I wish I was at the Emerging Technology Conference(ETCON)...it's only about 20 minutes from where I live. Hundreds of people from the around the world coming to Santa Clara to look at technology and innovative wares of the future...Keynote speaker Howard Rheinhold was featured recently in Wired News, "Futurist Fears End of Innovation." The piece was on his keynote address regarding the government's control over the sharing of new technologies. Although I wasn't there, I agree that we have a responsibility to share and constantly challenge ourselves to push our thinking about the use and usefulness of technology.

In the IA community there is always a need to find standards and to find best practices, are we doing our share to innovate the landscape of information access, architecture, management, retrieval, and user experience? Who are the folks? What are they saying now?

Neat article in CNET: Microsoft Research seeks better search . As much as I try to follow information retrieval, HCI & Microsoft...this article had tidbits that were quite interesting from all points. I believe I heard some of it from various research conferences, but I look forward to seeing these research ideas as an end-consumer.

If you have a 993 and you like to do car maintenance and projects, you have to check out Jeff Chan's* 993 FAQ site.

*disclaimer: Jeff Chan is my husband ;)

ARGH!!!! I wish I was able to CHI this year. I found out from Lou today about this really cool workshop with some folks I know talking about search.

Search Workshop Submissions

It's pretty much all healed. Saw the doctor and he was impressed at how well the wound has healed. I'm pretty active now. Venturing around campus and walking all over Portland, OR last month. I'm even doing kickboxing and yoga right now. I'm so excited I'm all back 100%.

Before foot surgery
After foot surgery

Previous notes on foot:
Update: Foot
My Left Foot

I highly recommend using Mederma after surgeries. There is no scar in the after surgery photo. I applied the cream every day for 6 weeks and kept it covered. I'm really happy with the product.

I am so grateful I'm healed and I so appreciate the ability to walk and get around on my own.

Was reading up at BlackBeltJones and stumbled on the recent research by Martin Belam on BBCi Search. I'll probably follow Martin's research since I'm trying to establish some methodology for search log analysis here at GSB.

Some hilights from Martin's site:
talking for the uk upa on april 15th
bbc training & development: with presentation slides available.
a day in the life of bbci search

I also thoroughly enjoyed BBCi's IAMags Hanley's presentation(ppt) on content modeling during the IA Summit in Portland, OR.

I follow Search Engine Watch pretty religiously since much of my work revolves around search engines. Today they launched a new look. I like the information design since I can distinguish ads vs. content and I can browse more easily through the their current vs. archived materials.

Some highlights of questions related to taxonomies/thesauri/content management/enterprise IA/search:

Merging thesauri...do it or not?
What other tools besides meta-tagging?
What are topic maps? How can you use them for aiding discovery?
What are the critical compoonents for enterprise content management strategy?
What are the alternatives to meta-tagging?
How does metadata help you visualize information? Which projects should people be watching?
and more...

The video archive can be located at the FLICC website. | My Notes from the Webcast. (Word 2000)

I contributed my quick tidbits on the summit as a staff member of Boxes and Arrows. It's quite frustrating to listen and write when so many of the topics were very intellectually engaging. I'll be posting my presentation slides shortly through Nick Fink with the rest of the panels' slides. I'll probably write more provocative uncensored thoughts about the summit sometime this week. Like what I would have said if I had the guts to stand up at the 5 minute madness. The summit wrap up article also has links to other folks notes and photo albums. I've posted before about my albums already.