43 Things keeps information design at a basic, yet charming level to show what things are most popular on others’ lists – the typeface just gets bigger. The social dynamics are simple and effective: personal wishes are shared with a specific number of people, but no one’s identity is revealed until a person decides to post a link to their list.

This morning I tried out the Google offering-du-jour: Google Scholar. For the past couple years I’ve used CiteSeer when doing research. It goes one crucial step further than Google Scholar in that it offers a page that lists the abstract, who the article cites, and who the article is cited by. Citations are the primary means for tracking lines of research and getting to know the players in a field, so it’s appropriate that citations are given so much emphasis.

To compare, Google Scholar only lists who a paper is cited by, not who it cites. It also doesn’t group citations together in an easily scannable format. It does have a helpful “Library Search” link though, and appears more scalable &mdash I got a “server busy” error three times while searching CiteSeer.

Anyhow, compare searches for “interaction design” on Scholar and CiteSeer. I found an old classic on Scholar I wanted to comment on, but I’ll save that for another post.

Return. Wow. It sucks to visit your own site and see that all the posts had rolled off the home page. I enjoyed writing a thesis on self-presentation, but it also exacerbated my self-consciousness. I haven’t wanted to post online for well over a year. I’m either going to have to shelve this blog or redesign it.

Resettle. I’m back in San Francisco, living on Capp St at 23rd, directly across the street from where I lived in ‘99. In some ways the last two years in Pittsburgh feel further away than the bay area years that preceded them. My ties to academia are pretty slim these days. I co-authored a poster that was presented at CSCW last week, based on some of the work I did at IBM Research last summer. That will be the last for a while.

Rework. Google is challenging, mostly due to insanely tight schedules. Many interesting projects (v1.0 heaven), but no time. We desperately need more designers. If you have any interest, please drop me an email (it’s over there on the sidebar). The hiring process isn’t the best, so if you applied previously and it didn’t happen, email me and I might be able to help.