February 28, 2005
Nooked on RSS
Sligo firm launches RSS directory Deirdre McArdle, Yahoo UK News (Feb 25) - Nooked, an Irish firm with US offices that specializes in corporate communications, has a created a directory of RSS feeds to serve its largely business audience of sales and marketing executives, PR firms, journalists and analysts. Directory is organized somewhat by industry.
Nooked also has a good starter page of RSS Resources. Nooked offers a Web-based RSS publishing solution.
Of interest: "In the US, where RSS has really taken off, Pew Internet estimated that 5 percent of all US web news was read via RSS feeds." RSS is moving out of early adopter stage.
Vannevar Bush Visionary
Envisioning the Web, 60 Years Ago By Chris Sherman, Searchday (Feb 28) A look back to Vannevar Bush's famous article, As We May Think, in which he envisioned a 'memex' for storing and interlinking information. It's a classic.
Personal Information Management
UW ponders how to best store and retrieve electronic information By Kim Peterson, Seattle Times (Feb 15) Could we live without saving things in folders if search got so good it could find by keyword? No, says William Jones of the University of Washington.
" ... people still want to classify, to order, to sort their information in ways that will help them find it again on their own. This idea of organizing your electronic stuff — be it e-mail, favorite Web sites, letters, addresses or anything else — is the foundation for a nascent field called personal-information management. "
Project at UW is to build organizational tools that will work on top of current tools - email, web, Word etc - for easier labelling and finding.
Watson Searches While You Work
Watson from Intellext is a new search engine for searching the desktop and the Web. It will suggest terms based on contextual analysis of what you are working on in a document.
Meta Search For The Desktop By Susan Kuchinskas, Internet News (Feb 4) ""It understands the overall gist of what you're working on and selects terms of the query that you use over and over. It tempers that with what slide or paragraph you're on at that moment," he [Jay Budzik, a founder and chief technology officer of Intellext] said. The toolset includes ways of focusing the search, as well as a regular search query box."
"It will search Microsoft Word, Outlook and PowerPoint files, do Web searches via Internet Explorer only and can leverage only the X1 desktop search tool. But Budzik promised that integration with other desktop search products is on the way."
Trial personal version is available for 30 days. Then costs $99.95 US / year. There are multiuser and enterprise versions also.
Requires Windows 2000 or above and a 766 MHz CPU or greater.
Adding RSS to your Web Site
The Aggravations of Aggregation by Walt Crawford, EContent (Jan/Feb 2005) Advice to people about setting up an RSS feed for your website.
Interview with Ask Jeeves
"In conversation with..." Jim Lanzone & Apostolos Gerasoulis of Ask eeves/Teoma by Mike Grehan, e-Marketing News (Feb 2005) -- In conversation with Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President, Search Properties at Jeeves and Apostolos Gerasoulis, founder of the Teoma search engine. Lots of gems in this. Grehan undertook this conversation, reproduced here as a transcript, as part of his research for a book on search engine marketing.
+ Reviews ranking technologies. Grehan refers to another research paper he wrote about use of link analysis in Google's Page Rank and the topic clulstering doen by Teoma based on Kleinberg's algorithm. Gerasoulis says that Google is only using its Page Rank to break ties -- "The importance has diminished because PageRank is just one piece of the ranking algorithm over there. The ranking algorithm is so much more complex now. And PageRank is just used when they want to break ties."
+ Ask Jeeves doesn't intend to absorb Excite, iWon and MyWay, but it might switch these portals over to the Teoma search.
+ Is it wise for Yahoo to index XML feeds and web sites? These three men say not. "It's mixing apples and oranges, the structured data with the unstructured."
+ "Majority of searches on the web are non-commercial".
+ Gerasoulis expects 2005 will be an exciting year for search engines. "Now it's not just about communities, it's about the users. There are new technologies coming in which will change the way that people access information."
February 26, 2005
SortPrice - Comparison Shopping
Shoppers in the U.S. have another comparison shopping engine they can use - SortPrice. Seems to be based in New York. Issued a press release saying, Sortprice.com - the Broad-Based Shopping Search Engine to Watch (Feb 23). It provides free listings for merchants, and reasonably good categorization of products. However, it doesn't have reviews or the parameter searching that others like Yahoo Shopping have.
Smart Search Might Be On The Way
Web searching made more successful with automated, personalized assistance system - from Penn State, PHYSOrg.com (Feb 18) -- search software in the future might give better advice by watching what the seasrcher does.
Of interest >> "A Penn State researcher has developed software that improves Web searching with a personalized system that offers automated assistance for structuring and refining queries, evaluating search results and finding more relevant information. "Research shows 50 percent of all Web results retrieved are not relevant, pointing to a need for improved searching techniques," said Jim Jansen, assistant professor of information sciences and technology. "This technology enabled a 20-percent performance increase.""
Google Algorithm
Google Watchers See Shift In Algorithm by Shankar Gupta, Online Media Daily (Feb 22) -- Signs that Google has changed its relevance ranking algorithm -- "... new formula appears to give more weight to sites that have content, not just sponsored links and a navigation bar. And Google apparently now evaluates the anchor text to determine if it's related to the site content, or is just the same word over and over again--in which case the site's rank would fall."
Hockey Archives
Library and Archives Canada has a new collection -- Backcheck: A hockey retrospective - covers early days, French-Canadian tradition (an essay), women's hockey and community hockey.
+ Hockey stories from newspapers - choose by decade all the way back to 1820.
+ Bocks and Links - enough information to ask your library.
+ Educational resources - some ideas.
Firefox Security
Tech Support Alert had a tip for Firefox users - disable some or all of the javascript settings under Advanced. Do this through Tools/Options/Web features/Advanced. Tech Support wrote that , "the consensus view is that users should definitely disable the second option "Raise or lower windows" and there is little downside in also disabling the rest." This advice came from the Tech Support Alerts Newsletter (16th February, 2005) - worth subscribing to.
Hitwise's Search Engine Standings
Hitwise tracks visits to nearly everything on the Web. For the Computers & Internet - Search Engines & Directories category in the week ending Feb 19, 2005, Google took top spot.
Top 10 were:
Google
Yahoo! Search
MSN Search
Google Image Search
Ask.com
Yahoo! Image Search
My Web Search
Dogpile
Yahoo! Directory
AltaVista
Average session duration was 10 minutes, 14 seconds.
February 25, 2005
Firefox 1.0.1
Firefox fix plugs security holes By Steven Musil, CNET News.com (Feb 24) Mozilla released "Firefox 1.0.1 to fix, among other bugs, a vulnerability in the Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), a standard for handling special character sets in domain names that lets companies register domain names that appear to be the same in different languages." Update is at http://www.mozilla.org/.
Rocketinfo expanding
Rocketinfo to Access Prestigious NewsStand Inc. Content Business Wire via CBS Marketwatch (Feb 24)
Rocketinfo customers will have access to publications offered by NewsStand, including the New York Times, Barron's, Harvard Business Review, International Herald Tribune, National Law Journal and the Asian Wall Street Journal.
Of interest >> "Rocketinfo's database of over 100,000 business news sources includes all of the worlds leading news outlets including Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, the New York Times, BBC and many other well-known news sources. In addition, the Rocketinfo database covers thousands of smaller specialized publications as well as content from niche content providers such as trade journals, industry portals and specialty magazines. The Rocketinfo weblog database also includes the world's most popular and dynamic weblogs."
