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Thank you, Barry.
As one of the folks within this industry whom I hold a great amount of respect for, your words are very much appreciated.
Some excellent examples, Dave. Your experience presenting a new business site to a forum that might provide criticism you could learn from sounds like it was a great opportunity, for you and for the community that you approached.
The cluetrain manifesto and Ruskin's Roots of Honor are a couple of my favorites. If anyone has suggestions on others in a similar vein, I'd appreciate hearing about them.
Thanks, Dave and Winooski
Ok. A lot of people click on the first result, most probably because its the first result. :)
First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users
There are at the very least dozens of theories circulating about working memory, many of them from well established and respected researchers, and many of which contradict each other. I think at the heart of my complaint are a few issues.
While I appreciate the intent behind the human hardware series of articles, and the limitations of presenting a rich body of material in limited article format, I do want to stress that there are many theories regarding working memory, and how it functions. I'm not sure how clearly that comes out in the human hardware articles. I think there is the potential that people might be mislead by the information as presented, into thinking that there was agreement within the community of cognitive scientists on how working memory actually works, including one popular theory that sees working memory as a part of long term memory.
Certainly there are limitations to our ability to perceive and process information based upon our physiology, but theories of working memory are works in process, and I question the use of working memory as an absolute limitation on our ability to look at a list of search results, or menu items, or bill boards, or vacation destinations, and make rational choices and comparisons based upon what we see before us.
I see this topic sometimes come up in forums, with designers thinking that they intentionally need to limit menu choices in drop downs to no more than seven items, based upon the folklore that grew out of George Miller's research.
I do like the exploration of this topic, but I think that care needs to be given to the way that it is presented.
For instance, the latest article in the human hardware series points to an article by Luck and Zang, "Discrete fixed-resolution representations in visual working memory," and states that it concludes that working memory allows us to only "compare 3 or 4 alternatives at any one time." There is another paper from a few years ago that offers that possibility (Cowan, N. 2001 - The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. - http://web.missouri.edu/~cowann/docs/articles/2001/Cowan%20BBS%202001.pdf), but the article from Luck and Zang focuses instead upon describing how visual working memory might function in terms of how we process the things we see over time, and the depth of resolution of those images. Part of their conclusion was that:
...when presented with more than a few simple objects, human observers store a high-resolution representation of a subset of the objects and retain no information about the others. Memory resolution varied over a narrow range that cannot be explained in terms of a general resource pool but can be well explained by a small set of discrete, fixed-resolution representations.
While the experiments described in this study may lead to the idea that a limited number of channels exist within working memory, there are no "magical" numbers assigned in their work, whether 3, or 4, or 7 plus or minus 2.
Gord,
My major criticism is to present theory as theory, and not as fact. Perhaps some kind of peer review of some sort might also serve you well.
I think that it is important for a community to look at the way that votes carefully, and how their votes matter.
I believe that in at least one of the threads about the Desphinn function, Danny noted that they would be looking back at how well or poorly Desphinn was working after some time had passed. I don't know if that has been done.
It can be helpful to listen to people who are involved heavily in a number of social media sites, and who pay careful attention to how they work, like SpostareDuro and onreact. Does the Desphinn function help or hurt?
Is the ability to vote down posts, based upon factors that have little to do with the original sphinn or the content of the source pointed towards help the community? Is Desphinning a post because you don't like the topic (twitter, in this case, which is relevant to what sphinn covers) rather than because of the quality of the post or content really something that we want to see?
Isn't that a little like burying posts at Digg because the source site is from someone involved in SEO?
Thanks for sphinning this Steven, for the kind words websuccessdiva, and for all the sphinns.
It was interesting seeing Yahoo's take on how they might try handle the same content at different pages.
I like Kimberly's suggestion of auto submission of those, with a separate section (with tab or sidebar) for them.
There are a number of SEL posts that are shorter new pieces that are definitely worth discussing, but may not be posts that I would think about sphinning.
As it is now, if they don't go hot, they may not get discussed in a meaningful way. If Sphinn is going to serve a dual purpose (social bookmarking/voting and SEL discussion forum, it might be best to do it in a way that enables people interested in discussing SEL posts get to do so...
§ 1120. Civil liability for false or fraudulent registration
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/usc_sec_15_00001120----000-.html
" Any person who shall procure registration in the Patent and Trademark Office of a mark by a false or fraudulent declaration or representation, oral or in writing, or by any false means, shall be liable in a civil action by any person injured thereby for any damages sustained in consequence thereof. "
Thanks for sphinning this post, Dave. A little surprising given its age, but the patent application does provide a lot of information about how this might work.
The paper is available on Dr. Jansen's Web page (http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/) at Penn State's web site, and was published last year:
Determining the Informational, Navigational, and Transactional intent of Web Queries.
http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/academic/pubs/jansen_user_intent.pdf
Data for the study appears to have come from Dogpile from 2005.
