Internet News

Google's link analysis

How Google Evaluates Links by David Naylor (Feb 28)

Google announced that it would be " turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. " Davide Naylor speculates on what that method might be. Most likely candidate is inanchor text since it has been the piece for google bombing - but maybe Google intends to cut back much more on link analysis.

Interesting piece - essentially a primer on how factors affecting link analysis.

Bing's Linked Pages meet a need

What Google+ Should Have Been: Bing's Linked Pages, Jon Mitchell, ReadWriteWeb ( Feb 28)

Will Bing's new Linked Pages (US only) do what Google could have with Google+?

"There's no need for a new social network, but there is a reason to put personal identities in search. Searching for people has always been a terrible experience. It's nearly impossible to find the person you're looking for, unless they're famous. Search engines need an identity layer."

Google - more personalized search

Eric Schmidt: Google search will continue to become more personalized, Drew Olanoff, The Next Web (Feb 28)

Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt answered qustions about Google at a keynote he delivered.

Message: "Schmidt noted that Google search will continue to become more personalized, getting away from the “10 link” approach that we see in search results today. He noted that thousands of Google engineers are currently working on beefing up search with artificial intelligence in hopes to find us the results we want right away."

Eric Schmidt is now the company's executive chairman, and Larry Page is the CEO.

VIP Product Review of Factiva

VIP has made its Product Review of Factiva (Nov 2011) available .

"With a unique combination of authoritative business news and information, plus sophisticated tools, Factiva helps you easily find, monitor, interpret and share the essential information your organization commands."

See what a premium service can offer. It will tear you away from the free (and very limited) web sources.

EU view on Google's privacy policy

Google in EU showdown over privacy rules, by Richard Waters, FT.com (Feb 28)

EU regulators don't like Google's new privacy policy - "High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9d2fecda-6230-11e1-872e-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1ni9hYY7u

The French data protection agency, the CNIL, warned the US company in a letter released on Tuesday that European regulators were “deeply concerned about the combination of personal data across services”, and that they had “strong doubts about the lawfulness and fairness of such processing.”"

Google claims it can meet all objections and concerns - for example - "...High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9d2fecda-6230-11e1-872e-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1niA04vDx

it would still provide more detailed explanations of how it will use data through other means, such as its online help centre, notifications that appear inside some products and in the “frequently asked questions” sections for its services."

Newsie will watch for news about people

Newsie will alert you to when someone in your social network turns up in the news. It watches news sources and blogs for occurrences of the names. Connect through Facebook or Linked In - follow friends and any other people you're interested in. It's new - don't know if it tracks any Canadian sources.

See Tracking People in the News with Newsle, Semanticweb.com (Feb 23)

Bing, Facebook, and Linkedpages

Want to be found on Bing by your Facebook friends? Here's how by Lance Whitney, CNet (Feb 23)

On the US version of Bing.com, users can connect Bing to their Facebook account and get results from their Facebook friends. Except - what if you wish to control the information that will be shown in these searches?

Bing has introduced Linked Pages - in which you "link" pages to yourself - your blog, a website, organizations.

"Rolled out yesterday, Bing's Linked Pages let Facebook users manage which of their Web pages, profiles, and blogs show up on Microsoft's search engine. So whether you want to promote yourself or keep your other Web pages off the grid from your friends, Linked Pages will give you a certain level of control."

Advice to Facebook users - this is the way to control what is seen about you in Bing search results to your friends.

Read article and Bing's blog post - Make a Good Search Impression with Bing’s Linked Pages

Do Not Track coming to Chrome

Chrome to support Do Not Track privacy feature by Stephen Shankland, CNet (Feb 23)

Here's another reason to use Chrome - after it adds the Do Not Track feature.

"Google has agreed to build support for Do Not Track into Chrome so its Web browser can tell Web sites when people don't want advertisers scrutinizing their behavior."

Article has information about a do-not-track browser extension.

Google's related image search

Google Images Related Searches Now More Visual, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Feb 23)

This change at Google images is neat -- "ou can now mouse over the related search phrase and Google will hover open an image preview of what the first three images look like for that image search query." Try with toronto - mouse over related searches.

Private Search Engines

Scroogle’s Gone? Here’s Who Still Offers Private Searching, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Feb 21)

Scroogle, a search engine that used Google but did not collect user data, has closed - it had become too difficult to contineu.

