Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2009
From The Eponymous Pickle
Whole Foods Launches App
I see that Whole Foods has launched an Iphone/ITouch application that indexes its 2000 recipes. The same recipes it has had online. I installed and did some searches. Free, quick and very easy to use. I like simple forWhole…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SourceForge Grows Up
I have used the open source developer community Sourceforge a number of times. Its useful because it can point to useful and economical solutions to tough problems. A report on it's direction. ' ... the SourceForge Web site…
From Putting People First
Even the BBC believes that we are all hackers now
My quest of understanding the mainstreaming of hacker culture is now also endorsed by the BBC: “The maze of electronics on a typical circuit board can be difficult to decipher, but as hackers and tinkerers grow in number, an…
From Putting People First
EU lays out plans for the
The European Commission has announced plans for Europe to play a leading part in developing and managing interconnected networks formed from everyday objects with radio frequency identity (RFID) tags embedded in them – the so…
From Putting People First
Could Twitter ever be used to trigger a genocide?
Jamais Cascio asks in a Fast Company article if the same technologies that have allowed for a potential democratic revolution in Iran could emerge just as readily in support of something far more sinister. “In noting the potential…
From Putting People First
Four new Dott07 case studies
The UK Design Council just published — a little late — four short case studies based on the experience of Dott07, a year of community projects, events and exhibitions based in North East England and curated by John Thackara,…
From CSDiary
Nico Habermann Wins ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award
The newly established ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award recognizes an educator who has “made significant contributions to, and impact on, the field of software engineering with his/her accomplishments as a teacher, mentor…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IPOV: An E-Learning Service Bureau
The topic of knowledge management was one of my interests in the enterprise. In the 80s we tried mostly successfully, and also very expensively to use artificial intelligence to solve this problem. Some of our AI applications…
From The Noisy Channel
Real-Time But Not Ready For Prime Time
Extra, extra, read all about it–two new real-time search engines debuted today: CrowdEye and Collecta. I love the headlines from Techmeme:
Mashable!: Collecta: True Real-Time Social Search paidContent: Startup Promises Best…From Putting People First
Large scale user testing project as part of the Digital Britain initiative
According to NewMediaAge, the UK Technology Strategy Board (TSB), the government body for business innovation in technology, and NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, will collaborate on digital…
From Apophenia
Understanding retweeting on Twitter
As we try to work out how Iranian citizens, activists, journalists, new media propagators, and politically conscious folks are using Twitter to converse about the Iranian election, we need to step back and think about some of…
From Putting People First
Clive Thompson on the future of reading in a digital world
Clive Thompson explores the future of reading, and of books, in a digital world, and remains optimistic. “Books are the last bastion of the old business model
From Putting People First
The blind leading the deaf
A recent HarvardBusiness.org article about the use of anthropology and ethnography in global R&D strategies (blogged about here), has got Nokia’s user anthropologist Jan Chipchase a bit worked up, as he thinks it “largely misses…
From Putting People First
We are all hackers now (ctd.)
In my ongoing exploration of the theme “we are all hackers now” (also the title of a talk I will give on 29 June in Brussels), I once again found quite a lot of recently published supporting material. We build the parts, you…
From CSDiary
Chairing the CRA
Today I attended a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association, my first as its Chair. In case you don’t know, the CRA does a lot to promote the cause of computing research, including educating policymakers…
From The Noisy Channel
Google Markets Itself
I still don’t buy that Google is “gripped with fear“, but I agree with Danny Sullivan’s analysis that Google’s new “Explore Google Search” page (with a link in the usually sacrosanct real estate on the home page) is a reaction…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neuromarketing and Search Optimization
An item about emotional engagement and search engine optimization. Two areas that I am currently engaged in.
From The Noisy Channel
JCDL 2009
For the benefit of those of us not lucky enough to be attending this year’s Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2009), a number of attendees are live-tweeting the conference using the hashtag #jcdl2009. I’m sure there…
From The Noisy Channel
Spam in the Twitterverse
I’ve noted in the past that “real-time” alerting systems, in contrast to search engines that place less emphasis on immediacy, are particularly vulnerable to spamming. It’s a lot like telemarketing–you could avoid it entirely…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Increasing Female Participation
I have always dreamed of my students working with an international student team on a computing project. This dream became reality when I met Archana Chidanandan at the 2008 ITiCSE conference at Madrid. Archana is an Assistant…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is Open Access publishing the solution? Really?
Back when I was a consultant, I had client who was convinced that Microsoft Windows was free software. So, he insisted that all applications ran on Microsoft’s web server. To him, the Apache server was an expensive proposition…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wikipedia Community
A good Q&A about the Wikipedia community. The comments also post some excellent thoughts. I remain a proponent, with the usual words of caution, which can also be made of any sources.
From CSDiary
CMU CS Department to Move to Gates and Hillman Centers on August 3
I’ve been feeling pretty guilty about being off the blog for the past month. I do have some excuses, though. Of course, there were the usual paper and proposal deadlines, two distinguished lectures, and a busy season for recruiting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tweetdeck on the IPhone
Have been experimenting with the Tweetdeck client for the IPhone, now in Beta. So far well done, have found no obvious errors yet. The best package I have yet to see for phone based management of a microblog social network.…
From The Noisy Channel
Wikipedia: Play The Ball, Not The Man
Today’s Freakonomics blog in the New York Times has a nice post entitled “By a Bunch of Nobodies: A Q&A With the Author of The Wikipedia Revolution“, in which Annika Mengisen interviews Wikipedia editor/administrator Andrew Lih…
From The Eponymous Pickle
FMI Looks at Private-Label
FMI will start to sponsor research on private-label good and put on a conference devoted to private label issues. In SupermarketNews. Good direction to take.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Facebook Increases 700 Percent
Social networking sites continue to expand. Blogging traffic is slipping. Reason is likely the simplicity and ease of short snippets versus longer posts. Probably a good thing. There will continue to be people interested…
From CSDiary
Autographs on the Kindle
Last Sunday’s NY Times had an amusing article about people going to book-signings and asking authors to autograph their Kindle ebook readers. Well, gee, I guess I was a bit of a trend-setter! Over one year ago, Amazon CEO Jeff…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Innovation in Manufacturing
Sammy Haroon and Tony Tsai, two former enterprise colleagues of mine pass along comments on the Accenture Roudtable report about innovation in manufacturing.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital at Unilever
New from Unilever in Adage: ' ... Digital media and branded content largely have been seen as strategies for mature markets where TV advertising faces its greatest threats from media fragmentation and DVRs. But Unilever has found…