February 24, 2005
Paid Search
The Four Horsemen of Vertical Search, Rob McGann, Clickz (Feb 23)
"The paid search market will more than double from $2.6 billion in 2004 to $5.5 billion in 2009, and that growth will be driven by the "four horsemen" of vertical search, according to a new study by JupiterResearch." Retail, financial services, travel, and media and entertainment as the "four horsemen" accounted for 79 percent of spend on paid search in the U.S. in 2004.
"The pricing of paid search advertising is also projected to grow strongly from 2004 to 2009. Revenue will grow from $13.50 per-thousand-queries in 2003 to $28.05 per-thousand in 2009."
Also see Study: Paid search to continue climbing, Dinesh Sharma, Cnet (Feb 23)
AOL Local
AOL goes public with local search by Stefanie Olsen, Cnet (Feb 24) AOL has launched a local search on the public web for users to find local businesses, dining, movies, events and performers close to home or anywhere in the United States.
Of interest >> "AOL plans to improve its local and Web search service over the coming months. For example, it plans to introduce a travel search site in partnership with Kayak.com. It also plans to introduce improved local shopping tools in partnership with Bizrate.com. The local search site unveiled Thursday is powered by technology from Fast Search & Transfer. It also features local news aggregated by Topix.net."
TurboScout All-In-One
TurboScout is a new All-In-One search site that has 90 search engines across 7 categories.
Categories include Web, Images, Reference, News, Products, Blogs, and Audio and Video.
The Web category has a mix of search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Gigablast), directory (Looksmart, ODP), and other metasearchers (ixquick, Mamma). TurboScout will search the first engine on its list and display results. You can select other engines, one by one. Could be handy.
The developer, William Chee, a 21 year-old undergraduate from Singapore, says, "I've created TurboScout to help me save time by accessing all search engines without retyping. I hope you'll find it useful too."
Institutional Access at Google Scholar
Google Scholar has added a page where you can ask it to show institutional access links for a university. There are about 22 universities in the United States listed. Google calls this a "small pilot project".
"Institutional access is usually restricted to students, faculty, and staff of the respective institutions. You may be required to login with your library password, use a campus computer, or configure your browser to use a library proxy. Please visit your library's website or ask a local librarian for assistance."
Go to Google Scholar and click on Scholar Preferences.
Reverse Phone Lookup
Is It Too Easy To Find People On Google? Pete Barlas, Investor's Business Daily via Yahoo (Feb 18) It's easy to do reverse phone lookup for US phone numbers at Google - just enter the number in the search box and then link to a map and directions. Many telephone directories on the Web support reverse lookup and maps, but Google is what people know and it has made it very easy.
"Google's reverse directory service, called Google PhoneBook, is a bit quicker than similar services. InfoSpace and AnyWho require at least one extra step before getting to the reverse directory. After that, users get the same results as they do on Google."
People who are concerned about this can ask to have the information removed from Google. However, Danny Sullivan got to the nub when he said ""The real issue is that you have third-party companies out there compiling information on you, and they are publishing it and putting in on the Web."
My view -- Removing the listing from Google is just swatting at one fly. People who have any concern at all should switch to an unlisted number or perhaps switch to a cell phone.
Celebrities on Ask Jeeves UK
Hello! and Ask Jeeves team up for celebrity searches in Revolution (Feb 18) Hello Magazine in the UK will be supplying information on celebrities to Ask Jeeves UK.
"Users performing a search for a famous UK celebrity will receive a picture and be able to read text directly on the page. They can then click on the More function to read the full profile on hellomagazine.com."
Movies at Google
Google has a new shortcut for finding reviews and showtimes of movies.
Get movie reviews showing short blurb and the rating just by entering the name of the movie. Movies are grouped into positive, neutral, and negative reviews. Sort by relevance, date, and rating. Page also has frequently mentioned terms. US residents can also find showtimes and theatres in their area by entering city or zip code.
If you can't remember the title but can remember some bits of the movie, use movie:
Of course coverage of current movies will be best, but there are reviews going back to 1930s and 1940s, thanks in part to the New York Times Movies section.
Movie fans will love it.
February 23, 2005
Pluck v Onfolio
Two New Web Information Managers Debut at DEMO@15 by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Feb 21) - Writes up Pluck 1.0 for saving, organizing and storing web pages, and Onfolio 2.0 with RSS feed reading, local capture, and personal Web publishing. "While the products have some similarities, including RSS feed capture in both, the companies are positioning them for different markets and are using different revenue models."
Comparison Shopping
The future of comparison shopping in the Internet Stock Blog (Feb 22) Picks up comments made by Sean O'Rourke, author of the Organized Shopping Blog, on the future of comparison shopping. "This is a must-read for anyone interested in Shopping.com, Google's Froogle, Yahoo Shopping, MSN Shopping, and ValueClick's entry into comparison shopping."
Organized Shopping Blog also has an extended review of the MSN Shopping Beta.
Copernic Desktop Search 1.5
A New Version of Copernic Desktop Search is Now Available Search Engine Watch Blog (Feb 23)
Copernic Desktop Search is Gary Price's favourite of the many desktop offerings. In this posting he says why. Specific features worth noting:
- indexes Eudora email and Mozilla Thunderbird as well as Microsoft's email tools.
- does iPod music files - for all those iPod fans.
- handles 20 new file types
- indexes Firefox bookmarks and browsing history (as well as IE, of course)
More details and download are at Copernic Desktop Search.
MSN Image Search Uses Picsearch
MSN is now partnering with Picsearch of Sweden for its Image search. Picsearch announces collaboration with MSN - Image search for the new MSN Search is powered by Picsearch AB. Press release (Feb 21) It claims "hundreds of millions of images".
At MSN Search the image search options are by size (large, medium, small) and color or black and white.
But at Picsearch itself, you can use Advanced search for 6 choices in size, select on color vs black and white, and on images vs animations.
Ask Jeeves and Lycos also use Picsearch.
Yahoo Image Search
Yahoo Beefs Up Image Search Index to 1.5 Billion Images, Adds Shortcuts SearchEngineJournal (Feb 23)
Yahoo Image database is now 1.5 billion (that's larger than Google's). It has also added some trigger words that work in the Web search to show images as well as colour or format.
For example --
Web search for peace tower ottawa photos. Trigger words are photo, picture, image, and the plural forms.
Or -- black and white images peace tower ottawa
Also see Yahoo Increases Size of Image Database, New Features Added Search Engine Watch Blog. (Feb 23)
Is GMail Close to Launch?
Gmail moves to next stage by Matt Loney, CNet (Feb 18) Google has been sending out invitations to use the GMail email service rather that relying solely on the current membership inviting their own friends (current users are allowed to connect 50 other people). GMail offers 1 GB of storage, is known for its search capabilities, and for its context-sensitive advertisements. People are wondering when Google will offer open subscriptions.
Also see How Gmail Works - A look at the most buzzworthy development in e-mail in years; much for small business users to eventually consider - by Demir Barlas, Line56 (Feb 15)
Line 56 recommends GMail to small business users -- "A recent Line56 test of Gmail revealed it to be a service that could be particularly useful for the smaller business user who, unable to afford more potent malware-fighting software, IT safeguards, and basic content management, can get those features from Gmail. "
Bates' Google Search Tips
The Virtual Chase has a new contributor in Mary Ellen Bates, known for her columns and sessions at conferences about web search tools and techniques. She will be providing search tips to TVC starting with this month's "Googling Better" - four ways to exploit Google's capabilities.
- synonym operator ~ - my favourite also - tends to pick up word variants and related words (not exactly synonyms).
- personalized Google available through the labs (http://labs.google.com/personalized)
- shortcuts -- define: is good, most others are for the US
- specialized searches on US federal government content, specific universities and others.