But there are a few other engines that promise the same privacy.

+ Duckduckgo
+ Ixquick+ Startpage - operated by Ixquick - searches Google
+ Yippy
+ Ask.com still has Ask Eraser - in which you ask it to erase your search history.
+ Google encrypted search - secure but not private

Local Search for Businesses in the US

Beyond Yelp: Which User Review Services Matter?, Christopher Null, PCWorld (Feb 12)

Yelp has come under some criticism by businesses. There are other places in the United States where searchers can get reviews of restaurants and services. But for Canadians Yelp and Google Places are the two main ones. TripAdvisor has information for travellers to nearly all parts of the world.

Others on this list are US only.

+ Google Places (has Canadian places)
+ Judy's Book
+ Angie's List
+ Yahoo Local
+ Merchant Circle
+ City Search
+ Insider Pages
+ TripAdvisor

Video guide to new twitter

New version of Twitter, now on for everyone, Twitter Blog (Feb 16)

Desktop users get to see what mobile users have had a for a while. Get introduced to the new look through the video.

Blocking Cookies

Does your browser feed the cookie monster--or starve it?, Seth Rosenblaat, CNet (Feb 18)

Tracking cookies - these are the bits that watch what you do on the web and give that information to sites. There are privacy issues. We can manage these somewhat through our browsers. This article shows how.

Healthfinder

Scout Report has revisited Healthfinder.gov.

"The Healthfinder website was established as part of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and is maintained by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. On the homepage, visitors will find a MyHealthFinder tool, which allows users to find health advice for a friend or a family member just by typing in their age and sex. The homepage also features the Health A-Z section, which is an encyclopedia of over 1600 health topics from a variety of trusted sources. ..... [KMG]" [Source ]

Browse the health category at the Internet Scout Project - possibly the last scholarly directory in the world that is well maintained.

Use Stealth

Stealth - a search engine that promises complete privacy - no tracking, no cookies, no saved searches, no IP addresses. It does its own crawling and uses different API's (Google's Ajax API, Bing's search API, etc) .

My quick tests indicate that there is some fielded search: intitle:, site:, filetype, and even inurl:

Reviewed in Stealth Search Engine Offers Private Internet Browsing, Alissa Skelton, Mashable (Feb 16)

Google and the Knowledge Graph

Google Knowledge Graph Could Change Search Forever, Lance Ulanoff, Mashable (Feb 14)

Search will not always be about matching on words and statistical relationships between words. It could become about entitites and concepts - ideas that those in semantic technology field (AI, natural language) have been talking about for years.

Anit Singhal, SVP at Google describes where Google has been and where it is headed.

"Google, Amit said, was the first to use links as “recommendation surrogates.” In those early days, Google based its results on content links and the authority of those links. Over time, Google added a host of signals about content, keywords and you to build an even better query result."

....

"Google now wants to transform words that appear on a page into entities that mean something and have related attributes. It’s what the human brain does naturally, but for computers, it’s known as Artificial Intelligence.

It’s a challenging task, but the work has already begun. Google is “building a huge, in-house understanding of what an entity is and a repository of what entities are in the world and what should you know about those entities,” said Singhal."

Manu Sporny, chair of the RDF Web Applications Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium, shows that webmasters could take advantage of what Google is doing today to prepare for this future. Google is identifying RDFa and schema.org markup on pages and enhancing search results that include those pages. The markup is used to add structural information. See articles for examples and screenshots.

Change location for search results pages

If you need to remove location from influencing search engine results pages (SERPs) at Google, Bing or Yahoo, the LiveSerps toolbar could help. It provides for "Geo-targeting in 30 countries and 20 US markets"

Preview Live Search Engine Results Pages With The LiveSerp Toolbar, Josh Dreller, Search Engine Land (Feb 17)

Resistance to Google's Search Personalization

Survey: People Largely Negative About Google’s Personalized Search Results, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Feb 8)

In a survey of 400 people in the United States by Ask Your Target Market, 45.4% said they thought everyone should see same results on a query - no personalization.

Would using Google+ make a difference? "In terms of whether more people would use Google+ if they knew it helped personalize their results, 7.5 percent said “yes” they would be more likely to use it. However 44.4 percent said “no” and 48.1 percent said “maybe.”"

