Disqus - Latest Comments for dtunkelang

Re: The challenge of creating a new category

cdixon — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:45:08 -0000

I agree. Hunch is a different solution to an age old problem. We think of our main competition right now as people going off and doing research themselves on, say, CNET.

Re: The challenge of creating a new category

dtunkelang — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:34:44 -0000

I think that part of the problem is that people conflate problems and solutions. For example, if Hunch is a way for people to get their questions answers, does that place it in the same category as Yahoo Answers? But they, why not also include Google and consulting services? Clearly a meaningful category also constrains the solution space to a class of approaches.

For all that I've read about the distinct kinds of innovation, I think reality is never so clear-cut. The most extreme statement is for a company to say it is solving a problem you didn't even know you had--and which no one else has discovered, let alone tried to solve. That is truly category creation. But I think that even most "disruptive" innovation starts from a known problem, even if it frames it using a different objective function.

Re: window office - Ad-hoc retrieval: measurably going nowhere « IREvalEtAl

dtunkelang — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:41:18 -0000

Thanks for the pointer. Of course, we HCIR junkies have been saying this for a while, but we tend to see the problem as the emphasis on batch retreival measures, not whether researchers shop around for easier baselines.

Re: Voices

dtunkelang — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:16:38 -0000

Thanks for including me in your list! I'm flattered to make it through the filter.

Re: It’s official: I now use Bing instead of Google

bobcaswell — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 18:15:05 -0000

Hi Daniel,

The first half of the Google result is comparable (for the food query) but the second half, comparing Bing's easy-to-find, more appealing landing page with a "scorecard" to Google's hidden, less flashy version... seems to me Bing wins on that one. Granted, the actual difference in info presented on the two landing pages is not significantly different (though Bing's does have more), but Bing's seems more intuitively designed and easier to navigate/find.

As for travel, sure, it competes with kayak (a service I know and love, btw). But I really doubt the audience Microsoft is going after with this is likely to be die hard kayak fans (or even people who know what kayak is). I'm guessing the majority of new users of Bing that come to test it after seeing some of the ad campaign have likely never heard of kayak. Point being, as compared to Google, which is what everyone has heard of, this is a definite value add. And even for those who have heard of kayak, there is something to be said about having one less place to check. I'm used to kayak but prefer getting these kinds of results directly from my search engine now that that's an option.

As for the other two verticals, I haven't played with health but I definitely have played with shopping. Left that one out because it was a similar comparison (in my opinion) as the restaurant. I really like Bing's product/shopping landing page over Google's.

All in all, though, I can definitely see how this could come across as a disappointment to an experienced user as yourself. These are smaller, incremental improvements that experienced searchers are already comfortable with. But Microsoft is the one bringing this kind of new perspective on search into the light. Remember that as Google improves stuff, it rarely tells anyone beyond a blog post. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing the majority of Google searchers probably use Google the same way that they did 5 years ago. That is, even if much has changed in the past 5 years, Google user search habits probably haven't.

Thanks for the link, loved the discussion over on your site.

Re: It’s official: I now use Bing instead of Google

dtunkelang — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:08:24 -0000

Out of curiosity, what distinguishes Bing from Google on that first example? Isn't the Google result ( http://www.google.com/search?q=indian+food+98004 ) comparable?

I grant that Bing wins over Google on travel--though I'd say that's by default, since Google doesn't do travel. The real question is how Bing compares to Kayak, which is clearly its real target here. I still prefer Kayak, though I imagine some people appreciate the Farecast stuff, but I'm skeptical that it's enough for Microsoft to gain significant market share in this vertical.

You don't really comment on the other two verticals: shopping and health. I'm underwhelmed by Google on both of these, but frankly not all that whelmed by Bing either.

My early reactions to Bing and some interesting discussion:

http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/06/01/banging-o...

Re: window office - Just received my first request for a paid link on...

dtunkelang — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:08:46 -0000

Don't sell yourself short! Your blog is worth almost $2M!

http://www.pufip.com/?q=windowoffice.tumblr.com...

Re: louisgray.com: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

piers — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:16:49 -0000

Well put. It's a free service, and you get what you pay for. It does some things well, some things poorly. And a catch 22 - Twitter could offer premium service, but could they support it?

