Believing myself to be an efficient-ish sort of person, I imagine I screen out irrelevant detail when searching for information on the web. But, as advertisers know so well, extraneous information impinges on the consciousness of even the most focused researcher. Which is why, I suppose, I was so distracted by the banner image (above) on the web site of the Oxford Institute for Science, Innovation and Society. The dome of the German Reichstag (below) seems a surprising choice... or have I missed some linking significance?

Looking to the future

Fascinating research showing a correlation between a population's predisposition to make future-focused Google searches and GDP. Not causal, of course.

[via John Naughton]

Tracking paths through the web

Clive Thompson worries that he loses the paths that get him to information on the web and, in so doing, loses 'cognitive value'. Personally, I'm not sure how much value is lost in a string of un-processed links. Usually there's a way back to things you've skimmed. On the other hand I like the idea of tracking (with their agreement) other people's paths, with their agreement, as in reading.am.

[via Cory Doctorow]

Tagging human knowledge

Summary talk by Paul Heymann of research at Stanford looking at web corollaries to physical book browsing in library stacks. His team have found that tags for book content (either Library of Congress or user-generated tags (including tags generated through Mechanical Turk)) help users find books they might otherwise not have accessed, and that medium frequency tags carry the information that is the most useful in helping people find the specific books they need.

[via InfoDesign]