Well as I posted earlier I attended and presented at the first NordLib 2.0 conference in Stockholm. My presentation was about folksonomies and social navigation, how user can navigate folksonomies through other users profiles.
Se the slides: User to User: Browsing folksonomies through other users profiles

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

Google launched some new features in ranking of search results, relevance feedback, adding web pages to results and a comment feature.

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

On friday I will be at the NordLib web 2.0 conference in Stockholm. I will give a presentation of my project  shortly after lunch in the Aula Magna, the big auditorium, so I tried to direct my slides to a bigger auditorium than I used to. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

There will be live blogging from the conference.

I will post my presentation as well as pictures from it later on. For now, I just look forward seeing Stockholm again ;)

I found this great example of user generated metadata. It’s a photograph from The Smithsonian Institution libraries and it portraits: Niels Bohr, James Franck, Albert Einstein and Isidor Isaac Rabi.

The metadata provided by the Smithsonian are poor and some plain wrong. But fortunately Flickr has some bright users who noticed the errors (the date was set to 1879).

When librarians and custodians have ask me, if I thought that they could let users tag and comment their resources. I always said “What’s in it for the user?”, and thus shoot down the idea. But this example shows that users apparently tag and comment without any gratification other than the contribution to the community.