Search autosuggest and n-grams
Having an interest in computational linguistics, I'd like to spend some time explaining an example use that we see a lot. Often times when browsing the web we use search forms to find what we are looking for. Many search forms try to help us find what we are looking for by automatically suggesting common search terms as we type. If you are searching an online shop you may only see suggestions for items for purchase, whereas searching on Google even very obscure terms may have suggestions. What exactly is going on here and how can you make your auto suggestion more robust and/or relevant?
Taking advantage of academic resources
Last week, OmniTI hosted a pretty awesome conference about scalability called Surge. I really enjoyed John Allspaw's keynote in which he spoke about the importance of looking to academia and different fields to help solve some of the problems we face with upcoming web technologies and in general. I completely agree and while I do a little of this already, I hope to delve into it more. I'd like to share some of the resources I am currently using and hope that others will find them useful and be able to point me in the direction similar useful resources we can all use to find papers and articles pertaining to the problems we are trying to solve on the web.