QueryCat is a new site that indexes FAQs and makes them searchable via ordinary language queries. It claims to have indexed over 4 million FAQ questions.

Cool idea. FAQs have enough predictable structure that the questions can probably be pretty cleanly separated from the answers. (For one thing, them question thingies tend to end with curly marks.) And, of course, the info in FAQs is, by definition (well, if FAQs actually compiled questions that were frequently asked) frequently requested and thus valuable.

I did a little poking around. “Where can I get a free blog?” got 664 results. ” “How do I tune up a bicycle?” got 11 hits. Where can I get vegetarian omega 3?” pulled up three answers, all pretty relevant. “Should I reply to spam?” got 372 hits, some generic and some specific to particular mail programs or sites. “Does putting in a new hard drive invalidate the warranty on my thinkpad” and “What’s a normal triglycerides result?” got zero hits. So did “What movies has Lily Tomlin starred in?” because that’s unlikely to be asked in a FAQ.

As is common for sites that let you type in questions, “How do I tune up a bicycle” gets exactly the same results as “tune up bicycle” (all without quotes). Natural language = no stop words. Who cares, if it works? It’s also not very forgiving of misspellings and variants; remove the space in “omega 3” and you get zero results. “Fix a dent in my car” gets zero hits, “Repair a dent in my car” gets six, and just “dent in my car” gets 12.

I wonder if QueryCat keeps track of the context of the questions it indexes. So, if 9 out of 10 of the Q’s at the Acme TNT FAQ use the phrase “Acme TNT” in their replies, but the tenth Q&A — “Q: Does this blow up coyotes real good? A: Yup. Real good.” — does not, will that tenth Q&A show up at the top of the list when some queries “Can I blow up coyotes with Acme TNT?”? Just curious.

I did run into one anomaly, or maybe I’m just confused by the site’s UI. The results are listed in the usual search engine format, with a link to the URL, a description, and then some more links. But in my limited poking, the links led to the home page of the sites, even when the anchor text said it linked to the FAQ.

Anyway, it’s a nice idea for a site and could quite possibly be helpful, especially when your question uses terms that would open up the floodgates of normal search engines .

[Tags: querycat faq metadata everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Ed Cone’s published an interview with me in the Greensboro News-Record that pushes on the philosophical side harder than most. Thanks, Ed! (Note: Ed has provided a backup link in case the newspaper’s breaks.) [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ed_cone aristotle ]

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Now before health care folks stick a needle in you, they say, “You’ll feel a little pinch.” That’s a pretty accurate description, and especially helpful since the action that causes it doesn’t seem to be much like a pinch at all.

But, it wasn’t always a pinch. When I was a kid, they’d say something like, “This may hurt a little,” but they didn’t try to reframe the puncture as a pinch. I wonder how and when this recategorization of sensation occurred… [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous needles categorization sensation]

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Susan Mernit has a nice post about what we can learn from Facebook, Twitter, et al., even if you think they’re just fads.

My overall lesson from such sites – much in line with Susan’s — is that we really enjoy one another. [Tags: susan_mernit facebook twitter everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Pownce.com, a new social network, gives you the following choices on its “Gender” pulldown:

Guy
Girl
Dude
Chicky-poo
Bloke
Bird
Lady
Gentleman
Male
Female
Transgender
None of the above

Nice. [Tags: everything+is+miscellaneous pownce gender ]

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I continued to be impressed by Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. More than impressed. Amazed. It has many, well, virtues, but you can’t read it without being astounded by MacIntyre’s grasp of Western philosophy (with occasional notes on Icelandic and Islamic traditions as well). The mere fact that the comments eruditely on Kierkegaard, Nietszsche and Sartre one one hand, on GE Moore and CL Stevenson on the other, the Scholastics on a third hand, and Foucaultishly (high praise!) on the Greeks from Homer through the tragedians, would be enough. Dayenu! Contemporary Western philosophy has become so fragmented that cutting across all of its branches is an achievement worth acknowledging. Just his command of languages — does the fact that he refers to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or by its Danish title mean that he reads Danish also? — is enough to turn your head.
So, ignoring for the moment the content of the book and the nuance of its argument, I am bowled over simply by his expertise – like being amazed by Rembrandt’s brushwork. We need people like MacIntyre who are able to spend a lifetime reading, learning, thinking and writing.

The point about MacIntyre is not that he is a professional. It is that he is an expert. Andrew Keen in The Cult of the Amateur it seems to me sometimes confuses those two things. Keen is right to point out that we have a traditional “ecosystem” that enables people like MacIntyre to flourish. But that ecosystem — in this case, the university system — is not endangered by the new connectedness that is the Internet. The profession that enables MacIntyre to support himself through his studies is largely intact. Now, because of the Internet, we are able to benefit from experts who are amateurs or professionals. [Tags: alasdair+macintyre andrew+keen amateurs scholars ]

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No, the title of this post makes no sense. But it sounds clever, and that’s what counts, right?

