For some reason I missed this post from last week by Jon Udell about Indexing and searching Outlook email, but I thought his concluding paragraphs had a much broader impact on Enterprise Search in general.

… The Web has trained us, rightly, to expect that we just type in a word or two and get the “right” answer. I don’t know what the stats are on use of Google’s advanced search, or any advanced search, but my gut tells me such features are rarely used.

I used to think the answer was to standardize on query syntax. Now I think that might help some, but not much. More fruitful, perhaps, would be to use multiple search strategies in parallel, suggest “best” outcomes, and factor the user’s choices into future determinations of “best.”

For years now, we’ve been able to find things on the Web more easily than we can find things in our own personal data stores. There’s a huge opportunity, and a huge need, to swing that pendulum back toward the center.

Some good quotes from Kevin Werbach article on CNet titled, “Anticipating a post-Web, post-PC world”

“If you want to know where you are, you don’t study a map to determine where you’re going. You trace back the steps from where you’ve been. Over the past several years, “where we’ve been” in the technology world has changed. While we were all focused on the dot-com bubble and the subsequent bust, “yesterday” shifted. It used to be the PC revolution and client-server computing in the enterprise; now it’s the Web.”

“Companies now worry less about how fast their computers run and more about how well they work together. People no longer wonder whether something is available online, but rather how to find and make use of it. Companies worry less about how to move large numbers of units, whether it is songs or laptops, and spend more time thinking about how to make money doing so. Those are today’s challenges.”

I needed to do some quick testing in Linux today, but I didn’t have immediate root access to a Linux distro. That’s when I popped the
Knoppix Bootable Linux CD into my drive, restarted and POOF!! …
my laptop is now running a complete Debian-based Linux distro including OpenOffice, Mozilla, KDE, and more. I could even get to the local file system.

Awesome!

Don’t leave home without it! It’s a great recovery CD as well.

“KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.”

If this works, I’ll be posting this via NewsGator
1.2’s new Outlook posting interface! Congratulations Greg!
Update: Well, the post arrived, but it had no title and the HTML was a bit mangled. I think in part because of Outlook 2003’s HTML formatting and the fact that I used the Blogger API plug-in. I think I need to update my b2/cafelog to support the MetaWeblog API

A new paper by a Stanford group claims substantial increase in calculating Page Rank performance (used by Google), which could make room for personalized topical searches.

“Computer science researchers at Stanford University have developed several new techniques that together may make it possible to calculate Web page rankings as used in the Google search engine up to five times faster. The speed-ups to Google’s method may make it realistic to calculate page rankings personalized for an individual’s interests or customized to a particular topic.” (via BoingBoing)

Catherine just sent me a link to this
article in the NY Post about TRACKS, which is the name of a
new music magazine that will hit this fall from the Good Music Media…

“This magazine is the antidote to the hype and gloss of the
youth music marketing machine,” … “Tracks will deliberately pursue the
30-to-45 year old audience.”

Perhaps it’s a sign that I’m getting older in that the announcement of a
magazine targeted at the 30-to-45 year old audience appeals to me, but what
else is out there for a retro-punk with a revived interest in jazz? I
suppose a Jazz magazine, but that’s to niche for me.

Hopefully the mag will live up to the hype, or perhaps the anti-hype.

However, in an effort to put hype into reality they should have a web site
right now to foster interest in the zine and brand (like some other
up-and-coming magazine I know of
;-)

A very slick hack was posted over at O’Reilly that combines power-line
Ethernet, with a wireless access point and a fluorescent light bulb to
create “a weatherproof
wireless access point integrated into a light-fixture” (via BoingBoing and Futurismic)

Catherine has just posted (well, yesterday actually) the top things our dog Pinto has taught us

(I’m including myself because, well, I’ve learned these things too and it’s better than just saying “Ditto” :-)

John just sent me a link to this Reuters story about Verizon’s launch of new Wi-Fi hot spots in phone
booths through out NYC:

Verizon Communications today launched its new Wi-Fi service by lighting up150 hot spots in New York City, with plans to activate another 850 by theend of the year. Verizon said its deployment marks the largest such initiative by an Internet service provider in a single U.S. city. Verizon’s hot spots will be inside pay phones located throughout New York and will have a range of 300 feet.

The company said its access points are currently located in some of the city’s most heavily trafficked locations, such as the Upper East and Upper West Sides, Columbia University, Greenwich Village, Wall Street, and Battery Park.

It would be pretty cool if they also worked in the subway too.

Dave Sifry’s just publicly announced the Technorati API (link via Ben), which seems very timely (for Dave) given the recent report of a new Google-powered blog search engine.

Also with Google’s blog-enlightenment, will Technorati become the next Daja or more specifically the next Google search tab?

As for the API, I like the fact that it’s REST-ful, which should enable simple integration. I just scooped up my Technorati API-Key and may give it a try on my blog and perhaps internally on an internet portal.