Phil Bradley's weblog

Google adds blogsearch filter

Google has announced that they have added a new function when you're searching blogs. As you know, if you run a search and limit your search to blogs (using the left hand menu) you'll get to see blog posts and also a short listing of blogs that Google thinks are particularly appropriate. You can now click on the 'More search tools' option (towards the bottom of the left hand menu) and can choose 'homepages'. Alternatively, you may find the option already available, so take a look! The idea being that you'll get straight to the blog home pages of those blogs that are specifically interested in the subject that you're searching for.

Twitter hashtags: quick guide

Twitter hashtags are the strange little oddities that you find on lots of tweets, and they use the hash symbol # followed by something else, so an example would be #cilip. They're very useful, but can be a bit puzzling, so let's shine a light on them.

The first thing to know about hashtags is that they are entirely informal. They're not something that Twitter has instituted, and there are very few 'rules' about how they are used. Actually scratch that - there are no rules at all, just a general code of practice. You don't have to ask any permission to use them, there's no central authority, and you can use them pretty much however you'd like to.

Why do they exist? Well, suppose that you're interested in a particular subject, conference, television programme, event or other similar 'thing'. If anyone you follow tweets about it, the chances are that you'll see it, but what about all the other folk who are also talking about the same thing who you don't follow? You'll be missing all their tweets and information. Now, you can of course do a search at any number of search engines to try and find appropriate information, but how do you find it? There are plenty of different ways that you can refer to something - in short, there's no controlled vocabulary. However, if people can agree on a specific word to use in their tweets, this can in part be overcome, as you can just search for that word, and to enhance, or emphasis it, the # helps identify the keyword even more. Consequently, you can then just search for #keyword and you'll see all the tweets that people are writing, all gathered together in one place.

A second way in which tweets are used is to emphasis something - it's almost like writing in bold or italics - people don't really expect you to search for similar tweets, they're just making their own personal point, such as #gladitsfriday although sometimes these hashtags do seem to take on a life of their own, and you'll find that other people start to use them - I see #latenightlibrarian quite often for example. 

You may also find that people will use a specific hashtag to gather a series of tweets together if they're running a training course, just to make it easy for everyone to see what everyone is up to.

There are of course disadvantages to this system. Since it's unofficial and people make it up as they go along, you'll find that the same event can be referred to by any number of hashtags, which kind of defeats the point really! The television show Big Brother might be referred to as #BB or #BB11 or #BigBrother or #BigBro but generally you'll find that after a short space of time a common usage will prevail. Some people write really long hashtags, which I think is illadvised, since every hashtag character reduces the amount of tweet space you have. This is a particular irritant with conferences - the conference organisers do seem to put great store on the year of the conference, but as Twitter is primarily real time it's pretty obvious that tweets about the conference are taking place now! There are exceptions obviously, but the shorter the tag, the better. Ideally a tag should make some sort of sense - a tweet with #cilip on it is probably going to be about CILIP - a real no brainer. However, as long as a group of people agree on a tag, it doesn't matter what it is, that's the delight of the system. Hashtags also break quite easily, since they only work with a basic character set, and symbols can break them, since it's only the first part of the tag that will be recognised, so #Web2.0 would be seen as #Web2. Another disadvantage is that if spammers see a hashtag trending they can add in their own spam, together with the tag, and this can be rather irritating.

There are a few helpful hashtag resources that you can use. Hashtags.org displays recent tweets, their content, and has a graph of the use of the term in the last few days. If you see a tag that you don't understand, What The Trend can help identify it for you. Twubs does something similar; it groups tags together, allows you to 'register' (entirely unofficially and unenforceably) a tag, and it displays popular tags. If you see a tag and you don't know what it means, try out Tagalus which shows you the definition for a tag, but again it's worth stressing that it's not official at all. What the Hashtag also does the same thing.

Conference organisers may wish to make use of resources such as TweetChat, TwitterFall, or TweetGrid to display the tags real time. 

That's a quick overview - there's more detail at the Twitter FanWiki that you might want to take a look at as well, but what you've just read should be enough to get you up and started.

