October 2007 Archives

I'm finally getting around to putting up some notes about the CIC CIO TechForum. The best technical talk I attended was one on Search Analytics by Richard Wiggins from Michigan State. I was on the planning committee for the TechForum and I really pushed for this one.

According to Rich, he's been doing this since 1999, when their Altavista search engine began "cracking at the seams" (not scaling, returning confusing answers). What he and his team decided to do was to develop "Best Bets" where they examine what term the Web site visitor looked for (e.g. "campus map" or "admissions") and looked at the results which were successful. They then drew a frequency curve of the most used terms in searches. As you might expect (and if you've read my stuff on The Long Tail), the frequency distribution is a Zipf/Pareto curve. While this is indeed a "Long Tail" distribution, the benefits come from dealing with the "Short Head" of the frequency curve. Rich's analysis shows that only 500 terms constitute over 50% of the searches. By concentrating on the "Best Bets" in those 500 terms and their results, his team optimized the search on their "Best Bets" page. Some of his other findings include that search frequency is seasonal (think admissions, arrival, graduation, etc.) and that having a date range on the search is valuable.

Rather than steal Rich's thunder, I'll point you to his TechForum presentation which contains much more information than he could deliver in 20 minutes. He's also working on a book with Lou Rosenfeld called Search Analytics:Conversations with your Customers. They have a Web site for the project and you can read the first chapter there.

Today Radiohead goes public with their new album, In Rainbows. The interesting thing about this album is that you, the Internet consumer, can download individual songs or the whole album for any price you'd like to pay. The tracks are Digital Rights Management (DRM) free, so you can do anything you'd like with them. It's sort of like shareware music.

Says singer Thom Yorke:

I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one.

TIME Magazine has a pretty good story about it.

I just tried the In Rainbows Web site, and it seemed overloaded...

I'll post more this week about last week's CIC CIO TechForum, but I've been thinking about a comment someone made during the question and answer session of my panel talk. Someone asked how Iowa could justify having a wiki and another proprietary service which claims to do the same thing. One of the folks in the audience said that it comes down to the "atomic unit of content" for these systems. The "atomic unit" of a wiki is the page, whereas for most of the other systems it's the document. His contention is that wikis work better because they allow people to collaborate on single pages rather than whole documents.

Something to think about. I wish I had written down his name.