Meredith Skeels and Jonathan Grudin have written a paper (to be published in GROUP 2009) that examines the use of social networking sites within a large organization. They present interesting demographic data on who uses Facebook vs. LinkedIn (among other such tools), and discuss some interesting findings in how these tools are used (and perceived) in the workplace.In particular, the authors make an interesting comparison between adoption patters of social networking software and email and IM in the corporate arena. For example, they found that social networking tools helped strengthen weak social ties in  the workplace, but that it is difficult to measure the ROI. There are also tensions around personal vs. professional uses of the tools that have not been resolved through interface design of existing tools.

It will be interesting to see if these pressures to integrate personal and professional social networks in some contexts but keep them segregated in others will give rise to new tools or interfaces. Given that is unlikely that social network sites will allow their data to be exported, the onus for developing these tools falls on Facebook and LinkedIn. Will they rise to the challenge?

Shortly before my son was born, I had attended a lecture about  multilingualism and children. The talk backed my desire to raise him bi-lingually with some practical advice.  Much of the lecture revolved around the book Raising Multilingual Children by Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa. The book is about children’s abilities to learn languages; it is based on several cases studies of bi- or multi-lingual children (including the author’s), and backed up with considerable research.

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Last June, Gary Marchionini hosted a workshop on Information Seeking Support Systems, which I was privileged to attend. The workshop brought together researchers from industry and academia for two days of stimulating discussion about systems, models of information seeking, and evaluation. One of the results of the workshop was a Special Issue of IEEE Computer that Gary and Ryen White edited.

We published a position paper at the workshop, and followed up with an article for the special issue, out today. We look broadly at collaboration in information seeking, including some motivating scenarios of use, a model of the design space, and a short discussion of roles.

This is the same issue that Daniel mentions in his post.

Update: IEEE says they are undergoing a “software changeover”, and expect the TOC to be up early next week.

Update 2: The online copy is now available from IEEE and on our web site.

One of my ongoing information retrieval interests revolves around the relationship between the search engine user and the search engine advertiser.  In a search engine that is supported by advertising, there is a natural conflict of interest that exists between the users and the advertisers.  Users want to find the information that is most relevant to themselves and advertisers want the users to see the information that is most financially rewarding to the advertiser. These two sets of information do not always overlap.

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There is a lot of discussion on the web about Google and its proclamations, policies, and practices. One recent episode involves Google’s pay-per-post service in Japan, as described here. While the article is informative, I was much more amused by the exchange between Justin Davis, Ian McAnerin and David Brunig in the comments. Your mileage may vary, but I am with Justin.