Monthly Archives: March 2009

Social ?= Collaborative

There is an an interesting comment thread happening over on the FXPAL blog, about the differences between social search and collaborative search: http://palblog.fxpal.com/?p=350#comments

Posted in Collaborative Information Seeking, Social Implications | Leave a comment

Long Term versus Evolutionary Thinking (Part 2 of 2)

Continued from Part 1. Now that I’ve fully (perhaps too much so) explained the analogy that I will be using, I’d like to ground this discussion in the subject of information retrieval.  And I’ll start with an example that O’Reilly … Continue reading

Posted in General, Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 8 Comments

Long Term versus Evolutionary Thinking (Part 1 of 2)

Last week I attended the O’Reilly eTech conference.  The first night, Tim O’Reilly gave his annual Radar talk, in which he surveys the technology landscape and comments on upcoming and interesting trends. I have heard this Radar talk for years, … Continue reading

Posted in General, Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 1 Comment

Collaborative Information Seeking: Intent

Over on the FXPAL blog, Gene and I added the 2nd of a series of posts mapping out the collaborative information seeking systems domain.  Here is an excerpt: When we view collaboration from the IR perspective, it becomes clear that … Continue reading

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Why No Exploratory Search on the Web?

Daniel makes a provocative statement: “One of the recurring objections to exploratory search is that it can’t work for the web.” While I suspect that he is correct about this being the common wisdom, I find myself wondering about the … Continue reading

Posted in Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 2 Comments

Overloaded Operator: Collaboration

I just want to announce that over on the FXPAL blog, Gene Golovchinsky and I are starting a series of posts about what we think it means to collaborate during the information seeking process. There are many different dimensions and … Continue reading

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Computers and Poetry

I first became fascinated with the relationship between computers, information, language, and emotion back in 1984 when I read an Analog article about a computer than had been used to automatically generate poetry.  A week later, I was on my … Continue reading

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Creating Passionate Search Users

I was listening recently to a podcast on IT Conversations, published 1/17/2009, entitled “Creating Passionate Users”.  It is a conversation between Tim O’Reilly and Kathy Sierra.   Tim O’Reilly: You talk about creating passionate users.  What are some of the … Continue reading

Posted in Social Implications | 2 Comments

Music and GooTube

Google has had somewhat of an odd relationship over the years to music information, and music information retrieval.  They’ve never really had a consistent policy, research, or product agenda around music.  The specifics of that history is too rich to … Continue reading

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Exploration and Explanation

Sometimes, the story is as good as the moral.  Sometimes, the journey is as good as the destination.  So in Information Retrieval, why are we too often satisfied with producing results, but not with explaining how the results were arrived … Continue reading

Posted in General, Information Retrieval Foundations | 8 Comments