Wouldn’t you know it, I skipped the first session this morning because I had some editing chores to finish up and many emails to make. With no connectivity in the NFAIS hotel conference room, the opportunities for multitasking are limited. I arrived just after the first coffee break to find that everyone was raving about the presentations on Creating the New Information Experience: The Product Development Process. Drat.

The second half of the Creating the New Information Experience was about Enabling Technologies. Bill Kules, Takoma Software, presented the results of the research he did for his PhD dissertation, which he just submitted. It’s about interfaces for exploratory search. He’s in favor of adding categorized overviews. Mouseovers are easier for people to grasp than typing. Categorization also exposes meaningful domain structure and increases connections between cognitive representations of user needs and search results.

I’m not sure how cool Kules is. He doesn’t seem to have listened to Stephen Abram yesterday. He’s in favor of lists and snippets, not fond of graphical representations of search results. As Stephen pointed out, people learn differently. Some folks, particularly the younger crowd, prefer visual to lists, no matter how hierarchical they are. I found his talk to be pretty retro. Here’s the Web site for his research.

Geoffrey Bilder, Scholarly Information Strategies, talked about “The Edge is the New Center.” In it he reviewed various social networking, Web 2.0 technologies. The old model was content at the center distributed out to various constituencies. The new model is contributions from those edge constituencies feeding the content at the center. He showed the Gartner hype cycle and put Web 2.0 at the top. Yet it’s not all hype. He mentioned the usual suspects on tagging, shared bookmarks, recommenders, and collaborative filtering. I didn’t find a whole lot new here. I liked his characterization of why people are interested in this. “I want to subscribe to your brain.” This part was important: So many of these business models are based on advertising, but he can run scripts that zap the ads. What does that do to your business model? Also important was the fact that many of these still operate as silos. Why can’t he buy something on eBay recommended by someone he trusts on Amazon?

John R. Smith, who wasn’t left a whole lot of time by the other speakers, did an admirable job of explaining his company’s research into searching of large multimedia repositories. He described MARVEL, Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval System, which is impressive. He talked about query by example (with audio, it could be query by humming) and benchmarking.

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