Phil Bradley's weblog

SearchDazzle

A multi search engine that places four key search engines directly onto the SearchDazzle page, with a search option at the top that replicates the search for you. I think it looks very messy, with screens being cut off, overlapping and it's horrible visually.

Spezify - inspired searching

This is a slightly different search engine, and the keyword that comes to mind here is 'messy'. Essentially Spezify allows you to type in a search and it will then go off and find information from various sources (acting as a multi search engine). It then displays the information it finds in a visual format as can be seen below:

 
Any text information is rendered in a visual format as you can see. One click on the image enlarges it and provides a link to the original source and a second click opens the page. It's certainly quite attractive - you only get a little bit of a feel from this image. It's bright and colourful and is the kind of thing that would appeal to children, though some of the images (yes, even for the term 'librarian') were sailing a little close to the wind, though none that I saw were absolutely NSFW. It was also nice and fast. There is a 'related words' search but it's fairly basic.

That's the good news. The bad news is, as I say, it's a total mess. You can't get an overview of the entire screen and have to mouse around which wastes time. You can only search for a single term or combination of single terms, so phrase searching is out. No help screens or about us (look Spezify, searching the net is a complicated business, don't pretend it's so simple we don't need to know how you want us to do it!). The emphasis is on images rather than text pages, which is fine I suppose, but it does lead me to think that I may just as well use a proper image search engine or a text search engine, since this falls between the two. I'm left wondering if the relative size of the images and text is anything to do with relevance. Your guess is as good as mine. Re-running the same search results in images loading in a different order, so you have to hunt around if you're trying to find a particular picture you saw previously. However, the developers do make it clear that it's just a beta version at the moment.

Nice idea then, but it needs a lot of tweaking before it's particularly useful. An option to view the entire screen would be marvellous, an 'about us' page, help screen, the ability to search phrases, a standardised order of display and option to filter, and as they say themselves, the option of adding in video and audio. Thanks to Judy O'Connell for this one via Twitter.

Apple in talks to buy Twitter for $700m

At least, that's the story from The Telegraph this morning. It seems to make sense given all of the tieups between Twitter and the various iPhone apps that are all the rage on the phone. I think it would be a better deal that going with Facebook or God help us all, Google. I don't think either of those two resources have any real idea how to use Twitter to its most effective and both would seek to control it rather than let it expand in the way that I think Apple would.

If Twitter is going to be sold, and I think it's obvious that it will be, Apple looks like the best contender so far. Expect the deal to go through in June, so it can be announced at Apple's annual developers conference.

Twazzup - new Twitter search engine

I have to say at the outset that 'Twazzup' isn't the smartest name in the book; it's got the necessary double letter of course, but it's too easy to launch into 'Twazzup, Doc?' or to imagine one small child saying to another 'You dim twazzup!'. And I'm already onto an entirely different blog post without even talking about the engine itself. Actually it's quite good. This is what it looks like when you've run a search:

You get the most recent tweets for a search term (going back about 3 days with my experimental searches), trendmakers, images, featured tweets, most popular links, and keyword links to the most popular terms used in tweets about the subject. You can see the latter just above the real time tweets section heading. No help screens of course, which is sadly the usual state of play, and very little other information about the search engine. (Note to designers; if you want commentators to talk about your product, just give us as much information as you can!)

Nice search engine, and if you're fed up of the usual offerings give this one a go, and be forever branded as a twazzup!

Top 10 Tools for Learning Professionals

Jane Hart runs a very splendid resource, Top Tools for Learning and she invites information professionals to list their favourite top ten tools. I thought this would be a nice blogging opportunity to look back at the tools I suggested over a year ago, to see how many I would still recommend, and which - if any - have been replaced with something else.

The tools that I chose in February 2008 were:
Audacity (an audio recording piece of software)
Bloglines (RSS reader)
Firefox (web browser)
Flickr (Photograph sharing resource)
FURL (boomarking resource)
Pageflakes (home/start page resource)
PBWiki (a wiki creation package)
Slideshare (social media resource for storing and sharing presentations)
Typepad (Blogging tool)
Twitter

So, what's changed, and what remained the same?
Audacity was great, but it's slightly limited in that it's really just for voice. These days if I want to record, I prefer to narrate a screencast, and the software that I prefer for that is a nifty little thing called ScreenToaster, which is easy to setup and use.

Bloglines is not my preferred software now in the field of RSS readers - I got fed up with them messing around, technical errors, lack of information and so on. and switched to Google RSS Reader instead. I'm not overly fond of promoting Google when there's a good alternative, but the Reader has always performed really well. I've been back to Bloglines since, and it seems to have recovered well, but it's a little too late for me - I'm used to the way that Google's reader does things, and I don't want to go back and relearn something else. I think this shows the danger of loosing users - it's very hard to then get them back!

