Phil Bradley's weblog

My CILIP Council presentation 29/04/09

I have embedded my presentation for the CILIP Council meeting (hashtag #CILIP2) into my weblog, so you can see it. Unfortunately because it's almost entirely images it's not going to mean a great deal to anyone who isn't going to be following at Twitter. Either go to Twitter, run a search and refresh regularly, or visit TwitterFountain and change the settings to #CILIP2 and view it live. I'll be tweeting as it happens - Jill (my wife) will also be attending and she'll be tweeting my session for me.

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by Philbradley

CILIP2.0 - Council Open Session

Further to the series of discussions and blog postings that arose out of a post that I wrote (CILIP - Epic Fail) responding to Bob McKee's own blog post (All of a twitter), both I and my friend and colleague Brian Kelly have been asked to speak at CILIP2.0 - Council Open Session on use of Web 2.0  which is taking place next Wednesday afternoon (details behind the link). The idea behind the session is to "generate some really good ideas about how the Council could be using Web 2.0 to engage better with the LIS community and the individuals in it - both members and non-members."

I'm very keen that both Brian and I are able to articulate ideas and concepts that are important to everyone who has an interest in the provision of information. I've been looking back at the comments made in various blogs, so I have a fairly clear idea of what I want to say, but if you have a particular point, idea or comment that you'd like Brian or myself to try and put across please do let us know, either in the comments to this blog posting, or over on Brian's weblog - I know that he's writing a similar post as well. We've only got 15 minutes each, so I can't make specific promises, but we'll do our best!

New Search Engine Duck Duck Go

The wonderful people at Pandia alerted me to Duck Duck Go which is a new search engine that's trying to provide better results with less spam. It has a nice simple Google like interface, which is as minimal as you can get. Depending on the search query, Duck Duck Go (I have no idea why it's called that by the way) either provides a small factual box with information (which unfortunately it takes from Wikipedia; disappointing), asks for clarification (Duck Duck Go knows Apple can mean different things. Which meaning?) or displays a series of results, though quite limited. Any serious searcher is going to continually be clicking on the 'more links' option.

There is a nice shortcut icon bar to the right which allows searchers to copy their search directly across to YouTube, Twitter, IMDB, Amazon and so on. Nice touch.
I'd like to see this engine doing a lot more however. No help options! No RSS feeds, no indication of any options to allow users to search across news, images, blogs and so on, without leaving the site. While I was happy with the search engine it didn't hugely inspire me to be honest, and while a spam free search engine is great, I generally do find Google works pretty well for me in that area, and I'm still to be convinced about DDG. One to bookmark and revisit in 6 months or so I think.

Google's timeline experiment

Google has been running a timeline experiment for quite some time now, and I've mentioned it in the past. They've played around with it some more and changed the way it looks on the screen, which I think is a great improvement.

There are various options, such as type of resource (news, blogs, music and artworks for example) and you can change the display to month, year or decade if you wish.

This is where the problem with the resource rears its head. I did a search on Barack Obama, and expected early news references to talk about his early days in politics, but found a reference to 2002 which was from the Guardian newspaper talking about the problems he was going to face when taking office as president. It turns out that the article started with "Ever since January 11 2002, when the first 20 prisoners were flown in from Afghanistan in orange jumpsuits and shackles". Consequently you end up with results like this:

Meanwhile Google is saying this is "a web application that organizes information chronologically. Google News Timeline allows users to view news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and more on a zoomable, graphical timeline." Clearly it doesn't - or at least, it doesn't do it very well.

Ask getting increasingly desperate

You always know when a television soap is getting worried about their dropping ratings - they'll bring back a character from the dead to try and get people interested again. Well, Ask has just done exactly that with the Jeeves Butler character, and has also re-re branded itself in the UK as 'Ask Jeeves' again. This is apparently due to user requests, though if that's the case I wonder why they haven't done anything about their dreadful interface and rubbish results, since I image that a lot more users have been requesting some improvements in the service.

The character itself has undergone a makeover, but really - do we care? Ask don't appear to either actually, since there's no mention of it in their weblog. I could waste your time (and mine) going into detail about what they've done, but the long and the short of it is that Ask is continuing to spiral even further into oblivion, and like the soap opera, viewing figures will continue to decline.

StillTasty: Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide

The StillTasty search engine isn't really one that I'd normally mention in my weblog, but I discovered it a while ago and mentioned it in Twitter, then forgot its name and had to spend ages refinding it again. So it's in the blog in order to make my life easier.

Basically you provide it with a product, it asks you some questions to clarify what you're interested in and then tells you how long the product can safely be kept for. I asked about cheddar cheese, we clarified this down to an opened block in a wrapping that was kept in the fridge and I got a suggestion for 3-4 weeks. It also gave me some suggestions on the best way to keep it, what to do if mold develops and so on.

The site also provides answers to very sensible and quite interesting questions - is bottled water safe to drink after its sell by date, and is it safe to still eat pizza that's been left out overnight as two examples. (Yes and No, in case you're wondering).

This is a site that's a real time sink, so only go and have a look when you can devote a good half hour or more to it!

Google Similar Image Search

This isn't hot off the press, but I've only just had a chance to take a look at this - it's a really interesting Google image search development called Similar Images  which is currently available in the labs section of the site. It's not too hard to work out what's going on here; you do a search for an image and take a look through the results. Under some (though not all) images there's a 'similar images' option which provides you with, yes - you guessed it - similar images. I started with a search for London, saw an image of a London bus, asked for similar images and this is a small part of what I got:

Very simple to use, and for obvious images it worked very well indeed. It was however very easy to trip it up - it compared pairs of trainers to a rifle at one point for example, but it would be churlish to be too sarcastic at this stage. I found that it also worked very well with the colour option, so it was very easy to get images of drawn red dragons for example.

Google/Yahoo comparision cheat sheet

Ever confuse the syntax that you should use with Google and Yahoo, and type in the wrong command? If that's the case with you, then I would suggest that you take a quick look at this cheat sheet which compares Google and Yahoo commands quickly and neatly.

BBC news mess up Footie results

Any Manchester United supports checking the BBC website will be in for a disappointment. Everton won the semi final 4-2 on penalities, yet the BBC site is proudly displaying:

Man Utd beat Everton in shoot-out? I don't think so!

Visuwords; graphical dictionary

If you like words, you'll love playing around with Visuwords, which is a graphical dictionary. Type in your word and you're more likely than not to end up with a graphical creation like this:

You can hover your mouse over each definition and click to re-search the dictionary. The coloured links indicate useful information about the word and its relationship to other words. It uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers.

Nice, attractive and quick - bound to attract children as well as adults.