My old boss was thrilled the first time he saw the image of a spinning globe online. But that was long ago, when Web users were explorers, the Internet was a place of discovery, and an animated .gif could muster boyish enthusiasm. Expectations are much higher and far more sophisticated now that users have visited hundreds of sites that demonstrate the core truth of the cliché that notes the Web is about constant change, with users like kids in a candy store pointing out cool features they’d like to see.
We can now explore some of those user expectations in the results of a Reader Profile Study conducted last April by Harvey Research Inc. for Communications of the ACM. The study shows that Web readers have an eye on the future and a foot in the past. Indeed, that sentiment is embodied in one reader’s suggestion that ACM reintroduce self-assessment procedures and put them online. These questionnaires, designed to help a person appraise and develop his or her knowledge of a particular topic, were first launched over 30 years ago.
Other findings from the study show a split affinity for the old and the new. Half of the survey’s respondents say they will use Communications’ Web site to request RSS feeds or email alerts, fast and easy ways to get new articles. A greater number, 77.1%, will use it to access the magazine’s archive of 50-plus years of articles. (For more information about this readership survey, see Scott Delman’s “Publisher’s Corner” on page 7.)
Recent site usage analysis reinforces the pushme-pullyu preferences of our users. Alerts and feeds get more clicks than any other item on the ACM Resources page. Those electronic formats are balanced by old-fashioned printouts. The “Print” button is consistently the most popular click in the Tools for Readers, and that’s true for both 4,000-word Contributed Articles and
350-word blog entries as well. These contrasting tendencies would be reconciled if users were printing their e-material. But who would do that?
GöDeL PRize WinneRs omer reingold, salil Vadhan, and avi wigderson won the 2009 Gödel prize for developing a new type of graph that enables the construction of large expander graphs, which play an important role in designing robust computer networks and constructing theories of error-correcting computer codes. the award, presented by aCM’s special interest Group on algorithms and Computing theory and the european association for theoretical Computer science, recognized their work on the zig-zag graph— a technique able to solve one of the most intriguing open problems in computational complexity theory, that of detecting a path from one node to another in very small storage for undirected graphs (in which the nodes are connected by lines with no direction).
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siGiR 09
the 32nd annual aCM special interest Group on information retrieval (siGir) conference, the major international forum for the presentation of new research results and the demonstration of new systems and techniques in the field of information retrieval, will be held in Boston from July 19–23.
networks and human behavior will be the subject of the siGir keynote speech by albert-lászló Barabási, a professor at northeastern university and director of its Center for Complex network research. “Highly interconnected networks with amazingly complex topology describe systems as diverse as the world wide web, our cells, social systems, or the economy,” notes Barabási. “recent studies indicate that these networks are the result of self-organizing processes governed by simple but generic laws, resulting in architectural features that make them much more similar to each other than one would have expected by chance. i will discuss the amazing order characterizing our interconnected world and its implications to network robustness and spreading processes.”
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