“Search attenuation” is a new term to me, but seems like a good description of the process of filtering feeds and search results to a manageable size. As more content becomes available in RSS, I tend to subscribe to anything that looks interesting, but am looking for improved methods for searching and filtering content within that set.
Catching up a little on the feed aggregator, I see an article at O’Reilly about Rollyo, a new “Roll Your Own Search Engine” site from Dave Pell of Davenetics.
ROLLYO is the latest mind warp from Dave Pell. Rollyo affords anyone the ability to roll their own Yahoo!-powered search engine, attenuating results to a set of up to 25 sites. And while the searchrolls (as they’re called) you create are around a particular topic (e.g. Food and Dining), they are also attached to a real person (e.g. Food and Dining is by Jason Kottke). The result is a topic-specific search created and maintained by a trusted source.
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Rolly’s basic premise is one I’ve been preaching of late: attenuation is the next aggregation …
If you’re not interested in Reblog, Refeed, or PHP-CGI, I recommend you skip this post.
Lately I’ve been working with various combinations of aggregators, tagging, ranking, and presentation systems. Here are some fixes for anyone who is trying to get Reblog / Refeed 1.3 running on a hosted web service.
I’m mostly using Dreamhost, which is presently running PHP 4.3.10, and offers a choice of PHP as an Apache module or PHP-CGI. These installation problems are likely to occur for anyone running Refeed in a PHP-CGI environment. The initial symptoms are that the HTTP authentication dialog will pop up when you try to view the Refeed control panel, independent of whether credentials are defined in init.php.
The main issues:
My daughter sometimes asks me about words she comes across in her reading that she doesn’t quite know. Yesterday, she came across “disgruntled”.
I explained that this meant “not too happy, or dissatisfied with something”, which seems reasonably close. We also had a discussion about the absence of “gruntled” as a counterpart to “disgruntled.”
It seems as though “gruntled” should mean something like “relatively pleased or satisfied with something.”
A quick search turns up a few references:
The “dis” of disgruntled is not the same as the “dis” of “dismayed.” It means “completely”, and so “gruntled,” just as it sounds, is an old word that means “grumbling.” Today, however, “gruntled” has found its way into dictionaries as a word in its own right. If you look at the origin, you will see that it gives “gruntled” as a back-formation from “disgruntled.” People assumed that “disgruntled” was a negative and invented the word “gruntled.”
I am apparently a well trained, atypical search user.
Users studied in a recently published paper users clicked on the top search result almost half the time. Not new, but in this study they also swapped the result order for some users, and people still mostly clicked on the top search result
I routinely scan the full page of search results, especially when I’m not sure where I’m going to find the information I’m looking for. I often randomly click on the deeper results pages as well, especially when looking for material from less-visible sites. This works for me because I’m able to scan the text on the page quickly, and the additional search pages also return quickly. This seems to work especially well on blog search, where many sites are essentially unranked for relevancy.
This note captures some thoughts in progress, feel free to chip in with your comments…
Here’s a feature wish list for link tagging:
Tagged bookmarking services such as del.icio.us allow individuals to save and organize their own collection of web links, along with user-defined short descriptions and tags. This is already convenient for the individual user, but the interesting part comes from being able to search the entire universe of saved bookmarks by user-defined tags as an alternative or adjunct to conventional search engines.
From the New Yorker, via Business Week Blogspotting, which found it here:
This cartoon by Alex Gregory, which ran in the New Yorker on Sept. 12 is making the rounds online.
For comparison, see Peter Steiner’s 1993 cartoon “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog”, also from the New Yorker, which is included in the Business Week post.
In today’s WSJ, David Wessels outlines some systemic social problems that can arise as information becomes widely available at lower costs.
I like the description of the problem in a quote by Kenneth Arrow: “socially useless but privately valuable” information, which can provide individual benefits, but at an overall cost to society at large.
This is the inverse of the dynamics driving “web 2.0″, which thrives on the sharing of “privately useless but socially valuable” information such as click streams, tagging, location awareness, presence awareness, etc.
Computer and communications technology is making more and better information available ever more quickly. This is a good thing — usually.
But there are some things we don’t want to do more efficiently. Doing them better adds neither to the U.S. national psyche nor to the gross domestic product. Figuring out which is which is a growing challenge to society as technology makes gathering and analyzing information easier and cheaper.
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been looking at alternatives to the Red Cross for helping Katrina victims. There have been a disconcerting number of issues and bureaucratic problems with the Red Cross and other large relief organizations during the three+ weeks since Hurricane Katrina passed through New Orleans and the surrounding area.
While this is partially a problem of the sheer scale of the disaster, compounded by the absense of working physical and administrative infrastructure, it has also highlighted a gap between the “macro” relief services provided by the large organizations, and the “micro” relief services provided by individuals, local organizations, and ad hoc groups on the ground in the affected areas.
via Om Malik:
Google seems to have developed a secure WiFi VPN software tool - Google Secure Access Client. The information can be found here. Google Rumors has all the details. To sum it up, what they are doing is giving away a VPN tool that takes some of the security risks out of open WiFi. Companies like JiWire and Boingo also have these type of secure WiFi software solutions. While on paper this sounds like a perfectly good deal, Inside Google says not so fast, and writes, “Google Secure Access has the same benefits for Google as Web Accelerator did, with fewer of the things that scared away people the first time.” They dig deep into the GSA privacy policy …
Another take at Inside Google:
Word of Blog is a new and free service that helps you spread the word about things you like, events you care about and worthy causes you want to support.
Bloggers: You can pick and choose any of the ads appearing on this site and display them into your blog or website. Simply copy the HTML code appearing below the ad and paste it where you wish it to appear. The ads have been formatted to fit into most blog columns.
Organizations: If you want to post an ad on this site so that bloggers can start spreading the “word of blog” about you, please go to the “Submit Ad” section.
This site provides a clearinghouse for non-profit organizations to post their ads for use by bloggers and web site publishers that would like to contribute their support.
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