Hard to know whether the sample is representative of the US public - 1.5% (6 people) said they don't use a search engine. Doesn't sound as if the sample was of what we would call "internet users".

Danny SUllivan commented on the finding - and questioned the question. If questions were phrased positively to show an advantage, people would be more accepting.

He recommended further reading.

Blekko may add search ads

Blekko Testing Search Ads, by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Feb 16)

Blekko may be introducing search ads (sponsored ads) in its results through arrangements with Google and Bing. That's ok. They have to get revenue from somewhere.

Danny Sullivan on Google's Privacy Policy - video

This excellent video from WebProNews examines Google's move to a new privacy policy that brings together all its services. Danny Sullivan answers questions from WebProNews about the changes calmly, clearly, and thoroughly (as is his style). Google is doing what others already have - Microsoft has similar policies. Concerned users can opt out of Google collecting web history and targeting ads in each of the tools they use.

Worth the 10 minutes. WebProNews Videos - Danny Sullivan on Google’s New Privacy Policy Saga (Feb 15)

Travel services turning to social media

Can Social Media Lift Travel? , Justin Backman, Bloomberg Business Week (Feb 16)

Nearly 118 million people in the U.S. will plan vacations over the Internet. This has been a growing field for booking flights and accomodations, and looking for restaurants and activities. We have had the benefit of user reviews - especially at TripAdvisor - shall we now combine with social networking for views of friends (and their friends.)?

"A slew of startups with names such as Trippy, Gtrot, Gogobot, and FlyMuch promise to take the guesswork out of vacation planning by mining information from Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and other social networks. The newcomers operate on the assumption that tasks such as unearthing the best coffee bar in San Francisco can’t be entrusted to mere guidebooks."

Trippy has a very likeable video of a young single woman planning a trip through a Trippy- Facebook combo in which friends recommend places in Beachtown. The young woman gets there, shares with friends, and creates an album in Trippy. Package deal. Might work for a demographic that has a lot of travelling friends.

BTW - TripAdvisor users can sign in through Facbook (57 million users have done so) to see recommendations of people in their network.

100 registrants bite

ICANN attracts 100 would-be Net domain operators, Cnet, Stephen Shankland (Feb 14)

A 100 registrants are interested in applying for a new top level domain and running the registry. So - the new rules aren't dead in the water. Check back in a year.

The Republican trifecta and search engine ranking

Bing & Google: “Spreading Romney” Ranking Tops For “Romney” Is Normal by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Feb 14)

Continuing study of why bomb-like sites for Santorum and for Romney rank so well at Google and Bing - probably mostly because people are talking and linking.

Now it may pull in a Gingrich site - "By now, a Spreading Gingrich site has sprung up that’s getting some attention. But will it get the trifecta that appears needed to gain top rankings on Bing and Google? Or is there no trifecta, and will spreading-style sites instead spread out to search results near you?"

trifecta - I see that word everywhere now. Judging from Wikepedia According it was most associated with horse races (until this Republican campaign).

Merriam Webster says -- "a variation of the perfecta in which a bettor wins by selecting the first three finishers of a race in the correct order of finish"

An archive theme in Tumblr

Awesome Archives - Goroboto has a theme in tumblr.com for sharing items about archives - "A celebration of archives, archival material, and the amazing history that they protect. Expect to see a lot of strange historical finds, unique materials, and archives in the news. I throw up 5 posts a day."

Especially look at the archive. Truly an example of personal curation. You may want to join Tumblr.

Thanks to ResearchBuzz.

Google's symptom related search results

Where’s It Hurt? After You Search For A Symptom, New Google Health Search Results Suggest Causes, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Feb 13)

Google is trying to make health search better with symptom-related search results that are generated through algorithms.

However, new format doesn't show in Toronto yet.

Also see Google skips WebMD, starts showing you medical conditions that match your symptoms, Drew Olanoff, The Next Web (Feb )

Slideshow - Google Earth

Google Earth: Power Tips and Tricks, Daniel Ionescu, PCWorld (Feb 12)

"Here's your chance to discover a new dimension to Google Earth: Find out how to create your own maps, scroll through historic imagery, or fly across the globe."

AOL partners with Blinkx for AOL Video Search

Blinkx Replaces Truveo To Power AOL Video Search, Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch (Feb 13)

AOL has retired Truveo, the video seach engine it acquired in 2006, and is switching its video search to the British video search Blinkx.

