Phil Bradley's weblog

Quick ref. answers via Twitter

I was alerted to this resource by Tara at ResearchBuzz. Answers.com has a new feature called Hoopoe, linked into Twitter. The idea is that you can send a tweet directed to @AnswersDotCom with a question. It will then reply with a bit of an answer, and a link through to their website with more information. I played around with it for a bit to see what it did.

I wasn't overly impressed really. I asked 'when did the civil war start?' with the answer being returned 1861. Well, yes. If I was referring to the American Civil War - though a more precise figure would have been appreciated, but what if I'd meant the English Civil War? My next question was 'what is Meatloaf's newest album called?' It wasn't able to work with that at all. My 'what is the population of London' resulted in 11,320,900, but I don't know what the source for that was, and how current the information is. I asked (as Tara did) 'What is the square root of 12?' and got "The square root of 217 is approximately 14.730919862656." Finally, I asked a question with the @AnswersDotCom in the middle of a tweet, and that was a no hoper.

It's a great idea, but not something that I'd use yet - there's a tremendous amount of work required yet. It'll happen, there's no doubt about that, and we'll see a lot of this happening in the future as search engines use Twitter as a search interface. But the service succeeds or fails on the data it has available, and on that alone, this service doesn't cut it. However - try it out yourself - see if you get better answers than I did - you don't need to follow the service, just tweet including @AnswersDotCom in the tweet, preferably at the beginning. Alternatively, use the hashtag #answersdotcom or #hoopoe but don't hold your breath!

Frompo

Search Engine. Very straightforward search engine this one. Web, images, news, video and so on - all the usual suspects. Basic advanced search (if that's not a contradiction in terms), suggested terms and so on. Let down by silly things - 'Perferences' for example, and no option to limit to safe searches. Other than that - nothing wrong with it, but little to particularly recommend it either.

Popular Science puts 137 year archive online

Popular Science: "We've partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It's an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology's incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do."

Lots of fun to be had with this - some of the articles on libraries and librarians are worth reading, for the humour value if nothing else. Then when you've exhausted that avenue, take a run down the archives with 'internet'. I particular loved 'And precisely when did the Internet become the all-consuming national pastime of seemingly everyone from high schoolers to Fortune 500 executives' - written in May 1995! And before that by a few months is an article that refers to the net as 'Internet' as in "To attach yourself to Internet..."

This resource is a serious timesink, so be warned!

Mashpedia

I've been playing around with the Mashpedia this morning. It styles itself as, and I quote:

"Mashpedia is an effective medium to find and explore online content about almost any topic, providing a didactic and intuitive way of learning. In every article you get a basic definition, the latest related news, videos, images, twitter messages and relevant links, thus providing a quick, practical outlook of the topic. Since real-time contents are ranked with the most recent coming first, Mashpedia can give you new information each day - even if you are looking at the same article. Every article can also be commented, providing a space for people to share additional information or relevant links."

It's a fun little tool, and I enjoyed using it - it's what Cpedia should have been if it had been any good. Mashpedia is clear to point out that it's not a search engine, and lists a variety of searches are that better done on traditional engines; coldplay lyrics and apartments in chicago for example. Bearing that in mind I did a few searches - Volcanic ash being the first, as that's in the news right now.

Mashpedia pulls up data from Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, News sources, digg, blogs, book search engines and web pages, fitting it all neatly together. It works reasonably well, as long as you can clearly define what you're interested in. A search for 'Everton' comes up blank in the Wikipedia section, since it's not clear which Everton you're interested in, but amending the search to Everton FC works well. The sections are not always as up to date as I'd like - some of the digg references for example were several years old. I'd be happy to use it on a regular basis for news stories, and using it in conjunction with Silobreaker I think I'd be getting a nicely rounded view of a subject.

25 tools to entertain, educate, enthrall and excite

Looking for new tools to play with? Try this quick presentation, and explore something different today!

25 tools to entertain, educate, enthrall

View more presentations from Phil Bradley.

