i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

 "One of the challenges of info pros has been to use the structured information-retrieving and -filtering tools, which really do require sequential, left-brained thinking, while simultaneously thinking creatively and intuitively about the entire spectrum of information sources and features, which requires right-brained analysis. It sort of feels like I'm trying to solve a quadratic equation while playing the piano."

And now, a word about DEVONthink. They describe it as a "smart information assistant", although you could think of it as a sort of MyResearchBits.

From what I could find, I believe the origins of what we call IR could be credited to Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929). He was the first to develop a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards in order to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the founder of the company that became IBM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith

A feature that I'd really like in a search engine (or wikipedia or even the bowser itself) would be to be able to see a visual representation of the path i traced - i.e. the queries that i gave and the links that i clicked on.

Sites like Isohunt and The Pirate Bay serve as search engines wherin dispersed users can search for and share .torrent pointer files. These, in turn, are used to orchestrate distributed filesharing. Much of the content distribution facilitated by these sites occurs in violation of copyright.

This Economist article describes the use of bar codes in conjunction with mobile phone cameras to provide users with real-time, context-sensitive information. An example of this is the traveller photographing a barcode at a railway station with his mobile phone to obtain train timetables. Despite of varying bar code standards, the author suggests their free, open standard nature will encourage wider adoption.&#1