http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog MIT CSAIL Research Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:50:24 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en HCI research needs to get better at spreading the word, sooner, in the Web 2.0 era.  Typically, by the time that CHI rolls around, the research being presented is at least 7 months old.  When (or if) a group decides to post PDFs early, the papers are so distributed that ... http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/11/04/blogs-and-the-dissemination-of-scientific-research/ Ever since returning from the 2009 International Semantic Web Conference last week I've been bursting to discuss a panel that took place there on the topic "Does the Semantic Web need Ontologies?".    But the WWW2010 deadline was today and we had 3 papers to write.  With that deadline now ... http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/11/03/does-the-semantic-web-need-ontologies/ Right now the world's premiere semantic web conference is happening in Washington, D.C. As a graduate student of the fellow who's chairing the conference this year, and working down the hall from Sir Linked Data himself, I've had my fair share of semantic web experiences. But my background is not ... http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/10/25/tales-of-a-semantic-web-skeptic/ Many years ago I discovered NoteWorthy Composer, and I've been using it for music notation ever since. Unfortunately, I find that NoteWorthy doesn't scale very well in several important dimensions. In particular, it lacks the ability to: Let the user manipulate multiple staves at once (even just for copying/cutting and pasting a ... http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/10/22/on-music-notation-guis/ Which approach do you take to managing information overload on the web?  Do you unleash the firehose on yourself, subscribing to RSS feeds or relying on content aggregators to keep up with the news?  Or do you take small sips from the stream of content, regularly checking a small set ... http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/10/13/feedme-understanding-and-supporting-social-link-sharing-on-the-web/ I am in a state of transition: from Java to OCaml. [caption id="attachment_615" align="alignnone" width="446" caption="A Java Project in NetBeans"][/caption] I like Java as a platform primarily for its matureness, static typing, and great IDE integration (Netbeans in particular). But lately I've been finding myself manipulating a lot of tree structures—ASTs, query ... http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/10/04/java-ocaml-and-fsharp/ Our online lives are increasingly spent staring at advertisements and commercials.  Understandably so, we're bombarded in hopes that we'll click something, and someone, somewhere is making money off of our time this way.  Traditional models of online advertising are pay-per-impression (per view on websites), pay-per-click (for clicking through), or pay-per-action ... http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/09/28/on-like-ing-advertisements/ I was doing some experiments with Adam in the lab on Friday, and we discovered some interesting variations in the way that Firefox and Safari implement the HTML 5 Cache Manifest specification. I think this is a particularly important feature to have implemented consistently across platforms because it is the ... http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/09/26/how-safari-and-firefox-handle-html-5-manifest-files/ Today, we rely increasingly on the Web for a multitude of everyday activities that run the gamut from simple queries to complex social interactions. As a result, our browsing patterns are starting to reflect the intricate and multi-faceted nature of our daily lives, but web browsers retain little of the ... http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/09/22/eyebrowse-update-and-user-reactions/ Last April we presented results at CHI 2009 about how people used List-It, our open source Firefox plugin when it was released in September 2008.  Since this initial study, we've had quite a few more users - we just hit our 13,000th registered account on September 1st, 2009!  More importantly, ... http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/09/21/a-quick-note-on-quick-notes-part-two/