We had fun with the iPad this weekend, especially since our family was featured in the Detroit Free Press. Of course, I had to run out and buy several print copies, because those are the only ones that really count.
The iPad is a beautiful device that's perfect for sharing content and media with family members. It's much better than a laptop for show and tell.
But is it worth the investment? Well, I'm honestly not sure that first impressions count for much. What matters is how this tablet fits into our daily lives (or not) a month or two after arrival. We'll have to wait to see.
In the meantime, you can check out reviews from Consumer Reports and please feel free to fire a few questions my way. Also, if you're going to the IA Summit this week, just ask and I'll let you take it for a test drive.
Hi Peter
Couldn't see an email address for direct communication so this will do.
We currently live in a world of text-search where given a text query, the search engine returns web pages or documents containing a combination of the query text in some ranked order.
What if each web page, document, ad, image, article, sound, video, patent, journal paper and in fact, any data type was treated as an "item" (or "object" or "thing") so that given a query of one or more items the search engine finds other similar and relevant items.
This is what we do in our everyday lives. For example, given the task to find all "keys" in their home or workplace, a person will find keys of all shapes, sizes and colors. Humans have the remarkable capacity to learn and generalize.
Xyggy (www.xyggy.com) is an "item search" engine technology that also includes an interactive search box that supports both textual queries as well as items that can be dragged and touched in and out of the search box to find other relevant items and to improve the relevance of the results.
The Noisy Channel published a post on the Xyggy technology written by us at http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/04/04/guest-post-information-retrieval-using-a-bayesian-model-of-learning-and-generalization/.