i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I know we’ll spend a lot of time talking about privacy next spring in INFO 205, but over the course of this semester I’ve been reminded several times of this piece from NPR’s On The Media: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/12/18/06. Aired about a year ago, it does a nice job of addressing the personal implications of a world where the line between information organization and retrieval is continually blurring.

Is Qwiki the multimedia search engine of the future?

For those of you in Section C, you may recall when Rami mentioned that a startup named Qwiki, working on a multimedia information retrieval service, had won the grand prize of the venture competition at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference.

They have now moved into alpha, allowing testers to use their system and provide feedback. You can request an invite at http://www.qwiki.com or email me for one.

What is Qwiki?

http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/

I dug up this almost year old op-ed published in The Chronicle of higher education because it highlights some of the most challenging problems associated with metadata, classification and describing collections.

Google recently revealed an overhaul of its back-end web indexing infrastructure, called Caffeine, making search results “50 percent fresher”. The old system was split into layers that did a series of batch processes on new Web content.