Would you like some feedback on your CHI paper? We’ve set up a site to let people read and comment on it. On Wednesday at CHI, we’ll be presenting our paper on nb, a discussion forum situated in the margins of documents being discussed. Its original intended usage was for discussion of classroom lecture notes, [...]
Last week I attended NICAR 2012, a conference for computer assisted investigative reporting. I was there to help David teach reporters how to use tools such as Datapress and Exhibit and to learn about the needs and state-of-the-art of computers in reporting. It is always a privilege to get to visit and observe someone’s world [...]
Last weekend, Geertjan Wielenga came to Boston to hold, for the first time, the official NetBeans Platform Training Course as an IAP workshop here at MIT. It was a great three days, and as for myself, just about every single thing we were taught during the course will go straight into the software I am [...]
Today I gave a keynote at CIKM 2011. I argued that in addition to all our work on tools the process information for users, we should also be looking at tools that make people better able to apply their innate information processing talents for themselves. I talked about the following tools that reflext that idea, [...]
[cross-posted from the CrowdResearch blog] Crowds are already powering novel interactive systems like word processors and question answering systems, but their reach is too limited: crowds are reasonable choices only when the user can wait a minute or more for a response. Users, of course, hate waiting — they abandon interfaces that are slow to react. Imagine [...]
It may not be obvious from this blog, but I started out as an algorithms researcher and still work in the area. One of favorite kinds of work is helping practitioners use algorithms to solve their real-world problems. Recently (more precisely, a couple of too-busy-to-blog months ago) I attended a workshop on Algorithms in [...]
As forewarned in my last blog post, I’ve submitted a first draft of our Knight News Challenge proposal at their site; you can read and, more importantly, comment upon the proposal here. I welcome your feedback. And as I mentioned last time, if you’re interested in being one of our Guinea pigs, step right up—especially [...]
The Knight News Challenge is an ambitious undertaking to fund innovation in tools that can help digital journalism. I’m planning to submit a proposal around our Datapress data-blogging plugin for WordPress and am seeking some early-adopter WordPress bloggers who’d be interested in experimenting with our tools on their sites. I believe that publishing rich interactive [...]
Some time ago we began simmering a system called Tipsy that helps web users make voluntary micro-contributions to the content creators whose work they consume. It picked up steam when we started sharing ideas with Doc Searls. Since Doc mentioned it in a blog post yesterday, I thought it worth providing a bit more detail [...]
Our list.it note-taking plug-in for Firefox got a very nice review in the New York Times from the ReadWriteWeb blog today. This tool has been our research group’s most successful by far, with over 14,000 users at last count. I find this both surprising and wonderful. Suprising, because when you look at the tool, it [...]