From AKMA:

Alert! Cool Googlosity Feature! On a hunch, I just typed the carrier name and number of Margaret’s plane flight into the Google search box, and Google correctly parsed that data and offered as the first search result a link to the actual status page for that flight — but on the search results page, it also listed the flight’s origin, destination, scheduled departure and arrival times, and its present status — right there atop Google results page one, no messing with airlines’ arcane “enter this data into that box and click the following agreements, and by the way what’s your credit card number, your flight club number, and an email address at which we can harass you for the rest of the internet’s lifetime.”

Nice parsing, Google!

[Tags: google akma search travel ]

Tell Lijit.com what social networking sites you’re in and what content aggregation tools you use and it will create a search engine that returns results that you or your social network has created. Give it a try:

Lijit Search

This morning if you search Google for “Enron,” the top hit is Enron.com (the creditors’ recovery page) and the second is the Wikipedia article on Enron. The first listing from NYTimes.com is about 45th and it’s a TimesSelect (= pay) page that doesn’t even actually reference Enron. That’s an example of what’s on the mind of the Times’ ombudsman (um, “public editor”) Clark Hoyt when he begins his column. He finds the Times’ “business strategy” of getting “its articles to pop up first in Internet searches” — well, at least not at #45 — responsible for the quandary the Times finds itself in when it comes to the errors in its archive. I don’t quite see it that way.

Hoyt takes as his example an article abot Allen Kraus, who “once led a welfare office praised for its efforts to uncover fraud.” The Times first reported he resigned under pressure after a bribery investigation without including Kraus’ side of the story and later published a more balanced follow-up. Kraus says his boss eventually publicly sided with Kraus’ version. The details don’t matter much, although I must say it’s a relief for a change not to be talking about John Siegenthaler. The point is that Kraus is understandably upset that searches on his name turn up the Times’ faulty story. If that’s all you read, you’d think he’s a crook.

Hoyt then considers several solutions to this problem, seeming to favor the suggestion that the Time expunge faulty articles from its archive.

Nooooooo!

In fact, the solution is already in place. If you google “allen kraus” (in quotes), the #1 hit is a Times topic page about him that lists first the corrective article and then the faulty one. Perfect! We get the context we need while preserving the record. Topic pages are in fact the Times attempt to move its content up the Google results page. They give us a single, persistent URL that aggregates everything the Times knows about a topic…including what it got wrong.

Jeez, if the Times expunged from its archive every article about Iraq Judith Miller wrote, we’d think the Times slept through the whole run-up to the war. And future researchers would never understand how culpable the Times was for getting us into that miss. Bloggers get this right-er than Hoyt when we use strikethrough font to indicate an error we’ve corrected. We need the full archive.

Topic pages are a great solution to the problem of providing context, as well as advancing the Times’ search engine optimization desires. Removing articles from the record destroys the value of the record. You shouldn’t write history by rewriting the record.

So, rather than setting “time-outs” for articles based on how important the Times’ judges them, which is Hoyt’s suggestion, do more topic pages. And harvest the power of the crowd to create more topic pages and more context. [Tags: nytimes wikipedia newspapers journalism history archives everything_is_miscellaneous ]

I just wrote the following to a mailing list where someone had a thoughtful post about the way in which Google both provides for miscellaneous ordering but also structures the miscellany:

I don’t focus on Google or searching only because it’s too
familiar to my intended readers, but it’s certainly a central
mechanism for dealing with the “miscellaneous.” And I agree that
Google’s decisions (corporate-political and the decisions embodied in
its algorithms) structure the user’s ability to find what she needs
and put pieces together in meaningful ways. That is inevitable, though
(I think), and it’s why we need many, many different ways of
organizing on the way out. The ability of a user to find and organize
pieces inevitably (?) depends on what metadata is available in the
pile of stuff. That metadata may come from many different sources –
in the case of Google: the author’s decision about which words to
include in her text, the SEO’s decision about which words to put
towards the front or to use repeatedly, the rest of the Web’s
“decision” about whether and how to link to the page, Google’s
decisions about which elements to weigh and which sites to crawl - but
the user’s ability to find and organize on the way out is constrained
by the ever-increasing metadata present in the pile.

That is indeed one of the weaknesses of the “miscellaneous” metaphor.
A truly miscellaneous pile consists of things with no significant
likenesses (outside of their all belong within a particular domain –
your kitchen miscellaneous drawers contains items that belong in a
kitchen and that fit in a drawer). The miscellaneous as I use the term
consists of a pile ever richer with relationships. That disanalogy
between the usual use of the term and mine (along with the inclusion
of the word “disorder” in the subtitle) have understandably led some
to think that the book advocates chaos. Actually, I’m enthusiastic
about exactly the opposite: The development of an infrastructure
super-saturated with meaning.

Atif Rafiq, founder of Bazooked, takes the miscellaneous as his starting point for reflections on differences in how users selection information “depending upon where they stand in the consumption lifecycle.” He writes:

As a user begins to get deeper into consumption, choice begins to multiply not because there is any more content out there. When users interact with information, their interests can grow, branch or re-formulate. Initial inspirations may still apply but new ones are brought to light. In other words, interaction grows the possibilities in the mind of the user.

Then the question is how to deal with the user’s need at these different phases. But that’s what Atif’s post is about…