AnchorDesk Reader Responds re Browsers
Earlier Molly Wood at ZDNet warned that Firefox would get some stiff opposition from the new and more secure IE7 that Bill Gates announced. Her readers took issue - all of them, she said - and especially verdyp -- Reader response: Do you still trust Bill Gates? in AnchorDesk, ZDNet (Feb 22)
Key comment >> "What is consistently frightening is that Bill tries to convince everybody that the only way to browse the Internet is to use the latest version of Windows, in order to be allowed to get security updates on a free browser."
Become.com for shopping
Another comparison shopping engine? The founders of MySimon are about to launch a new engine. MySimon founders launch new engine -- Veteran dot-commers jump on search craze by Bambi Francisco, CBS Marketwatch (Feb 23) This time it's Become.com It will find online retailers and also related articles on a product. Watch for the launch.
February 21, 2005
Pandia Search Engine Awards
Pandia has announced its awards for the best in search tools and commentary.
Search engine: Google in spite of the spamming that often befuddles popular searches. Honourable mention of sorts to Gigablast.
Metasearch engine: Ixquick, much to my amazement. Says it's "simple and easy to understand". Recommended ones - Ez2find (Yea), Profusion, Clusty.
Best site on searching: Search Engine Watch. Also mentions some non-English sites.
Best site on search engine marketing: Search Engine Watch again. But watch for Andrew Goodman's Traffick.com (Yes).
Best publication on searching: Tara Calishain's Web Search Garage. Excellent!
Best weblog on searching: Gary Price's ResourceShelf, but also mentions Rita Vine's Sitelines and Tara Calishain's ResearchBuzz.
Best desktop search tool: Copernic
Contact Pandia if you'd like to send in nominations for next year.
The Pandia Search Engine Awards 2004 (Feb 25, 2005)
Opposition to Google Digitization
Google "library" sparks French warcry By Reuters via Yahoo News (Feb 18) -- French antipathy to American domination has popped up in opposition to Google's digitization project. Head of the French National Library, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, fears that Google will favour Anglo-Saxon ideas and the English language.
" "I favour a multi-polar view of the world in the 21st century," he said. "I don't want the French Revolution retold just by books chosen by the United States. The picture presented may not be less good or less bad, but it will not be ours.""
See Gary Price's comments in Head of France's National Library Not Happy With Google Library Project Search Engine Watch blog (Feb 18)
February 20, 2005
Theoretical Librarian
Gerry McKiernan, frequent poster at library-related listservs, has opened his own weblog - Theoretical Librarian. Gerry McKiernan is Associate Professor and Science and Technology Librarian and Bibliographer at Iowa State University Library. His observations and discoveries are always interesting. The blog has a RSS feed. The announcement about this weblog is good news, that Gerry intends to stop posting at BusLib-L is not. Email is usually a must-scan, whereas RSS feeds are very optional and easily forgotten.
Advice for About.com
Andrew Goodman has some advice for the New York Times for improving its new purchase, About.com-- Great or Ho-Hum? A Wish List for NYT's About.com (Feb 19) To his excellent list (especially cutting back on the clutter), I would add better ways to search and browse - use the taxonomy to better effect for finding the guides that are about a subject.
About Six Apart
Couple Build Startup Into Blog Powerhouse by Michael Liedke, AP via ABC (Feb 19) Describes the work of Mena and Ben Trott in building up Six Apart Ltd , a company that provides blogging tools - TypePad and Movable Type.
But there is competition -- "Software giant Microsoft Corp. is seeking to undercut TypePad with a free blogging service called MSN Spaces. Six Apart also faces another formidable rival in online search engine leader Google Inc., one of the companies where Ben unsuccessfully applied for a job in 2001. Google in 2003 bought another blogging pioneer, Blogger."
Mena Trott used to keep a blog herself called Dollarshort. http://mena.typepad.com/dollarshort
February 19, 2005
My NCBI for PubMed
New Tools for the PubMed Researcher: ResourceShelf (Feb 12) MyNCBI supports saved searches, filters and alerts for PubMed.
Online Mapping
The revolution will be mapped By Molly Wood, AnchorDesk (Feb 17) -- Wood is finding "some of the richest content on the Web" in online mapping sites. She lists Google Maps, A9 Yellow Pages, GEO URL, Zip Decode, and Baby Name Wizard (perhaps because it is a very interesting example of information visualization).
Autolinks in Google Toolbar
Google landgrab raises online ire by Stefanie Olsen, CNet (Feb 18) Google's latest version of the toolbar for IE is being criticized for the autolink feature. Street addresses on web pages are automatically linked to Google Maps, and publisher's ISBN numbers for books link to Amazon - leaving other online bookstores out in the cold.
"Nevertheless, some critics charge that AutoLink takes the liberty of modifying Web pages to direct people the way Google sees fit. Microsoft took the same approach with its Smart Tags feature years ago and eventually pulled it because of trust and trademark concerns."
February 18, 2005
Borders at KeepMedia
KeepMedia Announces New CEO EContent Magazine (Feb 18) Louis H Borders will take over as CEO of KeepMedia, an online premium content site with news and articles from popular magazines and trade magazines.
Kapica Blog
Jack Kapica, technology writer at the Globe and Mail, has a -- weblog -- a "... personal commentary on trends and items of interest in the news." No RSS feed. Also no links to his columns, now part of the for-fee Insider Edition.
NYT Gets About.com
N.Y. Times to buy About.com for $410 million Reuters via CNet (Feb 17) "The Times Co., whose newspapers include The New York Times and The Boston Globe, said it will expand About.com's content and visibility and use the site to market its products."
Return of MyDoom Worm
MyDoom Worm Spreads Via Search Engines -- Latest variant finds e-mail address on your hard drive and on search engines -- PC World (Feb 17) In brief, when the worm gets on a hard drive it picks up the email addresses and then finds more on the Web by searching on the domain at search engines. It does its emailing from its own mail server. All the more reason not to put your email address on a web page or in a weblog, and to make sure virus definitions are uptodate all the time.
MiniLyrics does Karaoke
Singalong music fans will beat a path to MiniLyrics. This is a viewer that will automatically display in time with the music the lyrics of songs being played from MP3 files. Supported players include Winamp , RealOne, iTunes, Windows Media Players, matchbox, Quintessenial Player, Foobar2000. These will be current popular songs. And it's free. Requires Windows 2000 and later. At least watch the demo.
MiniLyrics 3.3.137
http://www.philocode.com/minilyrics/index.htm
Mentioned in Interent Scout Feb 18, 2005
Science.gov alerts
New Science.gov Service Delivers Science Information to Desktops Press Release (Feb 17)
Science.gov, a U.S> government gateway to science and technology information, has introduced a free alerting service about current science developments. Science.gov has "more than 1,700 government information resources and 30 databases on a wide variety of scientific topics".
Web-based Conferencing
Web Meetings for Nothing, Collaborate for Free By Dan Muse (February 15, 2005) SmallBusiness Computing.com
Convoq is giving away ASAP Express for one-on-one conferencing.
"ASAP Express will allow you to conduct unlimited free one-to-one Web meetings featuring VoIP, video, text chat, screen sharing, PowerPoint and file transfers. "Express is for one-to-one meetings, and for many scenarios that's enough," Shah said."
There is a corporate version for 15 participants at only $249 and a full conference room for more.
GMail
Gmail Steals Users From Hotmail TechWeb News (Feb 16)
"Fifty-seven percent of the users with a new Gmail account were changing from Hotmail, said Return Path's 2004 data, while just 27 percent were switching from Yahoo. The remaining 16 percent was split between AOL, MSN, and Comcast."
