Phil Bradley's weblog

BookJetty

With BookJetty you can list your books, connect with friends, use a book based community, check local library holdings (though quite how this is achieved escapes me since there doesn't appear to be anywhere on the site that lets me do that) and blah blah blah. Does this sound a little like LibraryThing? Or Shelfari? Or GuruLib? Do we really need another of these things?

I'm all in favour of competition, varied resources, different approaches and so on. But this is starting to get a little ridiculous. LibraryThing is way in advance of all the others, so the first thing any competitor has to do is give me a good reason why I should use it, or change from my previously preferred option. Does bookjetty do this? No, of course not.  Next!

Addictomatic

Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It's the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what's up and what's now.

I have to say - it's not at all bad. It pulls out content from Ask news, technorati, Live.com news, Google blog search, digg, YouTube, Flickr, Blinkx, Truveo video search, Word press, Yahoo web search, Bloglines, topix, Newsvine, delicious, and Wikio.

Thanks to Gwen for this one.

Is knowledge hoarding all about your pay cheque?

The other day I was teaching a group of school librarians, and in one of the breaks I spent time talking to one librarian in particular, who was really keen on using Web 2.0 stuff. She'd done everything right - set up a wiki, using a weblog, making bookmarks sharable and so on. And yet the staff, who she was really trying to get on board were just not interested. She was very frustrated and disappointed, and above all puzzled. This article from Library Clips entitled Is knowledge hoarding all about your pay cheque? may well go some way to explaining what's going on. My summary, with my take is below, but I'd encourage you to read the entire article because it's really good.

There are two types of organisation, or two approaches when it comes to information. You either hoard it, or you share it. What you do is determined in large part by the type of corporation you're in. If staff are encouraged to 'eat what they kill' (as John puts it), there is no incentive to share, and so a company fails or succeeds due to the strongest, and the weakest fail and are disposed of. Hopefully just sacked, since I don't want to carry the hunting metaphor  too far.  This doesn't in the long run help the company, given the amount that they will have spent on individuals. In this sort of organisation Web 2.0 resources are not going to work well, because they encourage the second type of organisation.

This is one in which sharing is encouraged, and the entire organisation acts as a family, with everyone benefiting from everyone else. Clearly Web 2.0 stuff is going to be encouraged in this type of organisation because that's the way it works anyway. I'm somewhat surprised that a school is going to be in the former category, with staff setting up their own walled gardens, but I suppose it's in the vein of 'the more you publish the better you are', which again isn't a Web 2.0 approach.

So, if you're having trouble getting colleagues to embrace Web 2.0 stuff, it may well be because of the culture of the organisation, and that is what needs to be addressed first, rather than introducing start pages or whatever. The organisation really needs to change to a sharing, rather than a competing model. And this is one of the reasons why Web 2.0 is anarchic technology, and in many ways so refreshing!

Anyway, read the article, it's really eye opening.

Using Firefox in public libraries - why you should

It never fails to amaze me that people generally are just not using Firefox, when it's so superior to the lumbering beast that is IE. There's an excellent article from the 'Swiss Army Librarian' Using Firefox On Our Public Computers. It gives them more control over the browser, it's easier to use, it's more helpful for searchers, it's more secure and.. it's just better! If you're considering your browsing options in your library I'd strongly recommend reading this short article.

Google Maps Explore - New feature

Google Maps is a great resource and I think it's one of the very best things that they've done. They've now added a really nice new feature - when you look for a location it brings up an opportunity to explore the area through photographs, video and user contributed maps. They've provided some very useful help on how to contribute your own material. An example of what you'll find is below:

Google Maps explore via kwout

Custom-built Search Engines Ariadne Issue 55

I write a column for the online magazine Ariadne and my latest is on the subject of Custom-built Search Engines. I look at what they are, what the alternatives are and why you should use them.

Live Search's new interface and why it won't work

Live Search has finally, after much playing around, launched it's new interface. It should look something like this:

Live Search interface via kwout

Now, what does that remind you of? Just a teensy bit like the clean crisp Google interface that the world knows, perhaps? Actually enforcing the concept of this should be what a search engine interface box looks like. This isn't Live trying to come up with their own brand of interface, and Lord knows plenty of other search engines can and indeed have, this is direct from their 'If you can't beat them, join them' department. It's also making another fundamental flaw, which is that the design constricts the searcher. Instead of helping and assisting, the searcher is forced into the straightjacket of searching the way that Microsoft want them to think.

