2013 Blog in Review

I started the Slow Searching blog on March 20, 2013, and have completed 21 posts (including this one) in the intervening nine months. The topics I post about break down roughly into thirds, with one third covering my research (e.g., question asking, slow search), another third covering activities surrounding research (e.g., paper writing, conference travel), and the last third covering personal topics (e.g., Griffin’s book, walking 100 miles).

The most popular Slow Searching posts of the year were:

• Making the Marakon Ways: My 8 year old son wrote a 63 page fantasy novel! The book has sold hundreds of copies, and was made into an audio book by a publishing company in London. Related posts: The Marakon Ways, Surprise Success
• Standardized Fame: Students across Texas had to answer reading comprehension questions about me as part of their annual standardized testing. Related post: Questions about Me
• Attending a Conference with a Baby: I share a few tips that I found made attending a conference alone with a baby a little easier for me. Related post: Child-Friendly Conferences
• I Know You Know I’m Busy: Summarizes research that showed that people are more likely to answer their phone while busy if they know that the person calling them knows they are busy. Other popular research posts: #TwitterSearch, Asking v. Searching

Overall, the blog was seen almost 20,000 times and received 35 comments. I love it when people post comments -- it’s nice to know I’m not writing into a void. The most popular queries used to find the blog are twitter search, the marakon ways, and slow searching.

New Year’s Resolution: Once a month I will write a post summarizing an interesting research paper that I’ve read.

2013 Research in Review

This post summarizes the research I published in 2013. The work divides roughly into three components covering: 1) the role of time in search, 2) the use of human computation in search, and 3) computer mediated communication.

Walking to Great Wolf

My children's favorite places on earth is Great Wolf. Why? Because they can literally climb the walls there. They run around playing MagiQuest, going down water slides, playing at the arcade, and singing along with animatronic trees. Several of them already have plans to move to Grand Mound when they grow up.

The closest Great Wolf is located in Grand Mound, WA, an 86 mile drive from our house. It takes us about an hour and a half to drive there from Bellevue, barring traffic. But this summer, my 7 year old and I plan to take a week to walk the entire distance, and learn just how far away Great Wolf really is.