Miles Bacon
Nolin. SearchUpTicious » Blog Archive » User-Generated Query Suggestions Found to be Better than Machine-Generated. At SIGIR 2009, an excellent paper was presented by Diane Kelly, Karl Gyllstrom, and Earl W. Bailey that compares user-generated versus algorithmically-generated query suggestions. As far as I know, this is the first paper to do such a comparison within a usability study.
With a healthy-sized pool of 55 participants and 20 TREC topics, they found that query reformulation suggestions derived from human-issued search logs performed better than system-generated queries (at least using their system), in terms of number of suggestions used, number of relevant documents saved, and a precision score (although the latter was not a statistically significant difference).
The reference is: Kelly, Gyllstrom, Bailey, A Comparison of Query and Term Suggestion Features for Interactive Searching , proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2009 (no link available yet). This is relevant to Section 6.3: Automated Term Suggestions. Marti Hearst Predicts the Future of Search User Interfaces. School of Information professor Marti Hearst predicts the future of online search interfaces in an article in this month’s edition of the Communications of the ACM.
“The future of user interfaces will involve support for natural human interaction,” says Hearst. A scholar of search-engine technologies for the past two decades, Hearst believes today’s technologies are finally catching up with the long-time goal of search designers. “More-natural modes of interaction have long been goals of interface design,” says Hearst, “but recent developments have brought them closer to reality.” The article makes several specific predictions about the development of online search. Firstly, Hearst sees an increase in speech-based search interfaces, with Apple’s Siri as the latest step in this direction. Heast’s complete analysis can be found in the November 2011 issue of Communications of the ACM. Hearst is also the author of the book Search User Interfaces. Chris dixon's blog / Graphs. A graph consists of a set of nodes connected by edges. The original internet graph is the web itself, where webpages are nodes and links are edges.
In social graphs, the nodes are people and the edges friendship. Edges are what mathematicians call relations. Two important properties that relations can either have or not have are symmetry (if A ~ B then B ~ A) and transitivity (if A ~ B and B ~ C then A ~ C). Facebook’s social graph is symmetric (if I am friends with you then you are friends with me) but not transitive (I can be friends with you without being friends with your friend). You could say friendship is probabilistically transitive in the sense that I am more likely to like someone who is a friend’s friend then I am a user chosen at random. Twitter’s graph is probably best thought of as an interest graph. Graphs can be implicitly or explicitly created by users. Over the next few years we’ll see the rising importance of other types of graphs.
Content Curation: It's Going to Be HUGE. It's counter-intuitive--especially to Americans. But often less is more. When Erin Scime wrote a blog titled: "Content Strategist as Digital Curator", it's pretty clear that she didn't expect to stir up a whole lot of emotions and anger. Yet, that's what she did--at least in part. "I feel like there are a lot of bitter librarians out there," Scime told me. It's ironic, in part, because all her early training was in library sciences. But the buzz around curation threatens more than librarians--there's a posse of PhD's with pitchforks and torches that didn't much like what Scime had to say. What heresy did Scime actual dare to blog about? Scime today is the Content Strategy Lead at HUGE in Brooklyn--whose clients include CNN IKEA, Pepsi, Jet Blue, IVillage, and Penton Media. For a former student of Curatorial studies and information sciences to embrace the democratization of the word "curation" rattled some cages.
One example Scime points to is the relaunch of iVilliage. » Designing Social Tools Around User Interests Johnny Holland. The key to designing social media well lies in designing it for a user’s social interests. Conventional software addresses the user’s task-oriented needs and objectives. But social media succeed when they engage the user’s social interests. Social interests involve two psychological insights: that users are interested in others generally (social activities, or what’s going on); and users are interested in others particularly (another user). Each of these is doubled up by the self-reflexivity of social action: users are interested in how they themselves appear to others in general (one’s self image, impressions made, the stuff of “self-presentation” common in social media); and another particular user’s relationship to him or her (e.g. their interest in us). From this we can quickly see that social media are not a matter of straightforward goal-oriented interaction design.
As users, we are aware (if not consciously) of what and how social activities proceed. User’s activities can include:
Help.