Northern Light Back in Town
Northern Light, the search engine professional searchers used to love, may be back in business for business research. It's not free, but the $50 all-you-can eat monthly fee will be attractive to some.
Tara Calishain reviewed it in Is It the Return of Northern Light? Northern Light's information page is at http://www.northernlight.com/library.html. Impressive list of industries. Picks up full-text from "1500 trade journals, business publications, and newspapers with all the charts, tables, figures, and pictures from the original articles" and current news from 70 newswires. Also has a "Business Web of 20 million pages from 16,000 editorially-selected websites of public companies, private companies, trade journal and trade associations, venture funded companies, venture capital companies, corporate law firms, MBA programs, and the agencies of the Federal Government that regulate business". In addition to content, there are many good features - alerts, custom folders.
30 day trial available.
IE Google Toolbar Update
Tara Calishain writes about Google Updates Its Toolbar (Feb 16) Has spellcheck, translation, and online maps for people in the U.S. See http://toolbar.google.com/T3/ Only for Internet Explorer (argh).
February 16, 2005
Annodex Video Search
Firefox plugin delivers HTML-style audio and video browsing by Renai Lemay, ZDNet Australia (Feb 11) -- "Australia's CSIRO research organisation has developed a Firefox plugin named Annodex that allows browsing through time-continuous media such as audio and video in the same way that HTML allows browsing through text."
More about this video surfing tool at http://www.annodex.net/.
Search Engine Spam
What, Exactly, is Search Engine Spam? By Bill Hunt, SearchDay (Feb 16) - Report of a panel session at the Search Engine Strategies 2004 Conference, December 13-16, Chicago -- Spam, according to Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management for Yahoo Search, is "pages created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant, or poor-quality search results." Shari Thurow, another of the panelists, identified 16 types of search engine spam such as tiny text, keywords unrelated to site, and keyword stacking. You can report spam at most search engines - look for links to contact.
Two Mapping Companies
It's the Road Now Taken -- Two mapping companies are behind most of the road data that go into GPS gadgets and onto Web sites -- Newsweek (Feb 21)
"At the center of this technology explosion is Navteq and its chief rival, Netherlands-based Tele Atlas. They have a duopoly in mapping data, and license their maps to all the major device makers and Internet sites."
RSS in Libraries - Audio
Libraries get hip to RSS -- Future Tense with Jon Gordon (Jan 21) - Audio file from Minnesota Public Radio in which Jon Gordon introduces RSS and talks to others about its use in libraries. Interviews a systems analyst from Seattle Public Library about its planned use to deliver notices and alerts on topics. Also interviews Stephen Abram of SIRSI about a RSS service it will be offering to libraries for use in delivering specialty feeds of content. Lastly, Stephen Cohen of LibraryStuff sees RSS becoming a "mainstream thing".
Google Print Hype
Google Out of Print By Roy Tennant, Library Journal (Feb 15) - Questions the value of Google's huge digitization project of library books - even if Google is able to bring it off. Copyright law will severely restrict what can be made public: content will be mainly pre-1923 text and small snippets of the rest.
"Google hype to the contrary, blind, wholesale digitization is no more a good thing than buying books based on color."
IE7 Coming for XP SP2
IE 7: so much for Firefox By Molly Wood, CNet Anchordesk (Feb 15) -- Don't get too attached to Firefox, says Molly Wood. Bill Gates has announced that Internet Explorer 7 will be released independent of Windows.
Andrew Brandt reported from the RSA Data Security conference where Gates announced the coming of IE7 -- Gates Announces New IE; AntiSpyware Will Remain Free PC World Blog.
"Gates mentioned that IE7 will be able to defeat scripting and URL masking vulnerabilities that phishers use to fool users into clicking links to fraudulent sites, or where they're asked to provide passwords to sensitive accounts."
However, IE7 will only be for Windows XP SP2 (Service Pack 2) customers. IE 7.0 Leaves Windows 2000 Users Out in the Cold eWeek. "IE 7.0 will build on and expand the progress made with SP2 and put in place defenses against malware, spyware and phishing attacks." There was no information about non-security enhancements for the browser.
Tours.com - A True Travel Portal
Tours.com helps you search for tours and vacations. Select a destination and the type of travel - anything from adventure to yacht charters - to get a list of tour operators.
Other search tools cover transportation by water (barges, yachts, ferries, cruises), and rail. There are destination guides, travel guides (under maps), lists of online booking services (Kayak, Expedia etc), and visitor's bureaus and loads more. International and Canadian coverage is very good, although the travel agents and touring companies are mainly U.S operators and services such as TicketMaster tend to be for events in the U.S.
Internet Travel Search Engine Tours.com Now Offers Worldwide Travel Agent Search, Capabilities Press release (Feb 15)
February 15, 2005
Onfolio
Onfolio Releases 2.0 Econtent Magazine (Feb ) -- "Onfolio 2.0 is a PC solution that's built into the browser with integrated tools for reading RSS news feeds, collecting and organizing online content, and publishing to email, weblogs, and Web sites." Works with Firefox. Will have two editions - professional $99.95 and personal $29.95.
RSS Primer for Journalists
RSS for Journalists Your own personal Web butler, By Jonathan Dube, Poynter Online (Feb 15) - short primer on what RSS is, what you use to read the feeds, how you can find feeds. Written for journalists but useful to all.
The Butler And Mozilla?
Ask Jeeves mulls Firefox-based browser, by Paul Festa, ZDNet (Feb 14) - interesting twist -- "Ask Jeeves and the Mozilla Foundation have begun discussions on the twin possibilities of a Firefox-based Jeeves browser and of donating Jeeves' desktop search technology to the open-source group."
Listen to Quint
Tick, Tock, by Barbara Quint, Searcher (Feb 2005) -- Barbara Quint with her inimitable style and with her usual uncanny eye for the implications of information technology casts forward in time and sees that -- "the Universal Virtual Library is growing out of the Web and its search engines and that, some day, this emerging phenomenon will threaten and finally engulf the world of traditional, brick-and-mortar libraries." Google's digitization project and the open access movement will have enormous implications for libraries and information professionals. She has many visions but mainly advises designing services that serve many people at one shot and reach beyond the traditional constituencies.
Yellow Pages
Yellow Pages Association Expands Local Search Guide; First-Ever Online Local Search Resource Adds Profiles, Mapping Section and New Viewpoint Survey Business Wire via CBS Marketwatch (Feb 14) - tools for businesses to understand reach of yellow pages through local search tools.
"The Local Search Guide ... is the first-ever, free online resource that profiles Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs), Search Engines and Search Tools companies. Each profile is developed using public information and details corporate backgrounds, business/advertising products and partnerships."
Who's Who of Internet Yellow Pages and search engines at www.localsearchguide.org.
Pluck as an Information Centre
Pluck Launches New Personal Web Information Center Free Web Application Integrates Multiple Web Productivity Tools to Simplify and Improve How Users Consume, Control and Create Web Information -- PR Newswire via CBS Marketwatch (Feb 14)
Pluck 1.0 promises to bring together into one easy interface the tools we use today to be on the Web - browser, RSS reader, e-mail etc - "single source for all web needs" and "anywhere access" as well as "web information management". It even offers synchronization between computers for bookmarks, private and public folders, and RSS feeds".
