Phil Bradley's weblog

Delicious bought by Pinboard and shuttered

For those with long memories, Delicious was one of the sites to use; it allowed people to bookmark their favourite websites for ease of access. At the time of founding, in 2003 Delicious was a real innovation, as the idea of being able to quickly and easily put stuff onto a third party website and then share that with your friends and colleagues was a really new idea. However, Delicious was unable to keep up with the times as other sites such as Diigo came along to give it real competition. It was sold several times - Yahoo paid between $15-$30,000,000 for it, but as usual with Yahoo! they really didn't know what they had and people began to migrate to other services, in particular Pinboard which has finally completed its victory, buying the ailing service for an astonishingly low $35,000. 

If you're still a Delicious user then you will need to find yourself a new place to keep your bookmarks; I'd suggest Diigo if you want free, or you could go across to Pinboard and move your collection over, but it will cost you $11 a year for the privilege. Delicious will remain up for viewing, but you won't be able to add anything new. You can read more in the Pinboard blog entry, but in all honesty, you won't because you're not using Delicious any longer. 

Shame to see it go, but it had outlived its purpose and was badly used by people who thought they had a cash cow on their hands. 

Expert Internet Searching 5th Edition

I'm pleased to say that this book is now with the publishers, Facet Publishing and should be available in about 3 months. This is (as the title of the blog post says) the 5th edition of the title which started life in 1999 as The Advanced Internet Searcher's Handbook. That very first edition didn't even mention Google, which seems almost impossible to imagine. This edition references over 300 different search engines and associated tools. As usual I've started from scratch with it, and while keeping to the same format have added and removed content in almost equal measure. The book is in 13 chapters:

1. An introduction to the internet. While it's not necessary to really introduce the internet to anyone these days I still go into details about how the development and organisation of the internet affects internet search. I'm also able to look back over 17 years of the internet and look at how it's changed over that period of time.
2. An introduction to search engines. I look at how search engines work, how they collect data and arrange it, as well as looking in detail at about a dozen different types of engines.
3. The world according to Google. The good, bad and indifferent of the search engine. I go into detail about how to use it to its best advantage, and also provide lots of reasons why it's a really bad idea to trust it at all.
4. Other free text search engines. Alternatives to Google, and reasons why I think one of the best of them is quite probably one you've never heard of.
5. Directory, clustering and similarity search engines. There's lots of different types of search engines out there, and this chapter explores a few of them
6. Multi- and meta search engines. When one search engine simply isn't enough, you need as much information as possible!
7. Social media search engines. This is a developed and developing area, so I look in detail at some of the key engines you need to search the social media environment
8. Visual and image search engines. The internet is increasingly becoming a visual arena, and we need to consider other ways of finding content. This chapter looks at doing that from a visual standpoint.
9. People based resources. People finders, email search engines, finding people on social media and more!
10. News based search engines. As news becomes 24/7 and more importantly is about a second old, how can we find all the new material that we need to keep up to date? How do we deal with the pernicious problem of fake news?
11. Multimedia search engines. Video specific, educational, audio and podcast engines are the focus of this chapter
12. Specialised search engines. I look at academic engines, why there are no good ones for children, and other specialised engines
13. Hints, tips and the future. How to get the most out of the search engines, quick shortcuts and getting the most out of your browser.

I'm really pleased with this new edition, and I think it's the best one yet. It's aimed at anyone who wants to improve their search abilities and to become quicker and more effective when it comes to getting good material quickly and easily. I've written it with the intention that it's the kind of book that should sit on your desk or nearby shelf so that you can refer to it when you need to. Read it through, dip in and out if you prefer; I've tried to make it both informative but fun to read. I hope you enjoy it!

Some new Internet statistics for 2020

If you're as keen on using statistics to blow people's minds when running training courses, then you might find this post to be of some interest to you. I've just pulled out the statistics, but the whole thing is worth a read if you have time.

By 2020:

5.4 billion people around the world will have a phone

5.3 billion people will have electricity

3.5 billion will have running water  

2.8 billion carswill be on the road.

