At a seminar in the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series, Dr. Richard W. Hamming, a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a retired Bell Labs scientist, gave a very interesting and stimulating talk, `You and Your Research’ to an overflow audience of some 200 Bellcore staff members and visitors at the Morris Research and Engineering Center on March 7, 1986. This talk centered on Hamming’s observations and research on the question “Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?” From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, and why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists and great contributions, and has done introspection and studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.

You and Your Research

On the whole is seems that the MSN search engine is indeed placing IIS hosted sites higher in the results more frequently than other webservers. Frequently the MSN search is placing more IIS servers in the important top 10 results than Google even where result sets from a query have actually returned fewer IIS servers overall on MSN.

Looking at the coverage graphs, most search phrases return a more even spread of IIS servers thoughout the results sets from the MSN searchs.

So what’s going on?
I have no idea, I doubt it’s all a big conspiracy… but some possible explanations spring to mind:

Perhaps the MSN search has simply been coded by developers used to talking to IIS machines and so it just does that job better?
Perhaps the MSN spider is taking advantage of some specific IIS features to provide enhanced indexing?

Search engine report

Many of the design teams we talk to face the same major issue: how to organize the information on their sites. From creating navigation schemes to developing site hierarchies to refining checkout sequences, it’s highly important for design teams to organize information effectively for their users.

Information architects frequently must deal with the problem of managing more and more information. Rarely can they remove information from a site; in most cases, it’s add, add, add. Design teams must make room for this new content in some way, either by incorporating it into the current organizational scheme or by altering the information architecture to allow for it.

Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content

One of most popular aggregator today is Bloglines. Bloglines is web based, you don’t need to download any software to your computer. Just create an account on their website and subscribe to your favourite blogs. You can then follow your blogs from a Mac at home, a Windows PC at office or a PDA at some airport.

This tutorial will show you how to sign up and subscribe to blogs with Bloglines. We will also show you some other interesting things you can do with Bloglines.

betterdays » Blog Archive » Using Bloglines (or How to keep up with dozens of blogs everyday)

This project is my attempt to produce a free, downloadable set of high-quality star charts — the Mag-7 Star Atlas — capable of being printed at reasonable resolutions on the average home printer.

Free Mag 7 Star Charts

Working within the constraints of a very limited data sample, this study attempts to identify some of the information management and meaning construction practices of an online distributed classification (a.k.a. free tagging or ethnoclassification) community. Specifically, this study seeks to investigate the social and communicative practices that emerge when users are encouraged to share web links with one another by using a metadata keyword, or tag, to demark a social group, apart from using other tags to classify links according to an emergent taxonomy.

i d e a n t: A del.icio.us study

A deep research on Distributed Classification Systems.

Part of the allure of classifying things by assigning tags to them is that the user can give free reign to sloppiness. There is no authority —human or computational— passing judgment on the appropriateness or validity of tags, because tags have to make sense first and foremost to the individual who assigns and uses them. And yet, the whole point of distributed classification systems (DCSs) such as del.icio.us and flickr is that the aggregation of inherently private goods (tags and what they describe) has public value: When people use the same tag to point to different resources they are organizing knowledge in a manner, commonly referred to as a folksonomy, that makes sense to them and to others like them. In other words, the tag is the object that brings a resource and a social group together via the shared meaning of a word (although tags also serve to form connections between words and new meanings, as for example when you encounter a link to the Center for Alternative Technology when looking at the tag ‘cat’).

We can say, then, that DCSs function at the intersection of individual choices and the shared linguistic/semantic norms of a social group (the folks in folksonomy). In this paper, I explore two aspects of this intersection. In the first part, I examine some of the open affordances of DCSs in terms of the agency of the code (the program; the computer instructions that make things happen). In other words, I look at how DCSs frame social activity in the process of aggregating individual tagging choices into collective information; in short, how the code shapes social action. At the same time, I also explore the implications of relegating the organization of some social functions to the code.

In the second part, I explore some of the linguistic properties of tags, their role in an attention economy, and outline a set of guidelines for generating tags in ways that maximize the social usefulness of tags. Tag literacy in this sense refers to the ‘etiquette’ of generating tags in a way that increases their social value, balancing individual needs with the needs of the group. Because the code (rightly, I believe) does not enforce normative behaviors when it comes to the creation of tags, I argue that it is up to those users invested in the welfare of the community to develop a normative approach to tagging.

i d e a n t: Tag Literacy

So many of you might have already noticed that we have Google AdSense in our RSS feeds.

Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET - Longhorn Edition : AdSense in RSS - Explained

Plurn helps you organize and make sense of media on the internet. It can be used with audio, video, or any media type that can be played thru a playlist.

Plurn BETA

CreatingMinds, real and useful principles, tools, articles and quotations about all matters creative.

CreatingMinds - quotes and quotations from the wise on all matters creative