Cake is great, Twitter is good, short URLs can die

Cake is great, Twitter is good, short URLs can die

By Thomas Kjelsrud on March 2, 2009 | 8 Responses

Twitter is becoming increasingly popular and mainstream. We’ll go into some possible and slightly novel uses of Twitter to route the stream of communication to your site or blog. Twitters short message format creates a focused form of communication, but the tight limit enforces the increased use of shortened URLs, through services like bit.ly... Read More »

Four Approaches to Music Recommendations: Pandora, Mufin, Lala, and eMusic

By Vegard Sandvold on February 24, 2009 | Leave a response

ReadWriteWeb gives us some nice examples of the kinds of recommendation systems I wrote about in my previous post. Pandora is content-based, although the features are extracted by humans. The result is high-quality data, but poor scalability. Mufin is a classical example of content-based music recommenders, using a purely algorithmic approach. Lala seems to be old-fashioned word-of-mouth recommendations put on the Internet. eMusic is a hybrid system, but combines social with expert, and social with content-based like Oscar Celma proposes. Apple Genius is most likely a typical collaborative filtering recommender, based on artist (not song or album) similarity.

Does Everything Really Sound Like Coldplay?

Does Everything Really Sound Like Coldplay?

By Vegard Sandvold on February 24, 2009 | 4 Responses

If you have a feeling that all roads somehow lead to Radiohead, you’re not alone. Oscar Celma, my friend and former colleague at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, successfully defended his PhD thesis on music recommender systems the other day. The thesis, titled “Music Recommendation and Discovery In The Long Tail”,  sheds new... Read More »

All hail the information triumvirate!

By Vegard Sandvold on February 15, 2009 | 1 Response

Wikipedia has come to dominate Google web search results. It often ranks #1 for searches on common topics like Internet and Evolution. Is it true that Wikipedia articles are the very best source of information for all of these topics? Or are we witnessing the effects of a popularity feedback loop, fueled by the principles of least effort, and our tendency to stick with the first and obvious answers? The web link graph is fundamentally a product of socialization, and Google is fundamentally a social search engine. A popularity bias in inherent in all social information systems, leading us all down the same well-trod path. Could it be that, counter to our expectations, the natural dynamic of the web will lead to less diversity in information sources rather than more?

FASTforward'09 - Day 3: Which Path to The Future Will You Take?

FASTforward’09 – Day 3: Which Path to The Future Will You Take?

By Thomas Kjelsrud on February 13, 2009 | Leave a response

“Engage your users” was indeed an important message being sent by Microsoft/FAST at this years conference, examples being drawn from sites like Twitter and Facebook. However, Microsoft’s software and road-map did not entirely reflect this message in the online space, leaving customers working out the path for their products or sites themselves. Improvements were... Read More »

Microsoft Surface Enterprise Search Demo at FASTforward’09

By Vegard Sandvold on February 11, 2009 | Leave a response

A Microsoft Surface Enterprise Search demo is being presented by Conchango on FASTforward’09. Richard Wand writes about their efforts to create a playful search experience, using Microsoft’s new multi-touch screen-table-surface technology. Words like engaging, social and entertaining are not often used to describe enterprise search solutions. So what is different about this demo?
Update: A... Read More »

FASTforward’09 – Day 2: Vertical Business Strategies

By Thomas Kjelsrud on February 11, 2009 | Leave a response

The day kicks off with announcements from Microsoft regarding the search product lineup. The products and licensing models will be simplified and separated into 3 flavors: stand-alone FAST Search for Internet, the heavily emphasized FAST Search for Sharepoint version, and the free version of Search Server Express which has over 100,000 downloads to this... Read More »

FASTforward’09: Pre-session Impressions

By Ted Elvhage on February 10, 2009 | Leave a response

Microsoft FASTforward’09 started with a pre-session for the company’s European partners, gathering more than a 100 people a couple of hours before the official start of FAST’s yearly conference. It was a good opportunity for an interactive session with the FAST management team, and for listening to the stories of some of the European... Read More »

FASTforward'09 - Day 1: Get Social

FASTforward’09 – Day 1: Get Social

By Thomas Kjelsrud on February 10, 2009 | Leave a response

FASTfoward’09 (on Twitter & official blog) kicked off in Las Vegas yesterday with a bang.  Over 1000 bright heads were gathered in a football size like room within the never ending halls of the Mirage. This years flavour is “Engage your users” as we are looking at the big picture on search moving forward. ... Read More »

Watch Out – Intelligent Information Retrieval is Coming to a Business Near You!

Watch Out – Intelligent Information Retrieval is Coming to a Business Near You!

By Truls Berg on February 9, 2009 | 3 Responses

The Norwegian National Collection Agency (NCA) chose to use a search engine as a central component of their information infrastructure. Per Waage (CEO) is expecting to collect more money through monthly down payments, having more information about people’s financial assets at his hands. Moving from an old mainframe architecture to the FAST Enterprise... Read More »

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