users archive at Information Innovation Exchange

Archive for the 'users' Category

Find Your Inner Dewey Decimal Class Number

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Published by rwatstein November 15th, 2008 in users and cataloging. 0 Comments

Spacefem writes: “This quiz will convert your name to a class listed in the Dewey Decimal Classification system. That’s right. There’s no reason you can’t be classified, albeit randomly, just like a library book. Libraries are freaking awesome and we all need to read more, so there. Somewhere between 000 (Generalities) and 999 (Extraterrestrial worlds), you have a place.”

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Machines are Dumb

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Published by rwatstein November 9th, 2008 in users and technology. 0 Comments

The “technology revolution” is mis-named. Instead, we are in a human revolution… humans have learned to think with their fingers, to imagine that a flat screen is really as big as the world, to create new personae for themselves, to expand their social interactions in number and kind, to write and design in new ways, to visualize complex concepts, to find information in seconds, and incorporate that information into a constantly evolving awareness.

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The Art of the Field Study

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Published by rwatstein November 9th, 2008 in users, search and Google. 0 Comments

I’m Dan Russell, a member of the Google Search Quality team doing user experience research. This post is part of our ongoing series to talk about the Search Quality team at Google, showing a bit of what we do in the day-to-day course of improving the quality of the user experience. The role of “user experience” research is to try and get the inside story on what people do when they search. We’re constantly asking: What’s the user’s experience of search? What works and doesn’t work for them? What are they looking for? What DO they want?

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Paper — Finding Experts By Semantic Matching of User Profiles

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Published by rwatstein November 9th, 2008 in users, search and semantic web. 0 Comments

Extracting interest profiles of users based on their personal documents is one of the key topics of IR research. However, when these extracted profiles are used in expert finding applications, only naive text- matching techniques are used to rank experts for a given requirement. In this paper, we address this gap and describe multiple techniques to match user profiles for better ranking of experts. We propose new metrics for computing semantic similarity of user profiles using spreading activation networks derived from ontologies. Our pilot evaluation shows that matching algorithms based on bipartite graphs over semantic user profiles provide the best results. We show that using these techniques, we can find an expert more accurately than other approaches, in particular within the top ranked results. In applications where a group of candidate users need to be short-listed (say, for a job interview), we get very good precision and recall as well.

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How to Master Screencasts in 7 Steps

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Published by rwatstein November 2nd, 2008 in users, education and video. 0 Comments

Torley writes: “Making screencasts (also known as video tutorials) is already easy, and becomes easier with better tools and broadband proliferation. However, no tech is complete without a human who dives in, does experiments, and discerns best practices from the results. I’ve made over 200 video tutorials, mostly for the virtual world of Second Life. If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, then a video is a lot more. Through such experience, these are tips and tricks I’m sure you’ll find practical and applicable to your further forays into the video fields.”

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Making Search Social

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Published by rwatstein October 12th, 2008 in users and search. 0 Comments

Looking for an apartment online, day after day, can get tedious. Finding the right sofa at the right price can also be time consuming. A new search engine, called Yotify, is designed to make these kinds of persistent quests more tolerable, and hopefully more successful. Much like Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts, a Yotify search does not start and end in an instant. Instead, the search runs at regular intervals–either hourly or daily, depending on the user’s preference–with results sent back to the user via e-mail.

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What is the Future of Human-Powered Search?

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Published by rwatstein October 12th, 2008 in users and search. 0 Comments

Bernard Lunn writes: “Mahalo popularized the term ‘human powered search’ when they launched just over a year ago. Many of the pitches we get still use that term as part of their positioning. Many of them are bootstrapped, so the price of entry is clearly low. But the upside has not yet been established. In this post we look at the pros and cons of human-powered search engines in general, look at some differentiating strategies, and ponder the future.”

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Google Uncertain on Whether to Give Users a Voice in Search

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Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008 in users, search and Google. 0 Comments

Google is still debating the merits of an experiment that allowed users to re-rank and remove search engine results and comment on them. The test, presented to a random portion of users, adds buttons next to result links to move them up and down, remove them from view and append comments to them. Implementing these features permanently would be a major step for Google in giving more participation to its users in influencing the process of ranking and evaluating search results.

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Do Users Know What’s Good for Them?

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Published by rwatstein September 14th, 2008 in users and knowledge management. 0 Comments

I think most knowledge management practitioners would agree that part of their job is to educate users and management types about the possibilities of a successful knowledge management program. But what happens when the knowledge management practitioner doesn’t agree with where the business wants to go with KM?

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50 Ways to Implement User-Generated Content in Your Library

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Published by rwatstein June 21st, 2008 in web 2.0, libraries, users and library 2.0. 0 Comments

Jessica Merritt writes: “In the internet age, everyone’s a content creator. Embracing the trend of user-generated content allows you to spread more information and engage library users at the same time. Read on to find out how to go about doing this, and pick up some handy resources along the way.”

