James Durbin has interviewed me sooner this week about Talk Digger. You can read the interview on recruiting.com: “TalkDigger Interview: Frederick Giasson”.
You will possibly learn some new things about Talk Digger, about my vision of the future of search engines and about my professional life.
Enjoy the reading.
Technorati: Talkdigger | interview | jamesdurbin | vision | search | engines | life |
I just finished to re-write an English (thanks to Jon for correcting it) and French version of my personal web site. I wanted to open myself a little bit more on the cyberspace; I wanted to give the possibility to people to learn who Fred is personally, professionally and in pictures.
More and more people contact me, via my blog and website, for a full of reasons. However, everything is happening on the cyberspace and people sometime have doubts about the authenticity of the people they meet. For that other reason, I wanted to write more things about me: what my profession is and my passions in life as well as publishing hundred of pictures I took around the World in my last trips. That way I wish that people become more comfortable and less shy to talk with me by knowing more things about my personality. That way, I wish that I will increase the trust people have in my cyber-authenticity (so trusting me and my work).
Technorati: Personal | website | open | social | profession | passions | photo | |
Kone Mamadou Tadiou that co-chair the event with Daniel Lemire contacted me two days ago to know if I would be there: sure I will! I registered yesterday and I am impatiently waiting after that event.
The CSWWS will be in conjunction with the Canadian AI-2006 and the International workshop on agents and multiagent systems. If you are interested in Artificial Intelligence, in multiagent systems or in the Semantic Web, you have to be in Quebec City from the 5th to the 9th June.
The computer science department of the Laval University worked hard to get things done with that major Canadian event of 2006. It will be a great opportunity to meet new people, talk about fascinating subjects and to discuss about new academic and commercial projects related with these domains.
I hope to met you there, in one of the most beautiful and enjoyable city on the planet.
Technorati: Semantic | web | conference | canada | artificial | intelligence | cswws | event | canadianai2006 | multiagent | systems |
Recently I wrote some things about what I am currently working on for Talk Digger in some of my last blog posts. One picture worth 1000 words, so I will save time by posting 2 screenshots of that next version (generation?) of Talk Digger.
Before getting a look at them, please have in mind a couple of things:
I will not describe everything on these screenshots. I will let them talk by themselves. What I would like is that you write a comment to describe what you think is going on. That way, I will know if users “intuitively” know what it is all about or if what I have done so far is a total piece of crap. It’s a sort of test and experiment.
So let me introduce the idea behind this new development, and after make your mind with these two screenshots.
As you probably know, Talk Digger is: a new way to find, follow and join discussions evolving on the Web. So you have three elements: (1) finding discussions, (2) following discussions and (3) joining discussions.
With the current version of Talk Digger, users get stuck at step one. These new improvements to Talk Digger will let its users to go ahead with the step two and three.
With these new features, Talk Digger will become a social platform that helps people to connect with other people that follow the same stories (the premise here is that people that follow the same discussions will also have some personal and professional interests in common). It will also become a search engine of its own, and not only a meta-one.
(Click on the thumbnail to enlarge the screenshot)
Conversation page
(Click on the thumbnail to enlarge the screenshot)
Some people could wonder why I make these screenshots available. They are not a state secret?
Fortunately they are not. Since the beginning, Talk Digger evolved with the ideas of its users. The only thing I hope is that it continues that way and it is for that exact reason why I am posting them today. I hope having your feedbacks and your first impressions about what I have done so far.
Technorati: Talkdigger | web2.0 | search | engine | conversation | discussion | social | connection | network |
I just discovered some new behaviour from Talk Digger users while I was analyzing the server logs. I found that some users (intentionally or not) are using Del.icio.us not to bookmark Talk Digger’s website, but to bookmark discussions Talk Digger has helped to discover.
How does this work?
1- Someone finds an interesting page somewhere on the Internet and wants to know who else is talking about it. To demonstrate, let’s take an article of the Washington Post called Bush Speaks Out for Rumsfeld.
2- They copy the URL of that web page, and then go to
http://www.talkdigger.com/?dig_url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401649.html
That way they start a search to find the discussion evolving around that piece of news, using Talk Digger.
3- Finally they copy that URL and bookmark it using Del.icio.us. That way they only have to login into their Del.icio.us user account and click on the bookmark to see the discussion they are “tracking” using Del.icio.us.
It’s great that users are sharing with the Del.icio.us community their interests for a particular piece of news (website, blog, etc) by tagging it with different tag names. Then other people from the community can save that same bookmark and start following the discussion too.
If you read my last blog posts about the future of Talk Digger and what I am working on right now, you will probably find out that this is the same idea that is behind the sort of “portal” that I am developing for the “next generation” of Talk Digger.
The purpose of the “portal” will be to help users find other users with the same interests while following a specific conversation that is beginning to evolve on the Internet. The premise of the idea is that people with similar interests will find each other by checking and displaying which users are tracking the same stories.
For now, what is really interesting is to see how users of two totally different web services can use them in conjunction to answer one their persistent needs.
Technorati: Delicious | del.icio.us | talkdigger | conversation | discussion | track | follow | web2.0 | bookmark |
