Thursday, May 20, 2010

Geeking with Greg administrivia

This blog passed some fun milestones recently. It just had its six year anniversary, logging over 1500 posts in its lifetime.

When I started this blog in 2004, I wanted to bring personalization to information. Just as personalization and recommendations help people discover what they want in a massive product catalog, I thought personalization and recommendations could help tame the information streams that flood over us. Over the next five years, I wrote on this blog as I worked on personalized news, personalized search, and personalized advertising.

Regular readers may have noticed that posts on this blog have slowed down a fair bit over the last year. In large part, this is because I am no longer working on personalized search or personalized advertising, nor does my work still benefit from tracking what is going on in the information retrieval research community.

I try hard to keep this blog on topic. My plan is to have posts here continue to focus on personalized information, perhaps a bit on research papers, but mostly tracking the increasingly aggressive moves of the internet giants toward personalized search and advertising. But, that means posts will continue to be fairly infrequent.

If for some reason you can't get enough of geeking with me, if you really must have more, you might consider tracking what I am reading more broadly by following me in Google Reader. I use the shared items there as a link blog and comment broadly there on many topics.

Also, on this sixth anniversary, I welcome feedback on what you might enjoy seeing more of on this blog, especially from long-time readers. Do you mostly like the reviews of research papers (which, many have told me, are a great time-saver)? Comments on events in the industry (which might be snark, but perhaps useful snark)? Do you find the posts to be too long or too infrequent? Do you care if this blog stays on the topic of personalized information? If there is anything you want more of, please let me know in the comments!

16 comments:

Benoit Maison said...

Hi Greg,
Happy anniversary, and thank you for a great blog!
Both the paper reviews and the industry comments are very useful, please don't change anything.

Daniel Lemire said...

(1) I don't care about frequency. There is no "publish or perish" for bloggers.

(2) I don't care much for topic. Blogs are author-centric, not topic-centric. We need to be moving to an author-centric world. What I care about is *you*. If our interests diverge, then I will unsubscribe. But otherwise, this blog should be about what you care about, right now. Whatever it is. If I want to follow a topic like IR, I'll watch which papers get accepted in SIGIR and Information Retrieval.

(3) Reviewing research papers is alright, but the most valuable posts carry information which I can't get easily in an (electronic) library. In a sense, original content, observations and opinions (even when they are wrong) are most valuable.

(4) I really enjoyed the post-mortem you did of your start-up.

Soi Silicon said...

I like research papers. I don't really have the expertise to distinguish what's real/useful versus what's mental masturbation, so your input is greatly greatly valued.

Todd Martin said...

I always find your viewpoint valuable so just keep doing what you've been doing no matter the frequency. And if an off topic post sneaks in there that's fine too. :)

Jim said...

I've enjoyed your many of your posts. I especially like the paper summaries and Findory stories.

Amund Tveit said...

I prefer your comments and perspectives and research papers, and in particular where you look at related papers and discuss relationships between them.

One suggestion: it would be interesting with your thoughts on parallel algorithms for mapreduce/hadoop.

jametong said...

Hi Greg,
Congratulation.
Thank you for your great blog, I've learned a lot from all of these blog posts.
I want to know how to follow you in the google reader.I have searched several places for it ,but all failed .

Daniel Tunkelang said...

What the other Daniel said.

Mark said...

I've found the blog consistently enjoyable. Don't feel straight-jacketed by your topic. Just post about what you find interesting, and I am sure it will continue to make for a good blog.

Anonymous said...

I like you blog and the material you dig up! I do not read RSS any more so I would prefer that you twitter new articles

regards and keep up the good posts

.

hezi said...

Mr. Lemire pretty much nailed it.

Thank you for a great blog!

a said...

Just to say thank you.

It had been the really entertaining (for the IR inclined) and thought provoking posts what have made me come back regularly.

Industry insights are interesting. You know how to write succinct but complete opinions on the trendy topics on IR.

Paper reviews with comments are great too.

Just post when you feel inspirated.

Cheers!

Anonymous said...

Greg,

I need the link to your link blog. I tried searching for it to no avail.

Kindly share it here or put it on your blogroll. I'd love to follow what you read.

Thanks

Greg Linden said...

Thanks, everyone, sounds like the blog should largely stay the same, but I'll feel a little more free to drift off topic. Thanks again.

Greg Linden said...

Hi, Anonymous. The shared items are available on the web page at

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/12884161467498101722

in Atom format for a feed reader at

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F12884161467498101722%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast

and my profile is at

http://www.google.com/profiles/102076128417589427747

But, if you are already a regular user of Google Reader, you can also use the "follow" feature there. You can access that in a couple ways, but the fastest might be to go to

https://www.google.com/reader/view/#friends-manager-page

and then use the search form in the "Find More People" section.

Hope that helps!

jeremy said...

I agree with Amund.. I like not only when you discuss research papers, but when you compare and contrast various pieces of research. Along a very similar line, I like when you compare and contrast a research paper or concept with what is happening in industry.