Of interest: "Of course, most people search for videos on Google, not blinkx. And somehow YouTube always seems to turn up as the top video results on Google. If your videos aren’t on YouTube, they are sort of invisible. But if they are on YouTube, you have to cut them in on the ad revenues. So media companies are trying to push video viewers to their own sites through deals like the one AOL just did with blinkx."

Factiva Expands Content

Factiva Adds More Global Sources, Blogs, and Images, Newsbreaks, (Feb 13)

"Factiva expanded its aggregated content to offer more global sources, blogs, and images. In the last year, Factiva’s content has increased by more than 20%, totaling more than 35,000 sources and furthering its position as one of the largest global digital business aggregators and archives. The new sources comprise 1,500 licensed publications, 1,600 websites, nearly 8,000 blogs, and more than 1.2 million images, covering 26 languages."

US Search Market Share Jan 2012

Bing Now A Full Point Ahead Of Yahoo In Search Share — comScore, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Feb 9)

Google' s January search market share in the US holds on at 66.2% but Bing pulls further ahead of Yahoo - 15.2 vs Yahoo's 14.1%. However, since Bing powers Yahoo it's all one of the same - except it does indicate that Yahoo users may be switching to Bing since there isn't much to keep them at Yahoo.

These are Comscore's figures for "explicit core search", which, it explains means -- "*“Explicit Core Search” excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results." - whatever that means.

Dysfunctional ranking

Now, Mitt Romney Has A Santorum-Like Bing & Google Problem, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Feb 10)

The lunacy of the GOP presidential candidate contest in the US has spilled over to Google and Bing search results. Something has gone awry with the ranking algorithms at Google and Bing that they give such high rankings to an anti-Santorum and anti-Romney site - at least they don't show a bias. Sullivan shows the cases but can't explain why - largely because Google and Bing do not support backwards link analysis that would provide needed information. Sullivan says it is not a "bomb" - the kind that affect George W Bush - and is puzzled..

Others, in their comments on this posting, gave more examples. Some suggested possible causes - all to do with factors that go into ranking.

One person said that getting the ranking for the romney page would have been easy.

"There are a few easy ways to get a site ranked high in Google in the first 30 days of its existence.
1.) Write keyword heavy meta tags
2.) Ensure your h1 tag is exactly what you want to be found for – in this case ‘romney’
3.) Provide enough content to get indexed – in this case a definition
4.) Have a least 1 outbound link and 1 inbound link that has been indexed in Google
5.) Immediately install Google products such as Analytics and Google+ –
6.) If possible, include your h1 tag in your domain name, which it does.
7.) Install Webmaster Tools about 1 week later"

A mystery.

Pinterest - one of the top 10 social networks

Pinterest - a social pin up board - the very lastest version of a social networking place. Bookmark a page by pinning up a picture - don't bother with words. Follow others, swap images. Organize these by topic - gardens, recipes, books, birds, wedding plans, travel places - no limit. Of course you can like, and comment - and do all the social things.

There is a search box in the upper left corner. Search term birds finds some beautiful "pins" and a couple of "boards".

Started a year ago, it is now very hot - it sets the speed record for reaching 10 million unique users per month.

Pinterest leads content curation boom by Mia Pearson, Globe and Mail (Feb 9)

Also mentions Buyosphere - "Buyosphere, founded by Canadian Tara Hunt, is focused more on actual purchases. It provides a “questions” forum for users to ask the community about products they’re thinking about buying, as well as a “discover” space for users to share product recommendations or their latest wants."

Want to join Pinterest? You’d better like rainbow socks by Ivor Tossell, Globe and Mail (Feb 7)

Tossell gives a full account of how this works and what it's like. Women, it seems, love it - it's handy for shopping, and the pipup boards are like a bazaar.

Learn the Basics of Using PinterestBy Rick Broida, PCWorld (Feb 10) - very quick tutorial.

It's invitation only - ask for an invitation here.

Behind the scene at social networking sites

The tone of life on social networking sites, Lee Rainie, Pew Internet (Feb 9)

Social networks are, by and large, positive experiences for their members.