Dan Russell, from Google, gave us a different and more detailed breakdown of query types from Google searches in a November 2006 presentation at Stanford. See: http://searchengineland.com/061218-231343.php
In the first article in this series, Human Hardware: Working Memory (http://searchengineland.com/080307-071251.php), there's a section about the work of George A. Miller. It misrepresents the work of the author, who was discussing studies involving memory when it comes to very small changes involving a very limited range of stimuli - musical tones played and the ability of most people to remember those tones in order. (Sadly, Miller discards results in his experiment of people, trained musicians, who could easily remember 50-60 notes at a time.)
The original paper from Miller describing his research is The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information (http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/), and a statement from George Miller about how the Billboard industry had misapplied his research for years appears in a thread on Edward Tufte's web site (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000U6). A snippet:
Armed with this insight, he looked me up and told me the whole story about my career, unknown to me, in the billboard industry. There was much more to it than I have outlined here, and I was shocked. So shocked that I wrote a long letter thing to set the record straight. The letter was published in the monthly journal of the billboard industry and that was the end of it. Unfortunately, I no longer have a copy of the letter an I don't recall the name of the journal (this was all back in the early 70s) so I cannot quote to you its contents. But the point was that 7 was a limit for the discrimination of unidimensional stimuli (pitches, loudness, brightness, etc.) and also a limit for immediate recall, neither of which has anything to do with a person's capacity to comprehend printed text.
Miller's article does not say that we are limited in our ability to make choices involving around seven chunks of information at any one time. I can remember and think about thousands of words, hundreds of faces, multitudes of concepts. It says that when there are stimuli that are very limited in their differences, that most (not all) people can have difficulties in remembering them. It's very unlikely that applies to vacation destinations or many other concepts in our working memories.
It would have been a great excuse, to have told my social studies teacher in grade school that I couldn't remember the names of all fifty states because my memory was hardwired to only contain up to seven items at a time. Or to tell my middle school teacher that I could only recall seven of the ten vocabulary words in our weekly quiz because my brain wasn't wired that way. Or my history professors in college who wanted me to recall hundreds of dates for a single exam - what were they thinking (yet somehow people got passing grades on those tests). Our daily briefings of cases in law school involved breaking those cases down into nine different categories for analysis - we managed that, painful as it was.
Before thinking too hard about the application of Dunbar's number to social settings, I'd recommend reading the original work. I'm not so sure that it says what we are being told it says, either.
Thanks.
Your link is broken, Gord. Not sure which article you meant to link to.
Chunking has been considered to be related to long term memory, as least according to modern researchers in the field:
The formation of chunks in immediate or primary memory often made use not only of the information present to the research participant, but also of prior knowledge that was already present in long-term or secondary memory. It is worth noting that there have been demonstrations that practically anything can be held in immediate memory, if there is enough knowledge to back it up.
The Legend of the Magical Number Seven (pdf)
Nelson Cowan, Candice C. Morey, and Zhijian Chen
I said that Miller's work shows that there are definite cognitive limits to working memory and we have to keep this in mind when thinking about presenting alternatives, such as on a search page.The ability to read, consider, and act upon alternatives presented in a set of search results has little to do with Miller's research. Miller personally refuted that kind of thinking and approach when it was applied to limit the amounts of information presented on billboards - see my link to the Edward Tufte page above, and scroll down to the letter from George Miller.
As Miller noted there:
But the point was that 7 was a limit for the discrimination of unidimensional stimuli (pitches, loudness, brightness, etc.) and also a limit for immediate recall, neither of which has anything to do with a person's capacity to comprehend printed text.
Thanks, Kimberly. Lots of good directories listed in there. I like that the TopRank one indicates where a fee or reciprocal link is requested.
Great article, Barry. Very comprehensive and helpful. I like the "executive summary" analogy, too.
Great advice to those beginning in SEO on starting a blog, and learning hands-on, on interacting with others and growing.
You're welcome, Kimberly. Encouraging post for people wanting to learn about internet marketing.
Story: Does it pay to BLOG?
The post does read like a self promotional advertisement more than the sharing of information about a "new" study, Wizardman. Looking the study up, I see it's from August of 2007, which I'd question calling new:
http://chitika.com/blog/?p=253
Somewhat question the methods of those Ph.D's who conducted the study. Looks more like a paid advertisement/endorsement for chitika. Who says there aren't spammers in academia, too.
I'm Italian. You don't have a problem with that, do you?
Story: Happy Birthday Bill Slawski!
Story: Happy Birthday Bill Slawski!
Story: Happy Birthday Bill Slawski!
Story: Happy Birthday Bill Slawski!
Story: Happy Birthday Bill Slawski!
Story: Happy Birthday Bill Slawski!
Thanks, everyone for all of your kind birthday wishes. Unexpected, but very much appreciated.
Dave, I wonder if there's some connection between being a Pisces and having a fondness for search technology patents.
Shana, happy birthday to your son. Hope it's been a good one.
Charlie, age is just one ranking signal.
Story: Representing Your Business on the Social Web