Bret Victor offers the above design suggestions (from 2006) to Amazon in the book search results display (he’s comparing to this). I didn’t discover them at the time, but many of them are still relevant now. Bret notes that Amazon’s display doesn’t do a good job of answering the questions a person has when searching for [...]

Posted June 9, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: amazon, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, search results. 2 Comments.

Way back in April 1997, Jakob Nielsen tried to educate us on Zipf Distributions and the power law, and their relationship to the web. This is where discussions of the Chris Anderson’s Long Tail start, but the emphasis is on the whole picture, not just the many economic opportunities at the end of the tail.

Here’s [...]

Posted November 1, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: academia, academic library, google, google economy, googling, group think, jakob nielsen, libraries, library, lowest common denominator, networked information, popularity, quality, research, search engines, search rankings, search result rankings, search results, wikipedia. One Comment.

Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability sold out at Amazon today on the first day of release. There’s a reason: it’s good.
Morville’s work is the most appropriate follow-on to the usability concepts so well promoted by Steven Krug in his Don’t Make Me Think and Jakob Nielsen in Designing Web Usability. Findability, Morville argues, is a necessary [...]

Posted September 29, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Books, Movies, Music, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: ambient, ambient findability, designing web usability, don't make me think, find, findability, finding, global marketplace, google, google economy, googling, hidden web, jakob nielsen, new books, peter morville, search, search engines, search results, seo, steve krug, steven krug, the effects of findability, the hidden web, the search, top rank, usability, web usability. Be the first one.

I’m only just getting into Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, but I’m eating it up. In trying to prep the reader to understand his thesis — summed up on the front cover as “what we find changes who we become” — Morville relates his difficulty in finding authoritative, non-marketing information about his daughter’s newly diagnosed peanut [...]

Posted September 23, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Books, Movies, Music, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: ambient findability, find, findability, google, google economy, googling, hidden web, long tail, non-commercial information, peter morville, search, search engines, search results, seo, the hidden web, top rank. 3 Comments.

Call it a law, or dictum, or just a big stick, but it goes like this:
The value and influence of an idea or piece of information is limited by the extent that the information provider has embraced the Google Economy; unavailable or unfindable information buried on the second or tenth page of search results might [...]

Posted August 31, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: availability, big stick, dictum, findability, google, google economy, idea, ideas, influence, search, search results, value. 2 Comments.