"The overall social and emotional climate of social networking sites (SNS) is a very positive one where adult users get personal rewards and satisfactions at far higher levels than they encounter anti-social people or have ill consequences from their encounters"

Tweeting news breaks

Don't break stories on Twitter, BBC journalists told, Guardian (Feb 8)

Staff at BBC were asked to send breaking news to the newsroom first, and tweet later.

Of interest: ""We are all feeling our way forward through the fog of this new media landscape. The social media revolution is changing power structures in newsrooms, allowing young journalists who understand this new world - and a few older ones - to build reputations independent of their own organisations."

Make money browsing but ..

Google Search's Screenwise vs. Bing Rewards: Which Pays More?, PCWorld (Feb 9)

Bing and Google reward people who allow them to track their web browsing. Through Google's new Screenwise (using Chrome) you might make $25 in a year with Amazon dollars, and at Bing (using a toolbar), $40 in Amazon dollars. BUT - Bing is only in the US. It's not clear if there is a country restriction for Google's Screenwise - but at the moment it's not accepting new panelists.

Of course, you have to be comfortable in having either of these follow what you do online.

Volunia - new form of social search

Volunia, A Social Search Engine, Says The Web Has Come Alive, Sean Carlos, Search Engine Land (Feb 7)

From Italy comes Volunia, a new search engine that will depart from 10 blue links and 2 lines of text - it says. It will be visual - with maps and grids. These will show connections and "neighbourhoods". More multimedia resources will be identified as well.

Next comes social - choose a site based on what other Volunia users are looking at - and talk to those other users.

Volunia is in private beta. You can be part of it by registering at http://launch.volunia.com/

Resource Lists

LLRX, January issue, has two updated collections of resources from Marcus P Zillman:

Knowledge Discovery Resources 2012 - An Internet MiniGuide Annotated Link Compilation: data mining, ontologies, knowledge management

Deep Web Research 2012 - variety of articles about deep web research, and search engines. A lot of this is very old - no one would use Beaucoup today.

Chrome most secure browser

German gov't endorses Chrome as most secure browser, Gregg Keizer, Computerworld (Feb 3)

Germany's Federal Office for Information Security, endorsed Chrome as the most secure browser. The reason -- " anti-exploit sandbox technology, which isolates the browser from the operating system and the rest of the computer; its silent update mechanism and Chrome's habit of bundling Adobe Flash ... "

StatCounter's browser statistics worldwide show IE with 37.5%, Chrome at 28.4%, and Firefox at 24.8%.

Google's January Update

Google’s January Search Update: Panda In The Pipelines, Fresher Results, Date Detection & More, Mark McGee, Search Engine Land (Feb 3)

Interesting bits in Google's January changes to the ranking algorithms. Here's a digest of digest

+ even fresher results using caffeine infrastructure. In November 2011, 35% of searches were "fresher" - suppose this means it's even higher.
+ autocomplete faster and includes spelling corrections
+ improves how it detects date on a page
+ corrects for spelling error and will only show results for the right spelling
+ new rules for blenging news with web on a Google web search

Full list at 17 search quality highlights: January, Inside Search.

Also Google will set Google Instant: Only On When Your Computer Can Handle It.

All-in-one for Searching Creative Commons

Search Creative Commons offers an all-in-one place entry point to materials that may be under a creative commons usage license. Enter search terms, and select a service - images: Flickr, Fotopedia, Google Images, Open Clip Art Library; media: Europeana, SpinXpress, Wikimedia Commons; music - Jamendo; and Google Web. Examine the query it constructs on the service - you should see limitations according to license.

Very good place to start your search for material that is under CC License.

Social Media Infographic

Need a Cheat Sheet for Social Media?, Search Engine Journal (Jan 31)

New to social media? This infographic, which was written for small business and organizations wanting to reach people, put Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Google+ and Tumbr on one page. But where's LinkedIn?

Brilliant - Don't Be Evil bookmarklet

Focus on the User proves that Google could deliver social media results from sources other than Google Plus if it tried. Focus on the User offers a tool - the Don't Be Evil bookmarklet - that will retrieve twitter, facebook, and linkedin results as well as Google+ and rank those results as they should be - rather than giving priority to Google Plus.

The video is starting in showing how much of a difference this can make. Works very well on their examples of Jamie Oliver and AT&T.

The Don't Be Evil tool works for Google.com - ONLY. Pity - because it doesn improve results.

