Mathemagenic

It's always like that: looking for one thing you find many others.

Full paper behind Blog Epidemic Analyzer (for Anjo and Rogier :) - Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace by Eytan Adar, Li Zhang, Lada A. Adamic, and Rajan M. Lukose

And other papers from HP Information Dynamics Lab, especially those with titles that I found interesting:

• Privacy and Deviance
• How to search a social network
• Finding Communities in Linear Time
• Conversational Structure in Email and Face-to-face Communication
• Information Flow in Social Groups
• SHOCK: Communicating with Computational Messages and Automatic Private Profiles
• Email as Spectroscopy: Automated Discovery of Community Structure within Organizations
• The Dynamics of Reputations
• When Can I Expect an Email Response?  A Study of Rhythms in Email Usage
• Eliminating Public Information Biases in Small Group Predictions
• Local Search in Unstructured Networks
• Protecting Privacy while Revealing Data
• Status as a Valued Resource
• A Market for Secrets
• Search in Power-Law Networks 
• Friends and Neighbors on the Web
• Free Riding on Gnutella 
• Zipf, Power-laws, and Pareto - a ranking tutorial
• Competitive Dynamics of Web Sites

The high cost of not finding information by Susan Feldman (via Michael Fioritto): 

• examples of information disasters (how things went wrong because of information not found)
• reasons for these disasters
• information is scattered between multiple sources (think of your own e-mail, local drive, paper archive, bookmarks, weblog + all systems of your company that you use + Internet + who knows what)
• everyone does search, but not everyone has skills to do it well
• there is too much information (but think of: every signal starts out as noise)
• data on costs of not finding information for an organisation
• success of searches
• knowledge workers spend 15-35% of their time searching
• only 50% searches are successful
• 40% corporate users can't find information they need to do their job on their intranets
• costs of recreating information (see the quote below + estimations of costs for an enterprise)
• a bit of promotion for advanced search technologies
• what knowledge workers need to interact with information efficiently?
• easy access through a single interface
• need to understand what is there, so they know what they don't know
• information seamlessly embedded into work

A quote:

Recent research on knowledge work shows that knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information than they do turning out information that does not already exist. Some studies suggest that 90% of the time that knowledge workers spend in creating new reports or other products is spent in recreating information that already exists. In 1999, a European study by IDC examined that phenomenon, called the "knowledge work deficit," and concluded that the cost of intellectual rework, substandard performance and inability to find knowledge resources was $5,000 per worker per year.

Just a small thing to add: in many cases the reason for not finding information is not about search problems, but about not searching at all. For me it's not about bad search, it's about human nature: for people reinventing is more fun than reusing even if their organisations lose money (hope to post a paper with some data to support it soon :)

See also: Knowledge workers time spent finding information, Why people do not ask questions? (1) and (2), Personal ways of doing things in public