Firefox is still my preferred browser of choice and don't understand why it's not got more users in the UK than it has. It's fast, flexible, I love the add on utilities and it doesn't feel clunky in the way that IE does.

Flickr is still my photograph sharing resource. I've just paid out for another two years of use, which says all that needs to be said really. Oh, other than, if you want to look at my photographs you're more than welcome and they're at http://www.flickr.com/photos/philbradley/

FURL was my preferred option for bookmarking. However, it's now been bought out and closed down by Diigo. I moved everything across but to be honest, I've not gone back to Diigo since. I'd always used Delicious as a backup resource, and have found that I'm using that more and more now. So Delicious is currently winning out for me.

I loved Pageflakes as my home/start page, I really did. However, they were sold to some idiot who simply doesn't understand the concept behind them, and the company alienated their users by forcing advertising on pages, and then crashing for a week without even an apology when it came back online. I now recommend Netvibes instead. Just as good, better in many respects, they're going from strength to strength. This is probably the single piece of software I use most in a day since it's always the first thing that gets loaded when the browser starts. I'd happily pay to use it if necessary.

PBWiki has now turned into PBWorks. Straightfoward and easy to use. Free and paid accounts. I still use this on my courses and have no problems with it. Sure, there's plenty of other resources out there, but PBWorks is still fine by me!

Slideshare is still the first place that I put my presentations. They did have a blip on April 1st when they played a slightly illthought out prank, but everyone is entitled to a mistake now and then, and I'm still happy to use them.

Typepad as my weblog authoring tool. I've been using this product for 3 or 4 years now. Quite frankly, I don't like it that much now. They 'improved' the product by reducing functionality and making it much harder to use. I'm still with them basically because I can't cope with the idea of moving the blog again and starting from scratch. Consequently I don't feel able to recommend them. If you want a good blogging tool, it's got to be Blogger, since it's free, easy to use, flexible and does what it should do.

Twitter is the resource that I'm most surprised about, since I was singing its praises over a year ago, and predicted good things for it. If anything it's even more vital now than it was then. I've been saying for a while now that Twitter is going to end up only second to Google as the most important tool on the net *IF* they don't get themselves bought out or dramatically change what they do and how they do it.

So, that's my current top ten tools that I can't be without. Let's have a look at the overall top ten on Jane's list.

1. Twitter. Obviously.
2. Delicious. Makes perfect sense.
3. Google Reader. Still matching my choices so far!
4. Skype. I have to admit that I've never got into Skype, having always preferred email and written communications. However, it's a very good tool if you like that kind of thing!
5. PowerPoint. I sort of agree with this one, but I've taken it to the next step with Slideshare.
6. Google Search. I can see why this is valuable - I'm fascinated to see where it is in the list, but I wouldn't regard it as a tool in the same way that I have referred to the others.
7. Google Docs. A great way to store and share resources. I tend not to use this one so much, though I teach it on courses because - since I work alone - I don't have that many times when I need to share content.
8. WordPress. Well, I've gone with Blogger as you know, but as long as there's a blogging tool in the top ten I think that's important.
9 - 11 Gmail/Slideshare/SnagIT These all share the same spot. I have one of them in there, so I'm happy with that. SnagIt is a capture tool that I've not used, since I prefer Fireshot as a Firefox add on. I do agree however that some sort of screen capture device is very important.

So - that's my list; what about yours?

CILIP Council Open meeting; review and report

I'm sorry that my feedback from this event has been delayed, but I was ironically enough running a CILIP course yesterday on using Blogs, RSS feeds and Wikis. By now everyone should know the history and background behind the event, and I don't think it's necessary to rehash it here; I'd prefer to concentrate on the event itself.

Clearly there was a lot of interest in the event from librarians and #cilip2 began trending in Twitter by about 11.30 (you can see the timeline of events/tweets thanks to the excellent work DaveyP has done collating everything together. Importantly, because this is now stored in his blog it's going to be available from now on, and is not going to lost to the vaguaries of Twitter storing the content. Anyone else doing meetings with Twitter should strongly consider doing the same thing!)

Even reading back on the tweets now there was a level of excitement and interest that I'd not really quite experienced before. For me this clearly indicated just how useful Twitter could be in drawing a group of people together. While it was possible to refresh a Twitter search for the #cilip2 hashtag most people seemed to be using Twitterfall or Twitterfountain to keep in touch with what was happening. Important given that the term managed to trend up to second position at one point, beating out swineflu and Wolverine!