Google Search Plus Your World has not come to Google.ca. We don't get

+ People and Places on the right side when entering terms like music, movies.
+ Google Plus profile in the Instant Search dropdown display.

But we do get Google+ profiles if one exists. This search result for AT&T has a Google Plus page.

You may not see this on other company results for some time. I ran many searches, and none had a Google Plus page.

About.com traffic is dropping

The New York Times’ About.com: From All-Star To Albatross, Jeff Roberts, PaidContent.org (Feb 3)

Bad news for About.com. New York Times, the owner, revealed that About.com "suffered a 67% drop in profits and that revenues had fallen by a quarter".

It sounds serious. Of course revenue is from ads (there are a lot of them on about.com pages) - and it didn't help that Google downgraded About.com pages in ranking results. About.com does get 60 million unique monthly visitors, but that it gets 80% of traffic from being found in a search engine does not bode well.

Pity - because the About.com are generally excellent - the guides are broad and current.

But the amount of screen space given over to ads does make it look spammy. Did NYT ever consider that?

What Google Knows

Who Does Google Think You Are?, Karen Weise, Bloomberg Busienss Week (Feb 2)

Find out who Google thinks you are as a marketing target in terms of interests and age. As the article says, the url is awkward - just search Google for ad preferences manager - follow the link and sign into your Google account. Are you what Google thinks you are?

The issue is Google's intention to bring together in one place all the products a Google account holder uses in order to integrate the data - and know its users better.

Of interest: "The concern has prompted regulators in Ireland and France to announce they’re going to examine Google’s new policy. A bipartisan group of eight U.S. representatives sent Google Chief Executive Officer Larry Page a letter with questions about the change. Google responded on Jan. 30, emphasizing the controls users do have and how new approaches will make it easier and quicker for people to find the information they want on the Web. They also noted that Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, praised the clarity of the unified privacy policy."

Grow your social network

Google+ Growing Your Social Network: Quantity vs. Quality, Aaron Friedman, Search Engine Land (Jan 31)

Interesting proposition - "Google may be building a network simply to enhance our search results, not necessarily to kill Facebook.

The concept of a social graph, which was brought to life by Facebook, may be what Google is really creating. But not for the Social network; for relevance in the search results."

Therefore, build your circles to improve search results for your specialty. Mind, this article was written for marketers looking to "grow" an audience.

Socialized search personalization - not yet

It’s Complicated: The Awkward Socialization Of Search, Kendall Allen, Marketing Land (jan 31)

"Socialized search personalization", notwithstanding the all-out efforts of Google and Facebook, is a long way away - and may never be.

"In order to deliver perfectly and authentically on this hallowed search concept, all across the land, many entities must cooperate and expose themselves on the back-end. Exactly how many entities must play along with the mass data game? The answer is: all of them. In order to service legitimate, socialized search personalization, every single platform or social network used by our friends, peers and business networks must participate: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, MySpace, Tagged, Orkut, Meetup, Ning. The list goes on and on."

To this we might add - be careful what you wish for.

Amazing tips for using Google+

50 Great Google+ Tips for School Librarians, Melissa Venable, Online College (

This is an interesting list of ways school librarians can use Google+ to stay in touch with parents, students, teachers. We can easily adapt these for any group. Course, the first step will be to have members in the group a open Google account.

Some tips in the list are about finding new people through search, following them, and following Google+ suggestions. Another use - create your own circle for following authors.

All in all - use Google+ as a PLN - personal learning network .

Machine Language Translation

Language Translation in the Internet Age 'My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels’ by Nancy K. Herther, Searcher (Feb)

Machine translation still has some distance to go. It still isn't good enough for business use, but it might give the searcher enough to get by on.

"With the use of computers for nearly everything today — news, shopping, education, communication, information — it seems only natural to assume that computers will somehow play a major role in helping us deal with the increasingly global aspect of the internet and, in particular, the profusion of languages being used."

Therefore, what shall we use? Article describes translations efforts today and the software available - Bing, Yahoo, and Google are on the list.

Of interest: Google Translate -- "Introduced in 2006 originally for Arabic, the underlying software is also used in Babel Fish, Yahoo!, and AOL translation products. In May 2011, Google announced that Google Translate would be terminated; however, due to public pressure. in June, it announced that a paid version of the Translate API would remain available for developers."

