What do our search terms say about us?

The annual list of what the world searches for online has been released.  No real surprises — Britney Spears and Barack Obama top the lists, which are littered with pop culture (WWE, Miley Cyrus, Lindsay Lohan) and political (Sarah Palin) references.  The Olympics, the iPhone, and functional terms like credit score make a good showing […]

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A Dozen “Edutainment” Application Bundles

A Dozen “Edutainment” Application Bundles Definition SEARCH WAS THE GREAT NEW FRONTIER. Sodden with copycats, it has become anhydrous. As Science Fiction writer Harlan Ellison has noted: “We are entertaining ourselves out of existence.” The Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead would have been a thin book indeed, if it had as its base the […]

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Search Working Group is … Working

Thanks to the members of the iFOCOS Search Working Group who gathered for a kickoff meeting last week (April 24, 2007) in Santa Clara, California (and thanks to Neil Budde and crew at Yahoo! for hosting the meeting). Thanks, as well, to Dabble founder Mary Hodder, who couldn’t make it to the meeting but will […]

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Make better search; then get people to use it

Oren Michels is CEO of Mashery. My closest cousin had cancer surgery yesterday. Based on what we (her close family and friends) have learned, this is the sort of cancer you really, really don’t want. Of course, we don’t know that for sure. After all, when we first got the preliminary diagnosis a couple weeks […]

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The limiting factor for knowledge diffusion is people’s time

Jeff Given is the IT Operations Manager for the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This post is a pre-cursor to the iFOCOS Search Working Group meeting on April 24th, 2007. About OSTI – OSTI’s mission is to collect and disseminate scientific and technical information (STI) for the U.S. […]

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iFOCOS Search Working Group Launches

The discussion at We Media Miami on next-generation search concepts, chaired by Jim Kennedy of The Associated Press, was both vibrant and inconclusive. So we’re going further. We’ve launched the iFOCOS Search Working Group. The group will hold its kickoff meeting April 24, 2007, in Santa Clara, California – using meeting space generously provided by […]

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Search, while dominant, is not very good

Jim Kennedy is VP of Strategy for The Associated Press. He is also a member of the iFOCOS Search Working Group, which is holding its first meeting April 24, 2007, and of the iFOCOS Advisory Board. Over the past six years, the online function of search has become the dominant content entry point for digital […]

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