Surprise Success

This is an update to my earlier posts about my eight year old son’s experience writing a 64-page fantasy novel titled The Marakon Ways. We self-published the book as an easy way to share it with friends and family. I guessed we might possibly sell up to 100 copies, but to all of our surprise we have already sold more than twice that! And the book only just became available via Amazon today.

How to Ask Effective Questions

We all ask questions of our social networks. For example, the other day I posted a question to Twitter looking for a hotel recommendation in Dublin for SIGIR 2013. When we ask questions, sometimes we get good answers, and sometimes we get bad answers. But the quality of the answers we get isn't completely random – it is something we, as question askers, can control. This post describes some of the tricks we have learned about how to ask effective questions online from our research.