Phil Bradley's weblog

The new library fad: borrow a person - Times Online

The new library fad: borrow a person - Times Online. From the article:

A new library allows readers to borrow people for a 30-minute chat. Here's the experience of one man who offered himself as a human book. The idea, which comes from Scandinavia, is simple: instead of books, readers can come to the library and borrow a person for a 30-minute chat. The human “books” on offer vary from event to event but always include a healthy cross-section of stereotypes. Last weekend, the small but richly diverse list included Police Officer, Vegan, Male Nanny and Lifelong Activist as well as Person with Mental Health Difficulties and Young Person Excluded from School.

More details from the Living Library website.

Stumpedia goes where Cha Cha failed

 

Stumpedia, which describes itself as "a social search engine that relies on human  participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web" has now started to provide what it terms 'instant answers'. These are not the same kind of small potted answers that you get with a search engine like Ask however, oh no. These are questions that you can ask that are routed through to a human being. One of many I should point out - I don't think it's one poor soul chained to a keyboard.

However, which person or persons this may be, we have no real way of knowing. You can ask a question and Stumpedia then utilizes a resource called Muchobene to pass the query onto someone who may know the answer. "The Muchobene plug-in allows you to share your knowledge with other users by responding to their questions."

I asked a fairly straight forward question - 'when was the American Civil War' and after a few seconds up popped a chat window and someone (no idea who) gave me the answer 1861 - 1865. Well yes, but not great, though to be fair, after a few seconds they came back with a fuller response. Which was vaguely correct, depending on how pedantic you feel like being. You can see this in the screen shot.

Flickr Photo Download: Stumpedia instant answers via kwout

Well yes. Except no. No citations were offered. I am left with no idea who the person is who answered my question. I have no idea if it was right or wrong. This is just plain insanity, and quite frankly I can't see this working at all. It's really nice that people are prepared to give up some of their time to help others but really - go and add something to Wikipedia if you want to do that. I couldn't use this information with cross checking it, it's really unusable in this format. Cha Cha tried it for a while and they've now dumped that in favour of mobile answers. It didn't work for them and with the best will in the world, I can't see it working for Stumpedia. Of course, the only exception I can quickly think of is where the person at the other end of the chat gives you a URL or other reference that you can check; my second query 'is there a crystal mineral that forms long, flat fragile shapes' was answered rather better, since I did get a URL I could use. However, I still remain to be convinced.

Internet Resources Newsletter: Issue 161

Internet Resources Newsletter: Issue 161. This is now available. Grab a coffee and go and read it. :)

Social Networking presentation

I did a brief presentation last week for the CILIP East of England group on Social Networking. This is now up at Slideshare (just follow the link) or see the embedded version below. It's quite short, but gives a bit of an overview of the subject matter.

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Quiet revolution EducationGuardian.co.uk

By embracing the interactive, user-generated world of web 2.0, libraries can ensure they keep pace with bold new ways of learning. That's the tag line for the article Quiet revolution. They can't resist a reference to library stereotypes with the 'quiet' bit, but the rest of the piece is really good. It looks at how libraries can use 2.0 stuff, the problems facing students who are using more traditional resources, book bags (read the article),  and so on. It's a short piece, but it's a nice recognition pointing out that libraries are actually doing 2.0 stuff.

 

Getting Past the I.T. Gatekeeper

There's a great article from ReadWriteWeb called  Enterprise 2.0 To Become a $4.6 Billion Industry By 2013. One paragraph that really leaped out at me was:

One of the main challenges of getting Web 2.0 into the enterprise will be getting past the gatekeepers of traditional I.T. Businesses have been showing interest in these new technologies, but, ironically, the interest comes from departments outside of I.T. Instead, it's the marketing department, R&D, and corporate communications pushing for the adoption of more Web 2.0-like tools.

It's a good read if you have 5 minutes to spare.

TigerLogic ChunkIt! Personal Search Engine

And so the search to get better results continues with TigerLogic's ChunkIt! a personal Search Engine. Basically you download their software which sits in with your browser and you choose your search engine, run the search on the ChunkIt! interface. Then you see the search engine results on the right, and on the left you get to see the page with the keywords in context. It is a bit like a super thumbnail option. There are a few of these out there already, with various Firefox extensions for example.

This kind of resource has been characterised as a 'download and overlay' resource, and for me, it just doesn't work. It ties me to a specific machine, I can get almost the same information I need from a good preview window without downloading anything, and I can pretty much write a search strategy that gets me the content I need in the context I want. Admittedly not everyone can of course, but for those who can't, are they really going to want to go to the level of downloading/installing and then using something like this? I can't see it happening myself.

britannica webshare and twitter

The Britannica has long been holding out against giving away content, but the walls are finally beginning to crumble with ' Webshare.' They're making an offer to anyone who publishes on the net on a regular basis that they can have free access to all content, and that they can link to it, allowing their readers to have access to entire articles.

I've added in their widget pointing to an article on the Internet - it'll be interesting to see what happens; in my preview window it's just saying that it's loading, so we'll have to see if it does load!

If you're a blogger, and you blog on a regular basis, you can sign up from the link above - so if anyone asks you why it's worth becoming a blogger, you now have a whole new reason to give them!

Seriously though, it's about time the EB did something like this - they're being hammered by Wikipedia in terms of numbers of visits and they're very much in danger of pricing themselves entirely out of the market. Moving in this direction is a good step forward, and I'm willing to be that it's not the only one they'll take.

They also have a Twitter account so that you can keep up to date with the goings on at http://twitter.com//EBWebShare but there's not a lot there, but they do have 97 keen enthusiastic followers!

Google adds domain name search option

One of the things that I'm often asked on training courses is 'how can I find out more information about a particular website?' Google has now added 'whois' as a search variable. If you follow this link: whois philb.com. you'll get to see something that looks remarkably like this:

Google whois on Flickr - Photo Sharing! via kwout

Now that's vaguely useful because it tells you a little about the site - which is that it's been around for over 11 years. If  we follow the link there's a whole bunch more information that's available as well, from the DomainTools site. You get to see title, thumbshot, historical thumbshots (4 in my case), related sites, a lot of SEO material, links in DMOZ, Wikipedia, registry data, server data and so on. Very useful material if you're researching a site. Thanks to Danny over at searchengineland for the heads up.

compfight / a flickr™ search tool

compfight / a flickr™ search tool. Seems to do the job well. I like the fact that you can limit to Creative Commons, which is very helpful.