Phil Bradley's weblog

FREE ACCESS to my Apps for Librarians video collection!

Since I'm shortly going to be retiring I won't be doing any more work on the Apps for Librarians video collection. This is a collection of over FORTY different videos covering a wide variety of different apps. It covers:

Browsers

     Opera

     Puffin

     Safari

Guiding Tools

     Symbaloo

     Pearltrees

Making Videos

     The equipment you need

     Intro Lite

     Parrot Teleprompter

     iMovie

     Magisto

     Periscope

     Videorama

     Clips

     Stop motion animation

Multimedia Tools

     Augmented Reality

     Podcasting

     Videolicious

News-based Apps

     Mention

     Nuzzel

     Flipboard

Photography Apps

     Aviary

     Google's Photoscan

     Instagram

     Photosynth

Presentation Tools

     Adobe Voice

     Animoto

     Explain Everything

     Haiku Deck

     Padlet

     Post-it notes

     ThingLink

Productivity Tools

     Doceri

     Popplet

     Trello

     Wunderlist

Reference Apps

     Dictionaries

     General Reference Tools

     Location based apps

     Wikigraph

Scanning Tools

     Clixta

     Photomyne

Search Engines

     Allsearch in 1

     Just search

     Phlo

     picTrove Pro

     Startpage

Social Media Networks

     Hootsuite

     Reddit

I'm making access to these videos completely free of charge. You are welcome to use the collection for yourself or within your organisation, I really don't mind. Only two restrictions - please don't make commercial use of them, and attribute back to me with a link. If you want to offer me a tip for the use of the collection that would be very nice and I'm not going to turn it down. Please donate to my PayPal account in my name [email protected] but you don't have to, and you can give as much or as little as you wish. The collection is available at:

http://appsforlibrarians.pbworks.com

Optical illusions

I was sent a link to this page by a scout troop leader. Her daughter Willow, was trying to get a 'making games' badge, and came across a site providing links to lots of optical illusion sites. She thought it was really useful, and I agree with her. Plus, it's important for our younger digital citizens to see that the things they find and suggest for others can really make a big difference. So, if you're asked for information on optical illusions, please take a look at 'Fool your eyes with optical illusions' at https://www.eyebuydirect.com/fool-your-eyes-with-optical-illusions THANKS WILLOW!

Time to go...

Having thought long and hard, I've decided that it's pretty much time to retire. There are various reasons for this - some are personal (and if you know, you know, and if you don't, it's not that important) and others are financial. Quite simply, in order to do my job properly I need to spend a lot of time in front of a computer every day to keep up to date with what's going on in the world of the internet, search and librarianship so that I'm on top of my game when I teach. However, there are very few opportunities to run courses these days, and it seems silly to spend all of that time doing that work when it's hardly being used.

So I'm shutting up shop pretty much at the end of this year. The blog (this one and the social media tools one) will disappear when the account becomes due, and the website will go at the beginning of 2019. I'll write my last CILIP Information Professional column in November - that will probably be the very last 'professional' act that I do. 

I think I've had a pretty good run - I've been a freelance internet consultant since 1995, so I've managed 23 years of finding work for myself, which I think isn't bad. I've written 14 or so books, visited every continent except Antarctica (over 25% of the world's countries) taught at many top universities in the UK, worked for blue chip companies, schools, charities, public and corporate libraries, both Houses of Parliament and the EU. I think the only ambition I was never able to fulfill was to speak at a conference in the US, but I did speak at the Canadian Library Association Conference, and that's only a few miles out. I've been on the board of both Online and Internet Librarian International, the two premier conferences in Europe. I've had the opportunity to work with some of the very best professionals in the world.  I've given speeches, talks, lectures, training sessions and keynotes. I believe that I'm the only person who has written for the Library Association Record, Update and Information Professional. I'll just miss out on being the longest serving contributor, but can't have everything. I spent 4 years in a Presidential role at CILIP, and two of those as President, and that hasn't happened in recent times before. So in professional terms, I think I'll give myself a B+, and I'm content with that. I've met some fantastic people in the whole course of my career, and they have enriched my life. 

I will be posting some thoughts on the places that I've worked, and what I've done, so expect stories from, and opinions about, the British Council, SilverPlatter Information, CILIP and my own work. These will get blogged in due course.

I think that about wraps it up. 

Cheers!

Phil.

