We've Moved!

Please redirect your readers to http://thenoisychannel.com! The RSS feed is available at http://thenoisychannel.com/?feed=rss2.

See you all there...

Migrating Tonight!

At long last, this blog will migrate over to a hosted WordPress platform at http://thenoisychannel.com/. Thanks to Andy Milk (and to Endeca for lending me his services) and especially to Noisy Channel regular David Fauth for making this promised migration a reality!

As of midnight EST, please visit the new site. My goal is to redirect all incoming Blogger traffic to the new hosted site. This will be the last post here at Blogger.

p.s. Please note that I'll be manually migrating any content (posts and comments) from the past 5 days, i.e., since I performed an import on September 12th. My apologies if anything is lost in translation.

Quick Bites: Search Evaluation at Google

Original post is here; Jeff's commentary is here. Not surprisingly, my reaction is that Google should consider a richer notion of "results" than an ordering of matching pages, perhaps a faceted approach that reflects the "several dimensions to 'good' results."

Quick Bites: Is Wikipedia Production Slowing Down?

Thanks to Sérgio for tweeting this post by Peter Pirolli at PARC: Is Wikipedia Production Slowing Down?

Here's the picture showing the reduction of growth in the number of Wikipedia editors over time:



Interesting material and commentary at Augmented Social Cognition and Peter Pirolli's blog. Are people are running out of things to write about?

Information Accountability

The recent United Airlines stock fiasco triggered an expected wave of finger pointing. For those who didn't follow the event, here is the executive summary:

In the wee hours of Sunday, September 7th, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel (a subsidiary of the Tribune Company) included a link to an article entitled "UAL Files for Bankruptcy." The link was legit, but the linked article didn't carry its publication date in 2002. Then Google's news bot picked up the article and automatically assigned it a current date. Furthermore, Google sent the link to anyone with an alert set up for news about United. Then, on Monday, September 8th, someone at Income Security Advisors saw the article in the results for a Google News search and sent it out on Bloomberg. The results are in the picture below, courtesy of Bloomberg by way of the New York Times.



For anyone who wants all of the gory details, Google's version of the story is here; the Tribune Company's version is here.

I've spent the past week wondering about this event from an information access perspective. And then today I saw two interesting articles:

• The first was a piece in BBC News about a speech by Sir Tim Berners-Lee expressing concern that the internet needs a way to help people separate rumor from real science. His examples included the fears about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN creating a black hole that would swallow up the earth (which isn't quite the premise of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons), and rumors that a vaccine given to children in Britain was harmful.
  
  
• The second was a column in the New York Times about the dynamics of the US presidential campaign, where Adam Nagourney notes that "senior campaign aides say they are no longer sure what works, as they stumble through what has become a daily campaign fog, struggling to figure out what voters are paying attention to and, not incidentally, what they are even believing."
  

I see a common thread here is that I'd like to call "information accountability." I don't mean this term in the sense of a recent CACM article about information privacy and sensitivity, but rather in a sense of information provenance and responsibility.

Whether we're worrying about Google bombing, Google bowling, or what Gartner analyst Whit Andrews calls "denial-of-insight" attacks, our concern is that information often arrives with implicit authority. Despite the aphorism telling us "don't believe everything you read," most of us select news and information sources with some hope that they will be authoritative. Whether the motto is "all the news that's fit to print" or "don't be evil", our choice of what we believe to be information sources is a necessary heuristic to avoid subjecting everything we read to endless skeptical inquiry.

But sometimes the most reputable news sources get it wrong. Or perhaps "wrong" is the wrong word. When newspapers reported that the FBI was treating Richard Jewell as a "person of interest" in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing (cf. "Olympic Park Bomber" Eric Robert Rudolph), they weren't lying, but rather were communicating information from what they believed to be a reliable source. And, in turn the FBI may have been correctly doing its job, given the information they had. But there's no question that Jewell suffered tremendously from his "trial by media" before his name was ultimately cleared.

It's tempting to react to these information breakdowns with finger-pointing, to figure out who is accountable and, in as litigious a society as the United States, bring on the lawyers. Moreover, there clearly are cases where willful misinformation constitutes criminal defamation or fraud. But I think we need to be careful, especially in a world where information flows in a highly connected--and not necessary acyclic--social graph. Anyone who has played the children's game of telephone knows that small communication errors can blow up rapidly, and that it's difficult to partition blame fairly.

