Vivisimo's Clusty service

Vivisimo is not new but it's worth remembering. This is one of those services that searches the web and then groups the results in various ways. I did a search on Kpelle (an ethnic group from West Africa) and like the hits I got this way better than what I got in Google. There was more news.

Visual Tools

• Kartoo - a visual search engine
• Anacubis - desktop information analysis software
• Anacubis Google Search - http://www.anacubis.com/googledemo/google/index.asp- run the search and then expand the sites that link to the page.
• TouchGraph Google Browser - attempts to visualize the relationships between websites
• Visual Thesaurus - commercial product, can try for free
• Grokker - download software for $49
• An Atlas of Cyberspace - Shows screenshots and provides links for various visual tools
• WebBrain - displays a directory structure visually. Clicking on a subject changes the view to show related subjects
• Potato Land - click on Shred, enter a URL and it will visually shred any website. Seems fairly useless, but interesting.

Google Maps

Zounds! Google Maps is awfully cool. You drag the map around and can zoom with a tool bar that acts as if you can pick any point on the scale to zoom in on. The map designs are way better than MapQuest/Yahoo/etc. When you get directions the map is similarly zoomable. It worked better for me in Firefox than Netscape and it was a bit slow/jerky but still impressive.

Crazy barcoding stories

So there have been some crazy barcoding stories in the news lately. Some researchers at UCLA are considering using RFID to track cadavers.

Scientists intend to barcode all life on earth!

Read more about what people are not saying about RFID. In this article, one analyst is quoted as, "If you're behind the curve, obviously, you'd want to hide that from everyone, especially Wal-Mart and the DOD."

And yes, he is referring to the Department of Defense.

Some stuff on the Google Print Project

This Chicago Trib article is a nice summary of the project even though there is nothing terribly new.

From the web sites for the libraries participating in the project:

• Harvard University


• New York Public Library


• Oxford's Bodleian Library
  


• Stanford University


• University of Michigan

Build your own TiVo

I remember this was discussed at a Scrapple meeting. Here's a page I stumbled across recently for those who (like myself) might like to try it:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1121844,00.asp

Also, there is the Whole Hacking TiVo FAQ

Wiki Web sites

Wikis are a type of web page that can be edited by anyone - giving us yet another tool for online collaboration. Some services are emerging around Wikis - such as JotSpot. JotSpot's new service targets businesses that want to give authorized users a common location to collaborate. According to the CNN news story, coworkers could take a spreadsheet, customize it and revise it and have all information for a project reside in one Wiki Web site.

Read more about what Wiki's are. Here's a listing of Wiki's: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?BiggestWiki

If you're saying, wiki what are you talking about?!? You might know of a Wiki and not even realize it. Wikipedia - the Free Encyclopedia.

Combining the best of blogs and Wikis is a Bloki hybrid.

Topic Maps

Being discussed on LITA-L. Reference to an old article (2002) at http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/09/11/topicmaps.html. Will add more references as I explore.

A9 Yellow Pages Photos

A9 (the search engine owned by Amazon.com) now offers photos of the businesses at addresses in several cities as part of their yellow pages. You can find out more about how they did it here.

The French Yellow Pages (Les Pages Jaunes) has done this for several cities in France and Spain.

New search engine MuseSeek: "Others search, we find"

MuseSeek (http://www.museseek.com ) comes from MuseGlobal (http://www.museglobal.com.

Graphics are 'not to my taste' but the engine is pretty cool.

They let you choose one of their 9 categories to do the searching (Web Engines, Business, Entertainment, News, Booksellers, Sports, Libraries, Reference, or Careers.)

Advanced Search lets you more than one category to search and they offer 2 boxes with the choice of AND, OR or NOT.

**n.b., Link that says it lets you 'change the search rules' actually lets you change the display rules. Options include:

Results per page:
10 results per page 20 results per page

Results per source:
10 results per source 20 results per source

Retrieval by:
Fastest Relevance Date

Good article about Search Engines

Phil Bradley's regular column in Ariadne this month talks about what else users are looking for in a search engine. Not just how good is it (really who knows) but by features like toolbars that let them easily search without typing a whole URL, to watch for new email, to easily add items to a blog and so forth. So we are/will be beginning to see people look for bundles.

For my money, one of the very nice features of Firefox is that you can add as many search engines as you want to the tool bar. This kind of openness makes it appealing to librarians supporting public workstations.

Is MetaData dead? or is the sky just falling?

From a msg posted to the LITA listserv.

From: Brian Elkins
To: lita-l@ala.org
Date: Monday - January 31, 2005 5:59 AM
Subject: [LITA-L:1006] Impact of Google
quoting Joseph Esposito to liblicense-l on Jan 30

"...what exactly is Google planning to do? How will this fit into emerging metadata schemes? Will Google become the 'universal interface' for all research? Is metasearch dead? Will enabling data harvesting by Google become a priority for publishers, and if so, how wiil this affect the libraries that license content?..."

This one's just for fun

You can see how fast WorldCat is growing. The page automatically reloads every eight seconds.

Search LexisNexis for free

Yup, that's right. See the announcement in Information Today
(You'll need a subscription to and EBSCO database like Academic Source)

or go directly to http://www.lexisnexis.com/alacartenow . Caveat: You have to register and, of course, you'll have to pay for articles if you want to get them from L/N.

Google Suggest

Try it out at http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
"As you type your search, Google offers keyword suggestions in real time"
They seem to be offering something like a browse search terms option.

Comparing search engines again

Check out a comparison of Google and SCIRUS (an Elsevier product) by a guy in the UK:

http://www.ich.ucl.ac.uk/library/news.htm

Dynamic "appropriate resolver" bookmarklets

See Daniel Chudnov's site http://curtis.med.yale.edu/dchud/resolvable/for a prototype of a way to use OpenURLs via bookmarklets.