me to describe his own preliminary efforts to build faceted search on top of Yahoo! BOSS. I believe there’s a clearly established business case for faceted search inside the enterprise, for site search (especially for retail and media / publishing sites), even for vertical search on the open web. In all of these cases, relevance-ranked results are insufficient to meet a large subset of users’ more exploratory information needs, and HCIR approaches like faceted search are an easy sell. But ...