Re: louisgray.com: Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken

dtunkelang — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:07:39 -0000

I haven't had the kindest words for Twitter Search: http://thenoisychannel.com/?s=twitter+search

But I think some of the comments here are overkill. I use Twitter search regularly as an alerting service for a broad vanity query. It works reasonably well, and I've learned to live with the glitches as part of what comes along with a free service. Could they do a lot better? For sure, and I've blogged about that. But what they have now is nonetheless useful.

Re: Do Tags Work?

dtunkelang — Thu, 21 May 2009 11:57:16 -0000

You might want to take a look that my colleagues and I at Endeca did by bootstrapping on author-supplied tags for computer science documents in order to improve the overall findability of documents in the collection. The paper is entitled "Supporting Exploratory Search for the ACM Digital Library", and you can find it in the HCIR '08 proceedings (p.85):

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/r...

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/05/dont-tempt-online-mob-they-come-bearing.html

victorpanlilio — Fri, 15 May 2009 11:03:39 -0000

Daniel - the sense of entitlement suggests that people have lost a sense of proportionality. Perhaps it is because their ego-gratification needs are somehow tied to their online celebrityhood, enabled by a medium like Twitter. On USENET, no one cared who you were, and the concept of "followers" was irrelevant. If people agreed with what you had to say, fine. If they didn't, fine. USENET brought out some of the best and worst behaviours in people but at least everyone understood that they did not have a right to complain about what a FREE service should or should not offer its users. Now, with social media, users act as though the world owes them a tailored platform from which to spew their intellectual arrogance. No, it doesn't, regardless of their professional accomplishments or academic qualifications. Say I put up a store and decide to offer FREE coffee every MWF to all the people who come in, whether they shop there or not. Then I -- the store management -- decide to change this to Tue-Thu, or Sat-Sun -- for whatever reason. Do the people who helped themselves to the free coffee have a right to tell me NOT to change the schedule of free coffee days because it's not as convenient for them? Do they have a right to dictate to me that I should only use fair-traded coffee? Do these same freeloaders have a right to insist "you owe it to us to keep things the same because our patronage of your store is what creates shareholder value, blah blah blah...", as the chattering classes of the social media universe tend to do? If I was the store management, I'd be tempted to tell them "Take your change management business somewhere else." Some customers are just not worth the hassle, especially the people who seem to think we ought to bow down to them because they have some kind of "following." Reality check: remember the golden rule -- those who have the gold make the rules. Unless we're the VCs putting up the money, we can't demand anything at all from our "investment" -- as if. A mob is still a mob, even when it uses social media to try to bend others to its wishes.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/05/dont-tempt-online-mob-they-come-bearing.html

dtunkelang — Fri, 15 May 2009 09:47:20 -0000

I'm with Victor here. Criticizing a free service for poor design decisions is everyone's right. The right to *make* the decisions, however, is another story. And users believing they have those rights over a service just because they've "built the value" by voluntarily using it with no contractual obligations beyond what they agree to in the terms of service? Sorry, but that's an odd sense of entitlement that is far too prevalent, at least in the echo chamber of the blogosphere / Twitterverse. Imagine if we applied that logic to every business model--you basically destroy the conventional understanding of ownership. Perhaps that's part of the 2.0 Manifesto, but it has little to do with reality.

Re: Wikipedia Grappling with Deletion of IHT.com

dtunkelang — Sun, 10 May 2009 13:14:40 -0000

Perhaps this is a great reminder as to why many publications frown on online sources as citations. Not only can links be removed, but the content can be modified at any time. Of course, an online publication could make a commitment to permanent links and immutable content--and could even contract with a third party to maintain an archive, in the even that the online publisher goes under.

Re: window office - Facebook Quiz creation tasks Amazon Mechanical Turk.... evil...

dtunkelang — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:02:20 -0000

Wow, that's a nice scam. I do like how scammers are some of the most aggressive innovators!

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/04/are-your-writing-your-headlines-for.html

dtunkelang — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 21:55:44 -0000

140 characters is a lot of room for a headline. For perspective, your headline for this post is only 57 characters long. Is this really an issue?