Ebook Buzz Column

University Presses and Ebooks: A New Horizon by Sue Polanka, Wright State University, Online (Feb)

Online Magazine has added Ebook Buzz as a new column about ebooks in libraries and scholarly publishing - and we hope it will be free to view.

eBooks have arrived at universities - and they will soon be well integrated into online scholarly research.

"No fewer than four different nonprofit entities—Project MUSE, JSTOR, Cambridge University Press, and the Oxford-sponsored University Press Scholarship Online—now offer online distribution options to university presses."

SLA on its social networking project

Blog Impossible by Meryl B. Cole, Christian L. Gray, and Cindy A. Romaine, Newsbreaks (Feb 1)

SLA volunteers ran a blog during 2011 - FutureReady365 - with a post every day on sharing ideas on preparing for the future. Grand idea and grand execution.

The article by three of the organizers recaps leading ideas on values and activities for being future ready contributed by members. It also describes how volunteers were involved and ways by which they kept up the online social energy. They give a "tip sheet on how to create your own daily, collaborative social networking project".

Great - so why not continue the blog through 2012?

Legal Situation with Google Books

Divide and Conquer: Update on the Google Books Lawsuit by George H. Pike, Newsbreaks (Feb 2012)

Google has been engaged in legal action concerning Google Books and the digitization projects for 7 years. George Pike brings us to the present as Google tries to defang the class action suit by the Authors' Guild and photographs by seeking a dismissal.

Much of this would go away if copyright law were changed.

"Of course, the best solution would be for changes in the copyright law to reflect the technological changes and social benefit that the Google book database unquestionably provides. The orphan works problem continues to loom; it inhibits not only Google but also any other organization that wants to digitize and make available any information that is copyrighted but does not have an identifiable owner. Millions of documents, photographs, works of music, and media items representing an extensive cultural and historical heritage exist in this netherworld, possessed by libraries and archives but limited to their dusty shelves."

We get an update on Europeana too - and its use of a registry for holding information about orphan works.

LAC uses Flickr

Launch of a New Flickr Image Set: Prime Minister Louis Stephen St-Laurent, Library and Archives Canada (Feb 2)

Interesting: 1) the photos, and 2) that LAC uses Flickr - owned by Yahoo, situated in the United States. What happens when Yahoo sells Flickr - as might happen, or changes it in some extreme way? Also, should Library and Archives Canada be outsourcing to a US based service? What's wrong with buy Canadian? Cost would be the reason - that's how strapped cultural organizations are in Canada.

Complying with content rules

Google Introduces Country Domains on Blogger to Aid Content Removal, John Ribeiro, IDG News (Feb 2)

Empires will control communications if they can - Harold Innis was right.

Countries have rules on what their people are allowed to read - China, India, some Arab countries, some European countries.

Google has changed Blogger so that there are localized country domains making it easier to comply with content removal rules.

Twitter is doing the same - "Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world." [Tweets still must flow]

Google explained -- "Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you're reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or "ccTLD." For example, if you're in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected [blogname].blogspot.com.au. A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader’s current location." [Google Blogger ]

The new Google 2.0

Google 2.0 prepares to come out of the shade, Richard Waters, FT (Feb 1)

I guess it was inevitable - Google would have to go Web 2.0 in the face of the huge success of social networks, and as it built up new services, it would have to promote them over those of others. As this article says, "Google once had a single-minded mission: to pass on its users as quickly as it could to other sites on the internet. No more. The new Google wants you to hang around for a while ... "

Time will tell if users will bond to this new form, and if Google will make even more money from the associated advertising.

Stumbleupon adopts iframes

StumbleUpon Kills Direct Links, iFrames Everything, Brent Csutoras, Search Engine Land (Feb 1)

Stumbleupon has undergone a redesign so that as users stumble through sites that match up to their interests (theoretically - depends on how other stumblers tag what they find) they will stay inside the Stumbleupon frame.

Oh - that's not going to go down well. Many sites have done that and regretted it.

"One particular change that really surprised me was the removal of all direct links pointing back to the content sources from within StumbleUpon.

Instead on all content pages within StumbleUpon, you have a single button saying ‘Stumble This’, which when clicked takes you to an iframed version of the content."

Of interest: Stumbleupon has 20 million "users".