I was going to wait until we hit 100 legitimate comments to make the math easier, but we are close, and many of our usual posters are at CHI, so I’ll report now.
Along with the 89 real comments we’ve gotten 2537 spam comments. I’ll be generous and call that 3.4% real comments.
Thus far in our series on Collaborative Information Seeking we have explored two dimensions: Intent and Synchronization. The next dimension is the Depth at which the mediation (aka support, facilitation) of the multi-user search process occurs.
We can talk about three levels of mediation: communications tools independent of the search engine (e.g., chat, e-mail, voice, etc.), UI-level mediation, and algorithmic mediation. The first level typifies most searching currently being performed on the web, whereas the other two are more commonly found in research prototypes. Continue Reading
Fairly recently I became one of those iPhone types. You know the ones – gaze ever downwards, fingers poised to pinch or pick or tap-tap. I love the thing, though I’m not sure I love what I’ve become with it. Continue Reading
For quite a while now Jeremy and I have been characterizing collaborative exploratory search, and distinguishing it from other kinds of searches. While so far the exercise has been largely theoretical, and sometimes has been met with skepticism. Well, in Tuesday’s Washington Post, I found a passage that illustrates the kinds of activities we are talking about.
A week or so ago, we wrote a post on Social Search, and how (we believe) it is different from Collaborative Search. We have also begun laying out a taxonomy of the various factors or dimensions that characterize information seeking behaviors involving more than one person. So far, we have listed two dimensions: Intent and Synchronization. We will continue with two additional dimensions over the next few weeks: Depth and Location.
But in the meantime, we note that Intent and Synchronization already give us enough material to draw descriptive and discriminatory lines between various types of multi-user search.
I’ve always wondered about toys for young children that mimic the behavior of living things. Is this a good thing, or does it teach (on some basic level) indifference to the pain of others?
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, which came out just a few month ago, contains a wonderful short section entitled “Advice to a Young Mathematician” with advice from five eminent mathematicians. I was in the need of inspiration this weekend, and found some in these personal statements. Below the fold you will find a few excerpts applicable to any researcher of any age.
Readers: Please help me and other readers of this blog by posting in the comments section pointers to your favorite sources of research advice.
Kim Krause Berg recently wrote about the pleasure of reading a book (a tree-book!) compared to reading online (i.e., in a web browser, at a laptop). She is “not ready to let go of [the printed book], yet,” she says. I’m with her so far. Continue Reading
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?
In an earlier post, I described briefly the DICE system and the paper we are publishing on it. At the time I wrote it, I had forgotten that we had a short YouTube video of an early version of the system.
The video demonstrates how to use DICE to schedule and run meetings.
See the FXPAL YouTube page for more videos of FXPAL research.