Personalized search? The concept has been that by knowing some things about you, a search engine might refine your results to make them more relevant. A teenager searching for music might get different matches than a senior citizen. A man looking for flowers might see different listings than a woman.

Eurekster’s twist on this concept is to provide personalized results based not on who you are but who you know. Friends, colleagues and anyone in your Eurekster social network will influence the type of results you see.

The first steps to getting social search functionality in Google. Will be interesting to see where this goes.

“History of the Internet” is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.

Can predictive text in SMS help save languages from going extinct?

The Bluesky Innovation Competition on “Social Computing in 2020” seeks to promote new research directions for social-computing technologies of the future. We encourage participants to think broadly and freely about how society and technology will interact 10 to 20 years from now — far enough in the future to stretch our imagination of technology, yet near enough to be plausible. (DUE Jan 30, 2009)

An educated guess is that iodine deficiency results in a needless loss of more than 1 billion I.Q. points around the world.

How do people use the Internet to solve problems? We find that a significant portion of online Americans turn to the Internet at times because it seems to fulfill their needs more readily and thoroughly than the people in their community network do. We present evidence of when people use the Internet versus seeking the assistance of friends and family and possible reasons for this behavior. This research demonstrates how, to what extent, when and why the Internet supplements people’s lives.

“Gay activists have begun publishing lists online exposing individuals and organizations who have donated money in support of Proposition 8. On AntiGayBlacklist.com, individuals who gave money toward Proposition 8 are publicized, with readers urged not to patronize their businesses or services.”

Valdis Krebs demos his InFlow Twitter map to show meaningful relationships between people and between clusters of people among his network of Twitter followers (as opposed to the only pretty TweetWheel.)

How can the reds and the blues come together for the sake and well-being of our country going forward? This is an awesome set of photo submissions that will inspire you no matter who you voted for in the US election. (How I can make use of (or include) this great work with the post-election reactions I captured from Turkers?)

This looks like a really interesting Seminar (organized by IBM Hailfa Research Lab), including discussions of social search, sensemaking, and discovery.

These organizations all contributed to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign in California. Seriously, shame on you.

“The concern for internet research is that regulations are firmly rooted in face-to-face settings and the literature culture of paper and print,” Beddows says. “In order to relieve the problems associated with online research, there needs to be an effort made to develop methodological guidelines that take into account both the unique nature of the internet, and its relationship to the physical world.”

Review of literature and experts by a government agency. Produces a report on the myriad factors that would influence actual gas savings on a national speed limit. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gao.gov%2Fproducts%2FGAO-09-153R

Change.org looks like the Obama Administration’s official website—already live!

This an well-written article by the editors of the New Yorker in full support of Barack Obama for Presidency!

A teaser for our paper on social search (written by Ed Chi).

From the Google blog: they argue that the benefit of the social web and social technologies is that people are able to stay close to friends because they are aware of the small events going on daily in their lives. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fgoogleblog.blogspot.com%2F2008%2F09%2Fsocial-web-all-about-small-stuff.html