It seems that as of today, the Apple iTunes Preview Web servers are not playing well with the googlebot. Take a look at the top three SERP descriptions for Angry Birds, one of the most popular iOS apps.

Maybe the Apple Webmasters need to get a plucky action hero to improve snippets with a meta description makeover.

These results may also imply something about how much data has been gathered and is used for my personalized versions of both searches too. However, I don’t remember searching for any of these as either a "what is" search or for any of the other search terms.

Parliament? Gout? Gluten? The Illuminati? Strange indeed, but perhaps the makings of a great mystery-thriller novel!

[PDF]

James Pitkow, Hinrich Schuetze, Todd A. Cass, Rob Cooley, Don Turnbull, Andy Edmonds, Eytan Adar, et al.

Abstract

A contextual computing approach may prove a breakthrough in personalized search efficiency.

Excerpt

This is the abstract for the talk:

This talk reviews an exploratory study of sponsored search advertising for a major US university’s academic department. The ad campaign used Google’s AdWord service with the goal of increasing awareness – not eCommerce – as part of the search process.  A behavioral model of information seeking is suggested that could be applied for selecting appropriate types of online advertising for awareness and other advertising goals. Insights into the study methodology will also be discussed including the use of increased integration with server logs, targeted site query terms and alternative awareness strategies. 

The talk is part of the panel AM08 2008 – The Google Online Marketing Challenge: A Multi-disciplinary Global Teaching and Learning Initiative Using Sponsored Search with Bernard Jansen, Mark A. Rosso, Dan Russell, Brian Detlor and Don Turnbull.

This is a summary of the panel:

Sponsored search is an innovative information searching paradigm. This panel will discuss a vehicle to explore this unique medium as an educational opportunity for students and professors. From February to May 2008, Google will run its first ever student competition in sponsored search, The Google Online Marketing Challenge http://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/. Similar to other Google initiatives, the extent seems huge. Based on pre-registrations, more than two hundred professors and nearly nine thousand students from approximately 50 countries will compete. This may be the largest, worldwide educational course ever done. It is certainly on a large scale.

The Google Online Marketing Challenge is a real-life, problem-based, and multidisciplinary educational endeavor of the kind that many educators say is needed to relate teaching to outside the classroom. However, such endeavors are not without risks. The session should appeal to professors that competed in the 2008 Challenge, any professors considering the 2009 Challenge, as well as other educators who might consider the inclusion of Google AdWords as a pedagogical tool in their curricula. The panel will also be of great interest to those information professionals and educators as a possible model for use in other domains besides sponsored search.

Well, to me.

Here’s the abstract for the paper:

The OpenChoice system, currently in development, is an open source, open access community rating and filtering service that would improve upon the utility of currently available Web content filters. The goal of OpenChoice is to encourage community involvement in making filtering classification more accurate and to increase awareness in the current approaches to content filtering. The design challenge for OpenChoice is to find the best interfaces for encouraging easy participation amongst a community of users, be it for voting, rating or discussing Web page content. This work in progress reviews some initial designs while reviewing best practices and designs from popular Web portals and community sites.

I’m also making it available to download: Turnbull, Don (2007) Rating, Voting & Ranking: Designing for Collaboration & Consensus. Works-in-Progress Paper presented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference. San Jose, CA. May 2, 2007.

Goodbye Spotlight?

It’s worthwhile to think about how the interfaces, features and even the incentives (“it’s the user stupid”) can influence a tagging system’s design and use.

Some highlight quotes from the panel you really shouldn’t miss:

• “Explicit refactoring affordances” – Adina Levin
• “Razor-sharp, small pieces of metadata” – Thomas Vander Wal
• “What happens in the brain… in your cortical areas” – Rashmi Sinha
• “Dual-folksonomy triad” – Thomas Vander Wal
• “What we need is Tagginess” – Prentiss Riddle
• “More math is always the answer” – Don Turnbull

How can you pass up quips like that?

The Tagging 2.0 panel was one of the “highly-rated panels” this year, tied for first place with a number of other entertaining and informative panels, so check out their podcasts as they become available as well.

Check it out.

Since my all-time favorite O’Reilly book is Mastering Regular Expressions, this has got to be my kind of conference.

Now why not a program for academic research access to the data stores?