 

Gluten free product search engine

It's not until you find out that you can't eat gluten, or that you have a friend in this situation that you realise what a difficult life it can be. There's gluten in a huge range of things, including plenty that you probably wouldn't consider which means constant checking of labels, since even a very small amount can have terrible consequences if eaten. The Gluten Project aims to make life a little easier for people with this condition. Their search engine has a database of 35,000 gluten free products as certified by the American Gluten-Free Certification Organization (GFCO). That's the bit which is not good news for people in the UK since the products are all basically those you'll find in the United States. However, I'm sure that there's going to be a reasonable amount of crossover, which may at least provide some pointers for people.

The database is clear and easy to use. I did a simple search for 'cakes' and got literally dozens of results. They are classified by producer, with the products listed. A small number do give further details, but that simply takes you to another page which shows the product and a link so that you can buy it - I suspect the site makes a small amount as a result, which is fair enough. It's however something of a shame that they don't provide any more details on the producers, such as website, address and so on. This is a really disappointing oversight from an otherwise really helpful resource. Thanks to the ever wonderful and useful ResearchBuzz for giving me the headsup on this. 

My library related Twitter lists

Twitter lists are a really powerful tool, but one that lots of people don't seem to know about. Basically you can add an account to a list that you create. You don't need to follow the person, but it's really easy to just add people when they start following you. Start off by going to https://twitter.com/your_name/followers and you'll see a list of people that are following you. Each person will be in their own little box with a 'Follow' option and next to that, 3 vertical dots. You can choose to follow the person (obviously) and you can also click on the 3 dots. This will give you an option of adding people to a list - 'Add or remove from lists'. 

If you click on this you may find absolutely nothing - this will be the case if you haven't set a list up yet. Simply choose the option to create a list and then call it whatever you would like to. For example, I have lists for 'UK Librarians', 'Search Engine accounts' 'Libraries' 'Friends' and so on. You can make the list publicly accessible or you can keep it private. Once you've set up a few of these lists you can then start adding people to them. One account can be added to multiple lists if so desired, so I'll quite often add someone to my UK librarians list and also my Schools library and librarians list as well. 

Unfortunately you can't just tweet TO a list, but you can see tweets FROM that list. That's really useful if you've spent the day being busy and just want to catch up on what a particular segment of the people that you've listed have been tweeting about. You can either do this directly from the Twitter interface or you can add lists to packages such as Hootsuite. Simply click on your avatar at Twitter.com and the second option will be 'Lists'. Click on that, see the lists you've got, click on one of them, and lo and behold - just tweets from the accounts on that list. 

Of course, you'll quite possibly be on some lists yourself. Click to go to your profile and in the top menu is a section called unsurprisingly 'Lists'. Click on that, then choose 'member of' and you'll see what you've been added to. What you can also do, which is very neat, is to subscribe to any of those lists or others that you find. This means that you don't have to actually follow all of those people - the list will appear in your own collection (though of course you can't add people to it since you don't own it), but you can then just see the tweets from the accounts on the list. So my UK librarians list currently has 1915 accounts on it and you can find it at https://twitter.com/Philbradley/lists/uk-librarians and if you want to, you can subscribe to it. It currently has over 300 subscribers - so this means that you can automatically see what these accounts are tweeting without having to follow them all. 

If you have any questions, do post them. However I'll try and answer a few before we start. You can create as many as you like, with as many members as you want. I do seem to recall a limit of 5,000 but I could be wrong on that. You can keep them private or public. I don't think you can force not being on a list, but of course you could ask the list owner to remove you. You're entirely free to add people, even if you're not following them. Your lists, your choice. 

I've got lots of lists - you can see them at https://twitter.com/Philbradley/lists/ and feel free to subscribe to and use any of them that you want to. The ones that might be of particular interest are:

UK Librarians and this is my guesstimate from people who follow me that they're a)library folk and b)based in the UK. I may be wrong on either or both counts!

School libraries and librarians is a list of school library accounts and school librarians where I've been able to identify them as such. Global in coverage.

Libraries from around the world which could be public, academic (university etc), specialist - anything except school.

Library Associations is a list of professional or voluntary groups that are obviously library related.

There are plenty of others, many of which won't interest you, but feel free to take a look. 

 

ClearScore - not so hot when it comes to privacy

I was slightly surprised to get an email from ClearScore recently. They are the company that can tell you what your credit score is, so their database contains highly confidential and personal information about you and your financial details. I didn't think that I'd signed up with them, but clicked on the link, and then clicked again to reset my password. I then got an email back from ClearScore confirming this had been done. I was then able to log into my account - except that it wasn't my account! It was the account of another person with the same name, but who lived in a different part of the country. I was able to see details on what his ClearScore account was, and get some basic information about him.

