The MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) Presents:
Social Networking: Is there Really a Business Model?
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Bishop Auditorium, Stanford Business School

Speaker:
Reid Hoffman CEO and Chairman LinkedIn, Ltd

Panelists:
Jonathan Abrams Founder & CEO Friendster, Inc.
Andrew Anker Partner August Capital
Ross Mayfield Founder & CEO Socialtext

Moderator:
Tony Perkins Creator and Editor-In-Chief AlwaysOn

Sponsored by:
MIT/Stanford Venture Laboratory

Paul Festa interviews Marc Smith, resident sociologist at Microsoft Research. "Microsoft's in-house sociologist." It's a good interview of insights in the use of Usenet Newsgroups to analyze social networks and hopfully improve information retrieval(search). Lots of the typical questions regarding spam, and value of short lists to answer questions, however the reason why this was worth blogging, was the fact that there really is a trend converging on the use of IR & social networks to not only help people find information, but also to help people find each other. Yes this is almost like knowledge management, but it definitely is about community. We aren't limited to our physical community, and tools such as Verity K2 or this new MS Aura project I can see a stronger pull towards better IR tools. All the better for us who are trying to find answers to questions.

Ok, a new feature that totally slipped by me until I read about it in Econtentmag.com. You can use the tilde(~) character just like you can use the plus(+) or minus (-) in your query string. The tilde(~) provides synonyms to the terms in your query. More info at the Goggle Refine Search Help Page.

Found an article by Gary Price on SearchEngineWatch.com on a pretty beefy online search directory tool called Look Up Directory. I can see tele-marketing folks loving this or your local and corporate libraries. This is definitely a bookmark item.

Wow. The extension of "search" and "information retrieval" has a new twist. Google now offers their search box as a calculator. They are definitely taking search in the direction I've envisioned. Give the user one search box that can do and find things to solve your question/problem. Pretty interesting!

Overview of Google Web Search Features

Discovered this through IA Slash, but Tanya just did a write up on how she created faceted categories for her blog. I wish I had more time, and she is definitely on the path that I was "going" to do with the multiple categories stuff in MT. Obviously I haven't done anything with my categories in a long time, but hopfully when I have time I can follow in Tanya's footstep.

CNET article "Google Names Enterprise Search Clients" mentions the decoupling of internet search from enterprise search. One of the comments at the end of the article bothered me.

"Google is the only (company) left playing in both markets. Long term, we believe if you're going to be successful in enterprise search you have to know how consumers search,'' said Berk, who noted that Google is also marketing its product as easier and cheaper to use than those offered by competitors.

I actually believe that internet searching is very different from enterprise searching. Just like searching your local library's catalog system is not the same as searching a research database or Google. I'm wondering if Google really believes they can survive the enterprise search sphere where many have already acknowledged that it's a different market. I was actually having lunch with Avi(www.searchtools.com) a few weeks ago and discussed this same trend of internet search companies separating from their enterprise search siblings...if anything this will probably put more money into research and development rather than two siblings fighting for attention of management and money. Not only are the content areas different, but the motivations for searching, domain/scope of content, and you don't necessarily have inlinking among documents. This is definitely another interest I'll be monitoring over the next few months.

Just noticed on the ASIST website that the next Summit is in TX. I didn't notice any link to a conference site.

Information Architecture, February 28-29, 2004, Austin, TX

Also the ASIST Annual 2003 is in Long Beach, CA. I'll be curious to hear anyone form the IA Community planning to attend. Marcia Bates is the conference Chair.