Phil Bradley's weblog

Audiobaba Music Search

Audiobaba Music Search is a next generation music search engine that allows you to find songs by acoustic similarity. Until now, there was no easy to way to browse for new music. Audiobaba lets you tell it what kind of music you like and returns results that sound like it but are in fact different. This isn't a new search engine - it's been around for a good few months now and has been on my list to visit.

It works well - I tried it with a couple of unusual songs and it not only found them, but came up with good suggestions for other music in a similar vein. Worth taking a look at.

GrabAll

GrabAll is a search engine that lets you compare results from different engines next to each other. You run a search and then have a choice of viewing 2 of Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, DMOZ, AltaVista, Gigablast, Looksmart for web searching. It's also possible to do image searching, using Google, Yahoo, Webshots, Pbase, AOL or Ditto. Oddly enough when I ran a search here Google was acting under Strict SafeSearch, while Yahoo was running with SafeSearch off.

Other search options include Map (US only), audio, price, reference, software, people, weather and  local.

Thanks to Karen for this one - I found it in one of her slideshare presentations, 'Update on Search Tools'.

Cluuz visual search engine

Link: Cluuz. is a visual search engine that provides results in a variety of different ways - via networking chart with links between concepts, in clusters or lists. It comes up with some very odd stuff - it was really keen to associate my name with the term 'young person excluded' for some reason I couldn't fathom. It's using the Yahoo and MSN databases from what I can tell, but not doing a great job of it - paying rather too much attention to photograph sharing sites for example. May be of interest if you like your results in a visual format.

Dublin City Public Libraries on Facebook

Dublin City Public Libraries. now have a Facebook page. This includes a newsfeed, photographs, RSS, Flickr pics and other stuff as well. Really nice example of what can be done.

50 best cult books - Telegraph

A week or so back the Telegraph did a list of 100 books you must have in a library or some such, and now they've done 50 best cult books. I have to say that I disagreed with almost all of their choices, which is what makes it all so much fun. Comments are worth a read as well!

Sutton leading the way on unhelpfulness?

So here's the thing. For various personal reasons I have to do my work in the Sutton Public Library once a fortnight. They used to have nice little study areas where I could plug my laptop into, get onto the wi-fi and spend the day working. Currently they're doing some sort of refurbishment and have closed off the entire area. Which means there isn't as much space as there was.

However, there's a useful Internet area with machines, tables, sockets and other marvels, so I've been using that for a while. I've slotted myself between two desktop computers and spent the day working. 9.30 arrives, I settle down and start work. About 13.00 a librarian comes up to me and says 'You have to move. You're not allowed to use your own laptop here.' I asked why and she said that it's because they don't have the room, and people were complaining about lack of space. Which would be fair enough except that there has clearly been enough space when I've been there before, and for the whole of the morning. It would also have been nice if there was actually a sign to that effect, but no.

Fair enough - if those are the rules, then I'll move. So I asked the librarian if there was somewhere else I could go. She waved in the direction of downstairs. 'Are there any sockets there that I could use?' I asked. 'I don't know. You'll have to look. I expect so.' She almost literally stood over me while I packed up and moved. Downstairs I go, look around, no sockets. Another librarian. 'Anywhere I can...etc' 'No, nothing here. Try down on the ground floor. There may be one there.' I'm sensing a theme here - perhaps they're trying to win an award for 'Most unhelpful librarian of the year'?

I found the area - no luck, all the seats were taken, which wasn't a surprise. Eventually I've managed to get a space in some public area and back online.

Now if I was in the wrong - fair enough. But not only have I done this plenty of times before, I'd been in the same place all morning, but the impression was given to me that I was being a nuisance and causing other people problems. No signs up to say that I couldn't be there though, so that doesn't really work for me. No need for rude and unhelpful behavior either. I understand that if they're working on an area it's going to make life difficult, but I think it's reasonable to work out what the ramifications are of doing work and to try and get around them. Simply saying 'go away' doesn't really cut it in my book. It's been a very long time since I've had a negative experience in a library, so I guess that it was bound to happen at some point. Can't say that I feel very welcome at Sutton any longer though. Maybe I'll try and find a Starbucks instead.

How to Analyze your Site with Del.icio.us

This is a really useful article if you're interested in learning How to Analyze your Site with Del.icio.us. I've mentioned del.icio.us a few times as a search tool, and Ann Smarty has provided some great examples of what can be done. For example, it's possible to use Delicious to search a specific website page using http://del.icio.us/url/ Doing this for my home page shows that it's been saved by 153 people, with the tags Internet, library, resources and search being the most popular ones. On the other hand, my Web 2.0 I want to page has been saved over 6,000 times, with tools and Web2.0 being the most popular tags.

Ann also suggests using Similicio.us to find related sites. Google's done this for a long time of course, but it's always a good idea to have an alternative. Finally, a Firefox plug in, SeoQuake, which provides more information to web authors gives more content as well.

Word of the day is 'exaflood'

From a BBC News story "Does online video threaten the net?" we get the word 'exaflood'. It is derived from the word 'exabyte'  which is a huge amount of data. It's estimated that in 5 exabytes you could list all the worlds ever spoken by human beings. By 2011 more than 12 exabytes will be crossing the net every month. 30% of the traffic will be video, and another 43% will be people swapping video and other files via peer-to-peer networking.

However representatives of the ISPs interviewed didn't seem overly bothered by this, and the general message coming out of the report was 'don't panic!' Not that I was, but - y'know, it's better to be safe than sorry.

Google accounts for more than a third of UK traffic — Internet Retailing

Google accounts for more than a third of UK traffic.

Online intelligence service Hitwise reveals that the top 100 Google Internet properties sent over one third of all Internet traffic to websites in the UK during March 2008. A custom category consisting of the 100 most visited web properties in the UK that are owned by Google Inc. accounted for 36.55% of upstream traffic to all categories of websites in the UK during March 2008, up from 30.19% in March 2007.

The most visited Google property in the UK is www.google.co.uk and, with a market share of 7.77% of all UK Internet visits in March, it was also the most visited website in the UK last month. www.google.co.uk was also the website that sent most traffic to other websites during March, accounting for 27.48% of upstream traffic to all categories. This was followed by www.google.com , which had a market share of 1.70% and accounted for 4.43% of all upstream traffic in March.

CILIP Q&A

My CILIP | Q&A has been published for the month of May. It covers presentation software, Google variants on its home page, using memory sticks and my site of the month. It's a brief read, but you might like it! :)