Author Archive

I'm really happy to see trails being made into the so called "Deep Net".



I just did a search on "fish" and found this result:





This is exactly what I hoped would happen. Here we see trails using different topic-specific search engines (e.g., recipezaar.com and walmart.com). Trexy is starting to uncover the "deep" resources searchers use to find results - great!

Catwoman from Thomson Local came to visit us at the Trexy stand at the recent London Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference and Earle took her around the Cycle of Search Game.

I finally added the feature that we started at the WWW2006 Conference.



You can now "Edit a Trail" by clicking on the "Edit" link in My Trails.



The new feature means you can:

• add your own searchable description to a trail
• highlight individual steps in the trail
• delete individual steps in the trail
• delete the entire trail
  
  
• choose whether or not to share your trail with others

Let us know what you think? Your feedback and comments are much appreciated.



More features coming soon ...

Talking of new features. We've also added the ability to collapse and expand trails:

I really enjoyed speaking to a group of academics at City University the other day.



Ideas were flying all over the place. One of the students thought the "emergent trail algorithm" (i.e., the Goat Trail Algorithm) might turn out to be inherently 'evil'! We then had a polite disagreement which boiled down to a difference in personal philosophy - are people inherently good? or inherently bad?



I personally believe people are inherently good and that we are not only 'wired' to make discoveries but also to share them with each other. Human language, for example, was a discovery to help us share discoveries.



Although we disagreed about good and evil we both agreed that humans are inherently lazy. That is, given a choice, the majority of us will take the path of least resistance.



So there we have it - my ideal trail algorithm brings out the good in people while taking the path of least resistance. Let's see if we can get there. Stay tuned ...

I'm flying to Chicago this afternoon for a Perl conference where I'll be giving a short presentation on The Goo. The Goo is a system that helps us 'stick things together' behind the scenes at Trexy and Turbo10.



Trexy is programmed in Perl 5 and I'm looking forward to sharing some of the ideas behind The Goo with the Perl conference as well as learning about the upcoming Perl 6.



Should be fun!

I had a great time at the recent Perl conference in Chicago.



Perl is my favourite computer language and there are thousands of lines of Perl code behind Trexy.



For a long time Perl's branding strategy has been confusing. This is a problem, not only in the mind of the consumer, but a law court will not uphold a confusing or deceptive trade mark.



In the absence of a clear branding strategy the Perl community adopted "The Camel" from the cover of a Perl book written by Perl's inventor, Larry Wall. The problem is, "The Camel" logo is owned by a book publisher, O'Reilly and Associates - not The Perl Foundation. Oops.





While I was at the conference I had meetings with Larry Wall and other Perl luminaries to see if something could be done about it. Fortunately they were quite receptive to the ideas in my proposal: "LoveMarks(R) for Perl".



Over the next six months I hope to see The Perl Foundation adopt my proposals.

I've just come back from an enjoyable day sharing ideas about trails with an academic from the University of Nottingham. We're going to write some papers together over the next year. It's been a while since I put my academic hat on and it was fun devising some of the research questions we need to answer and the best methodology for answering them. There are many avenues of research open to us but we both share a strong intuition about the fundamental nature of information retrieval: it's not about the information - it's how people use it that matters. If you like your ideas to come in academic form then stay tuned. I'm still looking to forge other research partnerships so if you're an academic interested in trails then get in touch!

One of our American search engine partners excitedly told us, "if you only do one Show this year - it's just gotta be San Jose!"



Well the San Jose SES conference is opening and the Trexy booth is open for business and ready to go. A special San Jose version of the Trexy Pub Trail has been organised too.