February 14, 2005
Ingenta and Infotrieve
Ingenta Expands Relationship with Infotrieve Newsbreaks (Feb 14)
"Ingenta and Infotrieve, Inc. announced an expanded partnership that allows Ingenta-hosted content to be indexed by Infotrieve’s full-text crawler. This will enable Infotrieve to provide full-text article searches via its discovery research portals, thereby increasing resources for Infotrieve customers and generating additional document delivery traffic for Ingenta-hosted publishers."
Collaborative Online Tools
New Tools Making Online Work Easier by May Wong, AP via ABC (Feb 13) -- "The idea is to make it easy to quickly post and remove stuff from digital bulletin boards where the online communities of the future will gather to catch up and trade ideas, images and work." Mentions JotSpot, Bubbler from Five Across for community bloggins, and iUpload from Canada for blogging. Also Pluck -- "that's designed to be a one-stop personal information manager for search, blogs and data feeds known as "Really Simple Syndication," or RSS a system that grabs fresh information from designated sites and distributes summaries and links to the user."
Newsburst
New online RSS news aggregator / newsreader - this one from CNet - Newsburst It has a starter list from which new subscribers can select feeds. List looks good for technology. U.S. sources dominate the news category except for BBC.
From Newsburst -- "Newsburst is a personalized tool that tracks virtually any type of information on the Web: news, blogs, shopping lists, weather, search results, alerts, auctions and more."
Mentioned in CNET to Launch Web-Based RSS Reader Micro Persuasion (Feb 9)
Fight Spyware
Antispyware By Konstantinos Karagiannis, PC World (Feb 2) Editor's Choice is Webroot's Spy Sweeper 3.5
Peek into Google's Intentions
Google Reveals Its Product Formula By Matt Hicks, eWeek (Feb 9) Google executives revealed some of their plans in sessions with Wall Street analysts.
+ Google's business formula is 70% on "core search and advertising", 20% on "adjacent" - like Google Desktop, and 10% on experimental.
+ It will be more global. "The model is one where Google's main search technology draws enough traffic to its local site and to partners that it then can support the addition of its advertising-based revenue model".
+ Betas will remain betas as long as the engineers keep making changes to them. So - Google News is likely to stay in beta for some time.
Frankly - this begs the question - Google Search is changed from time to time and it's not in beta. Leaving products in beta and being silent on what work is being done on them (such as Google Scholar) may make users wary and distrustful.
Article does not mention that Eric Schmidt, CEO, talked about the possibility of Google requiring its users to register and provide personal information in order to use the products. Several of the articles about the session missed this point.
Google Discusses Strategy With Analysts BizReport (Feb 10)
Web Information Literacy
Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea By GEOFFREY NUNBERG, New York Times (Feb 13) - We all put too much trust in what we find on the Internet. Several studies by Pew Project on the Internet and American Life show that people are unaware of the dangers (can't recognize paid listings and feel they are finding what they are looking for). In particular there was the study by BJ Fogg in 2002 that showed people judge sites by their appearance.
A new test developed by the Educational Testing Service to measure students' ability to evaluate online material might help.
Mainly -- "In the end, then, instruction in information literacy will have to pervade every level of education and every course in the curriculum, from university historians' use of collections of online slave narratives to middle-school home economics teachers showing their students where to find reliable nutrition information on the Web."
Post-Boolean Y!Q
Yahoo!’s New Y!Q Service Improves Conceptual Searching by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Feb 14) - describes Yahoo's Y!Q for pasting a block of text into a box and having Y!Q pick out the concepts. Quint finds some resemblence to boolean - ORing the terms, searchers select particular terms - AND them. She writes -- "Y!Q combines the ease of post-Boolean search capabilities (relevance ranking, More Like This, automatic taxonomy checks, etc.) with the control that Boolean-style searching offered."
Try it at http://yq.search.yahoo.com.
Wiki Google?
Google may host encyclopedia project by Matt Hines. CNet. (Feb 11) "Wiki Media Foundation, the group behind the Wikipedia online encyclopedia project, said Friday that search giant Google has volunteered to host some of its content on company servers."
John Dvorak at PC Magazine isn't sure that Google's motives are 100% altruistic. He gives the example of Google's lacklustre support of usenet newsgroups through Google Groups. Googlepedia: The End is Near (Feb 14) - Google is now a public corporation. Can it be trusted to always do the right thing, the demands for profit being what they are?
Wikinews
Looking for news stories from the grassroots? Wikinews might have it. Wikinews is based on the same premise as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Anyone can add or edit an article. At Wikinews the aim is collaborative news gathering and reporting. In theory editing by others will make for neutral and unbiased reporting because errors are corrected. But that doesn't prevent new bias or new errors being introduced. In practice, Wikinews might have some value for picking up first hand accounts by citizen (untrained) journalists, but it's not likely to ever be a fully credible source.
Wikinews creates the unassociated press by Aaron Weiss, CNet News (Feb 11)
Of interest: "Despite the obstacles, the Wikinews community has produced more than 500 articles in its first two months. One contributor, Lennart Regebro, a consultant from Paris, said he was drawn by the opportunity to shape online news delivery. Another, Seth Matheson, a junior at St. Mary's College of Maryland and editor of the college newspaper, said he was interested in bringing diverse news sources together. And Wiki Wickramarathna, a freelance photographer and journalist from Sri Lanka, saw an opportunity for reporting on recent events from his location."
Wikinews - Seven language 'editions'.
Wikinews - English - browse by subject and region.
February 13, 2005
Blog at MSNBC
MSNBC.com Announces Blog This. EContent (Feb 11)
MSNBC.com has added a Blog This - "designed to allow users to quickly and efficiently write blogs related to specific MSNBC.com news stories and communicate their opinions to others."
Map Search
Review: Google Online Maps Need Work AP via CBS Marketwatch (Feb 10) - compared Google Maps to Yahoo, Mapquest, and MSN.
"First off, all the services get their data from the same sources, primarily Navteq Corp. and Tele Atlas N.V. They differ in how they analyze and present the data."
"MSN offers maps in all or parts of 20 countries, mostly in North America and Europe. Mapquest covers most of the world, though most countries have only city maps not street-level maps or driving directions. By contrast, Yahoo Inc.'s map service covers the United States and Canada only, and Google only includes parts of Canada."
Overall, writer picked Yahoo Maps.
February 10, 2005
Amazon into 43 Things
Amazon invests in blogging site by Alorie Gilbert, CNet (Feb 9) Must be something in the water - all the search engines want into the blogging action.
"Amazon is dipping its toe in the Web log phenomenon with an investment in 43 Things, a new Web site where people write about their goals and accomplishments and are linked to others with similar interests."
Market Research Tutorial
Knowthis.com has a good online tutorial on Finding Information for Market Research (Part 1) Part 1 is an overview of the inexpensive sources - associations, company web sites, government, third party and universities. Part two will get into the for-fee resources (available in March.)
Ask Jeeves Buys Bloglines
Ask Jeeves turns to bloggers By SIMON AVERY, Globe and Mail (Feb 9) Ask Jeeves bought the very successful (and non-commercial) Bloglines, an online news aggregator and weblog publishing centre. Why? Tap into a population of early adopters? (Blog readers and blog writers tend to be early adopters of technology.) Gain the support of those users? Have a place to put advertisements? Index the blog contents?
"Mark Fletcher, who founded Bloglines in 2003, had been running the firm out of his Silicon Valley home and had yet to commercialize it with advertisements. It remains to be seen how Ask Jeeves will monetize the popular service, but the company said Tuesday that it will combine Bloglines's leading aggregation technology with its own algorithmic search technology, but will maintain the Bloglines service and brand separately. In addition, Mr. Fletcher will stay on as vice-president and general manager of the Bloglines service."
