MAKING SENSE OF THE SOCIAL STREAM: THUMMIT

I'm fascinated by the social media stream. Twitter is the best platform or sandbox I know of for examining the masses' stream of consciousness.

Thummit is right up this alley. They analyze the social media stream and make sense of it, parsing it into specific, real time 'ratings' of a sort by determining on a tweet level whether a comment about something or someone is negative or positive. I'd love to see the algorithm for the determination.

GOOGLE EYE-TESTING FOR USABILITY OF SEARCH

Post on the official Google blog about using eye tracking studies to best position search results.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/eye-tracking-studies-more-than-meets.html

An interesting part of the article revealed that Google's researchers have found that a lot of decisions made on Google's searches are made unconsciously, after a preliminary scanning on results that happens almost instantaneously. This reminded me of some of the discussions in Malcom Gladwell's book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. A good read for this kind of "unconscious decision" stuff.

Further, it's interesting to see how usability/user experience testing is obviously a huge investment for Google searches.