Category Archives: Social Implications

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

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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

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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

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Searching and Advertising

One of my interests in the information retrieval arena is the relationship between search and advertising.  Over on the FXPAL blog I posted a thought, and a quick experiment, related to this topic.  Here is an excerpt: The search engine … Continue reading

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Empty Calories

A couple of days ago I made reference to a KQED Forum show on the 40th anniversary of the Personal Computer.  In listening closer to that program, a couple of the guests made comments about the “empty calories” applications and … Continue reading

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One Click Away

Daniel Tunkelang pointed me to a NYT article on the growing power, and therefore growing public unwariness, of Google.  The article makes a number of points, but what struck me most was the pseudo-repartee between Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, … Continue reading

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