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.

Most IR research has been focused on static information retrieval as if we are retrieving information from physical and digital libraries, and those techniques are what we have learned as part of this course. However, increasingly, researchers have become interested in the dynamic and temporal nature of information on the Web.

Maps. Most people think of them as a means of a getting us from Point A to Point B, but this article discusses how they have become more than a tool that keeps us from getting lost. In the not so distant past, we relied on paper maps that, for the most part, provided the user with a consistent visual vocabulary to determine exactly how to get from Point A to Point B.

Do you know read-it-later applications? If you don’t, you have to try it. With it, “One reading list, everywhere you are” (from Read it Later). Read It Later and Instapaper are the most used applications. They

There are many reasons to use them.

The real and the digital worlds are converging, bringing much greater efficiency and lots of new opportunities, says Ludwig Siegele. But is it what people want?

Recently launched, Blekko, a new search engine, is attempting to provide users with better search results. Currently, when individuals search the web, they have to sort through various sites in order to find 'trustworthy' information. According to Rick Skrenta, CEO and co-founder of Blekko,'the web is filling up with spam and low-rent webpages from content farms like Demand Media, saying the web now has 100 billion urls, most created by bots.'