Monday, May 25, 2009
Kumos to you MSN
Bing is a combination of Microsoft's Live Search search engine and semantic Web technology (which Microsoft had quietly acquired in Powerset last July, 2008). It is said that Kumo is designed as a "Google killer" in mind. However, not without a cost.
It's been reported that the amount of resources Microsoft had spent on Kumo has caused deep divisions within the vendor's management. Many within the hierarchical monolith are arguing for staying put with the companie's money-making ways rather than spreading it elsewhere on fruitless desire for the holy search grail.
This is important new developments for information professionals - especially librarians - to take note. While the Semantic Web adds structure to Web searches in the backend technology, what users will see in the front end is increased structure such as the search results in the center of the page and a hierarchical organization of concepts or attributes in the left (or right)-hand column. This could be what Bing ultimately looks like.
What this implies is that with so much of the spotlight currently on "practical" social media and Web 2.0 applications, much is happening underneath the surface among the information giants. Google itself is quietly conducting much research into the SemWeb. Who will be the first to achieve Web sainthood? Until last week, we thought it was these guys.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The Web 3.0 Hoopla
In turbulent economic times, it is critically important to understand what opportunities exist to make our businesses run better. The emergence of a new era of technologies, collectively known as Web 3.0, provides this kind of strategically significant opportunity.The core idea behind web 3.0 is to extract much more meaningful, actionable insight from information. At the conference, we will explore how companies are using these technologies today, and should be using them tomorrow, for significant bottom line impact in areas like marketing, corporate information management, customer service, and personal productivity.
I would be hesitant to accept this definition of Web 3.0, particularly when the words "in turbulent economic times." It's awfully reminiscent of how Web 2.0 had started: the burst of the dot-c0m economy in 2001, which lead to programmers convening at the first Web 2.0 conference. For better or worse, Web 2.0 was born; but it was never endorsed by academia. The creators of the internet never envisioned for Web 2.0 technologies; the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) never had Web 2.0 standards. Rather, the Semantic Web has its roots from the very beginning.
Unfortunately, I fear the same is happening with Web 3.0. Much is being slapped by corporate and technology interests and labelled "Web 3.0." Because of the downturn in the economy, information professionals beware.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Swine Flu and the World Wide Web Scour
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Twittering the Digu Way
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
World Digital Library Coming to a Computer Near You!
The Library not only offers an array of books, maps, manuscripts and films from around the world, in seven different languages, it ultimately aims to bridge a cultural divide not only by offering people in poorer countries the same access to knowledge as those in richer ones - but also by making available the cultural heritage of Asian, Africa, Middle Eastern, and Latin American cultures.
Friday, April 10, 2009
The Waves of Cellphones Use
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Michael Stephens in Vancouver, BC
Michael Stephens is one of my favourite librarians. One of the most enjoyable things is the memories of how libraries affect a person's memories and shape a person's life. This is a very honest, intimate discussion of Stephens' love of libraries. He's coming to Vancouver for the upcoming British Columbia Library Association 2009 conference. I'm looking forward to it.
Monday, March 23, 2009
A Time To Be An Information Professional
And thus is the profession of librarianship. Perhaps we will be known by another title, another name, as some of us already are known as metadata managers, taxonomists, information architects, and knowledge managers. Library schools have evolved into I-Schools. Who knows, LIS might evolve the point where it not longer is recognizable to us -- as the apothecary is no longer recognizable to the pharmacist. But the art of searching, sharing knowledge, collecting, organizing, and disseminating information in whatever shape and form they may be, will never change. And hence, whatever we may become, we will never change.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
The Search Continues . . . .
Search algorithms today are largely based on a common paradigm: link
analysis. But they've ignored a mother lode of data: The network.
Nicely said. Although there are a multitude of variations of search algorithms, architectures and tweaks, search technology has been based largely on three canonical approaches. In a nutshell, here they are:
1) Human-powered directories - Hierarchically organized into taxonomies (e.g. Yahoo!)
2) Crawler-based index - Generates results largely prioritized by link analysis. (e.g. Google)
3) Collaborative tagging - Users tag pages with keywords so that future searchers can find
However, these three options still fail to prevent click fraud and also content unreacheable in the Deep Web. Weinman proposes the Network Service Providers as a fourth option, which uses data and metadata associated with the actual network transport of Web content—including HTML pages, documents, spreadsheets, almost anything —to replace and/or augment traditional Web crawlers, improve the relevance and currency of search results ranking, and reduce click fraud. A network service provider could better determine aggregate surfing behavior and hold times at sites or pages, in a way sensitive to the peculiarities of browser preferences and regardless of whether a search engine is used.
Weinman's proposal is an interesting deviation to the thoughts of Semantic Web enthusiasts. It does throw a quirk into the speculation of the future of Web search technology. And so the search continues . . .
Monday, March 09, 2009
Searching Search Like a Yandex
What is interesting is that Yandex's search algorithm is rooted in the highly inflected and very peculiar Russian language. Words can take on some 20 different endings to indicate their relationship to one another. Like the many other non-English languages, this inflection makes the language of Russian precise, but makes search extremely difficult. Google fetches the exact word combination you enter into the search bar, leaving out the slightly different forms that mean similar things. However, Yandex is unique in that it does catch the inflection. Fortune has written an interesting article on Yandex, and my favourite part is its examination into the unique features of this Russian search giant:
While some of its services are similar to offerings available in the U.S. (blog rankings, online banking), it also has developed some applications that only Russians can enjoy, such as an image search engine that eliminates repeated images, a portrait filter that ferrets out faces in an image search, and a real-time traffic report that taps into users' roving cellphone signals to monitor how quickly people are moving through crowded roads in more than a dozen Russian cities.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
BBC's Semantic Web
considering how best to build websites we’d recommend you throw out the Photoshop and embrace Domain Driven Design and the Linked Data approach every time. Even if you never intend to publish RDF it just works. The longer term aim of this work is to not only expose BBC data but to ensure that it is contextually linked to the wider web.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Shame on You Wall Street Journal
It is regrettable. Our reporters do have access to multiple databases including Factiva and this migration to digital databases as you has been happening for many years.
Sure. Good luck with having your reporters spend up to ten times the amount of time it would take to find information a trained information professional could obtain for you in a fraction of the time. A librarian is like the glue that holds the house together. You can only go so far and so long without a librarian's information retrieval skills before the infrastructure cracks and crumbles. Particularly in our emergine Web 2.0 world of social media and open access resources, can a company survive alone without expert information and knowledge management? Best of luck Wall Street Journal.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Video Sharing for Librarians
I recently presented at TOTS. What is video sharing Whyshould we care? How can be of use for information professionals? What are some issues for us to consider? Let's take a look together.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Who Video Shares? Barack Obama Does!
Who uses Web 2.0 to its fullest capacity? Barack Obama does. The President posts regularly to Vimeo. Vimeo is different in that it offers High-definition content. On October 17, 2007, Vimeo announced support for High Definition playback in 1280x720 (720p), becoming the first video sharing site to support consumer HD.