Tuesday, March 04, 2003

Joel on Software - Building Communities with Software "...we have discovered the primary axiom of online communities: Small software implementation details result in big differences in the way the community develops, behaves, and feels..." 2:54:49 PM    comment [] Mindjet - Software for conception and planning Tis looks like a pretty interesting product... "MindManager allows users to develop their thinking in real time just the way the brain does -- visually. From a graphic symbol in the center of the screen, users add branches and sub-branches, labeling thoughts as they unfold. Users can connect thoughts with arrows, add symbols, and emphasize key points with color highlighting. The result is a visual "map" of the thinking process that can be shared over the Internet, used as a presentation or setup as a Web page, etc. Mind Mapping is a powerful system for visualizing and communicating knowledge. Mind Maps use both words and visual clues (such as proximity, color, graphics and icons) to express ideas and relationships. Mind Maps allow you to convey in an instant what other documents take pages of text to express." 2:42:09 PM    comment [] O'Reilly Network: Making Feature-Rich, Movable Type RSS Files [Feb. 28, 2003] "The curse of metadata, once you get over the intractable issues of trust and standards and categorization, is that you never know how much to give. For the weblogging community, which produces masses of metadata, mostly without knowing it, this is especially true: we could be giving out so much more for others to play with, and with very little effort..." 1:00:35 PM    comment [] A Call for Softer, Greener Language "One section of the memorandum, "Winning the Global Warming Debate," asserts that many voters believe there is a lack of consensus about global warming among scientists. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly," it says. "Therefore you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue."" 12:50:45 PM    comment [] Duncan Wilcox: PageRank 2.0 "Today I would speculate that link topology analysis has a very marginal role in determining the final page score. Additionally, the actual content of a page that is a link target is of importance only as a cross check with the link text." 12:38:58 PM    comment [] Jon Udell: What is integration? "Even though Google has 100 Ph.D.s working the problem, Brin thinks that truly intelligent search remains an elusive goal. In the Q and A, when asked about RDF and the Semantic Web, he offered a "possibly unpopular" view. "Look, putting angle brackets around things is not a technology, by itself. I'd rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to write in ways computers can understand." When I asked about an experiment with topic-sensitive PageRank, Brin pointed out that the kinds of ambiguous queries this approach can resolve -- for example, the difference between "blues" the musical sense versus the mental health sense -- are in practice rare, and easily resolved by the user with follow-on querying. " 12:36:46 PM    comment [] Topic-Sensitive PageRank "In the original PageRank algorithm for improving the ranking of search-query results, a single PageRank vector is computed, using the link structure of the Web, to capture the relative ``importance'' of Web pages, independent of any particular search query. To yield more accurate search results, we propose computing a set of PageRank vectors, biased using a set of representative topics, to capture more accurately the notion of importance with respect to a particular topic. By using these (precomputed) biased PageRank vectors to generate query-specific importance scores for pages at query time, we show that we can generate more accurate rankings than with a single, generic PageRank vector. For ordinary keyword search queries, we compute the topic-sensitive PageRank scores for pages satisfying the query using the topic of the query keywords. For searches done in context (e.g., when the search query is performed by highlighting words in a Web page), we compute the topic-sensitive PageRank scores using the topic of the context in which the query appeared." 12:32:50 PM    comment [] focuseek searchbox "focuseek searchbox is the advanced solution for the gathering and aggregation of content to be used in web sites, public and corporate portals, knowledge management systems, and more. focuseek searchbox is the most sophisticated Content Gathering system available on the market, offered with a flexible deployment model, scalable for any need. focuseek searchbox let you for example index and aggregate multiple publically accessible information sources, to enrich thematic sections of any site with content that is always fresh and relevant. With focuseek searchbox you can create thematic search engine, implement information feed services, build news archives, information monitoring serives, and much more." 12:23:35 PM    comment [] The NAUTILUS Project "We propose a different approach that has been investigated recently by many researchers involved in machine learning systems. The idea is to learn the user's interests and provide him/her with suggestions of interesting web sites or pages automatically. The NAUTILUS is an intelligent robot that navigates the Web autonomously looking for pages that are potentially interesting for the registered users it manages. The NAUTILUS navigates in the background fetching pages and evaluating them with respect to the current user profiles stored in the system. The score obtained for each page is used to decide if the page should be suggested to the user and if the automatic navigation should continue through the links contained in that page. The learning module of NAUTILUS takes into account the users' feedbacks on the suggested links and modifies consequently the profiles. " 12:21:39 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Jon Phipps. Last update: 7/10/2003; 5:33:39 PM.