Phil Bradley's weblog

Google malware error runs rampant

I'm seeing lots of reports from friends, colleagues and Twitter postings about oddities at Google, which I've reproduced below. Every single result that's being returned as a 'This site may harm your computer.' warning. Clicking on the warning itself just results in a 502 Server Error message. Interesting - I've not seen this before.

Clicking on the appropriate page link leads to Google intercepting the query and displaying their warning page - so you have the bizarre situation of Google warning searchers against visiting.. Google!

There are huge numbers of comments already on Twitter... coming in at the rate of about one every 2 seconds at the moment.

UPDATE!! SIGNING OUT OF YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT REMOVES THE ERROR MESSAGE.

Another update - everything now seems to have returned to normal. Everyone can go on about their business, nothing to see here. Move along now!

Pageflakes: 10 fatal mistakes

I first discovered Pageflakes a few weeks after it launched towards the end of 2005. For anyone not familiar with it - it's a home or start page - a webpage that loads when you launch your browser. It's possible to add links, search engines, RSS feeds and hundreds of widgets to enhance the time you spend on the web. It's got over 250,000 of these widgets, and people can also publish their own pages directly on the web for other people to view and use - over 130,000 of them in fact.

It was a very smart looking resource - very flexible, very simple to use and highly innovative. While there were other resources around that did much the same thing, such as Netvibes and iGoogle they have never been able to offer quite the same level of functionality. However, even if they had been, I would have been inclined to stick with Pageflakes because the management team talked to their users. They had an active forum, a Facebook page and so on. They would ask questions of the users, they set up a small group of beta testers and developed the product in conjunction with the feedback they got. In April 2008 it was sold into the Live Universe consortium, run by Brad Greenspan, and immediately things at Pageflakes started to take a turn for the worse.

Clearly Brad Greenspan isn't the sharpest tool in the box. In fact, I'd go so far to say he's a complete idiot (I'd like to say more, but this is a safe for work blog, though if you're reading Mr Greenspan, please feel free to drop me an email and I'll explain to you in detail why you shouldn't be left in charge of any sort of company), since he's failed on just about every level. All communication between Pageflakes and their users quickly started to dry up. The last entry from a Pageflakes team member to their Facebook page was back in July 2008 for example, and the team of beta testers never heard a word at all. Communication on the forums also ceased. Greenspan and his team were clearly unable to work out that the main strength of any Web 2.0 based resource are the users. Meanwhile Netvibes was going from strength to strength, with new versions, lots of communication and technical support responses within 24 hours - all told very impressive. Brad Greenspan's second mistake - ignore what the competition is doing.

His third mistake (I'll keep counting, because there are a lot of them) is to stop improving the product. Well, I suppose he was using the Google technique - buy up a product and then doing nothing with it. Suggestions went by the board, but Pageflakes is a very robust product; extraordinarily stable in fact, so that wasn't too much of an issue. At that point I still felt quite happy to suggest to people that they use the product, though I was also suggesting that Netvibes and iGoogle were worth looking at as well. By then I'd started to really ramp up my own Netvibes page.

Towards the end of 2008 came the first of what I would regard as the killer blows to the service; there was a long period when a lot of users were unable to connect to the service, and 'long period' is days, not hours or minutes. Understandably people were upset by this and a large number complained and left to join Netvibes. Mistake number four; you have to provide a stable service for people to use, whatever the cost. Very little by way of apologies on Pageflakes own forum, with one poor tech guy (who seems to be the only one left) taking the flak and trying to apologise. Mistake Five - hiding behind junior staff and not having the guts to talk directly to users.

If this wasn't bad enough, Pageflakes users who still remain, but who are getting understandably concerned and more than a little ticked off go into the service one day to see a huge advert plastered over all their pages. The advert can't be moved or minimised. Mistakes Six and Seven - don't launch things without warning users, and don't introduce things users have no control over. If you were one of the users you'll know what happened next, and if you're not, you can work it out rather better than Brad Greenspan - users went through the roof. The second tranch of users walked at this point, having made their point in the forum and on the Facebook account. Several made the point that they were happy to help Pageflakes, and realised that the resource needed to make money - but simply whacking advertisements onto the page without any discussion with users really wasn't the way to go. The advertisements disappeared after a couple of days, but by then the damage really was done. The Pageflakes team had made their opinion quite clear - the resource was nothing more than a cash cow, the users their mealticket and nothing else. Mistake eight - treat your users with contempt and they're out the door.