We invite position papers for the WWW 2006 workshop “Logging Traces of Web Activity: The Mechanics of Data Collection”. Many WWW researchers require logs of user behaviour on the Web. Researchers study the interactions of web users, both with respect to general behaviour and in order to develop and evaluate new tools and techniques.

Traces of web activity are used for a wide variety of research and commercial purposes including user interface usability and evaluations of user behaviour and patterns on the web. Currently, there is a lack of available logging tools to assist researchers with data collection and it can be difficult to choose an appropriate technique. There are several tradeoffs associated with different methods of capturing log-based data. There are also challenges associated with processing, analyzing and utilizing the collected data.

This one day workshop will examine the trade-offs and challenges inherent to the different logging approaches and provide workshop attendees the opportunity to discuss both previous data collection experiences and upcoming challenges. The goal of this workshop is to establish a community of researchers and practitioners to contribute to a shared repository of logging knowledge and tools. The workshop will consist of a panel discussion, participant presentations, demonstrations of logging tools and prototypes, and a discussion of the next steps for the group. Participation is open to researchers, practitioners, and students in the field.

The deadline for workshop proposals is January 10, 2006. I hope to see you there.

From the blurb:

This unique book presents authoritative overviews of more than 70 conceptual frameworks for understanding how people seek, manage, share, and use information in different contexts. A practical and readable reference to both wellestablished and newly proposed theories of information behavior, the book includes contributions from 85 scholars from 10 countries. Each theory description covers origins, propositions, methodological implications, usage, links to related conceptual frameworks, and listings of authoritative primary and secondary references. The introductory chapters explain key concepts, theory, method connections, and the process of theory development.

Check out the Table of Contents (pdf file). (I’m the last chapter in the book, it’s funny that the chapters are organized alphabetically by the title of each chapter.)

Amazon.com link to Theories of Information Behavior. American Society for Information Science & Technology Member Price is 20% off now.

SIGIR is one of the best academic conferences to keep up with what’s new and what’s possible for Web search and increasingly, in Desktop search and mobile device search. For 2006 I expect we will see more about vertical search and even blog search too as well as some new insights into user behavior for IR.

I will be a reviewer again this year in the Browsers and User Interface track, where there are usually a number of amazing systems and interfaces. Here’s some text describing the track:

The Browsers and User Interfaces track at WWW’2006 focuses on promoting novel research directions and providing a forum where researchers, theoreticians, and practitioners can introduce new approaches, paradigms, applications, share their knowledge and opinions about problems and solutions related to accessing and interacting with data , services, and other humans over the Web. We invite original papers describing both theoretical and experimental research including (but not limited to) the following topics:

Hope to see you there.

OK, while we’re at it, don’t forget the best extension ever – adblock.

Throw in Bloglines with its easy to use, Web-based interface for any number of RSS feeds and very soon, a few personal tweaks with greasemonkey, not to mention integrating your own personal blogosphere view using Technorati tags or even more personally oriented, pluck with its client interface/information dashboard++ and you can kiss your portal application providers goodbye.

ORACLE’s recent buyout of Peoplesoft may not be so smart in the long, long run when every business unit, not to mention employee, can crank out structured data feeds, tweak simple logic to act on other’s sources and keep up to date with everything in the organiztion with just a few clicks on everyone’s favorite orange button: .

Trivia note: originally Zipf’s work was based on some ideas from Condon (which GKZ acknowledged), way back in 1928, but Zipf’s name won out over time.

Here’s the blurb:

Room 18A on Sunday, March 13th from 11:30 am – 12:30 pm

Monolithic, overarching imposed systems rarely provide full support for the range of use and users that these systems are intended to serve. Networked software should be smarter, taking advantage of users’ behaviors to evolve a system keenly adapted to actual use, not just intent. We are currently in a special moment, witnessing the development of systems that are beginning to demonstrate the power of this approach. Whether it is through passive tracking, such as purchase histories on Amazon, or explicit tagging of content, such as bookmarks on del.icio.us and photos on Flickr, websites are increasingly taking advantage of the aggregation of individual behavior to improve the utility, usability and desirability of their systems. Drawing on a range of perspectives, this session will address the intersection of the personal and global, the tensions that exist and the opportunities they afford.