“The internet is now the third most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio.”

Personally I get all my daily news from the Internet through my mobile and my rss-reader. We subscribe to a (paper) newspaper, Weekendavisen. Weekendavisen have thorough articles about present topics. I very rarely watch the news on TV. I regularly use the ’send to friend’ feature on news sites or share it via Shareaholic in Firefox.

Whats really interesting in the survey is that 37% has contributed to the creating or spread of news fascilitated by social media. As noted by David Weinberger This breaks the rule some claim to be a fact, that 99% of the Internet users consume (or lurk as a non-flattering term sometimes used) and 1% produces.

This, I think, might have been a fact in the good ol’ newsgroup days. With the popularity of social media and the fact that almost every household has at least one computer, I think PEW’s results indicates that Internet users of today are much more participatory.

Another finding in the study was that a lot of people get news through email. I wonder if it is the same people who share news through email that also share through social media.

Interesting survey indeed

Take the stairs instead of the escalator!

First live blogging is about Introduction to Information Retrieval presented by C. J. ‘Keith’ van Rijsbergen. The topics in this presentation are What is IR? IR Models, Precision and Recal, Relevance feedback. Here I will focus on what Information retrieval is.

Keith presented this model of the fields scientific paradigms

Scientific paradigm

Theory

<->

Experiments

<->

Real Life

Top down, and Bottom up -Approach

My research is clearly the Bottom up approach. I start with real users, and real (as well as simulated) task, experiences and from there on I will try to develop theory.

What is IR?
Generally speaking IR is about retrieval of textual documents. As a former student of Peter Ingwersen I would like to add that interactive - the interaction between the user and the system also must be present. I would say that for me, there is no point of studying IR without studying the users.  But I can see that studying/investigating algorithms and IR-systems can be made without users. But at some point user studies must be made.

‘Retrieval systems count things’

Systems count words locally in a document/object, and then they count words globally/external from the document and violá.

- The strength of the field of IR is evaluation

How do we evaluate the invented IR-systems. Demonstrate that the systems work. Not just demonstrate the speed. Measuring what the IR system returns in connection with the user. This will come up!

Here are some highlights from Keith’s presentation

- 3 dimensional experimentation is when you add the users context - do that

- Controlled variables in experiments are test collections, topics, assesments (from Kal Järvelin)

- Use of words are problematic - words are to ambigius

- In real life - you don’t have relevance in advance

And my favorite from Swanson (1988):

- A document relevance depends on other seen documents - relevance is not indeendent

References
Swanson (1988). Historical note: Information retrieval and the future of an illusion. In: Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 39 (2). p. 92-98.

I made use of a interlinked group of expert users of the folksonomy Delicious as participants in a multiple case study. This to investigate my research questions regarding users information seeking behavior, social navigation and connectivity in a folksonomy.
I recruited the participants using the chain referral method. Starting with one participant known to be an expert user, I asked if the participant knew other expert users that he thought would participate in the study. He referred me to two and then the chain went on to fifth link. It was amazing, the positive feedback my project got. Of 16 participants only one participant said no, and that after struggling long and hard with his work schedule.

The 15 participants conducted four search sessions, three triggered by simulated work task situations (see Borlund, 2003) and one search task they brought to the session. The participant’s actions were logged, and after the search sessions the participants were interviewed about their thoughts during the searches and were encuraged to contemplate their connectivity to other users in their network. The log served as stimuli in the interview, and the participants were asked to explain their information seeking behavior as well as their experience with Delicious.

So now I have what seems like very good interview data, log data and social network data to structure, code and comment. Currently I am transcribing interviews, and developing codes to structure it.

More of this later

References

Borlund, Pia (2003)  “The IIR evaluation model: a framework for evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems”Information Research, 8(3), paper no. 152 [Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/8-3/paper152.html]

When I first browsed through the Swedish National Heritage Boards images, I found some wonderful photographs taken by Carl Curman in the 1880’s. Curman also visited Denmark and Ørstedsparken in Copenhagen:

Two days later i passed the same spot Curman had captured in 1882, and I couldn’t resist myself:

I hope that more cultural heritage institutions will go online in Flickr.

This episode is also  blogged here by Henrik Moltke (thank you Henrik for the nice feedback)

jobbig-men-bra

Loosely translated: strenuous but good
Jobbig is a bit hard to translate, the closest I can came was strenuous, it could also be translated with tough.

The tag is used to describe content like the film Dancer in the dark by Lars von Trier and La Haine by Mathieu Kassovitz. I think the tag is very accurate in relation to these films ;-)

Another feature in the catalog is that you can report abuse in tags. This is probably a thing that many folksonomies must incorporate to avoid spam.

Unfortunate the authors of the tags are not displayed. I don’t know if its there is a legal problem with showing public library users in Sweden.

What a great tag: JOBBIG-MEN-BRA

My Eboy Pixorama book has arrived! It’s consists of eight great illustrations of pixorama cities which I can spend hours just looking through.

Now the big question is - Do I dare showing it to my kids Viola and Ask - aged 4 and 2? And if I do, will I own the book afterwards?   ;-)

The frontside illustration is a city called Foobar. I think it will go nice to a presentation on social technologies on the web.

Library 2.0 Bibliography - Tagging & Folksonomies

I been meaning to make one myself, but now I am grateful for Monika Bargmanns ;-) There is a lot of articles from library periodical which I haven’t read. She also has a listing specific for social bookmarking.

I had a bit of a cold when I presented, but I think that it went rather well. It was a nice conference, and I love to talk to librarian professionals ;-D

This is me presenting

From the Nordlib2.0 Flickr acount. Photographer: Peter Elging

Through relevance feedback the searcher can move hits up in the search results page or deleting non-relevant hits (see: [1]). The new feature will not affect other users’ searches. Google states on their official blog that you can “tailor Google search results to best meet your needs.” the users have to be signed in to Google to use the features. Otherwise Google would have no way of knowing who they are. The users can also add a URL that they want for a given search. By clicking a link in the bottom of the search results page, other users have tailored their searchwiki. Another new cool feature is that users can comment on the results (see: [2]).

I think that this new feature looks very promising, and that Google again has proven themselves to be worthy of their popularity.

I can see many further possibilities with this type of ranking. I would like to see the use of individual users data to enhance all users searches. Google could thus attempt to make adaptive search possible, a search where user data is utilized so that similar users can benefit from eachother. A couple of years ago Simon Warthoe and I had a paper on a conference about adaptive design and knowledge organization.

Googles YouTube video of the new personalized search