There will be a tenfold growth in mobile data traffic to 366.8 exabytes by 2020. (What is 366.8 exabytes? That's the equivalent of 81 trillion Instagram photos or 7 trillion YouTube clips.)

More than 75 percent of the world's mobile data will be video.

Figures taken from Cisco's annual report on mobile traffic growth.

Testing your grammar

The people from the Stands4 network (which has produced sites such as Abbreviations.com and References.net) has produced a new site to add to the ever growing stable, and it's Grammar.com. As you'd expect, it's a site all about grammar - you can cut and paste your own content to have it checked for spelling errors or grammar suggestions. You can choose your language - I was impressed that there are six versions of English - American, British, South African, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian, as well as a rich variety of others. There are several other sections to the site - a collection of frequently misspelled words, common grammatical mistakes, parts of speech, vocabulary building, punctuation and few fun sections as well.

It's a very useful site if you're bashing out a blog post and you just want to check that everything is as it should be, if you have a concern over 'affect or effect' for example, or you're a parent who wants to point their child to an excellent reference tool.

As with all of the other Stands4 sites it does an excellent job and would be a real addition to any quick reference collection.

World Backup day 2015

Until you need them, backups are a boring irritating waste of time. But when you need them, they can be an absolute life saver - almost literally in some cases. Here's a useful infographic that is worth spending a few moments looking at, just to remind you!

  Courtesy of: Cloudwards.net

Sending a file - how difficult?

Minor rant which will be familiar to so many of you I'm sure. I want to send a file to a client. It's a large PPT, but it just slips in under the Gmail file limit. However, it's not accepted at the clients end, because it's too large. Not to worry, I'll add it to Dropbox. No, that doesn't work, since Dropbox is banned for 'security reasons'. Ok then, I'll try another file drop service where the file can be picked up and downloaded via the browser. No, that doesn't work either, since that site is also blocked for 'security reasons'. Not to worry - I'll upload it to Slideshare.net where it can then be downloaded - only Slideshare is blocked as well, once again for 'security reasons'. FFS! Am I really going to have to copy this to DVD and post it? Utterly insane. Mind you, I'm not the client who is also going nuts about it too. 

Search privately using your favorite search engine.

As we all know, search engines like tracking you - your IP address, your search terms and so on. They use this to build up profiles, store the data and so on. It can be a real pain trying to search without this information being stored, but you can try Disconnect Private Search. This routes your search queries through their proxy servers before they go to the popular search engines, including Google, Bing and Yahoo. Instead of these search engines knowing that a search is coming from you or your computer, all searches look like they’re coming from Disconnect. They prevent search engines from sending your search queries to the web sites you visit from search results pages, and encrypt your search queries, which prevents your Internet Service Provider (ISP) from seeing your searches.

You can install their service onto your browser, or if you're unable to do that, you can search directly from their website:

When you run your search you'll get a drop down box next to the search box for the engine that you're using, and you can choose to search on Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo or Blekko. In actual fact, it's almost acting like a mini multi search engine at that point, since you can flick from one to the other. Not entirely sure why they have added in DDG, as that is already a private search engine, but more is better than less.

You may notice a few differences to the search results - since the search engine doesn't know where you are, it can't provide you with local results, and some advanced search functionality is unavailable, although they're working on it. I think it's worth giving this a go, even if only from the website; it's really interesting to see which searches differ, certainly in comparision to your own results that Google gives you, based on your Google account!

 

 

 

 

 

Beware of Zorpia!

I've been getting a fair number of messages recently from a company called Zorpia, telling me that my friends are sending me messages. I am invited to view these messages, but I have to either let them have my Facebook or Google account details. According to the posts that I've read on the net about this company what they then do is harvest all of your contacts, and use your name to send out emails to them inviting you to join as well. The site at the name and .com address (I'm not linking to them directly for the obvious reasons) looks like it's a legit social media website, but I would suggest steering clear of them. Also, I'd be inclined to ignore the offer to take you off their mailing list - it doesn't work and will just confirm your email address. The best that you can do is to create a filter that automatically deletes their mails to you.

