Phil Bradley's weblog

Happy Birthday, Google Librarian Central!

 Happy Birthday to Google Librarian Central. It's a year to the day that they posted the following to their blog:

"Like many of you, those of us who were in DC last weekend are still recovering from the excitement of ALA (phew!)... This summer, our blog team is taking a break to think about the best ways to communicate with you and keep you updated on what's happening with Google. We're not leaving you hanging, though."

For me, this is pretty definitive - Google doesn't care about librarians. I'm done with this subject now.

Re-use conference canvas bags!

If you're anything like me, you go to a lot of conferences, and get given the little canvas bags to carry all the blurb around in. Very useful on the day, yet when you bring them home there's little use for them, but you can't bring yourself to chuck them away. I've found a use for them - as helpful bedside book bags! I can't recall exactly where on the net I found this idea, so I'm not claiming it's mine, but I've created a 'how to' below in case you're interested.

First of all, get your bag:

Next you need to measure up how big you want the bag element to be - I did this by putting my book down and making a mental note of how deep it should be. Of course, you could do the same thing if you wanted to keep all your remotes together in one place. Or all your electrical cables stored neatly until you needed them.

Cut through one side of the bag; this cut will define the new depth of the bag. While you're at it, cut the handles in half as well:

The next bit is slightly difficult unless you're good with a needle and thread or sewing machine, but it's as basic sewing as you can get, so we can all do it. Sew along the length of the cut to ensure that it doesn't fray. Then sew right through the rest of the bag to give it a little more strength:

You've now got a new bag. Lift up your mattress and tie the half handles around any bed struts to keep the bag in place, or if you've got a wooden bottom to the bed staple them. In any case, the weight of the mattress should help with stability. And there you go - a useful little book bag for the side of your bed, and recycled canvas bag; in all it takes about 10 minutes.

JacketFlap - Children's book social networking site

JacketFlap is the world's most comprehensive children's book resource and social networking web site for people in the children's book industry. Over 2,300 published authors and illustrators are members, as well as many librarians, agents, editors, publicists, booksellers and publishers.

48 Social News Websites You Can Use

48 Social News Websites You Can Use. Having spent a lot of time at various conferences recently one of the questions that I get asked a lot is 'how do you keep up to date?' There are a lot of sites that I use, and this article lists a lot of them. The ones that I particularly use are:

Reddit
digg
Slashdot
NowPublic
Sphinn

There are however many more, and the list is worth spending a few minutes browsing.

Feedky - View videos through RSS or Web

Feedky. This is a nice little resource. Simply whack in a few search terms and it'll go off and search YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe, Vpod, Google Video, Yahoo Video, Youku, Flickr, Viddler and Blip.TV. It'll then show you either a web page or you can have the content as an RSS feed if you prefer.

I created a webpage for the terms librarian, library, libraries, and there's also an RSS feed for the same search.

Only one slight problem - it's in Spanish, but you don't actually need to worry about that, since it's entirely intuitive. There is supposed to be an English version, but it didn't load for me.

accoona drops webpage search

accoona. is a good search engine; I particularly like the option to 'supertarget' searches quickly and effectively. It's now decided to drop the option of searching for webpages and is concentrating on business and news content - though I'm happy to see that it's keeping the supertarget option. This is something of a shame because it was a really good tool for novice searchers to use, though I guess the silver lining (from the searcher's point of view) is that it's helping Exalead keep the pressure on for fourth spot, given it's effective methods of reducing results by category.

100 Useful Niche Search Engines You've Never Heard Of

100 Useful Niche Search Engines You'€™ve Never Heard Of. Actually, you've probably heard of a good number of them, especially if you read this weblog on a regular basis! However, it's a good collection, focussed on US students though, so some of the engines will not be useful. It's arranged into categories:

Extracurricular
Quick Answers
City guides and travel
Shopping search engines
Business
Academic and reference
Social media and people
Multisearch
TV, Video and Radio
Medical students
Law students
Meta search engines
Photographs and images
News
Jobs and real estate

Create attractive tag clouds with Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I normally just put stuff like this into my Web 2.0 resources weblog but thought I'd put it in here as well. This is the one that I created for my del.icio.us tags, but you can do it for anything you like, such as Flickr tags, or any collection of words that you happen have available.

My del.icio.us tag cloud on Flickr - Photo Sharing! via kwout

Age banding hysteria continues unabated

The hysteria over the proposed age banding system shows no sign of stopping yet. Indeed, quite the opposite - the hysteria continues, getting shriller every day. According to the Guardian, age banding will lead to a two tier system, where the more well known authors will be able to dictate to their publishers, while the less popular ones will have to accept what they're told. As a result this is going to make it easier for supermarkets to simply stock the work of the best selling authors, ignoring the others.

On the other hand, the shrill voice of another section of the anti banding group is insisting that this isn't about banding at all, it's about the Tescofication of books. Banding will apparently make it easier for them to stock and display books (although they're ignoring the point that Waterstones and Borders do this anyway, but maybe because they're bookshops it doesn't count), which would surely imply that any author who doesn't have an age banding is going to be ignored and not stocked, so maybe the two tier system is supposed to work the other way around. What they don't seem to get surely is that having banding is going to make it more work for the supermarkets to stack books and sell them. They want to get them on the shelves and out of the door as quickly as possible. We're told that they want to sell books as though they're baked beans and what amuses me is that this is said by a bookseller, who surely isn't in it for the money at all and has nothing but altruistic motives of course.

Age banding isn't going to force a bookseller into doing anything differently. They can stack and sell their books however they want to. Children are not going to be forced into reading or not reading specific books. What age banding is doing is providing more information, not less. 'Good' parents will already check out books, read reviews and work with their children to decide which titles to buy. It's not going to make any difference to them, but it may make a big difference to those people who want to make an informed by impulse buy for a child - and that difference may be between buying a book or not.

Google's cinema search changed?

I used to be able to do a search at Google for cinema <location> and it would come back and give me a list of results, showing exactly which films were on, together with timings and links to reviews. This seems to have disappeared now, and what I'm getting instead is just a listing of cinemas in the location that I'm interested in. This is a real shame, because it was very useful indeed. Has anyone else seen the same thing?