Information Retrieval Gupf

I would like to quickly follow up on my previous post on explicitly collaborative information seeking.  My claim in that post was that, despite the shared terminology, a service like Aardvark (or Twitter) is not truly collaborative.
Let me be clear about Aardvark: What that service does is help you comb through a network of [...]

A panel on Social Search is happening at SXSW right now.  Reading Danny Sullivan’s liveblogging, I came across the panel’s definition of the three distinct types of social searching.  And I think they left one out:

Collective (gathering advice from a crowd)
Friend Filtered (using your friends)
Collaborative (asking a friend — see also our The Rise [...]

Greg Linden has an interesting post on Search on a domain like YouTube.  I reproduce it here because I would like to elaborate on it:
The article focuses on YouTube’s “plans to rely more heavily on personalization and ties between users to refine recommendations” and “suggesting videos that users may want to watch based on what [...]

What sort of information retrieval system would you build if you knew that all the users of your system would be expert or highly-motivated amateur searchers?  What sort of system would you build when you have a very large collection of unstructured information, and the goal in searching that information is not to find one [...]

Via Xavier Amatriain: The Dirty Little Secret About the “Wisdom of the Crowds” – There is No Crowd:
This is hardly the first time that the so-called “wisdom of the crowds” has been called into question. The term, which implies that a diverse collection of individuals makes more accurate decisions and predications than individuals or even [...]

As a researcher, I have more questions than answers.  And one of the questions that I have is in regards to the widely-accepted maxim that users are too lazy to give explicit relevance feedback to the search engine.  See Danny Sullivan’s take, here.
Perhaps I am stuck back in a view of Information Retrieval that is [...]

As a researcher, it is occasionally quite interesting to reread thoughts and positions that I’ve taken in years and works past. Sometimes I can observe a marked shift from my previous thinking; avenues or approaches that I once considered fruitful I now no longer do. And sometimes I can observe hints and seeds of my [...]

Now seems as good a time as any to post a quick recap of the series of collaborative information seeking posts that Gene and I have been writing over on Palblog.  We’re about halfway through the series.

Communicating about Collaboration
Communicating about Collaboration: Intent
Communicating about Collaboration: Synchronization
Social Search
Social Search Redux

I will post another recap once we finish [...]

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

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 collaboration does not merely refer to a decision to work together.  Rather, it refers to a [...]