Dr. Max L. Wilson

Tweetwahoo! - tweets about your search results

We think social search got it wrong so far. Tweets about keyword searches arent always useful. Tweets about links are very popular. This shows you tweets about your search results to help guide you in your search.

This search prototype shows you how much websites and individual results are talked about on the web at the moment.

1. The number of tweets about the domain provide social insights into the popularity or influence of the website as a whole.
2. Tweets about individual pages tell you more about why you should read it.

In the example picture to the right, I'd start with the 2nd result - wouldnt you?

Tweempact - watch your tweets spread globally

Authority in twitter is pretty undefined. Some people have approved accounts, but the power of Twitter lies in being able to share anything thats happening anywhere in the world - and so an authority on an event may be Joe Average, who saw it happen.

We also like to see where information has come from and where it goes.

Tweempact shows you the spread of information, who ReTweeted it, and how far it reached. This is an early prototype and currently needs its authentication moving to OAuth. Current research is focusing on tracking implicit RTing of information too.

Casual-Leisure Information Behaviour

Off the back of the social-media-ethnographic investigation into peoples search experiences, as reported discussed freely by Twitter users (see project below), David Elsweiler (Erlangen University) and I have combined our recent findings to produce the first version of a new model of casual-leisure search.

Unlike traditional information science models of information seeking behaviour, our recent findings focus on the casual, for-fun, entertainment value that people get from searching not from what they necessarily find. These experiences are often lengthy and dependent on being able to search, not being able to find. Further, this kind of search is becoming increasingly important as technology becomes more pervasive within our casual non-work lives.

Original presented as a workshop paper at HCIR2010, and subsequently covered by MIT's Technology Review, the new model is soon to be reported in a book chapter as part of Amanda Spinks forth-coming book on Future Directions in Information Behaviour.

Read the original workshop paper or See what MIT thought about it.

Using Twitter to Discover Real Information Needs

Figuring out what people are searching for from the keywords they type into a keyword search box alone, is a hard task. Especially when they type in things like:

• Orange
• Java
• Mole
• Bank

Turns out that people talk about the things they have or are trying to find on the internet. We've been collecting these conversations about search to get insights into real search tasks and example information needs.

Read more here or View my publications.

Sii: the Search interface inspector

Sii is designed to quickly answer: How good is your search interface?

Sii can inspect search interfaces, and even prototype designs, for how well they will support different types of search tactics. Uniquely, Sii also evaluates how useful the design is for different types of searchers, whether they know exactly what they want, or are hoping to stumble across a good bargain.

Sii is designed to be used by interface designers, usability experts, or information architects to evaluate early designs and show that they are right for the target users. It only takes a couple of hours to apply the method to each design (but you get better at it quickly) and can pick up lots of usability issues early in the design process. Much faster, cheaper, and earlier than user studies.

Read more here or View my publications.

mSpace

" I don't know much about Classical Music but i know what i like when i hear it"

This is the starting motivation for mSpace: supporting access to information by providing consistent context and domain specific preview cues of information. Though our context-rich interface, conjunctive and complex queries can be processed that cannot be easily accessed through sites like Google.

The most important thing is that we want users to explore and not search. By using Semantic Web technologies we can easily expose the relationships between information so that semantically close information can be reached through simple lightweight interactions.

Read more here or View my publications.

Continuum

Continuum is designed to rise past the limitations of timeline visualisations. Available timelines struggle to represent relationships between plotted events, if not entirely unable. For example, how can we clearly and easily show which pieces of music Beethoven composed, as well as when. Also, the usual approach to scaling and showing thousands of items is to simply zoom and out make everything smaller - often creating 'the blob'. In continuum, we use time and space both to convey relationships and semantically summarise data when scale is an issue.

Read more here or View my publications.

mSpace Mobile

mSpace mobile is a Mobile Application version of mSpace, designed to run on PDAs. Using .NET technology, information is transmitted wirelessly between the PDA and our server, allowing the user to browse semantic information about their surroundings. GPS is used to ascertain the user's position and provide extra context to the semantic information through a map; preview cues are presented as icons on this map.

mSpace Mobile uses custom designed ZedPanes to provide a focus+context interface, allowing the user to maintain context and focus upon the momentary interests as they go.

http://mspace.fm/projects/mobile

Read more here or View my publications.

EPrintCast

Want to untilise the journey to work? Hear about the latest publications with a repository podcast. EprintCast is a system that takes a standard RSS feed from an Eprints and uses speech synthesis to automatically turn it into a Podcast.

Try Southampton University's Computer Science EPrintCast

Copy the locatation above and add it to your iTunes to try it. Contact me if you would like to add it to your repository

Read more here or View my publications.

Indienet

indienet is an mSpace project dedicated to the independent music community. Bands can be easily discovered through the context-rich interaction provided by mSpace and users can blog and share amoungst their community and friendships.

I have been involved with the progress of indienet since late 2005 and we hope it will be a great asset for both the independent music community and for mSpace.

View my publications