The simplest answer is that we are accountable for how we consume information: caveat lector. But this model seems overly simplistic, since our daily lives hinge our ability to consume information without such a skeptical eye that we can accept nothing at face value. Besides, shouldn't we hold information providers responsible for living up the reputations they cultivate and promote?

There are no easy answers here. But the bad news is that we cannot ignore the questions of information accountability. If terms like "social media" and "web 2.0" mean anything, they surely tell us that the game of telephone will only grow in the number of participants and in the complexity of the communication chains. As a society, we will have to learn to live with and mitigate the fallout.

Is Blog Search Different?

Alerted by Jeff and Iadh, I recently read What Should Blog Search Look Like?, a position paper by Marti Hearst, Matt Hurst, and Sue Dumais. For those readers unfamiliar with this triumvirate, I suggest you take some time to read their work, as they are heavyweights in some of the areas most often covered by this blog.

The position paper suggests focusing on 3 three kinds of search tasks:

1. Find out what are people thinking or feeling about X over time.
2. Find good blogs/authors to read.
3. Find useful information that was published in blogs sometime in the past.

The authors generally recommend the use of faceted navigation interfaces--something I'd hope would be uncontroversial by now for search in general.

But I'm more struck by their criticism that existing blog search engines fail to leverage the special properties of blog data, and that their discussion, based on work by Mishne and de Rijke, that blog search queries differ substantially from web search queries. I don't doubt the data they've collected, but I'm curious if their results account for the rapid proliferation and mainstreaming of blogs. The lines between blogs, news articles, and informational web pages seem increasingly blurred.

So I'd like to turn the question around: what should blog search look like that is not applicable to search in general?

Progress on the Migration

Please check out http://thenoisychannel.com/ to see the future of The Noisy Channel in progress. I'm using WordPress hosted on GoDaddy and did the minimum work to port all posts and comments (not including this one).

Here is the my current list of tasks that I'd like to get done before we move.

• Design! I'm currently using the default WordPress theme, which is pretty lame. I'm inclined to use a clean but stylish two-column theme that is widget-friendly. Maybe Cutline. In any case, I'd like the new site to be a tad less spartan before we move into it.
  
  
• Internal Links. My habit of linking back to previous posts now means I have to map those links to the new posts. I suspect I'll do it manually, since I don't see an easy way to automate it.
  
  
• Redirects. Unfortunately I don't think I can actually get Blogger to redirect traffic automatically. So my plan is to post signage throughout this blog making it clear that the blog has moved.

I'd love help, particularly in the form of advice on the design side. And I'll happily give administration access to anyone who has the cycles to help implement any of these or other ideas. Please let me know by posting here or by emailing me: dtunkelang@{endeca,gmail}.com.

Quick Bites: Probably Irrelevant. (Not!)

Thanks to Jeff Dalton for spreading the word about a new information retrieval blog: Probably Irrelevant. It's a group blog, currently listing Fernando Diaz and Jon Elsas as contributors. Given the authors and the blog name's anagram of "Re-plan IR revolt, baby!", I expect great things!

Fun with Twitter

I recently joined Twitter and asked the twitterverse for opinions about DreamHost vs. GoDaddy as a platform to host this blog on WordPress. I was shocked when I noticed today that I'd gotten this response from the President / COO of GoDaddy (or perhaps a sales rep posing as such).

Seems like a lot of work for customer acquisition!

Quick Bites: Email becomes a Dangerous Distraction

Just read this article citing a number of studies to the effect that email is a major productivity drain. Nothing surprising to me--a lot of us have learned the hard way that the only way to be productive is to not check email constantly.

But I am curious if anyone has made progress on tools that alert you to emails that do call for immediate attention. I'm personally a fan of attention bonds approaches, but I imagine that the machine learning folks have at least thought about this as a sort of inverse spam filtering problem.

Quick Bites: The Clickwheel Must Die

As someone who's long felt that the iPod's clickwheel violates Fitts's law, I was delighted to read this Gizmodo article asserting that the iPod's clickwheel must die. My choice quote:

Quite simply, the clickwheel hasn't scaled to handle the long, modern day menus in powerful iPods.

Fortunately Apple recognized its mistake on this one and fixed the problem in its touch interface. Though, to be clear, the problem was not inherent in the choice of a wheel interface, but rather in the requirement to make gratuitously precise selections.

Now I'm waiting to see someone fix the tiny minimize/maximize/close buttons in the upper right corner on Windows, which I suspect have become the textbook example of violating Fitts's law.