Author Archives: donturn

About donturn

Don Turnbull, Ph.D. is a consultant specializing in software research and development focusing on search systems, information analytics, user experience design, semantic and knowledge management technologies as well as intellectual property analysis.

KM Practices in Organizations Undergoing Fundamental Change

On November 2 I will be speaking with three colleagues:

about Knowledge Management Practices in Organizations Undergoing Fundamental Change at the American Society of Information Science & Technology’s Annual Meeting.

Here is the requisite blurb about the panel:

This session combines individual presentations with a group discussion. The focus of this session and the expertise of this panel bring together the information-related issues of organizational change, managing knowledge, enabling technology and the role of senior management. This session reflects the interests of SIG-MGT membership and aligns with the ASIST 2005 theme of “Bringing Research and Practice Together.”

Of course, there is a Wiki page too.

New Book: Theories of Information Behavior

I am remiss in mentioning that a new book, Theories of Information Behavior, I have written a chapter for is finally out.

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 2006 Call for Papers

The ACM Special Interest Group for Information Retrieval (SIGIR) has thier SIGIR 2006 Draft Call for Papers out already. The conference will be in Seattle next August.

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.

Volunteer to help with the Hurricane Katrina PeopleFinder

If you’re reading this now, you have the skills to help out with the Katrina PeopleFinder Project.

From Rebecca McKinnon’s blog, RConversation:

After Katrina many friends and family members have been separated and left with no clear way to find each other. Hundreds of internet web sites are gathering hundreds, and probably thousands, of entries about missing persons or persons who want to let others know they’re okay.

The problem is: the data on these sites has no particular form or structure. So it’s almost impossible for people to search or match things up. Plus there are dozens of sites – making it hard for a person seeking lost loved ones to search them all.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project NEEDS YOUR HELP to enter data about missing and found people from various online sources. We’re requesting as little as an hour of your time. All you need to do is help read unstructured posts about missing or found persons, and then add the relevant data to a database through a simple online form.

START HELPING NOW


Katrina

Thanks to Jon Lebkowsky for letting me know about this effort.

NPR Podcasts (Media RSS)

Still in Beta, NPR is building an index of Podcasts, which you can sort by topic, title or provider.

Of course, regular RSS feeds are available as well. (Please, just put the link for both media player formats on the page for each broadcast, do we really need to go to another page just to select which streaming format? Thanks NPR!)

For the record, I still think “podcast” is a bad name for this media distribution method. Media RSS seems to be more descriptive (because eventually people will also have to say “video podcast” or somesuch and so on…).

Call for Papers: WWW2006 Conference

New notice for participation at the 15th Annual World Wide Web conference in Edinburgh, Scotland (one of my favorite cities).

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:

  • Browsers and user experience on mobile devices
  • Browser interoperability
  • Novel client-side applications
  • Multimodal interfaces, including speech interaction
  • Information visualization on the Web
  • Multilingual Web content design
  • Novel browsing and navigation paradigms
  • Web interaction with the real world, including robotics and sensor networks
  • Adaptive Web displays and Web personalization
  • Ubiquitous web access, shared displays, and wearable computing
  • Web usability and user experience
  • Web accessibility
  • Web-based collaboration and collaborative Web use
  • Web-logs and online journalism

Hope to see you there.