Lots of early comments prior to the meeting about what CILIP does or does not do for the profession, subscription rates and so on. Exactly the same kind of 'chit chat' that you would find in the face to face networking sessions that we all experience prior to the start of meetings. Jill and I arrived at about 2pm for the session, and I commented that I hadn't seen so much tech in one place since I couldn't remember when! Brian was able to tape the meeting, and several people have commented that it would have been nice to videocast the session, or provide it in an audiostream. I think that's an exellent idea, but to be honest, CILIP staff had never tried to put anything like this together before, so it was a learning curve for them as well. (At this point it's worth another quick aside to thank CILIP staff for their hard work in getting the session together and working as well as it did.)

I spoke first, with Brian second, and our presentations are available online (I've now managed to briefly annotate mine - I'd simply used a series of images as focal points, so viewing them by themselves wasn't that enlightening!) This of course meant that during our presentations it wasn't possible to view the tweets that arose from those recording the event onto Twitter itself, since we only had the one screen. I think that was probably the right approach - I'll be honest at this point and say that I would prefer people to listen to my presentation, and since I wasn't in a position to respond to any tweets it wouldn't have been helpful for me to see them. There's also the practical matter that in order for me to see them I'd have needed to set up a laptop screen to read tweets, and I was already kind of busy at that point. However, if I was running a presentation in which I was taking questions and using a discussion based approach this would have been more practical.

When Brian was speaking I found it much easier to pay attention to him as well as tweets; if anyone else is thinking of going down this route I'd recommend that each speaker/moderator has a laptop available to view tweets, and I was able to add my own comments to the stream. My impression is that tweeting seemed to be circular - people in the room reported out using the hashtag, twitterers would read them, comment back, this would be picked up in the room, commented on and pushed back out again - I didn't see too much direct discussion between people, though I've seen this happening quite often in American conferences that use Twitter.

One thing that did come out quite strongly was that some people felt involved in the discussions, while others felt distant; I'm not sure what the answer to this is, really, since I think it comes down to individual perceptions. Video/audio would help of course. I did see one or two comments at the time which basically said 'is there any point in those of us not attending tweeting at all?' to which my answer is that I think it was really important. Although you wouldn't have been aware of it unless you were there, I really can assure people that their tweets were being followed, both by individuals in the room who were following on Twitterfall etc. and by CILIP staff. Another pointo worth taking on board if you're considering doing this yourself is to use an in-room 'tweet-attendant' who is able to take notice of tweets, follow trends, pull out questions and pass them onto the moderator who can then include them as questions, just as though they had come from the floor or body of the audience.

The discussion following the presentations was very wide ranging, from the value of Second Life, to the role of CILIP staff, the value of tools, that trying something and it not working wasn't a bad thing, it was a good learning experience. Again, there's no point in me going through it line by line because you can follow for yourself, or read the live blogging account from Matthew Mezey who did a fantastic job trying to annotate it all.

Some people were concerned that the session was going to simply peter out, without resolving anything in particular. However, I think that simply running the event demonstrated a fair number of things:
Twitter is an incredibly useful and powerful conversation tool; several people commented that as a result they were able to attend a professional event without being away from their desks.
Twitterfall in particular is a good way to keep ontop of all the comments.
Even more technology will help increase the flow of conversations.
There is a huge interest in ensuring that CILIP is able to use Web 2.0 technologies, and if anyone on the Council was in any doubt of their value, I don't think they were by the time the session ended.
Over 150 people attended virtually with over 1100 tweets, which illustrates just how much a real community spirit and interest exists.

CILIP Council has, I feel sure, taken a lot of this on board and the session has demonstrated just what can be done with existing (and free!) technology. Of course, it's going to take some time to digest it all, and I'm not expecting instant change, but I do actually feel confident that we will see more use of Web 2.0 in the future. I'd particularly like to see (and mentioned at the session) CILIP using photograph sharing resources such as Flickr, allowing people to view and download presentations via sites such as Slideshare or Authorstream, doing more by the way of podcasting, creating a website 'jigsaw' pulling these resources together while at the same time letting them stand by themselves (Edinburgh City Libraries being such a good example here), learning by doing, accepting that 'getting it wrong' is a good thing, and supporting colleagues both by example and word that librarians can, and should be able to do this for themselves, and take control of the information flow in their organisations.

Of course, if you want to get more involved there are plenty of places that are continuing the discussions - blog comments on Matthews blogging, Caroline's 'Council Matters' roundup, you can view the Wordle that Dave Pattern has created, Brian's report on his thoughts on the event, and also the unofficial wiki that's been created as well.

Finally, I was really pleased that it gave people a chance to play with new resources, experiment, explore, learn and have a great afternoon. Thanks to CILIP Council for hosting the event and being open to the idea of change, CILIP staff for arranging it, everyone who attended it in person, and of course the people who were just as engaged via Twitter.