February 4, 2007
Barney on Cooking With Geeks (Podcast)
I was invited a few weeks ago to attend an experimental dinner event called “Cooking with Geeks”. The idea was to combine a salon with a cooking lesson and podcast it to the world. The Cooking With Geeks podcast is now available (the previous link is to part 1, after which you can watch part2).
Here’s the writeup from the CWG website:
We got a group of geeks together, had a great chef come in and teach us how to cook, handed out some wine, and kicked off an interesting conversation. Come on along for a San Francisco geek dinner.
Geeks involved are: Barney Pell, CEO, Powerset; Mary Hodder, CEO, Dabble; Henri Poole, founder/director, Civic Actions; Kathleen Lyman, CEO, LaunchMedia; Steve Gillmor. Our co-hosts were Robert Scoble [of Scobleizer fame] and Fred Davis, co-founder of Wired Magazine. Videographers are Eddie Codel and Glenn Gullmes. Chef is Rozana Ogneva of www.AreYouBeingServedCatering.com. Our host is Jeannine Barnard.
I knew some of these folks before, in particular Mary Hodder is a friend of mine. I didn’t know just how expert Mary was about food. The food itself was delicious and we all gave our compliments to the chef. In addition to food, we covered several interesting (to us) topics. Here are a few that I remember after a month (I haven’t watched the videos yet).
- I brought up the question of whether the MySpace generation would grow up to regret sharing all their personal information, and shared my view that more likely they would come into power and reshape the mainstream perspective on private/public information so that is is no big deal.
- We had an unexpectedly long discussion about Powerset (in Part 2) with several good perspectives shared by the other guests.
- Mary talked about trends in personal video creation, mixing, and sharing.
- Fred talked about the early history of Wired magazine, and his later startup companies.
- And we learned about the long history of publishing in the computer industry.
I enjoyed the event and look forward to doing this again.
For folks who don’t live in the Bay Area, I think this dinner gives a pretty typical glimpse into how folks here in the tech industry combine work and play in social contexts. It captures pretty well the way that everyone is passionate about ideas, technology, and startup companies.
Posted by barney on February 4, 2007 at 10:01 pm | No Comments
October 11, 2006
The Powerset Blogstorm: 1 week later
I wrote a week ago about how Powerset
had become the subject of a blog storm, and shared my vision of natural
language search. Little did I realize that the storm had barely started. One
week later, there are now about 400 blog articles about
Powerset, according to Technorati (over 100 with some authority). We got
covered by many of the leading writers on search and internet
technology. Below are a few comments on some of the articles by
high-authority bloggers.
- Michael
Arrington on TechCruch presented the story to a broad audience. He
stated he has become so familiar with keywordese that he even
uses it now sometimes in IM and email discussions, but that he is open to
the possibility of improved communication of meaning and intent with natural
language search. The 60 comments to his article address the issues of
natural language and search from many useful perspectives.
Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Watch gave a great critique of past
attempts at natural language search and wonders why Powerset would be any
different. He argues that natural language requires users to change
behavior, and is thus unlikely to succeed. By contrast, he is a big fan of
query refinement. For the record, in addition to natural language, I like
query refinement too, and I’ll throw in suggestions, guided navigation and
faceted refinement to round out the picture.
Erick Schonfeld at Business2.0 picked up on Danny’s criticism that “the most
‘natural’ thing for people is to be lazy”. He then talks about other
approaches to improving search: personalization, social search, and query
refinement.- Matt
Hurst’s Data Mining picked up on my “grunting pidgin language”
characterization of keywordese. While I used an analogy of getting by speaking
first-year French but wanting more expressiveness, he gives a great analogy
of talking to a reference librarian in keywordese vs. English. This really
points out how much potential there is to go beyond what search offers users
today. - ValleyWag
says “If the company can pull this off, it has a shot at rescuing the world
from speaking Search Grunt.” - Om Malik has a poll on whether Powerset can really beat Google. As of
this writing, 20% votes cast agreed that “Powerset will reset
Google”. I think that’s a lot of confidence for a product most people have never
seen…
continue reading the The Powerset Blogstorm: 1 week later
Posted by barney on October 11, 2006 at 1:09 am | 2 Comments
April 1, 2006
AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs
This week I attended the AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs.
This photo is from a group dinner during the symposium. Present were Natalie Glance and Matt Hurst (from Whizbang, Intelliseek, Blogpulse, and now Nielsen Buzzmetrics), Niall Kennedy (most recently at Technorati), Nicolas Nicolov and Franco Salvetti (Umbria), Rada Mihalcea (U. North Texas), Kevin Burton (TailRank) and Barney Pell.
Posted by barney on April 1, 2006 at 3:22 pm | No Comments