Uptown

Diese Woche waren Dolma und ich bei Ele's Kinderaerztin, die uns gefragt hat, wieviele Worte Ele schon sagt. Nach etwas brainstorming hier die Liste (nach Sprachen und Haeufigkeit geordnet):

No (as in: no-no-no-no-no)
Bye-bye
Blivia (Olivia, und als Platzhalter)
Shoes
Jeans
Ball
Baby
Bottle
Apple
Peas
Store

Papa'
Mamma
Nonno
Acqua
Ciuccio
Pappa (Essen)

Druuueee (as in eis, zwoi, drue)

Mehr faellt mir gerade nicht ein...Also am Deutsch muessen wir noch arbeiten.

Ansonsten ist unsere Maus immer noch im 90. Perzentil, sowohl Gewicht (82cm) als auch Groesse (12.8kg).

(Originally posted at Complexity and Social Networks Blog)

Thanks to those who participated in my quick survey on individual search strategies. Here's an attempt to distill your answers into a few sentences.

As expected, the main questions that arise on your jobs can be classified as knowledge-intensive, and you most likely cannot find one correct answer to them. Some examples: Trying to establish what "the best" system, or practice, is (I suspect that we all have subjective criteria in deciding what's best), what do we know about xyz (rather open-ended, I'd say), finding out about a certain procedure, event, etc.

As for your search heuristics, Google comes in first place, and second, and third, and...Several plug-ins and other tricks render those Google searches more sophisticated (thanks for the pointers, Allan and David!), and most of you tend to find what you're looking for by using search engines. Which means, most of you do not actually need the interaction with other individuals to answer most of your questions. Gosh, I'm trying to remember what life (and work) was like before Google! Obviously, I have a biased (and non-representative) sample of individuals here, but still, what an interesting result.

My final question was whether your search behavior varies according to the questions you have, and the consensus was, yes, it does, but turning to "offline methods" or other people really came off as a last resort. Again, probably - at least in part - due to the still rather geeky nature of the blogosphere, but while I'm typing this I'm thinking of something else: Since I asked people to assess their search behavior, they could have made the implicit assumption that search is mainly done using search engines, therefore a priori excluding the dialogue with other individuals as a possibility to search for answers. Was that the case? Or are our search engines getting so good that they can replace human interaction? I'd be curious to find out. Maybe I should google it.