Phil Bradley's weblog

Babel Fish at Yahoo!

Link: Yahoo! Babel Fish - Translation. Yahoo! has added Babel Fish to its collection. You can use it to translate blocks of text from one language to another, or to translate a web page. It's not brilliant, but it usually gives you enough information to work out what you're looking at.

BBC Programme Catalogue

Link: BBC Programme Catalogue. This is a pretty remarkable collection. It details 946,614 BBC Radio and TV programmes, dating back 75 years, including 500,000+ categories and over 1 million contributors. What it doesn't have is the actual film/audio, just an index to the programmes. It's also not comprehensive. I did a quick search for me, since I've been on a few things - it quickly located an interview I gave back in the 1980's, but missed out on the more recent radio interviews that I've given, but I have to say that it was pretty freaky to find myself listed at all!

It also has links out to Wikipedia, tag clouds and feeds in the form of FOAF and Atom. Many thanks to Tom Roper for pointing it out.

Search for Video

Link: Search for video. A nice search engine if you need to get video clips. Options include a general search box, and subsections for news, sport, entertainment, business, viral and so on. Results are pulled from a variety of sources, including the BBC, but I couldn't find a complete listing of where the data is sourced. It might be there, but I couldn't find it, which means that essentially it isn't there. Currency was slightly spotty - resources (both video and audio) were available from yesterday for searches on Tony Blair, but the most recent Everton footage was from a while back.

I got a lot of links to videos that I hadn't seen before with some of my usual searches, so I was quite impressed with it. It also has RSS feeds, which are generally a given these days, but it's always nice to see. If you're tired of Google/Yahoo! video search, it's worth giving this one a go.

Calm down dear - it's only a test!

Link: Official Google Blog: This is a test. This is only a test.. There's been a whole bunch of rumours and screenshots and chatter going around recently regarding the Google interface, and when and how it's going to be changing. The link goes to the official blog where they explain that they're only just playing around with different approaches to see what works and what doesn't.

Current experiments include refining searches, how people navigate to relevant information, and ways to enrich web results.

(For those not familiar - the title of this post comes from an advertisement in the UK featuring Michael Winner in which he uses the line 'calm down dear, it's only a commercial.)

Yurnet - The Search Anything, Everything Page!

Link: Yurnet - The Search Anything, Everything Page!. This is a nice simple to use search engine. Clean and crisp front page, with two boxes - one for the search and the one above the type of search you want. It has various options, such as Google v Yahoo! and Google V MSN (with results from both engines appearing as frames on the same screen), and other options, pulled from various search engines, such as blog search, images, person, school/college, library, website and so on.

It's a nice fast way to search. I would like to see more information about where the results are going to be pulled from, so rather than just 'image' it would be more helpful have 'image (Google image search) and so on, but other than that, it's a useful addition.

Who's Alive and Who's Dead

Link: Who's Alive and Who's Dead. Ever wondered if that famous person in the film is alive or dead? This website tells you. Of course, it's easy enough to find out, just by doing a quick search, but the advantage of this site is that it groups people together, so you can find out for example, how many stars of a particular television programme are still alive. I wouldn't say that it's a fun site, but it's an interesting one!

Create opml searches

I am in the process of updating my bookmarks collection and weeding out the rubbish and putting the good stuff where it should go, and I re-stumbled onto 'Monitor This' which is a very funky little thing. The idea is that you input your search term, and it will then create an OPML search for you with 22 different search engines. Save the file that it creates, import it into your feed reader and you're done!

Zepti - Search the Web

Link: Zepti - Search the Web or not, as the case may be. I'm only mentioning this one because I try and mention all the search engines that I find. Zepti appears to be an index/directory type of affair, but the options available are a bit strange - bodyart gets the same prominance as medicine for example. The search option seems to only search their (small) collection of resources, and has next to no value I'm afraid. I think I'll pass on this one.

Zetoc homepage

Link: Zetoc homepage.

Zetoc     provides access to the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents of around     20,000 current journals and around 16,000 conference proceedings published     per year. The database covers 1993 to date, and is updated on a daily basis.     It includes an email alerting service, to enable you to keep up-to-date with     relevant new articles and papers.

 

Zetoc is free to use for members of JISC-sponsored UK higher     and further education institutions. It is also available to English NHS     Regions, NHS Scotland and Northern Ireland.

UK Bloggers remain 'in a minority'

Link: MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | Bloggers remain 'in a minority'. Well, the good news is that two thirds of people in the UK now know what a weblog is. The bad news is that only 2% of Brits write weblogs and only 10% view a weblog once a month or more. So I guess that puts me well into the 1% category!