i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

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.  

The IFLA includes the abstraction hierarchy in its Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records in order to assist in cataloging entities. The abstraction itself is a way to define and distinguish between different types of entities in a library system.

A new 14-miles long 680 express lane will be unveiled next Monday.

Patrick McKenzie has identified 40 incorrect assumptions that programmers (and non-programmers) tend to make about names (of people, that is). Some of the assumptions are common "obvious" facepalms like #21:  "People’s names are globally unique" (how many Michael Davises or Ali Mohammeds are out there, do you suppose?) or #7: "People’s names do not change" (oh hi, newlyweds!).

 Info 202 Blog Post 1, "Google Social Search Screws Up"
2010Sep11
Walter Koning

Google Social Search launched near the close of 2009.  Since then the features have been refined but one feature is causing grief for users.

This week's New Yorker recently featured an interesting article about phone books. Once a source for information retrieval, "its legitimacy as a reference tool was undermined long ago-- first by 411, then by the Internet and smartphones."

This interesting debate published this past August on Wired.com proclaims that the web, as a business phenomena, may have reached its limits. The internet is now moving from the browser sphere to the application sphere. Why? We haven't been able to find a viable business model for content.

New York Times (NYT) published a very interesting article asking the question about the potential future of the social objects. (In case you don’t know what social objects are, here is the article called “Social Objects for Beginners”.) In brief, social objects are essentially the physical objects which embody social stories or social data.

"Google Inc. unveiled a major upgrade to its search engine today, showing off a new feature that promises to shave seconds off most online searches by attempting to predict what users are looking for before they're done typing the query."

If you have an experience using touch-screen devices such as cellphone, e-book readers, or ATM, you might be a person who is awkward or clumsy to manipulate some electronic devices which are not equipped with touching screens. Nowadays, it is so natural that people try to touch the screen when they grab a brand-new mobile device because touching screens has seeped into their daily lives.

The article link

The importance of the organization of information can be seen in the above article which talks about the launch of a new database for property and land mortgages in India. This database will contain the details of the property and the information on the borrower who is using it as the collateral for his or her loan.