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Information With A Twist

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Published by rwatstein June 1st, 2008 in web 2.0, libraries, users, information, librarians/information professionals and publishing. 0 Comments

Social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies led the social whirl of the information industry. Publishers and librarians tried to keep their products and services relevant by mixing authoritative content with user involvement, but that wasn’t enough. Enhancing interfaces, adding new forms of content, and making strategic acquisitions—all are necessary to ensure that the information industry party continues.

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The Transparent Library: Embracing Service to Teens

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Published by rwatstein June 1st, 2008 in libraries, users and library services. 0 Comments

When did it become an acceptable customer service response to try and push out an entire age group of users? Never, but that’s happening at too many libraries. Can we remain transparent, open, and focused on the core value of access and still tell young people to find another place to be social online?

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The Transparent Library: Insights from the Front Line

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Published by rwatstein February 25th, 2008 in libraries and users. 0 Comments

This column is directed to front-line librarians and staff, who deliver customer service and have damn good ideas for what can be done to improve things. It’s often a hurdle to get library administrators and managers to listen to your concerns and views. But there are ways. And we believe this advice holds true for everyone on the desk, from reference librarians to support staff.

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User Web Skills Improving, But Only Slightly; ‘Google Gullibility’ Remains a Problem

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Published by rwatstein February 25th, 2008 in users. 0 Comments

According to the latest AlertBox research, users now do basic operations with confidence and perform with skill on sites they use often. But when users try new sites, well-known usability problems still cause failures. Almost all users: are better at physical operations, such as mouse movements and scrolling; are more confident at clicking, and less afraid that they’ll break something; and know the basics of using search and use it more often than in the past.

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TV and Reading Are Consumer Faves

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Published by rwatstein December 1st, 2007 in users, television and reading. 0 Comments

US consumers say their favorite leisure activities are reading, watching TV and spending time with friends and family, according to The Harris Poll. Computer activities were named fourth most favorite, although the percentage of respondents listing it as a favorite has increased slightly in the last seven years.

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‘Search-Engine-Friendly’ Copywriting Style is Often not Very Friendly to Humans

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Published by rwatstein December 1st, 2007 in users and search. 0 Comments

‘Search-Engine-Friendly’ Copywriting Style is Often not Very Friendly to Humans
IF THERE IS one black mark that some search-engine-friendly copywriters will have left on the early years of digital marketing and advertising history, it will be for how they managed to butcher various language structures throughout the world with their new brand of “search engine friendly copywriting” style.

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Apple Fan Goes From YouTube to Prime Time

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Published by rwatstein November 3rd, 2007 in YouTube, users and Apple. 0 Comments

After Apple fanatic Nick Haley posted his homemade iPod Touch commercial to YouTube last month, a few ad execs at the Cupertino based company saw it. But rather than send him a cease-and-desist letter, they bought his ad, flew him out to Los Angeles to reshoot it in high def, and will be broadcasting it during the World Series.

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White Goods Morph into White Boards

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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007 in gadgets and users. 0 Comments

When GE launched “Imagination at Work” as its new slogan to replace “We Bring Good Things To Life”, the most eye-catching part of its online campaign was a virtual whiteboard that visitors could sketch and scribble on. Apparently, someone at GE had the smarts to transfer the ad’s essence to the gleaming white surfaces of GE’s appliances. White goods + whiteboard…? Witness the birth of the sketch-a-fridge.

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Corporates Urged to Embrace Consumer Tech

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Published by rwatstein July 2nd, 2007 in users and corporations. 0 Comments

Corporate attitudes to consumer-led technologies extending into the enterprise must shift from “unavoidable nuisance” to “opportunity for additional innovation”, according to Gartner. The analyst firm predicts that employees will continue to push consumer technologies into the enterprise, particularly in areas such as personal productivity and communications.

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Post-it Notes Now a Key Part of Many People’s Daily Lives

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Published by rwatstein July 2nd, 2007 in gadgets and users. 0 Comments

In 1980, when the 3M company introduced the Post-it, no one could have foreseen the effect the 3-by-5-inch yellow rectangle would have on domestic life. Its beginnings were folkloric: 40 years ago, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, discovered the imperfect adhesive that would adorn the Post-it; it took another six years for Art Fry, another 3M scientist, to find the application for this half-glue, which came in a flash of inspiration after the bookmarks for his church hymnal kept falling out. And for years Post-its were marketed primarily for this purpose — as tools for capturing a thought or for marking a spot on a document, among other typically office-bound tasks — even as they were steadily migrating out of the office and into people’s homes (and garages), onto vertical surfaces like cabinets, refrigerators, dashboards, mirrors, walls, toilet seat lids, bathroom scales and the edges of pet food bowls.

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Royal (e)mail

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Published by rwatstein June 25th, 2007 in email and users. 0 Comments

The Queen has set up her own email account, it has emerged. But she does not actually type her emails herself - she dictates them, according to the Daily Telegraph. The 81-year-old monarch, who also has a mobile phone and an iPod mini, revealed her acquisition of an email address at a recent Buckingham Palace garden party.

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