Bloglines and Ask Jeeves issued a letter to its subscribers that is more forthcoming in describing reasons and benefits than we see from most other companies.
"By purchasing Bloglines, the leading free, online service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing RSS news feeds and blogs, Ask Jeeves is able to add this rich web content to its search technologies."
Firefox Extensions
PC Magazine does a round up of Top 15 Firefox Extensions (Feb 2) Of course, Googlebar is one of them. I've used the Bandwidth Tester - not bad for a freebie, and MapIt would be good if you use MapQuest frequently.
Background Checks
New article by Genie Tyburski on How To Conduct a Background Check previously published in Law Office Computing. Provides a general overview of privacy protection considerations and the availability of public records online. Part one of two.
February 09, 2005
Listening to consumers
"Understanding Consumers through Online Competitive Intelligence" By Patrice Curtis, Freepint (Feb 10, 2005) Main message - CI researchers - pay attention to consumers.
"CI researchers can gain so much more from sustained attention to
consumer activity. In fact, beyond simple defensive postures, CI
professionals can proactively assist decision-makers in driving
company growth by identifying trends that might drive future product
innovation."
Google Maps in Canada
Andrew Goodman tested Google Maps for Toronto addresses and found that it worked. Google Maps a Smooth Experience traffick.com (Feb 8) I've tried Google Maps for Canadian addresses now too and find it's good for Toronto addresses but quite spotty for Ontario. It can show types of services near me - internet cafe, bakeries, banks. No wifi though - I guess that's really the case.
Google Scholar Way Behind
Rita Vine has the proof - Google Scholar is about a year behind in indexing material from PubMed. It's possible that Google relies on whatever the National Library of Medicine provides and that NLM hasn't delivered, but it's remiss of Google not to comment. Whatever the cause it's bad for Google Scholar and anyone who uses it. Means that Google Scholar is more a curiosity than a real service - at least for now.
Google Scholar is a Full Year Late Indexing PubMed Content Sitelines (Feb 8)
Collision Course
Google, Yahoo, MSN And AOL All Moving Towards Convergence by Jim Hedger, Webpronews.com (Feb 3) "February has come in like a lion with a multitude of major announcements from several major players in the past 48-hours." Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL on a collision course.
Search in Australia
The changing world of the search engine by Adam Turner, Sydney Morning Herald (Feb 8) Pits Mooter Relevance Engine, a new search tool from Australia, against Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. In doing so describes the product offerings and strategies of the big guns.
Of interest: "The Mooter Relevance Engine studies the way search queries are phrased and the selections users make, matching them to cognitive styles and behavioural variables to construct a "psychographic profile" that doesn't rely on prior knowledge of the user. It is being tested by news websites to guide users to relevant content and by marketers to dish up more appealing ads."
Has some information about Ansearch -- "New Australian search engine Ansearch is one of a new generation of search engines taking a less-is-more approach. It lists only the most popular segments of the web, minimising the amount of pages it monitors to produce more accurate search results."
About.com For Sale
About.com, Primedia's Web Venture, Is for Sale by Katharine Seelye, New York Times (Feb 8) Primedia has put About.com on the block. About.com offers guides to the Internet - 475 of them. Bidders are Google, Yahoo, New York Times, AOL and Ask Jeeves. Thomas Rogers created About.com as the Mining Company in 1996. The vision was a grand one of involving subject experts as guides and sharing the revenue. Under Primedia it became burdened with advertisements and the plan to integrate it with other print products never worked out. Primedia bought it for $690 million in October 2002. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, the owner of Primedia, is selling it for $350 to $500 million.
February 08, 2005
Answers.com is the best
So says Lisa DiCarolo in The Best Internet Innovation In Years at Forbes (Feb 7) -- "Let me just come right out and say it. Answers.com is the most useful, smartest, coolest, easiest-to-use Web innovation to come around in years." Well - it does have answers to factual questions, presents them very clearly, and is free.
Ingenta and Infotrieve
Ingenta Expands Relationship with Infotrieve eContent (Feb 8)"Ingenta, a technology and services provider for the publishing and information industries, and Infotrieve, Inc., a provider of content software technology and information services, have announced an expanded partnership that is intended to enable Ingenta-hosted content to be indexed by Infotrieve's full-text crawler."
Top Ten Search Engines
Can You Name the Top Ten Search Engines? Greg Jarboe in Internet Search Engine Database (Feb 7) - Has the Nielsen//NetRatings for top ten search destinations (US, home and work) in December 2004 and compares those to a year earlier.
+ Google has more reach. 44.85 vs 37.41%
+ Yahoo is in #2 spot, having swapped with MSN Search which fell to #3 (might change again with new MSN Search engine)
+ AOL is still #4 and gained reach - 17% up from 15.48%
+ Ask Jeeves is still #5 but despite all its work at new features declined in reach from 8.10% to 7.8%.
+ My Way, owned by Ask.com, has dropped off entirely.
+ Information.com, a portal-style meta searcher, has lept on.
Resource Discovery Network and other Academic Directories
Péter Jacso provides an overview of the state of scholarly directories in the Péter's Digital Reference Shelf - February 2005 and specifically reviews Resource Discovery Network (RDN) in the UK.
Notes that "The majority of resources [of RDN] have substantial and informative descriptions, as opposed to the too short and often erroneous entries in the widely adapted Open Directory Project (ODP), or in the ever-deteriorating Yahoo directory."
But "On the negative side, in spite of the richness of RDN, there are inexplicable omissions." - also duplicates, triplicates, and outdated records (always the bane of directories).
Conclusion -- "In spite of the deficiencies, RDN belongs to the few good Web directories and subject guides dedicated to scholarly resources that are not polluted by uninformative entries about mediocre or inferior sites."
Mentioned in ResourceShelf.
ENTERWeb for Business Sites
ENTERWeb lists and reviews resources on the Internet related to business (765 sites as of today). It describes itself as "an annotated meta-index and information clearinghouse on enterprise development, business, finance, international trade and the economy in this new age of cyberspace and globalization". The Main Menu provides a topical breakdown.
Enterweb has added a section on Competitive intelligence and strategic intelligence. First entry is a Guide on Competitive Intelligence produced by Industry Canada.
Google Maps
Google Maps is a new US local search tool from Google that has been released through Google labs. It's an interactive map - move the pointer, zoom in, move over, up, down - getting more and more detail. Could spend hours. But also has tools for getting directions from one address to another, or finding services in an area. It's much easier to get information if you know the zip code. Figuring this out isn't entirely intuitive. Take the tour.
See Google finds its map service by Margaret Kane, CNet News (Feb 8) - has short history on the product.
US Public Records
~ free public record databases are the future ~ in PI News Link by Tamara Thompson Investigations. (Feb 5) About Petrieve.com, a metasearch engine for public records in the United States.
Mentioned in TVC ALert
Kayak.com
Kayak.com Launches Consumer Online Travel Site; Company Announces New Content, Features, and Distribution Partner; Plus, Kayak.com to Award Winter Getaways for Registered Users Business Wire (Feb 7)
From the press release -- "Kayak.com is the first travel search engine to integrate user-created reviews and ratings and other relevant travel information with real-time prices and availability. The site accesses over 100 online travel sites with just one click, providing prices and itineraries for more than 550 airlines and 85,000 hotels."
As with any of these travel tools, you need to know a fair amount about airlines and hotels to know whether the travel search engine is finding the best combinations. I did a simple flight search from one city to another knowing that there are non-stop flights. Kayak didn't show them.