Anyway, Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur , and I have been debating, once at WSJ.com and once at Supernova. But neither of those have been posted yet. But the Supernova after-debate debate is available now. It’s less structured than the actual Supernova on-stage conversation, and is less detailed than our rather long WSJ.com exchange (which the WSJ is editing down). I think it’s the weakest of the three encounters — we had just come off the stage — but at least it’s up. (The on-stage debate should be up soon.) [Tags: cult_of_the_amateur andrew_keen supernova2007 supernova07 everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Denise Caruso, author of the new book Intervention, has been thinking about risk. She looks at innovations that have had nasty unanticipated consequences. The way to avoid it? “Have a conversation.” Talk with people before hand. E.g., the company that was going to incinerate chemical weapons in Oregon talked with environmentalists and their ilk and came up with better means of disposal. People don’t always do this because they fear it.

And, Internet tolols and culture exacerbate it. Targeted search taks away serendipity. Blogger bubbles, etc.

There are “potential dealbreakers” for the Net, she says, including copyuright bs. social media. So, we need to re-socialize the Net. We should automate serendipity.

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Clay Shirky begins by talking about a disagreement in Japan about whether a temple is old even though it’s been rebuilt as part of continuing process. The dispute is over “solidity of edifice, not solidity of process.”

Then he talks about a big development contract he got many years ago with AT&T in which he was challenged to provide support. “We get our support from a community,” Clay said, but to them it was like he’d said “We get our Thursdays from a banana.” So, he showed them it working in practice. They couldn’t see it work in practice because they already knew it couldn’t work in theory. He points to comp.lang.perl. “It’s doing fine,” but how is AT&T doing? Not so well. The solidity of the thing is evanescent.

Perl is like the temple, says Clay. It continues because the people doing it love Perl enough to stop what they’re doing and help one another. “No contracts are written, no money changes hands.” “We don’t often talk about love” at these conferences. But tools for coordinating and talking — simple things like mailing lists — turn love into a renewable building material. This leads to unexpected, unanticipated consequences. the better predictor of longevity is not the business model but do the people care about one another.

There’s lots of commercial opportunity. We’re not going to all live together in a commune. But the ability to get people together outside of management and profit motive creates a huge opportunity. And traditional work will be intertwined with this way of working.

Within 24 hours of Linus posting his first message, he had a global network of people eager to collaborate. The monitoring of Nigerian election through people using SMS and Flickr, the responses to terrorist actions, the anti-immigration-law protests coordinated through MySpace…we will see much more of that.

Add collaboration tools to love and you can write an operating system.

We can now do big things with love.

[This was a classic and beautiful statement of why the Net works and why it matters…and the fact that those two things are the same is what’s most hope-giving about the Net. Clay is such a phenomenal combination of insight, brilliance as a writer, and, well, love.]

[Tags: supernova2007 supernova07 clay_shirky denise_caruso love social_software everything_is_miscellaneous]

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[The next day] Nick Douglas – who is hilarious to have on a backchannel chat – video interviewed me right after Clay’s talk, so the conversation turned to love and community.

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Nature magazine has set up a site — Precedings — where scientists can post their papers before those papers are reviewed and accepted. This a big deal. As Nature’s Timo Hannay puts it in a broadcast email:

The traditional way for scientists to share their research results is through journals. These have the benefit of being peer-reviewed, citable and archival, but as a communication channel they are also relatively slow and expensive. As a complement to this, scientists also use more immediate and informal approaches, such as preprints (i.e., unpublished manuscripts), conference papers and presentations. The trouble is, these usually aren’teasy to share in a truly globally way (most repositories are institution- or funder-specific), and you can’t formally cite them (which is important because citation underlies the scientific credit system).

Nature Precedings is trying to overcome those limitations by giving researchers a place to post documents such as preprints and presentations in a way that makes them globally visible and citable. Submissions are filtered by a team of curators to weed out obviously inappropriate material, but there’s no peer-review so accepted contributions appear online very quickly — usually within a couple of hours. The content is all released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and each item is made citable using a DOI or Handle (the same systems used for peer-reviewed scholarly papers).

Timo goes on to acknowledge that arXiv has done this for physics and other disciplines.

This is very cool. From CC to DOI, it hits all the right notes. Even the name is good. And because Nature is one of the most important research journals around, this is a big deal. [Tags: nature science research everything_is_miscellaneous knowledge arxiv precedings cc ]

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Dave has a rich piece on the problem with closed social networks. He concludes:

Eventually, soon I think, we’ll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself.

In my terms, he’s talking about social information going miscellaneous: Lots of it, detached from any particular app, a seedbed of emergence. There have been attempts to make this happen before — FOAF springs to mind — but they attempted to get us to write things down about ourselves independent of any application. FaceBook et al. make writing things down worth our while. So, the data is there. We just have to (a) get it everywhere, (b) provide strong user control over it. (A is likely to happen before B does. But you never know. At least I never know.)

Dave also wants more-better metadata, especially with regards to the types of relationships these sites capture. Jeez, do I agree. For most of my friends at Facebook, the available categories are inadequate. A folksonomic approach would turn up far more interesting relationships. As it stands, FaceBook requires us to reduce this richest of social information. [Tags: social_networks dave_winer facebook identity everything_is_miscellaneous]

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