i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

With a 'radical overhaul' of its website, Twitter has to decide how to describe itself. 'Media company' or 'Content Aggregator' or both?

Xerox launched a new marketing campaign about assisting major brands with business process and document management.

1) Personalized mailing offers for Target customers by collecting and analyzing individual's shopping habits

2) Translating and delivering handbooks and technical manuals for Ducati around the globe      

A service that extracts associations and their relationships to entires in Wikipedia, i.e. crawling a wikipedia side an generating tags based on the content. The Platfrom works like a search engine wher users type in a word and an ontology that distinguishes between people, places, labels etc. is displayed.

dev.sigwp.org/WikipediaThesaurusV3/

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is reporting that the the US government's classification and safegauring of sensitive in information is in complete disarray [PDF]. The problem it seems that there are at least 130 different labelling for such information. Here are 20 out of the 130 possible clearance labels:

 Human Jeopardy contestants impress me, but a computer that can give similar responses, in as little time, would really amaze me.  "Watson" needs to interpret clues, process information quickly, and give correct answers.  It's that first bit that falls into Natural Language Processing, which we'll be discussing in 202.  

Photo from doodlepuppy.com.

To illustrate the point that Bob made in class about tagging and controlled vocabularies, you may want to take a look at SociallyDelicious. Prateek, Yo-Shang and I created this tool last year in IOLab. The main idea is to see show people tag bookmarks in del.icio.us and whether their tagging behavior is influences by their level of expertise.

Someone is doing research on HCI at CMU, building platforms and software to "help people collect personally relevant information for the purpose of self-reflection and gaining self-knowledge."

http://www.ianli.com/research

In the same vein as "My Life Bits" eh?

Devin Coldewey of UX Magazine recently wrote a piece entitled "Making the URL Bar Useful Again", where he proposes a new metadata tag that would create a breadcrumb trail within a browser's URL bar based on the web page you are currently on. Instead of seeing a long, indecipherable URL address, this space would present users with enhanced information on where they are within the navigation structure of the web site.

The New York Times recently wrote this piece about PeopleSmart: a web-based company that offers searchable profiles for every citizen of the United States.