Phil Bradley's weblog

Did you know 4.0

If you watched the original 'Shift happens' video, (and lets face it, most of us did) you may be interested to know that a newly updated version, Did you know 4.0 has now been released. It tends to focus on convergence, rise of social media, fall of traditional sources and comes with lots of facts and figures (together with citations!) It's certainly interesting and I'll be using it in my sessions this year, though I don't find it as compelling as the original version. Sequels huh?

Google Fast Flip

When you're looking at a news stand or collections of magazines in WH Smiths I imagine that you do what I and most everyone else does - we look at the pretty pictures to see what attracts us. Google folk obviously do the same thing as well, since they've now created Google Fast Flip which allows users to skim through news stories by viewing an enlarged thumbnail. Looks something like this:

 

You can obviously choose different sections to look at, and can flip back and forth between different screens. I found the images slightly too small to see easily (certainly on my laptop) but certainly there were a few items that caught my eye that I probably wouldn't have looked at.

It's an interesting idea, but in all honesty I don't tend to visit Google news all that much - isn't that what RSS and news alerts are for?

Silobreaker adds embeddable widgets

Image via CrunchBase

Silobreaker has long been my news search engine of choice. It pulls in content from a wide variety (15,000) of sources and combines content to provide access to not only current news headlines, but fact sheets, networks, trends, hotspots, blogs, audio visual news and so on.

The search engine has now released some of those widgets directly to bloggers and web authors to allow them to embed them directly into their own sites. Available from now, the widgets can be licensed for use to feature appropriate content simply and quickly.

If you're a news junkie, or you want to provide your users with news information I'd certainly suggest taking a look.

Search UK events with woZZon

I like this search engine. Type in your postcode or the area that you're interested in, choose your event and woZZon will find matches for you. As well as events it finds movies in your area, music, theatre, pubs, coffee shops and so on. I did a few specific and general searches and it came up trumps every time. This is a search engine that I'll be using on a regular basis.

Guardian to publish exclusively on Twitter!

Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink . This is the shock announcement from the newspaper today. Rio Palof, a key journalist explains that their content will be limited to 140 characters for each story.

Archives also to be re-written. A mammoth project is also underway to rewrite the paper's archive. For example; "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"

More details available by following the link. Do check the date though!

Social media in primary schools

Apparently the government is proposing that primary school students should be taught how to use Twitter, Wikipedia and so on. TechCrunch has an article on it: Please Sir, how do you re-tweet? - Twitter to be taught in UK primary schools and the BBC is also covering this: Primary pupils 'study Twitter'. As with other government ideas related to children and the internet all this shows is that they simply have no clue as to the situation.

Firstly, there is a huge, and I mean HUGE opposition within schools to the introduction of social media resources. I have run eight courses so far this year for school librarians and the overwhelming message is that the IT has access to resources shut down tightly (and I mean that sometimes it's not possible to get access to Google Mail, delicious, obviously Facebook and YouTube, Netvibes, Twitter and the rest). Various reasons are given for this, from none at all, through to 'it's not safe', 'protecting the children', 'virus concerns' and so on. In some instances the technical support team block access to things when they don't even know what they do! This was reported to me by one school librarian recently. Of course, if the government suggests that it's a good idea to open access to different resources it's going to happen isn't it - just don't hold your breath. All too often the IT squad appear to be more interested in making their own lives easier rather than doing the job of supporting staff.

Second problem that we've got is the most of the staff don't have any concept - at all - about these resources. Again, school librarians are reporting to me that it's difficult to get staff interested in resources or doing anything new at all. Who is going to teach pupils all of this stuff?

Finally, the concept is entirely wrong. Pupils should NOT be taught about Wikipedia and Twitter. These are simply tools used for another purpose. Students need to be taught effective search, and effective communication. Concentrating on an individual tool is pointless, because that tool isn't always going to be there; it may crash and burn or simply be unavailable. Students need to be shown the best way to appreciate and evaluate knowledge from wherever it comes; via Wikipedia, a Google search, a newspaper or a library book. Concentrating on tools and not processes is not going to achieve anything at all.

NewsCred for news information

NewsCred. is a search engine that draws together 'credible' news in one place. It's divided into tabs for breaking news, world, us, uk, europe, sports, technology and so on. RSS feeds are available. Users can register and vote for stories, personalizing individual newspapers. Users can also choose their news sources and for once it's a resource that actually lists the resources used.

It looks very Web 2.0, with lots of little boxes, quite busy, but with plenty of white space so that it's not overwhelming. It's worth taking a look at.

AllInOneNews - A News Metasearch Engine

The AllInOneNews search engine collates data from 1,800 news engines from 200 countries in order to provide searchers with very basic, but reasonable results. A search will provide users with title, source, date (day and time), short summary and photograph if available. It would appear to be possible to search back to 1988, but I ran a search for 'America' with dates from 1988-1990 and got zero results, and a search for 'Bush' from 1988 - 2008 only returned 99 results, so I'm not overly confident of either coverage by date or news resource. It doesn't seem to have any advanced search functionality, though to be fair it does have an RSS option - either terms they've chosen or you can input your own.

Bottom line - too basic for anything other than very simple searching, and you'd be better off sticking to Silobreaker.

Happenr.com - What's going on where? - Real-time event information at your fingertips

Happenr.com - What's going on where? - Real-time event information at your fingertips. Nice little engine that lets you see what events are taking place in your area. Seems to cover all Europe. Search by country, category, period and place as well as date.

Alltop, all the top stories

Alltop, all the top stories. This titles itself as an online magazine rack of popular topics. Basically it grabs RSS feeds from major blogs in various subject areas and displays the top 5 stories from each on the screen. Very easy to see and read and a good way to rip your way through a lot of content very quickly. Like it. Hat tip to Daynah for alerting me to this one.