Frank Skinner and libraries

Not a phrase that you expect to see very often, is it? For those of you who don't know who he is, he's a third rate comedian who sometimes has a chat show on British television and is probably best known for once helping to write a football song. For those of you who have not read this article, you're probably better off. It starts with a heading and subheading: "Sorry, the demise of the library is well overdue. I love books but I draw the line at old, large-print ones hiding previous borrowers' diseases". No, you didn't read that incorrectly - later on he goes on to talk about catching dysentery, I kind you not.

The whole piece is a poorly written, ill thought out but vitriolic attack on libraries, which he admits only having visited about ten times. In his entire life. Consequently his 'opinion' is based on very little of any substance and is worth even less. He's trotting out the usual 'statistic' that's going the rounds at the moment 'One expert says that between six hundred and a thousand local libraries could close in the next twelve months'. I'm already sick of this, and it's a stick that's being used to beat us and has the danger of becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. It's really NOT helpful, at all - especially when used by third rate celebrities who think we can replace the term 'local' with rubbish, so thanks for that Skinner.

That The Times is publishing this dross should come as no real surprise, but it's disappointing none the less. As for Skinner - he may not be much of a comedian, but he's certainly a joke.

YouTube: Really bad advertising

I've seen some bad and badly placed adverts in my time, but this one over at YouTube is the worst.

I was alerted to it by DigitalMaverick who expressed some surprise about it, and I can only agree. It doesn't look like an advert on first quick site - I think it's specifically designed to confuse people into thinking that YouTube is asking for their details - particularly since the Betfair advert appears below and to the right - it's only the tiny 'Close Ad' option top right of Mr Thug that gives it away. I wonder how many people have been conned into this. If you put your details in you're then invited to press play to hear Andy Gray's tips (the previously referred to Mr Thug - sorry Andy, but really!).

Very poor show YouTube, and as for Betfair - I won't be using your services thanks very much.

Google realtime search

Google's now got a formal 'Realtime' search page that you can visit for realtime information. You can read the official blog post for their take on it. It's got some useful functionality attached to it. Let's start with a quick look at the results page for a 'cilip' search.

We get a nice little time line right at the start of the results, and it's possible to then go back in time to look at previous results - very useful if you want to see particular spikes:

Unfortunately this only goes back to February 2010, although Google is planning on extending this. There are however no plans to provide an advanced search function, so the Twitter search options are still providing more detail and functionality if you really want to get into a search.

It's also possible to view conversations, which is a very useful option - the 'Full conversation' option brings all of the discussions together in one place, although if someone has retweeted a protected tweet you can't actually see the original, even though Google implies that you can. There's also a 'Custom Location' option so that you can see tweets from a specific location, although again with Twitter search you can specify a location and distance from. Another useful feature is the ability to create an email alert, although no RSS option as far as I can see.

The number of results is far superior to Bing, which only gave me three results for the same search. However, comparing what Google is offering with other real time search engines I remain entirely underwhelmed. Let's take a look at the SocialMention page for the same search:

At SocialMention we're offered a richness of information - not only are the results more current than either Google OR Bing (though Bing picked up my test tweet - I'm still waiting for Google to find it), but we get average mentions, top users, keywords, sentiment, retweets, hashtags, a wider variety of sources (which to be fair is how SocialMention found my tweet, but what I'm after is real time information, and SocialMention gives me that), RSS and Email alert options. Granted, Google is giving me the conversation aspect which SocialMention doesn't, but that's not exactly a killer option for me.

Collecta is another realtime search engine, and while I don't think it's got as much as SocialMention it's picked up my tweet quicker than Google realtime search:

The 48ers search engine that I looked at recently also was quicker on the update that Google realtime search. Meanwhile over at IceRocket we're getting tweets, blog posts, images, news, Facebook entries and a current Twitter feed.

At 22 minutes in, Google realtime search has found and displayed my tweet. Not exactly realtime, but could this just be a glitch? I tried various other terms which I found on my own tweetstream, and both Google and Bing simply couldn't compete with SocialMention or Collecta. Admittedly, Google picked up tweets much quicker than the test one that I tried, but as far as I'm concerned, neither Google or Bing are up to scratch on this yet. The conversation element apart (which I can get from other resources, such as JournoTwit) Google realtime search isn't worth using. To my mind it's just further proof, if needed, that Google just doesn't get social search.