Alternatives to Ning

As you're probably aware, Ning is closing its doors to its free service, and people will have to either migrate their groups elsewhere or start paying. Before looking at that, let's get the important stuff out of the way - what are the alternatives? I've found a few that you might want to consider taking a look at. I should say that I don't use these myself, so they're not personal recommendations.

http://www.socialgo.com/ Basic is free, advertising driven. Limited functionality, but appears to have no less than Ning.

http://www.igloosoftware.com/free Limited to 25 named users. Free, commercial version available

http://www.zimbio.com Basic, but seems to do the trick

http://www.grouply.com/ Offering themselves as a Ning alternative. Options to migrate users across

http://bricabox.com/ Not tried this, so limited knowledge of it

http://www.bigtent.com/ This looks easy and straightforward to create a group

http://www.spruz.com/ Also setting itself up as a Ning migration site. Good collection of features.

http://www.snappville.com/ This looks like it's free, but I'm not sure, and not convinced by their patter, either.

http://www.crowdvine.com/home Freebie version, limited functionality

http://www.mixxt.com/ Looks like it does the job, but doesn't say much about itself

http://www.qlubb.com/qlubbs/new Looks quite nice - easy to use, colourful and vibrant. Didn't see any pricing details, so assume free

http://www.webs.com/ has a freebie version as well as paid

http://grou.ps/ This looks quite funky, but appears to be a commercial product.

I think it's a really shabby move by Ning, who have always made it clear that they have free resources. If you check out their site in the Internet Archive you'll see that they often make the statement "Ning is the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds." Even going through the terms and conditions there's very little that refers to the free/commercial element of the site, and no-where does it even seem to imply that they're going to, or may possibly, revoke the free element; there's just the catchall 'we can change our minds on any and everything' clause, which everyone has.

'Free' is an interesting concept, and one that lots of social media organisations use. It's certainly one of the questions that I get asked on my courses - 'how do people make money out of these services', and the answer is always 'advertising and loss leader free limited accounts'. Ning was using advertising, but apparently that's not enough for them, hence their move now. They're entitled to do it of course, but is it sane and sensible? I'd say not, because although they may have not, to the letter of the law, lied to their users I don't think they're going to be in a position to claim any high ground - ever again. How about their users - are they going to be happy paying for a service from a company that they can't really trust? If I had a Ning Network (which I don't - I never particularly liked the offering, so was simply a member of a couple of groups) there is NO way that I'd give them money - not because the service wasn't any good, but because they're not to be trusted.

I'm reminded of the situation with Pageflakes - the home/start page company. They used to have a really nice product, which was then sold to a company that wanted to make money. I can fully understand this, and if they'd asked their users for ideas I'd certainly have been happy to have moved to a subscription based model. However, they didn't - they simply forced advertising (and some of it very dubious, certainly not appropriate for schools) on users, in a box on every page. Consequently people left in droves, Netvibes flourished (and is now in profit), and Pageflakes is now a very poor relation.

The money aspect isn't actually (surprisingly) that important in many respects - it's the approach to the user base. What people will remember about Ning in the long run is not that they went from a free to a paid model, it's that they betrayed their user base. My personal prediction is that Ning isn't going to last for much longer - I give it about a year.

Cpedia

I first looked at Cpedia a week or so back, thought it was a bit of a trainwreck and moved on. (You've got no idea how much stuff I actually look at and decide not to inflict on you!) However, I came back and revisited it due to a link to the blog entry of Tom Costello, CEO of Cuil (which you may remember from a year or so back), in which he's less than happy with the 'haters' who have said nasty things about the product.

He's used a slightly odd approach to defend his product, Cpedia, which is an attempt to create an automated encyclopedia by dragging content from a variety of different resources and jigsawing it together, apparently has errors that are intentional. This is because of 'bottom feeding' would you believe, in that Cpedia goes where other search engines fear to tread, and there's a reason why they don't - because the further down the results you go, the less useful they're going to be. 

My jaw did drop a little bit at his example though - he boasts 'I was able to discover that he (a VC he was meeting) has a tendency to over-imbibe.' This is his one redeeming feature according to Mr Costello. (Honestly, I'm not making this up - it's in the blog posting.) The promise of Cpedia is that you will find information that you might otherwise miss. So let's take a look at it.

I started with a search for Everton. Cpedia culled content from 6,624 pages. It's total gibberish! There's a contents listing (as Wikipedia has) and it starts with a player, which is a damn funny place to start. Then there are subsections about other players, other teams, things that have nothing to do with the club. Then there's a section 'According to Sky Sports'. Here, don't take my word for it - take a look. Sorry it's long, but it's worth it.

Have you ever seen anything quite that insane? It doesn't get any better when you start reading, because sentences are just jammed together in no apparent order at all - to the point of being unreadable. In case you think it's just a problem with that one article, I looked at Web 2.0, librarians, and Cuil. I did try and search for 'Internet' and was told there was no Cpedia page for internet.

