This morning, in the game room of the Frances Albrier Community Center, in between Dance Dance Revolution and an air hockey table, I cast my ballot. And I’ve never been happier to do it.

Daniel Tunkelang has a worthwhile set of posts [1, 2, 3] on whether Google is “good enough” for various kinds of tasks that involve document retrieval. The last one, on enterprise search, got me to thinking about what it is that interests me about scholarly information systems. Tunkelang, riffing on an article by Chris Sherman, argues that “enterprises, with all of their highly structured and carefully organized silos of information, require a very different and paradoxically more complex approach” to search than what Google does with Web documents.

Scholars too have existing “highly structured and carefully organized silos of information,” and I’m very interested in how to reconcile these, and the organizational processes that produce them, with the new tools that things like statistical machine learning make possible. Yet the scholarly domain is even more interesting than the enterprise domain, because its silos exist not only within enterprise-like organizations like universities, but also in the invisible colleges formed by colleagues who share a discipline but work within different organizations. Engineers have similar cross-cutting community affiliations: one might identify more strongly as a Python programmer and member of the Python community than as an employee of any particular tech company. Although the latter is the one paying the bills, the former is where questions are answered, contacts are made, and new jobs are found.

Anyway, the point is that while organizing information within a company or a university is an interesting problem, even more interesting is the problem of how to interweave these kinds of information systems with those of other, more fluid, disciplinary or interest-driven communities. Another way of thinking about it is: how can a complex organization not only articulate and fulfill its own information needs, but also be permeable enough to inter-operate with other kinds of organizations as needed in order to articulate and fulfill the needs of different trans-organizational configurations of users, as (for example) new disciplines are formed or strategic alliances made? Can we have the openness and flexibility of the Web without dismissing organizations or resigning ourselves to disorganization?

Me, a few hours after passing my qualifying exam.

I’ve been turning a lot of pages lately, both figuratively and literally. The latter because I’m preparing for my qualifying exam (date TBA, but no later than December, hopefully). The former is due my renewed focus on academic life: I’ve left Yahoo! Research Berkeley, where I spent 2 great years exploring the enigma that is “social media.” I was sad to leave, but am happy to have more time to focus on my Ph.D. research, and to be more involved in all the great stuff going on at Berkeley, like the Berkeley Center for New Media. More on that later.

Is Overheard in New York.

Today is my birthday. I am 29 years old. You may commemorate this joyous occasion by sending me an item of your choice from my wishlist.

As of today you can IM me via this blog, courtesy of Chatango.

Another excellent article by Henry Jenkins at MIT Technology Review, on the fan-driven grey-market spread of anime. Copyright cartels take note:

Japanese corporations have sought to collaborate with fan clubs, subcultures, and other consumption communities, seeing them as important allies in developing compelling new content or broadening markets. In courting such fans, the companies helped to construct a “moral economy” that aligned their interests in reaching a market with the American fans’ desires to access more content.

Many have argued that cultural rather than legal, technological, or economic solutions are crucial in resolving the bootlegging crisis hitting American media companies. Rather than suing their fan base, perhaps they should study how their Japanese counterparts profited from this first wave of underground circulation, seeing it as promotion rather than piracy.

I read danah’s rant about the NYT going on the offensive against bloggers, but I hadn’t realized just how far it went until I saw more sniping in a review of Nicholson Baker’s new book:

Jay is a deeply unhappy man. His wife has left him, his girlfriend has left him, he has lost his job as a high-school teacher, he works as a day laborer and has declared personal bankruptcy, he spends his days reading blogs. (About the deranging influence of blogs Baker makes a sterling point.)