This isn't what I was expecting and I was pretty taken aback. I contacted ClearScore and was even more surprised at the response that I got from them. In part it said "Someone has registered for ClearScore using your email address (or a slight variation of it). We understand this email address is yours and it shouldn't have been used so we've suppressed it to make sure that no one can use your email address to sign up for ClearScore in future. Please let me know if you’d like to sign up yourself, and I can help you with this."

Now, it was pretty clear to me by this point that someone else had indeed, for reasons I can't imagine, signed up using my email address. What also seems obvious is that they were able to go in, make up an account, provide data etc to get their ClearScore figure and leave, all without the email being validated! In most instances this isn't going to be an issue, but now and then, and this is one of those times, it's going to open up someone to a clear breach of their security. Now, you could argue that if the person who created the account was stupid enough not to check the email address they signed up with then it's their own fault. However, it's equally clear that ClearScore should have a duty of care to keep peoples personal and private information safe, regardless of how much effort the individuals put into doing that themselves. In this instance no email validation was forthcoming, because it would have come to me and I could have either ignored it or responded that the address was wrong. 

The idea that 'a slight variation' of an email address is enough to get ClearScore to create an account is quite frankly laughable. A computer doesn't say 'oh well, it's not quite the name that was entered but it's close enough, we'll work with that'. I'm also quite taken aback that the person I spoke to doesn't appear to have an concern about the breach of the Data Protection Act; I wonder if they are going to contact my namesake and let him know what they've done - or rather not done? All they seem concerned about is getting me to set up my own account. Somehow that's not going to happen. 

I have emailed back to the contact at ClearScore to seek clarification and have yet to get an answer. As soon as I have, I'll let you know, and in the meantime, if you are thinking of joining a service, do make sure that a)you put the right email address in and b)the company actually validates it before letting you do anything.

Edited to add:

I've had a response from ClearScore. They can't/won't tell me if they are contacting my namesake, which is fair enough I suppose as long as they do. They go on to say:

"With reference to your first point - "does Clearscore use some sort of pattern matching, and if so, does that happen on a regular basis", when a user registers for ClearScore, they are requested to enter their email address. This is a manual process which the user must enter. We have a background check which makes sure the email address is valid. This prevents most typos, for example if a user types [email protected] instead of [email protected], we will alert them to this. Unfortunately, in a very small number of cases if a user types an email address which is valid, this may allow them to register under this address."

So basically, apart from checking a mangled email address THEY DON'T VALIDATE EMAIL ADDRESSES! They go on to say "I have been discussing your case with our security and tech teams and we are currently brainstorming additional ways we can prevent something like this from happening in future." Here's a clue: VALIDATE EMAIL ADDRESSES! This is not hard, nor is it difficult, and it's not exactly rare. It's quite unbelievable.  

New royalty free image search engine

I've been told about Pikwizard, which is an image search engine for royalty free images. I've been playing around with it for a while, and it's really good. It's very clear, there are lots of images available and in the main they were right on topic. I was slightly bemused at one or two entries for my 'library' search (dried corn, pencils and chocolate for example) and it might be an idea to be able to flag some of the tags against images to let the users sort that out. However that's a minor quibble. The images are great - bright, fresh, interesting and most of them (in fact all of the ones that I looked at) are available under a Creative Commons Zero licence, which basically means you can do pretty much anything you want to with the images.

It's an excellent collection and one that I'm going to be visiting on a regular basis. 

Audiosear.ch closes its doors. What now for podcast searching?

Very disappointed to see that Audiosear.ch has closed its doors as of the end of last month. It was a really good podcast search engine and I always started my podcast searches there. If you're casting around (hah! See what I did there?) for an alternative, try Listen Notes which is excellent and indexes 415,107 podcasts and over 24.5 million episodes. It's a great tool and while I'm sorry to see Audiosear.ch go I'm not that worried since we've got this one as a great option instead. 

Google continues to destroy its search engine

Google really does seem set on a path of self destruction, at least as far as search engine functionality goes. They've changed the way that the search operator 'info:' works, and it's severely damaged the functionality. As regular searchers will know, info:<URL> used to provide you with lots of useful information. You got a link to the cache that Google had stored for the particular page, web pages that are similar to the page, web pages that link to the page URL in question, web pages from the site itself, and finally webpages that contained the URL being searched. You also got a nice little snippet of the page - and that's the only bit that now remains. Everything else has gone. You can still search for the information that you want, it's just that you need to do it in separate steps now, rather than having a nice neat collection all in one place. 