I don't normally issue alerts like this, but it seems to have got into the library/information community at the moment, so let's stop it before it takes hold!

Immersion of email and big data

Just how much can we tell about someone just using very basic data? I have been playing around with a tool from MIT called Immersion, which looks at very basic information about your emails. I found the tool via an article called 'Think Metadata isn't intrusive?' which if you haven't read it, I would suggest doing so. Basically you give the tool access to your email account metadata—not the content, just the time and date stamps, and “To” and “Cc” fields and it numbercrunches for a very long time (it took 15 hours for it to do mine) before giving you back a series of graphs.

This is the type of information that you get - you can save graphs with or without names, and I've chosen the latter for obvious privacy reasons:

Each circle is a person - and the larger the circle, the more email goes back and forth between you and them. The colours represent groupings; the orange group for example is people closely related to or at CILIP for example. This collection is a total figure of 9.6 years, 367 collaborators and 30,000 emails. Now, if I go back to 2009, before I started working more closely with CILIP, the pattern is very different:

It doesn't take a genius to work out that my work and social patterns have changed dramatically over the three year period - the colours relate to different grouping this time by the way, so the orange now relates to another set of people that I was working with very closely at that period of time.

I can also get other basic details:

and again it's not too difficult to work out some basic information about what I have been doing simply based on the bare minimum details. If I flick across to collaborators it's again very easy to make assumptions about what I'm doing at any given period of time. Obviously it's far easier for me, since we're looking at data about me, so it's an open book, but even if you know very little about me, you can quickly start making assumptions, and they're not going to be too far from the mark, even if you have no idea of the content of my emails.

The idea that the government doesn't want to access the content of your email, but simply have basic details may not - at first glance - be a cause for that much concern. However, it really IS a big deal, and I'd encourage you to consider experimenting yourself. You may of course have concerns about letting MIT have access to these basic details - but then, that's what the UK government want. Think about it.

5 reasons why I'm not using Jelly

I look at lots of new tools, and 'Jelly' has been making the news recently. Jelly was founded in April 2013 by Biz Stone (of Twitter fame) and Ben Finkel. It's supposed to be a new search engine that brings people together, and lets them connect and share stuff. It's basically an app that you put onto your smartphone, and if you have a question, you take a photograph, ask your question and then throw it out into the world, hoping your contacts will be able to provide you with an answer. To be honest, if this had been produced by anyone other than Biz Stone it would have sunk without a trace. Because it's bad. Not only is it bad, it's pointless.

First of all, it's an app. Nothing wrong with apps and I use them all the time - but it's nice when there's a desk/laptop version as well. Just having something that runs on one platform really isn't a great idea, irrespective of the platform, because it's closing out a lot of people who might otherwise use it. Secondly, it's not a search engine because... you can't freakin' well search! All that you can do is mindlessly flick from one photograph to another, trying to find something that is of interest. Third, it's not useful - sure, if I want to know something I can post my question, and it relies on people seeing the question and then spending their precious time answering it. It's serendipity gone wild. Fourth, I have to append a photograph - I can't just ask a question. What if I don't have a photograph to use? Something random and pointless is required, which again doesn't help matters.

Fifth and finally, Jelly is a pointless answer to a question that we don't need to ask. If I need to know something, I'm going to ask on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Quora, where I am not restricted to adding in a photograph, and I can share my question widely, and properly engage with people who want to answer the question. If I need to know what something is while I'm out, I'll use Google goggles on my smartphone to see if that can tell me. If something is particularly urgent, then I'm not going to have time to post a picture, wait for responses that may never come and then act on them.

Jelly is the worst of the social media applications that are out there - expecting to engage people simply because it's not something else, because it's backed by a big name, and because it uses a smartphone app to do its work. It's a total waste of time and it's not going to catch on; it'll be dead in 3 months, but will limp along for a year before it gets put out of its misery.