I'm a "beyond search" entrepreneur, now at iCurrent. I was a HCI/CS researcher at PARC and spun out Inxight, now part of SAP. Formally, I studied computer science at MIT, but I range broadly. Say: Shoestring Traveler, TED-ster, Runner, Rambler.

This site houses postings, publications, and presos, mostly on the topic of Information Flow. The topic has been my career's pursuit, and so as you might guess, the border between professional and personal can get blurred at times.

With iCurrent relaunched by Wapo Labs as Trove and powering Washington Post Social Reader and other features to come on the Post site, I've moved into a new role at Washington Post, which basically amounts to figuring out what to do next. I remain engaged by the future of news and journalism and so am considering various projects to drive at the Post company. That said, I'm also a startup guy in San Francisco, and see lots of next steps for the Web related to topics i've long considered. So let's see where this goes.

With six others, I pursued building a personalized news service at iCurrent for the wide audience of Internet users. For me, this was the next place in a long vector. After years of seeing search, text, and user experience technologies applied in specialized information and intelligence applications, it was time to attack the challenges of everyday uses for everybody. A few posts here and elsewhere paint the picture:

• Personalized News needs the Person - @iCurrent: the key ideas behind iCurrent service, which is public beta right now.

• The iCurrent Back Story: visions of personalized news and information are old, but we had new ideas on now and how.

• Beyond Search is Reap: conceptual distillation of intelligent information access based on text analytics and user-driven experiences at the end of 10 years at Inxight.

• The Long Tail gets Interesting - @Fortune: 50k foot view of the importance of personalization to the future of media.

These articles are thoughts on nextgen user interfaces, and text analytics, and the future of search. See more, including research papers, at Sensemaking.

See and Go Manifesto [Sept 1999, Interaction Magazine] Written as a reflection on the power of "wide widgets" aimed at the user interface research and development community, but given that wide widgets still haven't been fully absorbed into mainstream graphical user interfaces, it's still a bit of a rallying cry.

From Unstructured Data to Actionable Intelligence [Nov 2003, IEEE IT Professional] Describes the key beyond search technologies of categorization, extraction, and visualization. Also covers an abstract architecture for using these and the applications in leading areas of government intelligence, electronic publishing, and pharma research.

Sixty Years of Search and Beyond [May 2005, ACM Queue] A history of search starting 60 years ago as context to broadened PARC/Inxight ideas related to Intelligent Information Access. It concludes with predictions for 2020.

In the early nineties, I was working in the team that coined the term "information visualization." Though there was a lot of focus on 3-D using SGI machine in our group, I felt that the basic principles were quite applicable in 2-D techniques. Two inventions came about from this and ultimately were significant revenue generators for Inxight, the company we spun out a few years later.

Hyperbolic Browser - CHI 95	Table Lens - CHI 94

I was invited to do a 7 minute talk, and i managed to not get the hook as I went for 11 minutes. It really was the distillation of the story from the PARC team's vision of Beyond WIMP interfaces. The ideas have been influential for sure, but even now the vision hasn't fully come to pass. But I did get a standing-O! and I became a TEDster forever.

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