Google City Tours

This is quite a fun one, which I hadn't noticed before. Google has produced some city tours, and the one for London looks like this:

As you can see, it tells you how long it takes to walk from one location to another, and a suggested amount of time to spend at each attraction, though I'm slightly dubious about that - 45 minutes each for Westminster Abbey and the Cabinet War Rooms - I don't think so! However, it's a nice idea, and you can add or remove sites and get yourself ready for your trip. They also do them for San Francisco, New York and Dublin. Wouldn't it be great if a local library could do something similar for it's town or village!

Hidden object games

I wasn't aware of this type of game until a friend of mine pointed it out to me. The idea is very simple - you have a picture, usually quite complex and busy and you have to find images within it that you can click on. They then disappear and you get more until you complete the puzzle. A bit like 'Where's Wally?' I think. There are hundreds of these things, and as a word of warning, they're very addictive and you can spend hours playing them. Some are more educational than others, but I can certainly see how they could be used in a classroom situation. I did manage to find one that was library based and I've included a screenshot below:

The idea behind this one is that you have to hunt down numbers; it's not the most fun, but as I say, it's a library related one from Games2dress. Maybe in a couple of years we could do an image of the whole of the UK and have a 'hunt the library' one?

AlphaGalileo

AlphaGalileo.calls itself "Europe's leading online service for the best of news releases and other information from science, health, technology, the arts, humanities, social sciences and, recently, business. The news service, which is moderated, is provided by the independent not-for-profit organisation, AlphaGalileo Foundation Ltd. We only occasionally originate news material or write releases. We act as bridge between the research community and the media. We receive science news from prominent scientific organisations and disseminate it on their behalf to the world's media. We provide 24/7 access to press releases, event details, publications, multimedia items and broadcast media, reporting on the recent developments in research."

Not something I know that much about, so I'm particularly interested in any comments you've got regarding it that will guide other readers. I did do some searching on it, and the results are clearly displayed, with a good summary, arranged by date or relevance. Seems to be fairly up to date as well. Results came from sources such as the ESRC, Technical Research Centre of Finland, universities, Elsevier and Wiley to name a few.

Ask Scotland

Ask Scotland is an online information service provided by Scotland's libraries that lets you get real answers from real people direct from your desktop. Your questions will go to a librarian who will research your query and send a customised response. There's also a chat now option.

Not entirely sure about the sample questions though - 'Why do Scots wear kilts?' being the first one and just a tad stereotypical? Recently answered questions seemed to relate to history, rather than anything else. There's an answerbase which is searchable, and is great for giving a feel for the extent of the answer, which are - as one would expect - clearly laid out with citations and links.

Really good resource, and a lovely example of what libraries can do to counteract the 'it's all on Google' nonsense.

Search for tutorials

I always like to try and say something positive about resources that I take a look at, but sometimes it's very difficult. Such is the case with ThinkTutorial which is a great idea - tutorials based on a variety of different computer/internet related subjects.

It describes itself as "a database of simple, easy to follow tutorials covering all aspects of popular computing." There are currently 383 tutorials available, covering subjects such as Facebook, Google, Word, Firefox, Twitter and so on. I have no idea who actually creates the tutorials - that's simply just not referenced and consequently I'm unhappy right at the start. If I don't know who created it, how do I trust that they've got it right? And if a tutorial is pants, is it because that particular person didn't know what they were doing, and are they better in other subject areas or what? Consequently I'm not trusting the data to begin with.

Second point - the search option is rubbish. I ran a search for 'Twitter' and got 6 tutorials. However, going through their 'topics' option I got 15. The tutorials themselves are also pretty dire. This is the full text of the tutorial on 'How to send a tweet on twitter' - Type your message into the What's happening box on the top of your screen. [Image] Click Tweet. [Image] Seriously. That's it. Nothing about 140 characters even!

The one for Facebook chat is just as sparse: Click on the Chat button at the bottom right of your screen. [Image] Double click on the friend you wish to chat to. [Image] Enter your message into the bottom of the chatbox and hit enter. There were a few Facebook tutorials, but nothing on privacy, which is the hottest topic related to Facebook.

A real disappointment, and I don't really think this site/search resource has anything to recommend it at all.