accurate, descriptive page titles are in; creative, clever headlines are not-so-much -- http://bit.ly/nax2 -- well researched via @glenngabe

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Media used to be finite; social "media" (converstions) can be infinite. In fact, this "media" does not even pre-exist - http://bit.ly/11Davq

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Microsoft Page Hunt Game to Improve Search?

Microsoft just launched Page Hunt, a game that presents web pages to players and asks that they guess key words to hunt them down. In the past, RWW has covered a number of search relevancy projects that incorporate human computational power including Semanti. But few projects have been presented to volunteers in such a fun and easy way.

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Once a game begins, players are presented with a web page and receive points to guess keywords for the pages in the top 5 results. Unveiled by Microsoft's Chris Quirk and Raman Chandrasekar at the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Informational Retrieval (SIGIR) Conference, the game is aimed at improving search algorithms and ranking.

MIT's Technology Review compares PageHunt to Luis von Ahn's spam-fighting puzzles and image tagging games. Nevertheless, for initial volunteer buy-in, it may actually have closer ties to Wikipedia. While the projects seem very different, they actually share similar missions. Wikipedia is aimed at collecting and distributing educational content to global audiences. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Page Hunt aims to increase the relevancy and speed at which information can be found.

Very few projects offer the general public a chance to volunteer in improving the sum of human knowledge in such a significant way. Wikipedia volunteers are often fiercely devoted to curating their pages knowing that even the US Health Department is factoring the community into their outreach strategy. Page Hunt's search relevancy game players may adopt a similar mentality.

One key barrier to this sort of adoption is the fact that Page Hunt's info will not likely be shared with non-Microsoft search players. Meanwhile Wikipedia content is shared freely as public domain information. It will be interesting to see if the Page Hunt community fleshes out in the same manner or if a less-proprietary search game will spring up in its place.

Discuss

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Create an iPhone Document Scanner from Cardboard [Scanner Hacks]

You might need a scanner every so often, but they're far too big for their occasional usefulness. If you've got an iPhone and some time to cut cardboard, you can ditch some paper and capture documents without the glass bed.

University of Cincinnati student Kyle A Koch frequently synced his iPhone and backed up his iPhoto library, but wasn't so hot with the paper and study material organization. Since he knew he was reliable with iPhone images, he put his industrial design studies into practice and crafted cardboard-based docks that elevate the phone just enough to properly frame and capture 8.5x11 documents.

You can order a customized, pre-assembled version of Koch's scanner apparatus in cardboard or medium density fibreboard, but Koch also includes a free EPS file for downloading and DIY building. It builds roughly 15 inches tall and long, and would seem to be pretty cheap to build. Combined with a universal capture/OCR tool like Evernote and the powerful camera on an iPhone 3G S, it's definitely a work-able scanner solution for those who only need a few documents in digital form now and again.

iPhone Document Scanner
Ponoko showroom - iPhone Document Scanner [Kyle A Koch via Twitter / Kevin Lim]

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Google Voice for Android Adds Notification and Call Options [Downloads]

Android: An official Google Voice app update plugs two niggling holes in its settings and options, allowing users to determine how and when their phones alert to new messages, and whether Google Voice or the phone hardware makes their calls.

The first release of Google Voice for Android offered Voice users an all-or-nothing proposition. Either you wanted to use Google Voice for every U.S. call, only for international calls, or not at all. The latest version available in the Android Market, 0.1.415, adds another option to ask you before placing each call whether to call on your standard carrier number or through Google Voice. It would be great to see a toggle setting for each contact—the boss gets your Google Voice number, friends on the same network get their free minutes—but it's a helpful step.

The other settings tweak deals with your voicemail/SMS notifications. You can set a specific ringtone/bleep for them, and/or have your phone vibrate and use its LCD light. Not a big sexy update, but it's something Voice users encounter every day.

An updated Google Voice app can be downloaded free from the Android Market, or found at AndroLib. Thanks Gordon!

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