It is of course a real shame, and there's no real reason why Google had to do this. The multi-billion company may have felt that it was too expensive to keep the function operational, but that makes little sense to me. I really think that Google simply cares less and less about search. I think they will continue to cut functions because they know that they can. Most people will still use Google because they don't know any different, and as usual it's serious searchers who will bear the brunt of this.

Google improves search; makes it much harder

In a blog post Google has said that it's making search results more local and relevant. What it's actually done is to make things much more difficult, and far more messy. Let me explain. When you want to search on Google you type in your search and you get your results. If you want to see results from another country, such as the Netherlands, you could go to the Netherlands page, run your search and you'd get results appropriate for that country. It's obviously useful if you want to get local information about a person, place, event and so on. However, Google has now decided that it's going to overrule the searcher, and irrespective of which country version you go to, Google will give you results based on your current country. They are now including an indication of that in the bottom left hand corner of the page. They explain "So if you live in Australia, you’ll automatically receive the country service for Australia, but when you travel to New Zealand, your results will switch automatically to the country service for New Zealand. Upon return to Australia, you will seamlessly revert back to the Australian country service." Clearly there is a bias here in favour of mobile search, and apparently 1 in 5 searches is location based. Which of course means that 80% of searches are not, but the results are still biased.

So now we have a great many ways of searching for information, none of them at all perfect. Let's start with a search in which Google doesn't know who or where I am, by using Google via DuckDuckGo. By searching for firearms policy !google DDG is taking me to Google and showing me results. There's an instant answers on Dangerous Weapons and Firearms Policy from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Next is a Wikipedia result on the firearms policy of the UK, and third is a twitter account @gun policy.

Next I'll go to Google.com and try the same search - remembering that Google is aware that I'm in the UK. I get exactly the same result as I got with DuckDuckGo. Either Google is able to work out from DDG where I am, or DDG is actively telling Google. Alternatively my browser is telling Google where I am - it certainly brings up my local address at the bottom of the screen, so we'll come back to that later. 

Now let's try a search to include site:.uk to see what we get, still using Google.com. I now get a totally different set of results, the first two from BASC (The British Association of Shooting and Conservation) and the third is from Gov.uk on Firearms licensing law 2016.

Let's move to Google.co.uk and see what we get. Back to the results that Google.com and DDG were giving me; UAB, Wikipedia and the twitter account.

Using Google.co.uk and using site:.uk we get exactly the same results as Google.com and a site search, which makes sense.

Let's confuse matters now and change browser, and use a VPN so that Google thinks that I am in the Netherlands. My Google.com result is now completely different, giving me results from the Firearms Policy Coalition in 1st and 2nd spot, and the Firearms Policy of the UK from Wikipedia. 

If I now add in my site:.uk search it's a completely different set again. The first result is from the BMA on advice to doctors on the firearms licensing process, second is from the College of Policing, and the third is from BASC again. 

To further confuse matters, I can adjust my country results by going into settings, advanced search, and choosing a region. Let's try that with Google.com. We now have another completely different set of results. The first is from BASC, as is the second, but a totally different page relating to Wales, and the 3rd result is from the London Borough of Barnet. 

Trying a multi-search engine, eTools, I disabled all the search engines except for Google and got the Firearms Policy Coalition in 1st and 2nd and @gunpolicy in 3rd place. 

Next I used the TOR browser, and DuckDuckGo. For this result, Google decided that I was based in the Netherlands, and gave me results that were familiar - Firearms Policy Coalition in 1st and 2nd place, and the Twitter account in 3rd place. However, when I looked at the results that I got from Opera, using a VPN based in Netherlands it was a different set again. This was quite interesting, so I tried searching on Tor and Google.com (Netherlands) and firearms policy site:.uk and compared it to the Opera VPN also based in the Netherlands. The Tor version gave the College of Policing in 1st place, a student manual from the University of Chicago in 2nd, and the BMA in third place. The Opera results gave me Gov.uk firearms licensing law, the BMA and then BASC. 

So within a short space of time I've got a fairly wide variety of search results to choose from - and don't forget that I'm simply limiting myself to the top three results with each search; there's going to be a lot of other differences further down the results I'm sure. 

What this DOESN'T do is make life easier for the searcher. It does mean that Google can further personalise and then monetize search in their favour. The simple answer? Just don't use Google!