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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, via the IT Conversations podcast network, but this was the first time I’d seen it in person. O’Reilly always has challenging, thought-provoking things to say, and this year was no different. He did, however, mention two emerging trends or patterns that I thought contradicted each other, and I want to specifically comment on those.
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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 sources of that conception. Why is this a commonly held belief? I can think of five possible objections to exploratory search on the web, five reasons why companies might say that exploratory search can’t work:
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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 things that make people passionate?
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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 summarily ignored that user request and served the advertiser page anyway. So even though [...]
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 devices that we in the computer field like to create. The following is a transcript from that dialogue:
Michael Krasny: Just something that came up…Brian Cooley mentioned…and that is how a lot of the calories are going into things like Twitter and Flickr now.
Brian Cooley: Yeah, we’re spending the effort — you know we talked about the vision Doug had for this being a platform for greater collaborative reasoning and problem solving. We are using the connectivity and…the power of the PC in enormous ways of (quote) “thinking” and communicating. But they’re much more self-obsessed. We’re spending so much time on social networking and all kinds of relatively unimportant stuff like YouTube videos and Yelp restaurant reviews. There is an enormous bulk of calories being spent on this kind of problem solving of a very tiny, irrelevant nature.
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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, and long-time search watcher Danny Sullivan:
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