Pageflakes continued through December and into January in an unstable mode; sometimes available and sometimes not - at least only for hours this time rather than days. Pageflakes went down again a couple of days ago. According to CNET it's because Pageflakes and associated resources are being moved to new servers. If this was planned wouldn't it have made sense to actually inform users, and provide some information on a holding page, rather than what's happened which is to look as though the service has disappeared - and I'm still not entirely convinced that it hasn't. Mistake nine - not to plan ahead, tell users what is going to be happening and keep them involved in the loop.

I find it astonishing that this bunch of idiots were in a position to buy the product in the first place - clearly they're unable to run it properly. If you think I'm bitter about it, you should take a look at the comments flooding onto Twitter about the situation; of course, no-one from Pageflakes is on Twitter, which is Mistake ten - not going to where the conversations are, so being unable to reassure or firefight.

So - is Pageflakes actually dead and buried? Or will it rise up once ported across to the mythical servers? I think I can safely speak for the majority of people who have used the system when I say 'Who cares? If the management team at Pageflakes doesn't care about the users, why should the users care about them?'

If you want an alternative to a once great service that has gone to the dogs I would suggest taking a look at my list of Start Pages though I suspect that most people will now move to either Netvibes or iGoogle.

Google's enhanced 'did you mean?'

Google has had the 'did you mean?' feature for a long time now, and they've recently improved the functionality. If you try and run a search but the spelling is incorrect rather than just say 'did you mean?' and giving you the option of re-running the search Google now shows the top two results from what it thinks that you meant. The graphic illustrates this:
The clever element is that Google assumes fillip means Philip and then shortens it to Phil, before giving results for the term actually searched for.

However, (and with Google there is always an 'however') a search for fil bradley defaults to 'bill bradley'. Consequently if you do know what you're looking for, and it's not a standard spelling the results that you do want are pushed further down the screen, making a search more irritating and less helpful. Of course, if you're participating in the Google labs experiment to move search results around you might think that you can force the result you want to the top, but big G doesn't allow that. Welcome to the world of the Google common denominator!

Twitter; your first 24 hours

I've noticed a lot of new followers on Twitter recently, and most of them are probably looking at the thing and wondering 'OK, I'm here, what do I do now?' I thought it might help to provide a few pointers that should make that first day a bit more enjoyable and productive.

If you like background reading you could try my blog posts on using Twitter in libraries (you'll have seen this already if you subscribe to the LIS-LINK mailing list) or choosing who to follow on Twitter. Alternatively try 'A guide to twitter' which provides some useful hints and tips on getting started, from Lost art of blogging or CNet's 'Newbie's guide to Twitter' which will take you through some basics; it's comprehensive so there's no need for me to explain basic functionality.

If you're the type of person who likes to jump in and start looking for people to follow you could start withTwitter's follow suggestions tool, but quite frankly that's pretty dire. Better might be to look at the visual 'friends network' tool to see who your friends are following. You could alternatively try Twellow which takes a category approach to individuals or use the Twitter name search option (which also isn't great either!)

You may be a 'what's in it for me' person, and if that's the case I'd suggest heading over to the Twitter search engine to see which people are talking about subjects that are close to your heart. You can then decide to follow them (or not!) or jump in and start chatting. Alternatively, try clicking on the 'Find People' option top right to see if you already have friends and colleagues who are on the service.

If you're not any of those people, you might just want to sit back, follow a few people and see where Twitter takes you. I can't offer much advice here, since the people I follow may not interest you, but you can always take a look at them if you like! However, there are a few that you might be tempted by:

http://twitter.com/ICHCheezburger if you are into LOLcats
http://twitter.com/guardiantech to keep up to date with what's happening in the tech world
http://twitter.com/ukeig for obvious reasons (if you don't know what they are, you can ignore this one!)
http://twitter.com/stephenfry who now has almost 86,000 followers - help tip him over the 100,000 mark!

Finally, if you really want to utilise Twitter to the maximum, you'll want to check out the many hundreds of applications you can use. Many sites to choose from, but I'll suggest Twitterapps as one of the best. Of course, if you have any questions just ask them - either here in the comments field or generally at Twitter itself.

