Library Stuff

I’m addicted to Meebo. I have it running all day on Firefox. Today, I read on their blog that they’ve added Jabber and Gtalk implementation. This will be very useful for those that build tools on the Jabber platform.

Speaking of Firefox, Lifehack has a list of neat Firefox Extensions (link via populicio.us)

Tara re-introduced me to oishii! yesterday. I’ve been pretty bummed that populicio.us isn’t available anymore and oishii is a pretty good substitute (not sure if it’s better, time will tell). After subscribing to the feed (sites that have bookmarked more than 30 times in del.icio.us will be displayed – no repeats which is nice), a payoff! One of the first resources Aggie picked up for me was Firefox Tutor, which provides assistance with using Firefox. There’s a feed for new tutorials as well (subscribed!)

Go Go Gadget Oishii!

Update – Word from Greg Schwartz that Populicio.us is back online. Whoo Hooo. Thanks Greg.

I just got an e-mail from Glen Gillmore at the Universitry of California Press Journals. They are now providing feeds for “all 30 of their core journals”. You can access the feeds at their Library Resource Center page. There is also a feed titled, “News for Librarians”.

The feeds are links to abstracts. You can only get to the full text if you (or your library) pay for them.

Wow! The Syndication for Higher Ed blog mentions that Allegheny University now has a feed for the daily dining hall menu on Campus. Getting more information out the users. Priceless.

+ Looking for a lawn mower product manuals – You can find this on Amazon. (cool!)
+ Spoofstick will put a green bar under the address label and will tell you what domain you are on.

+ 10 Nifty things to talk about

1) Findarticles
2) IceRocket – Blog Trend Tool
3) MSN has a new feed syntax (feed:blog) or (Hasfeed:blog)
4) Google BlogSearch
5) OiShii
6) Daypop – Top 40
7) Technorati Corporate Blogs
9) Google Maps
10) (had to reboot – I missed this one)

+ Rapidly growing search (audio and video)
+ Searchng the words in the video

1) Closed captioning search
2) Voice Recognition
3) Metadata searching

+ Fee-based are much greater than free-based
+ TVeyes
+ Shadow TV
+ FedNet
+ Critical Mention
+ Stream Sage
+ Nexedia

Free stuff

+ Yahoo Video
+ Yahoo Audio
+ Blinx
+ Speechbot
+ Google Video Search
+ Feedroom
+ Singingfish

+ Can do many of these searched on mobile devices
+ Book TV author interview archives available
+ Streaming audio – NPR archive

+ Record this content for personal use
- Total recorder
- Hi Download

+ Vertical Searches are hot
- Global Spec
- ZoomInfo

+ Brainstorm for alternative terms and definitions
+ Sponsored links may provide ideas to gather data
+ Ready Reference Shelf
+ Use Wikipedia and How Stuff Works.com
+ maybe get leads to associations
+ Last, do a web search
+ Run News searches
+ Use taggings and folksonomies to find information
+ Blog searching can be useful – information on upcoming conferences – looked through the program and contacted people who will be speaking at the conference
+ Fooiund a mention of a EU study o nhow to regulate VOIP
+ use the tools that tap into the the people who are talking about this narrow type content.
+ Patent searching can be useful
+ Value added service – spent most of time on the web but not searching the web.

Lessons Learned

+ Stay focused but keep your peripheral vision on.
+ Use Firefox
+ Use new media technologies to monitor news and discussions (Social Bookmarking services).

Tips

+ Stay time going random
+ Set timer for 15 minutes

Know Command Line Techniques AND Know what new content is available

+ Advanced features that the search engines offer
+ Unique Databases – Who is doing something different and has unique databases

+ Command Line Searches
– Truncation or Stemming or “Wild Card”
– Proximity

+ Truncation – everywhere except at Excelead with *
+ “Run” to “Running” is automatic in Excelead
+ instead of truncatiom, do
– OR words together
– synonym operator “tilda” operator
– Exelead – phonetic search or approximate searching
– Google – “Wild Card Word in Phrase” – (EG – Jean * Literary Award” or jean * * poetry)

+ Proximity is getting less reliable
+ Near at Exalead – 16 word proximity
+ GAPS at Google – uses wildcard word in phrase. 3 word proximity
+ Boolean – default to an AND search – most engines
+ OR is supported almnost everywhere
+ inurl – segments are separated by punctuation – Great example inurl:k12 blog for K-12 sites that mention blog.
+ Uses Google to find books that were published illegally on the web.
+ Unadvertised Yahoo demands (region:africa – lots more)
+ Remember to use Tabs to diversity
+ Greg – A9 is well worth a look – “OpenSearch” allows you to create your own personal database
+ Start thinking about book full-text searching

Search Subsets

+ The scope of the web serach engine matters
+ GigaBlast allows you to create search sub sites (limit to all ALR web sites)

Peter Scott mentions today that the White House has a bunch of RSS Feeds. I can’t remember if they had all of these in the past, but I’m glad that the White House is working on pushing (pulling?) content to their userbase. I’ve subscribed to a few of them.