The bigger question in my mind is whether you're writing headlines to be noticed by search engines or by human beings. To me, writing for Twitter or other social media means trying to catch someone's attention by piquing their interest. SEO for search engines is also an attempt to stand out, but catching a search engine's attention involves different strategies.

Re: Amazon Accused of Removing Gay Books from Rankings

Russell Borogove — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:54:29 -0000

Daniel Tunkelang -- it's not related to the recent "girl scout cookies" incident; I read a report of it happening as far back as February. Apparently some Amazon customer service reps are claiming delistings are due to book specific complaints, which strongly suggests that some person or people are systematically filing complaints about LGBT and feminist books.

Deanna, fuentedance -- a few minutes of looking at what's actually being de-listed shows that racy hetero stuff for the most part isn't getting hit, but non-racy gay, lesbian, and even feminist material is getting delisted. Amazon is claiming a policy of delisting "adult" material, but the facts simply don't support that claim under any reasonable definition of "adult".

Re: Amazon Accused of Removing Gay Books from Rankings

dtunkelang — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 19:38:12 -0000

I can't help put wonder if this is related to their recent girl scout cookies incident.

http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/03/30/a-blooper...

Re: Tweefind Applies Google Magic to Twitter Search

dtunkelang — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:38:01 -0000

I'd be curious to see how it compares to TunkRank, both in theory and in practice.

http://tunkrank.com/

http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter...

Re: Evil Marketing Ploy or April Fools Joke? ('cause it can't be true)

dtunkelang — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:56:57 -0000

Yeah, it's a marketing ploy, and maybe a little even, but I think it''s cute / clever: it's funny, and it did get you to visit the site. I'd let them live.

http://blog.slideshare.net/2009/04/01/happy-apr...

Re: window office - Amazon.com search for [girl scout cookies]

dtunkelang — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 23:50:57 -0000

I do feel there's an object lesson here about relevance ranking approaches that aren't transparent to the user. Though it's so over the top that I have to wonder this was just a perverse Easter egg planted by an employee. If I were Amazon, I'd post an official explanation.

BTW, the site is fixed now (it took them a week from the first evidence of someone tweeting about it--but they probably didn't hear about it until the mass attention today), but I did save a screen shot:

http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/03/30/a-blooper...

Re: Mac vs. PC: Some Can Dish It Out & Take It, Others… Not So Much

zato — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 01:52:16 -0000

Daniel: "But go easy on the hate."
I respond in comments to a Microsoft commercial attacking Mac prices with the opinion that Microsoft crossed a line in this ad. The ad is not about hardware or operating systems. It's about hate. It's about dividing people into the "right" people and the "wrong" people. It's about egotism. It's class-based propaganda. It's HATE. Similar to early Nazi anti Jewish propaganda. Look around the internet - this commercial has pegged the hate-o-meter.
What comes next, PC egoists? Will all Mac people be forced into ghettos? Concentration camps for Mac users?
And yet I'M the hater!

Re: Mac vs. PC: Some Can Dish It Out & Take It, Others… Not So Much

bobcaswell — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:23:13 -0000

Well said, Daniel, thanks for your thoughts. I may tend to like Microsoft products more than Apple (I do own a few Apple products, btw), but I'm glad when it doesn't matter so much when trying to have a conversation. :-)

Re: Mac vs. PC: Some Can Dish It Out & Take It, Others… Not So Much

dtunkelang — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:07:22 -0000

Zato, don't you realize that it's folks like you that give Apple a bad name? I used to like Apple before I met so many Apple zealots. I still think Apple generally (though not always) produces better technology than Microsoft, but the attitude of the culty fans is a real turn-off.

Criticize MS technology all you want, and I'm with you. But go easy on the hate.

Re: Mac vs. PC: Some Can Dish It Out & Take It, Others… Not So Much

dtunkelang — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:01:06 -0000

The Seinfeld ads were disappointingly lame. This ad is good, as are the Microsoft Rookies ads. It's like Microsoft suddenly took a course in Advertising 101 and is proving to be a quick study.

Also, before I get called a Microsoft fan-boy, let me note that I work for a company that counts Microsoft as one of its competitors. Still, why bash a competitor when it does something right?

Re: San Francisco to be “Twitterfied”

parislemon — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:19:25 -0000

Zing!