Save the words - a logophile's delight

Save The Words is one of those sites that those of you who adore using words are going to enjoy. It's a treasure trove of old and forgotten words which are very attractively displayed (including a humourous audio track as well, so take care of the speakers if you're in an open plan office). Clicking on a word brings up a definition of the word, with an option of 'adopting it' with the pledge to 'use this word, in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible to the very best of my ability'.

Take a look; I defy anyone to leave the site willingly.

Using Twitter in libraries

As part of an ongoing discussion on the LIS-LINK JISC mailing list I posted some ideas on using Twitter, both on an individual and library basis. One or two people kindly suggested that I should blog my response as well, hence this post.

I have to say that I found it very depressing to see the report that Twitter is blocked (even on one site, though I suspect a lot more) and I would be fascinated to know what, if any, justification is used. My prediction is that any such justification is going to be based on media hype (which is seldom accurate) and without any actual experience. A lot of the people who I follow do actually work in legal settings - for some reason this particular niche of users has really started to run with it.

Of course, when Twitter is 'banned' that may mean a whole host of different things. It could mean that it's not possible to get to the website itself for example. If that's the case then it shouldn't be too hard to simply set up an RSS feed to pull the content through to a newsreader or home/start page and view content there, use a resource like Tweetdeck to read/post to it (though I'll accept that if an organization is closed minded enough to block access it's unlikely that it will allow unfettered download of useful applications), or use a texting service to send updates directly to Twitter.

It may be useful to provide some justifications for the use of the service by libraries or librarians. Speaking from my own experience I use Twitter for a variety of different things:

Social networking - this is by far and away the most minor use that I have, but I use it to chat to friends and colleagues, share snippets of information and so on. I would happily defend this use however - one could easily draw a comparison between this use and the general networking we all
do in the coffee and lunch breaks at conferences. I can't see even the most hard hearted employer telling staff not to do this when sending them to conferences!

Information updating - a tremendously useful way to find out what's happening - either in the world in general or in specific subject areas that interest me. I usually have Twitter open in a window automatically updating itself and I've really now lost count of the number of times I've first heard of some event via Twitter before email, news resources, television, radio and so on.

Trending information - what are people talking about right now? You simply don't get this material using the dinasaur search engines like Google. Most of the time it's not of particular interest, but now and then a trend does pop up that I really want to know about in more detail.

Searching for information - the Twitter search engine is pretty good and in actual fact uses functionality that I've not found anywhere else - it really is a powerful tool.

Asking questions - if I need some information of almost any kind a quick question to my followers gets me an answer in minutes. Similarly it's just such an easy way to provide assistance to other people.

Self promotion. I have my blog entries posted across to Twitter, which alerts followers to what I'm talking about in more detail. I also feed the Twitter posts back to the weblogs to point out to blog readers what I'm doing on Twitter.

Identifying experts in an area. Who is talking about subjects that interest me? What are they saying, and where are they pointing? Again, you simply don't get this by using traditional resources in the same way or with the level of immediacy you do with Twitter.

Keeping up to date with company developments. I don't have the time or the inclination to go to a company website to read the latest software developments - indeed, why should I? I expect information to come to me these days, and Twitter delivers it very effectively.

I could go on, but hopefully I've made my point - on a personal level this has quickly become a tool that is extraordinarily useful. It is absolute *insanity* to ban the use in an organizational setting. Now, let's briefly look at how libraries can use the tool - since I'm not obviously a library myself you'll need to take that into account.

General information updates - opening/closing times

Staff information - new staff, old staff, anything about staff

New resources - new materials perhaps, collections of resources in particular areas, brief notes on resources that can be used for specific purposes/projects

General information - a library is there to provide access to knowledge, so why not do it via Twitter as well - 'this day in history', local events taking place in the town, pointers towards resources to supplement information on specific news stories

Countdowns for events taking place in the library

Linking to images of/in/about the library

News alerting services - take feeds from the BBC and CNN for example and reTweet (copy and send on) to your followers

Notify students/staff/users/clients about any and everything the library is doing.

Be involved in any conversations that take place regarding your organisation, library or subject area of interest

Current awareness with regards specific subjects for specific groups of people

Updating a news RSS feed on your library page

Share best practices with other libraries

That's a dozen different things straight off. In short, if you're doing things in your library, you need (in my opinion) to make people aware of them. It's a superb tool for doing this - and if you don't have the time to blog about what you're up to, a Twitter posting every now and then is a fair substitute.