ThomasNet.com
ThomasRegister.com and ThomasRegional.com are Now ThomasNet.com; Industrial Search Site Meets Needs of Buyers and Sellers BusinessWire via CBS Marketwatch (Feb 7)
"Thomas Industrial Network, Inc., a leading online provider of Internet sourcing and marketing solutions for industrial buyers and sellers, today announced the official integration of Thomas Register of American Manufacturers (ThomasRegister.com) into its new Website, www.ThomasNet.com(TM)."
February 07, 2005
Blogs at Findory
Visualize A Weblogs "Neighborhood" at Findory.org, "the "personalized" news and weblog tool". Search Engine Watch Blog (Feb 2)
Jacso on Ebert
Another review of a service by Peter Jacso - this time the RogerEbert.com site for movie reviews. Jacso's review provides good overview of the best in film information on the Web -- "Movie fans have been spoiled rotten by the best free databases on the Web, which have been graced by such gems as the widely popular Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and All Movie Guide (AMG) from the early days. The New York Times Movie Reviews database added more than just a venerable collection to the Web for free, it made the Web more respected by conservative, technophobe cinema fans. Then came the lesser-known Rotten Tomatoes site with — among others — superbly consolidated, aggregated and sorted reviews. It, in turn, must have inspired the creation of the fine Metacritic site, which took this idea one level higher by extending the high-brow aggregation and integration of reviews from hundreds of newspaper, magazine and Web site sources beyond movies and into music, software and books." Essentially recommends we use IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes to get Ebert's reviews.
Web's Biggest Search Engine?
Web's Biggest Search Engine - that's the claim - done by using the domains registered with the whois.com database as the seed. www.websbiggest.com
But it's a very poor engine. AVOID it. No syntax, can't respond to anything but 2 or 3 word queries and is absolutely loaded with advertisments and sponsored listings - the worst I have ever seen. Does have some intriguing features such as links for reviews (Alexa), popularity rankings, discussion, contacts, but all to no avail.
Search Engine Claims It Is 'Web's Biggest' Tech Web (Feb 3)
Dialog To Divide (and Conquer)
Dialog Divides into Sci-Tech/Intellectual Property and Business/News by Marydee Ojala, Newsbreaks (Feb 7)
"Dialog and DataStar will shift to Thomson Scientific & HealthCare. Its general manager will be David Brown, who will report to president and CEO Vin Carraher. The remaining units (NewsRoom, NewsEdge, Profound, LiveNews, and Intelliscope) will stay as part of Thomson Legal & Regulatory. "
RSS and Search
Bloglines and the Future of Blogs, RSS and Search Cory Kleinschmidt, Traffick.com (Feb 6) Ask.com bought Bloglines, an online RSS newsfeed aggregator. Kleinschmidt sees an "intersection of search engines, blogs and RSS technology".
It's the money
Search-engine wars "Innocuous, no-frills advertising has become the hottest commodity on the Web Against all odds it works and of course Microsoft wanted in" The Toronto Star (Feb 7) [Registration] It's the money.
+ Google "$1 billion (U.S.) of advertising during the last three months of 2004"
+ Revenue from the search engine industry will increase to $8.9 billion by 2007 from $2.6 billion in 2003 according to an analyst at Piper Jaffray.
February 05, 2005
Local Search Hot in the US
Meet the Local Search Engines Shari Thurow, SearchDay (Feb 2) Report from a Search Engine Strategies conference - why local search should be attractive to advertisers. Spends time with local search at AOL and Ask Jeeves.
Of interest -- ""We're seeing users becoming far more sophisticated with search and using local search a lot more for their daily needs," he continued. "We've seen in Kelsey Research that as many as 25% of searches online are done for information with the intent of buying offline locally."" -- comments by Darius Pacsuzki, Vice President of Local Products at AOL
About GuruNet
GuruNet hopes soar on new ever-searching surfers By Shirley Yom Tov, Haaretz - Israel News (Feb 4) Feature on GuruNet, an Israeli company, that is responsible for Answers.com and has just entered an agreement with Google to provide definitions and additional factual information on key terms. GuruNet has had an agreement with A9 for several months.
LexisNexis Adds Content
LexisNexis Adds Content for Academic and Library Community EContent (Feb 4) "LexisNexis U.S., a provider of legal, news, and business information services, has announced an expansion of its news and international content for the academic and library community."
A Whitelist World
E-mail apocalypse: now Molly Wood, ZDNet (Feb 3) Spam by some estimates represents 88 percent of all email. The Can Spam Act passed in the US about a year ago is partly to blame. Exclude lists - or blacklists - are controlling the flood. The answer is probably whitelists - building lists of email addresses from whom you will accept email. Says, "Whitelists are a pain in the posterior, don't get me wrong, but we can ease into them."
Newsplorer
Newsplorer is a "fully skinnable news reader application" (meaning you can shape it into the window you want) that handles RSS formats (though Atom is not listed) and works with Windows 95 and above. Users can group by category and see most recent results in the system tray. Recommended by Internet Scout Report.
February 03, 2005
Canada's Online Arts Magazine
New online Arts magazine from CBC.ca at cbc.ca/arts covering new "ideas and trends in arts, media and entertainment."
"Our mission ... is to explore Canada and the world through the fascinating prism of the arts. We're operating on the premise that the culture surrounding us isn't just about diversion we think it's more important than that. Lots of Canadians define themselves through their cultural allegiances; the entertainment industry is a massive economic force; today's movie or pop tune is tomorrow's social history."
It looks eclectic - film, tv, stage, books etc - but it needs an alerting service or RSS news feed.
Netscape 8 to fight Phishing
Netscape readies antiphishing browser By Paul Festa, CNet (Jan 31) Netscape is expected to release the beta of a new browser, Netscape 8, on February 17. This one is designed to resist phishing schemes. "For example, Netscape is in negotiations with various security companies to supply the Netscape 8 beta with frequently updated blacklists of Web sites that are suspected of purveying spyware, phishing schemes and other hostile code."
It hopes to pick up market share (or hold its own). But Firefox has so much momentum - can Netscape compete?
NY Times on Topix.net
If you like Topix.net for its 12,000 sources and categorization into 150,000 topics, you'll like it even more now. New York Times buys featured position on Topix.net Silicon Valley (Feb 2)
"Hoping to attract more online readers, The New York Times is paying to have its headlines featured in sections of Topix.net, an Internet startup that compiles news snippets from hundreds of Web sites."
Google as Registrar
Google gets rights as Web site registrar by Stefanie Olsen, CNet (Feb 1) This story is turning up everywhere - must be significant.
"The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit based in Los Angeles, has deemed Google a domain name registrar, according to the search company. However, it has no plans to sell Web addressees for now."
Why is Google doing this? "Rival registrars that make a business of selling domain names are speculating that the credentials will give Google a more powerful seat at the table with ICANN, an Internet government body, or a potential business opportunity down the road." And it can control its own domains.
MJC Software Promises
Hope this isn't vaporware -- MJC Software Inc. to Unveil the Next Generation Search Engine -- "The new engine, not publicly available is an algorithmic search engine built from scratch by MJC Software engineers. "This is our new engine that we've built from the ground up," said Mike Curry, product manager for the "Skunk works" Project."
Onion on Google
Now the wonderful satiric Onion is giving Google some press. Google in 2005 (Feb 2)
New from Yahoo - Context search with Y!Q
Yahoo Offers New Y!Q Contextual Search Tool by Chris Sherman, Searchday (Feb 3) New tool from Yahoo called Y!Q (yes - an exclamation mark!) that will let you select a passage from a page to run as a query. Yahoo determines concepts and context and tries to match these in the results it picks. Of course there is an IE toolbar for this and a couple of extensions for Firefox.
