In her talk at the IR Eval workshop at SIGIR 09, Sue Dumais called for an experimental platform for conducting research in information seeking (thanks Sakai-san!). She called it a Living Laboratory. This is a tremendous idea, the high tide that lifts all boats. Whether you’re interested in doing log analysis, interface design evaluation, building new indexing algorithms, or other kinds of research, having real data sets with real users and real information needs can move the field forward in ways that Cranfield-style experiments do not.
Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle have written an interesting opinion piece on recent trends in collective intelligence on the Web, something they and others have called Web 2.0. The article covers a lot of ground, touching on everything from medical imaging to politics to Twitter. It is a vision, and one that isn’t so far off: we can see the technological dots forming recognizable patterns. Emboldened by the success of Google, Twitter and Mechanical Turk, the authors call for similar engagement in healthcare, energy policy, and financial regulation, among others.
While what they describe is not exactly a technological Utopia, their picture is somewhat rosy. Continue Reading
Jeremy‘s got an interesting post and discussion on his IR Gupf blog about the process of improving search results. The gist of the discussion is that the process of tweaking search engine performance leads to a local optimum, and cannot be used to discover new interfaces and interaction techniques to support information seeking.
I just poked around and found an interesting Health search site that’s part of Microsoft Live. Although the blank landing page is a sharp blow to the senses coming from the nice Manatees currently inhabiting the Live Search page, once you enter a query, the interface is actually quite pleasant. I haven’t played with it for real, but it seems to populate some aspects (Conditions, Personal Health, Drugs & Substances, Alternative Medicine, and Nutrition, with others available through a link), organizes some featured content along with a set of links to medical sites, allows search results and searches to be saved, and shows some ads.
The Economist is running a (moderated) public debate on copyright that should be interesting to those involved in electronic publishing, particularly on the Web. In light of recent attempts by the AP to implement a rather draconian copyright policy this is an issue worth following. AP has tried going after some bloggers and artists, so far without much success. Nonetheless, their published fees for online quoting of excerpts of their content are absurd:
Words
Fees
5 – 25
$12.50
26 – 50
$17.50
51 – 100
$25.00
101 – 250
$50.00
251 and up
$100.00
I don’t mean to imply that they aren’t allowed to protect their intellectual property, particularly in unambiguous (albeit funny) situations, but if these kinds of fees are enforced, it will be prohibitively expensive for most publishers to even mention the titles of AP articles!
I can only hope that the solution that emerges from The Economist debate is a compromise rather than a polarized outcome like the DMCA.
Pattie Maes from the MIT Media lab gave a TED talk this year about technology developed by one of her students, Pranav Mistry. The basic idea is that a person wears a device around the neck consisting of a camera, a projector, a small computer, all with wireless (cell phone) connectivity to the network. She argues that by augmenting our perceptions with information can give us a “sixth sense” that will help us lead more productive and fulfilling lives.