This is a first post in a new format that I’m trying out: the “Meta-Review”. Besides the fact that it starts with an “M” (thus fitting with my category naming format), I’m calling it a “Meta-Review” because it’s composed of notes and thoughts about a handful of papers all mashed together. This isn’t intended to be a carefully thought-out treatise on the papers discussed, but instead is really just a more public version of my immediate thoughts and notes (if I’m going to write them down anyways, why not share?) Comments, discussion, and pointers to additional/related papers are encouraged, as they would benefit other readers (and more importantly, me).
In this post, I present a summary and discussion of 4 papers (and a poster abstract) about the role that domain expertise plays in web search behavior and performance.
These are some slides from a presentation I gave on some Mechanical Turk data I collected about how people are using Activity Streams. Specifically, I was interested in what tools people were using, what they were using them for, how these tools might be improved, and how people had been using these tools to collaborate/coordinate. Here’s what I found…
A week or two ago, Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) posted a message on his blog entitled “Microsyntax: A Messifesto”, in which he outlines his plans for a structured survey of ‘microsyntax’ for Twitter, which he defines as “various ways to embed structured information right into the text of Twitter messages.” Some obvious examples of these are ‘@’ for replying to people, or ‘#’ for inserting keywords, which, while invented by Twitter users (see Chris Messina’s (@chrismessina) original/updated post on using hashtags from back in August, ’07), have become so commonplace that they are now an indispensable part of the Twitter grammar.
Back in December of 2008, I had a discussion with Mike Krieger (@mikeyk) where I started thinking about possible ways to revise the way that we retweet. The rest of this post is the result of some more recent thinking on the subject inspired by Chris and Stowe’s efforts:
This was the rather bold title of a PARC Forum talk that I attended yesterday.
The talk was given by Dr. Paul A. Rhodes, the CEO of a company called Evolved Machines, which is focused on studying neural circuitry and finding ways to synthesize it artificially. This, in essence, is the “new paradigm” mentioned in the title of the talk: the old paradigm being the basis of artificial intelligence on symbolic logic.