Could I also try your patience just a little more - I'm aware this is turning into an essay, so I'll stop asap. I've noticed a couple of things that a number of libraries/librarians are doing when they're using Twitter, which in my opinion stop them from fully utilising the system, though there of course isn't a right/wrong way to do any of this stuff, so feel free to ignore entirely. I see a lot of libraries who are posting to Twitter but who are not following anyone. That's akin to standing in a room talking without
listening. Twitter is a resource to encourage discourse, to share ideas back and forth. If you do not follow anyone I am absolutely not going to follow you, because you're not engaged. If you just want to say something in the sermon on the mount approach, use a webpage or a weblog without comments
enabled. It's really not using the resource to its best ability. Secondly, there is an option when you start to post (which you can change of course), to 'protect' your updates. This means that unless someone subscribes/follows you, they can't see what you're saying. I find it very annoying (though of course this could easily just be me!) when someone follows me, I go to see who they are to decide if I want to follow them back, only to see a screen that basically says 'if you want to know about me, you have to ask first'. I'm unlikely to do that unless I already know the person themselves. If I don't, then I'm probably not going to bother to try and follow them. Really, if you're saying stuff that you don't want people to read, then perhaps you shouldn't be using Twitter for that purpose, or you should create a very private, personal account for a small group of close friends. However, that's all just my opinion; feel free to entirely ignore it!

Finally, if you want to follow me at Twitter (it's in part a promotional
tool, what can I say?) you can take a peek at http://www.twitter.com/Philbradley On a more serious note - it's a fantastic tool and I really would recommend trying it out, though the usual Web 2.0
caveat remains in force - if you don't see a value in it, don't use it, and come back in 6 months to try it again.

Finding the Exalead search engine

If you're trying to find the Exalead search engine - which I thoroughly recommend, you might be finding it a touch difficult. A search for www.exalead.com will redirect you to www.exalead.com/search which is all about the company, without a search box in sight. (The link to the search engine is bottom left). The same thing happens if you try the UK site. In order to get to the search engine you need to go to http://www.exalead.co.uk/search which really isn't helpful.

I really don't understand the reasoning behind this - while I accept that Exalead wants to emphasis the work they're doing with Enterprise search, to make it so difficult to find the search engine isn't going to be getting more people to use it! Please reconsider your home page approach - or at least, reposition the link to the search page towards the top of the page so that people can find it. Exalead has, in my view, a great chance to take over from Ask if they play their cards right, but this isn't helping.

The 'Google of British Films' (and more!)

Find any film is a database of films that are available in the UK. It's supported and funded by the UK Film Council and is very impressive. They claim that they have every film available in the UK. Nice simple interface - just type in the film that you're interested in, or browse by genre, A-Z or advanced search. Once a film has been located you get to see the trailer (if one is available), a full summary and film viewing options.

The resource will find places that a particular film is showing; at the cinema, on TV, on DVD or Blu-ray, if it's available for download, watching online or in other formats. There is also an 'alert me' function for each of those options as well.

Findanyfilm also links to related titles, 'have you considered' options, most popular, new, and so on. Advanced search allows searchers to limit to title, actor, director, keyword, genre (20+), language, release date and certificate. It will also find cinemas that are close to you, show you what's on, provide a map and website link and give you filtering options.

They claim: "It's our aim to give you the best possible movie experience, promoting every type of film that's available for viewing in the UK. To do this, we're working with the UK Film Council, the Industry Trust, and exhibitors, distributors and retailers, to promote legally available films - making high-quality, legal viewing one of our top priorities."

I think they're well on the way to achieving this, and if you're interested in films, this is a site to bookmark - and I don't very often say that!

Leapfish video reviewed

I'm still enjoying ScreenToaster and thought I'd try a video review with it. Unfortunately I'm limited to 4 minutes audio, which is something that they're working on, so it's a brief review, which to be honest is probably good news for the search engine I'm reviewing.

Leapfish is a search engine that's been around for a while, and this is the latest incarnation. I've briefly compared it to Silobreaker, which I feel works in the same sort of area. Take a look at the video - there are no subtitles so you'll need to have your speakers on for this one I'm afraid.

Screencasts and videos online

Comments are of course welcome - either about the search engine, or the video review approach that I've taken. If people like it I'm happy to do more this way.

Nothing happening in Essex

Clearly there's a distinct lack of news in Essex this evening according to the BBC news:

Sure enough, clicking on (none) leads to a 404 error message. Quiet night in for all concerned then!