That just about says it all really. Do take a look, both at the ranty blog (and don't miss out on the comments, some of them are most amusing) and spend a couple of minutes with Cpedia itself. Just be careful of your jaw though, since I wouldn't want it to drop so far as to hit the desk and hurt you!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cpedia Founder Says Errors Are "Intentional" (gigaom.com)

Netvibes adds instant dashboards

If you're not familiar with Netvibes, it's a home or start page. That is to say, it's your own personal portal to the net, with links to your favourite sites, RSS feeds, search widgets, email checking software and a whole bunch of other things besides. One of the time consuming things with a system of this type is that it takes time to create pages or tabs and to populate them with appropriate content. Netvibes has however overcome this problem by introducing dashboards. They're accessible from the top left hand corner of the screen (familiar if you're already using the system) thus:

As you can see, I've already created two, one for the best football team in the world, and one for Web 2.0 They're simplicity to create - just click on the 'New' link, type in what interests you, and Netvibes almost instantly creates a dashboard. Simply click on the link and go to the newly created resource.

My Web 2.0 dashboard was populated with a general tab, news, video, conversation and Google search. The news tab had 6 different news related widgets, video content was pulled in from 3 different sources, and conversations took data from 6 resources. You can of course move the widgets around, delete them, add others and so on, just as you can with other Netvibes pages. The News page looks a bit like this:

It's a very clever idea, and one that I like a lot. Saves a huge amount of time and is instantly useful. Netvibes is now the clear out and out leader in the Home/start page business, and Pageflakes, with their rather sorry forced advertisements (some of which are close on NSFW, and certainly not appropriate in a school environment) is lagging so far behind that it's sad.

Journotwit - a new Twitter client

I'm slightly surprised that I've not seen much (read any) mention of Journotwit, since it's rather a nice client. It's browser based, like Brizzly, but it does have a desktop and mobile app attached as well. It's quite a complex interface, in comparision with the native Twitter client, but if you're familiar with Tweetdeck and variants it won't be hard to work out. It looks like this - or at least my version does, since I've tweaked it a bit.

(I've blurred most of the tweets, since some are protected).

As you can see, there are a number of columns - your entire feed, mentions (of you), feed cloud (of the people you follow), direct messages, your tweets, and then four other pre-populated columns with contents defined by the application - news, audiovisual, statuses and chatter. I'm not entirely sure how they sift those, and I haven't found them particularly useful.

Each column can be moved, resized, marked as read or deleted. Columns can easily be created - just click on a hashtag and a column is created for example. This is really useful if you just want to follow a particular conference or event quickly, then delete it when you've finished - a couple of clicks and you're done. Other functionality that I really liked was the ability to follow conversations more easily, as you can see tweets that are in response to others:

Running a search creates a new column that you can quickly scroll through. This searches the entire timeline but you can add in local: to perform a search within your own feed - perfect for a half remembered tweet! Clicking on a specific account also creates a column, bringing all their recent tweets together. When you're done looking through, just delete the column or minimise it so you can come back to it later to catch the recent tweets. Contacting someone is easy - just click on the green + sign and it expands thus:

When you've read a column, you can just click the tick box to mark all as read, or leave it as is. If you click as read this then minimises the column to the top of the screen:

This is very useful if you run a lot of searches - the search column will minimise until there's new data and then you'll see how many new tweets there are in brackets and you can then take a peek and see what you've got. If you're using Twitter as a news resource (and clearly from the name of this app it's aimed at people who do) this is going to be extremely helpful.

You can take this much further though. A new column can be created to follow anything in particular - say a breaking story, and you can limit the content you retrieve to your local stream if you wish, you can exclude specific words or indeed individuals, and very importantly you can decide the type of tweets you want. Options here include ReTweets, visuals, audios, links, or chatter for example. 

Journotwit supports multiple accounts, though unlike Brizzly it doesn't do Facebook. However, it doesn't support lists, which is a real nuisance as far as I'm concerned, since most everything I do on Twitter is linked to lists, and it doesn't bring across any stored searches from your Twitter account. Until they sort that out, I shan't be leaving Brizzly, but once that's sorted it's going to be very tempting indeed.

Rock the Quote

Rock the Quote. This is a search engine for quotes and speeches. There are 1,552 speeches and quotes available at the moment, so it's rather thin on the ground. Just over 100 people are included in the database, with a very heavy American/historical perspective.

Wasn't overly impressed to be honest, but it might just be what you're after.