Now, the next classic schoolchild error comes with the 'More' tab above search. This is exactly the same mess that Google got into a long time ago, by having to prioritize what search elements were most important, and relegating everything else to lesser status. 'More' doesn't tell me anything at all. More what? Search boxes? Search options? Advanced search? (Which is a fun thing itself, because Live doesn't have that as an option, which is, once again, forcing the user to THINK LIKE MICROSOFT!) Anyway, when you click on the 'More' option what do you get? You get a pulldown box that's simply a link which says 'See All'. Now, a couple of points here - if there's only one option, why put this in way of seeing all? Why not just do it? Why make me waste a mouse click? Second point - see all *what*? If I don't know what it is that I'm supposed to be seeing, how can I make any kind of intelligent, informed choice? Is it a list of 2 more things, 20, or 200? Until I actually click on the link I don't know.

As it turns out, I'm taken to another page entirely (therefore changing the basic concept of the search page - at least with Google they keep to the same pull down concept), and I get a choice of links to search options like maps, books, spaces and so on. But, and again we're expected to do as we're told, we have to click on a link to go to the search option. So, in order to do what I want to in the first place I have 2 mouse clicks to work with. It's not a lot, but that's not the issue. The issue is that Microsoft is forcing me down a route that it wants me to go.

So anyway, let's move on and look at the results. I'm comparing them with Google, and they look rather like this:

Live V Google via kwout

Don't worry about trying to make out the words; that's not the point. It's the look of the two sets of pages. They are remarkably similar - so much so that I suspect if I took off the logos and showed them to people they'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. The difference of course is that Google's display is far superior. It's cleaner and admittedly in this example specifically, less advertisement heavy. I can get right to the search results. Other searches will pull up options for related searches, shopping results and so on, which will it still clutters up the top of the page, is vaguely useful. I tried a mobile phones search in both and the results were hysterical. With Google, I got what I expected (as previously mentioned - related and shopping options), while with Microsoft I get 'Top local listings for phones near Mobile, United States' (their emphasis), despite the fact that the engine knows I'm based in the UK.

The Live page is much longer, despite only giving me 8 results with 2 subsidiary results from  2 sites,  while with Google I just had the one subsidiary.  I can't really see any pluses to using the Live option in terms of display. All that I see, and what I suspect that most others will see, is a poor imitation of Google. Now, I'm sure the development team at Microsoft are going to be saying that they ignored Google, and just did what they thought worked best (and having been on the Search Champs team it's exactly what they said then), but clearly this isn't the case. There's nothing new, interesting, exciting or visionary about what they're doing with search. I've seen startups with more thought and vision than Microsoft. They are simply plodding along trying to be an alternative to Google by trying to be exactly like Google. People who want the Google experience are going to go to Google, and people who don't want that are not going to look at the pale imitation - they're going to go for something different.

And that is why Microsoft are not going to get anywhere with this pale imitation. They lack the courage and vision to really look at search differently. If I get a delegate on a course asking me why Live Search should be their preferred search engine I simply couldn't give them a good reason.

Risky websites to be flagged in Yahoo! Search

SiliconRepublic.com: Risky websites to be flagged in Yahoo! Search. From the news report:
Websites that may harm a user’s computer just by visiting them will be omitted from Yahoo! search engine rankings, following a partnership between the search company and security firm McAfee. The new service, entitled SearchScan, also identifies sites that have shown bad email practices, flooding users’ inboxes with spam emails.

SearchScan launched in beta version today and is available for Yahoo! Search users in the UK, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Spain.

PARAseek.com - The Paranormal Search Engine

I recently found PARAseek the Paranormal Search Engine. My normal run of the mill test searches really wouldn't have cut it here, so I did a search on where I live. 3 of the 4 results no longer worked. Well, ok, maybe not their fault, but I was not impressed with the blood dripping font, references to television programmes and so on. I think there's probably a real need for a search engine that covers this subject area sensibly, but this isn't it.

Friends Reunited New and improved

For those of you in the UK, you're probably listed on Friends Reunited. You might be interested to know that it's now been updated. It's entirely free, and has a Web 2.0 feel about it. Unfortunately I think it's all a little too late. We've done the thing of contacting friends, finding out if they're doing better or worse than we are, and then the emails tailing off into silence. Or alternatively, getting on like a house on fire with your first crush, leaving your spouse and kids and it all ending tragically. These are really a one trick pony, and I'll give them their due, they've added in work, the road you lived on, armed forces and so on.

I seldom go back there, and I wasn't amazingly impressed with how it's changed. Most upsetting is that they appear to have deleted all the stuff that everyone wrote about their schooldays! This was without a doubt the best bit of the place, and I wept with laughter at some of the stories. [Edited to add: Apparently the memory boards have only disappeared temporarily and they should be coming back soon.}