Whit Andrews

Any number of fine books include artists toying with the idea that something that they create comes to life. I suppose the oldest version of this that i can think of is the lovely Pygmalion, in which a sculptor finds that his ideal woman takes life. In my case, it’s the Hostile Information Ecosystem, something [...]

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A question we often get is whether or not there’s a good reliable way to tell if search is working. In other words, people want to know how to measure their enterprise search engine’s performance. Yahoo has some ideas.

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And the publishing industry wonders why book sales ain’t what they was. <— link. (Sorry, bad joke.)

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This is the kind of thing that makes even veteran analysts — and it is with a wry grin I identify myself thus, as I wrestle daily with the impostor syndrome that tends to afflict the unpractitioner — absolutely sit up and take notice. After four or five years of despising video for its cheapening [...]

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I remember when I was first working at Gartner and I met a guy at a software company with a submarine. I think it was the same trip when I met a guy — he’d been at Gartner, really early — with a helicopter; I asked how he used it, and he said he used [...]

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Nice tight briefing from Linguamatics, a vendor I hadn’t run into in semantic analysis of information using a linguistic approach. It’s English-only, and at this point life sciences-only, which meets the four-way test I use of “are you in a vertical, a horizontal, a point solution or a platform mode?” The answer is, for Linguamatics, [...]

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When we originally published our research on the Hostile Information Ecosystem, I freely admit that some of it seemed fairly outlandish. Among the things that seemed weirdest was the idea that people would be untrustworthy in What They Searched For — in other words, that you would have naughty people who did searches they did [...]

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This was a comment response to Dan’s comment to my below post — I think it’s worth being it’s own post, too.
The scenario model is perfect appealing — obviously, the more optional elements that one can introduce into such a model, the better off one is. The more I think about this kind of thing, [...]

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What I decided to do on the RFP thing is a slight mod. I use a 0-3 Likert scale for how well a feature is supported, a 0-3 on how much it’s desired, and then group the calculation of one times the other as a mean. Then I’m going to have to provide a weight [...]

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Human capacity for premature judgment of technological irrelevancy in a world where typewriters still clatter is hubris.

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