There is a demo of it embedded in Yahoo News. http://test.news.yahoo.com/. Click on "Related search results".
This sounds a bit like a product from 4 or 5 years ago called Webtop that tried to provide natural language searches. It too working at extracting concepts from a passage.
More information about Y!Q at Yahoo Search YIQ
We'll have to watch how this develops.
February 02, 2005
MSN Search Reviews
Cory Kleinschmidt is unimpressed by latest changes at MSN Search and the MSN portal -- MSN Portal Update Doesn't Cut the Mustard Traffick.com (Feb 1)
"MSN seems to change its spots so often as to be untrustworthy in my book.
Compare that to Yahoo's steady user-friendliness and Google's ardent focus
on the user's needs, and the new MSN just comes out flat."
Tara Calishain would like to see more advanced search options -- MSN Launches their Web Search -- ResearchBuzz (Feb 1). Notes that you can do a title: search in News.
EDS Canada Privacy and Identity Management Survey
Canadians susceptible to scams By JACK KAPICA, Globe and Mail Update (Feb 1) - Really? Are these the same Canadians who wouldn't shop online for fear that their credit card number would be stolen? Yes - and they are still very wary about credit card numbers but have been scammed over the phone and through email. Article has some statistics on the differences between Canadians and Americans in their views about privacy and practices to prevent identity theft. On the whole, Canadians are more cautious and expect more of organizations to protect their privacy.
EDS Canada Privacy and Identity Management Survey-was conducted by Ipsos Reid. "According to the survey of consumer habits, 61 per cent are willing to provide their postal code, 54 per cent will provide their address, 12 per cent will supply their account numbers and 10 per cent will supply passwords." They are getting caught by telephone scams and phishing through email (being sent to a bogus web site).
But -- " few Canadians are willing to disclose information about their social insurance numbers and credit and debit cards"
Library City
The Future of the Digital Library: An Interview with Tom Peters by James Morrison and Tom Peters, Innovate - Journal of Online Education from Nova Southeastern University (Feb 2005) [subscription required]
About LibraryCity, a project to create a free online library of thousands of e-books in easy-to-read formats as well as an online community of readers.
Tom Peters, consultant to the project, states -- "Our goal is to construct a worldwide digital library of both public-domain and copyright-protected e-books. LibraryCity will focus in particular on the "last mile" issues related to helping individuals and groups access the content in extremely flexible, usable, interactive ways. When people use LibraryCity, we want them to feel that they are part of an online community, not just individuals in cyberspace accessing a digitized text. "
Comments on funding issues, technology options, stakeholders.
Firefox 1.1 Delayed
Firefox 1.1 delayed by Ingrid Marson, CNet (Jan 31) - Mac and Linux users will have to wait a little longer for a good fitting version of Firefox. Firefox 1.1 has been pushed back to June. Also, plans are to release a Firefox that is easier for enterprises to deploy.
CTO of Blinkx Talks
Video search with Blinkx Network World Fusion (Jan 31) -- Suranga Chandratillake, co-founder and CTO of Blinkx talks about Blinkx's video search technology. Blinkx TV accesses video and audio and makes it searchable by picking up text on the page around the clip, using any closed captioning, and using audio recognition to do on-the-fly transcripts.
February 01, 2005
Future of Search
In search of more: the ‘friendly’ engines that will manage the data of daily life By Richard Waters, FT.com (Feb 1) Futuristic view of what searching may become.
Of interest -- "Users will want more direct responses to their search queries, the experts acknowledge. "The biggest change we will see in the next five years will be in the way people use computers," says Mr Silverstein. Mobile handsets will become the most common way to find information on the internet, he adds. At that point, most queries would best be made and answered by voice. f the search companies become a more integral part of everyday life, how far will their influence eventually extend - and what impact will they have on other companies that exist to create or distribute information?"
Blogs from Iraq
Blogs of War A Review of Alternative Sources for Iraq War Information by Paul S Pyper, Searcher (Feb 2005)
" The beauty of blogs lies in their immediacy and interactivity. Readers can respond to posts immediately via the comments link and see their responses published automatically. Any blog author will attest that this immediate feedback provides fact-checking, stimulates discourse and debate, and adds extensive content. In the case of Iraqi blogs, both soldier and civilian, these posts also send love, comfort, support, and advice to and from friends and family."
Lists starting points for finding all kinds of Iraqi blogs and bloggers - written by soldiers, journalists, critics of the war, women, people in the US, and live from in Iraq.
Consumer Reports Web Watch
Consumer Reports has redesigned WebWatch. Has reports for:
+ In Search of Disclosure: How Search Engines Alert Consumers to the Presence of Advertising in Search Results
+ A Cross-Border Examination: 20 Travel Web Sites Selling International Airline Tickets in the United States and Six Western European Countries
+ How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility? Results from a Large Study
Also news, special reports, guidelines.
Google in Libraries
Two articles in the Library Journal (Feb 2005) about Google.
Google in the Academic Library By Carol Tenopir - about Google Scholar
Describes content - journals from some aggregators like ScienceDirect, bibliographic information from OCLC Worldcat, book reviews, other publishers; and citations for most items. Her test searches brought back mainly scholarly
Compared the search to results from premium services such as Ebsco. These "showed a much wider range of journal titles than Google Scholar".
Says that "Google Scholar has real potential to provide easy, one-stop access to articles in both subscription journals and items in institutional repositories, open access journals, and e-print servers."
Reported some weaknesses that were identified by Gary Price - lots of non-scholarly material, and by Karen Blackman - poor search features.
Notes that "Whatever it does, Google Scholar will be wildly popular with students." Libraries have to teach people how to use it.
The Google Opportunity By Stephen Abram
Presents long lists of Google developments -- " Google Scholar (see "Google in the Academic Library," Online Databases, p. 32), Google Print, Google News, Google Alerts, Google Deskbar, Google Desktop Search, Google Library Digitization Project, Google Suggest, Google Local with Keyhole (maps), Google Gmail, Google Orkut, Google Picasa (digital photo organizer), and on and on". It's a googlized landscape.
Lists "ten key things your institution, your library, and you can do in a Google world"
MSN Search Launches
Microsoft officially enters search engine fray by Jack Kapica, Globe and Mail (Feb 1)
The new MSN Search has come out of beta. Microsoft is launching its new MSN search engine in 25 markets and 10 languages - including Canada in both official languages. Go to http://search.sympatico.msn.ca/
+ Settings page - can set the number of results per page (up to 50), block adults sites, language, group results from the same site (or don't group).
+ Search builder - useful for adjusting the ranking according to freshness, popularity, and match (essentially relevance)
+ Search for images
+ Search for news. This is not the same as using the new MSN newsbot Canada that tends to learn what most interests you.
+ Uses Encarta and can get facts, statistics, dictionary definitions, measurement conversions and even some mathematical calculations. Time limit to how many free minutes of access you get to Encarta.
Of interest: "Mr. Sagness said that Microsoft had done extensive research on how people search the Internet, and discovered that Canadians use search engines more often than anyone else except Britain, and that 85 per cent of Canadian Internet users perform at least one search per month — the average monthly number of searches is 40. (The U.S. average is 35.)"
Also see MSN Search Officially Switches To Its Own Technology by Danny Sullivan, SearchDay (Feb 1) Notes that MSN Search has more "direct answers". Also points out that MSN shows a RSS button on search results (shows in IE and Firefox now). More is expected - certainly their own ad system rather than using Overture, and maybe blog search.