Viewzi for Impressive Visual Searching

Published by Hannah on May 13, 2008
Categories: Searching and Visual 1 Comment

Like many library folk, I’m always on the look out for new, more visual ways to search. I read about Viewzi the other day on the ReadWriteWeb and thought I should give it a shot.  Viewzi is still beta enough that you need to request an invite to use it, but my invite came within a couple of hours, so that wasn’t too big of a hurdle.  Viewzi has a very professional looking interface, and not just one but twelve different ways to visualize your search.  Some of these searches aren’t so much visualizations but ways of categorizing searches.  So for example, you can run a Techcrunch search (blog-specific search), a MP3 search (music search) or Amazon book search (I think you can figure that one out).

The visualization searches come primarily in the way they organize images, for example in the “celebrity photo view” below.  I don’t know that I would say any of these visualizations helped me find things better, but the interface was very pleasing and the image views were much nicer then what you get through a Google image search.  Definitely worth trying.


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teamsugar - social networking for women

Published by Laurie on May 11, 2008
Categories: Social 3 Comments

After Jane’s last post, I started pondering how women are engaging with the web and social networking. I did a little research and found a very popular social networking site for women, that I had never heard of, teamsugar. Something about the layout, fonts, and topics on teamsugar remind me of popular magazines such as Mademoiselle, People, and Glamour.

Once you join teamsugar, you can use the site to chat with friends, meet people, create and maintain a blog, post recipes, read the latest news, join groups, or browse one of the other teamsugar sites (for example, I think geeksugar holds a lot of possibilities for me!). This is a very very small list of all the things that are possible on the teamsugar site. On the “about us” page, the company behind teamsugar, Sugar Inc., says that their mission is, “..to be the definitive online media company for trendsetting, passionate women ages 18-44″. I wonder why the cutoff is 44? Seems kinda young to me.


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Weardrobe

Published by Jane on May 8, 2008
Categories: Personal, Shopping and Social 0 Comments

Living in a community where pretty much every one’s fashion style is decidedly Northwest casual mixed with collegiate, I sometimes miss seeing edgier styles that are often found in more urban settings. I thought when I came across Weardrobe, this might feature that range. But, it’s purpose is a little different. Weardrobe lets people show off their fashion & clothes as worn in every day life. Users upload photos of clothing items and categorize them using tags so others can come along and see how people are wearing an item of interest. If you’re like me, you might be thinking, huh? After exploring a bit, I can see why fashionistas or people interested in clothing trends might be drawn to this site.

weardrobe

For example, one of our students studying clothing and design searched for gloves, got some ok results and suggested that it would be helpful for seeing what people wear and how they pair it. While the same type of search can be done using a search engine’s image search, it lacks the context of what real people are wearing. One catch with Weardrobe is that it doesn’t seem to have hit critical mass.
A feature that Weardrobe is promoting is being able to put your clothes on “shelves”, an online closet organizer if you will. I note this not because I think this will be a show-stopper feature, but because I’m continually surprised at how much of one’s life can be lived online. Do people really want to be this online? Is this our inevitable future? Think I’ll Google that. ;)


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Textorizer - pictures made of a thousand words

Published by Margaret on May 7, 2008
Categories: Photo and Visual 1 Comment

Textorizer takes one picture and transforms it into another composed entirely of text. I was drawn to this tool because I saw some great results in the textorizer group on Flickr, so I thought I’d try it. I used the the web interface (textorizer1, the so-called easy way) to transform a photo of fellow ‘doodader Michael Baird into in a composite of the words “infodoodads mb” My results are okay, but I think they would have been better had I chosen a photo that didn’t have such a busy background. Choosing an image with a high degree of contrast between the background and foreground might also be a good idea. There aren’t too many tips on the textorizer web site. And it turns out that some of the textorizer images I liked were probably made with a combination of photo-editing tools and textorizer 2 (the hard way) that has to be downloaded and compiled.

MB

mbtextorizor


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xobni - make your outlook colorful

Published by Michael on May 6, 2008
Categories: E-mail and Mash-ups 2 Comments

Earlier today I received a tip from a colleague to try out Xobni, if it met our infodoodads standard of cool tool. Initially I thought an Outlook plug-in would have pretty low cool and sexy points but for the first time ever, I was wrong (right). You can also see the snazzy layout in the May 5 issue of NY Times.

Xobni, or spelled backward, Inbox, is a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook 2003/2007 running on Windows XP/Vista. Essentially it indexes ALL of your e-mail messages and cross-references data in a really dreamy way–an e-mail mash-up? Every time I need to do a search in Outlook I groan and complain, it never is very friendly and I typically don’t get what I need. Xobni demonstrates what I have come to love in the Gmail experience: single-box search of all messages and e-mail grouped into threaded conversations. It does all of this in a sidebar so none of your “regular” Outlook is mucked up. It also tracks files exchanged with that individual.

It also keeps track of your contacts with handy little profiles and stats on how much you communicate with them. As you can see, Laurie really enjoys e-mailing me and is my #2 most frequent contact. It populates the profiles by pulling phone numbers and info from e-mail signature lines and body of the e-mail. Not quite flawless–I noticed on a few contacts that instead of their work phone, it included a cell phone number they had at one time sent in an e-mail. Not everything is perfect I suppose. But if you have Skype installed, you can make the call directly from this profile!

Ready for the cool factor? Xobni Analytics. You can view some really interesting statistics on your e-mail usage. As you can see from this graph people tend to send me e-mail mostly in the morning, but I tend to send mine in the late afternoon/early evening. You can even filter these stats to individual users. Perhaps it’s time to set up 1:1 meetings with some folks instead of playing e-mail war.

Installation of this plug-in requires that you are running Outlook in cached mode if running on a Microsoft Exchange server. Here is a link to a Microsoft article with more details on how to make the switch and possible issues related to it. None of the negative consequences of the switch affected me. I would recommend switching this over and restarting Outlook before installing Xobni.


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Boolify-Boolean almost made fun

Published by Hannah on May 5, 2008
Categories: Instructional 1 Comment

I’m a big fan of helping people to visualize their searches and Boolify is another nifty example of a way to help out with the whole visualizing process.  Boolify is specifically targeted toward librarians and teachers (particularly those interacting with elementary and middle school students, although I think a wider audience could use it) and is a search site that uses a nice graphical interface to help people navigate Google search results.  They use a puzzle piece model to show how search terms can be joined together with “and,” “not,”  or “or.”  You can easily see how your search result numbers dramatically change based on which search operator you use.

Unfortunately, only the top four search results show up on the first page (the next pages take you to a Google page with your search term entered in Google search language) and Google is the only search engine it works with.  Overall, I think Sortfix still has a better interface, at least for more “regular” users, in other words, people who aren’t in a class being shown how to use Boolean operators.  But Boolify definitely offers a good alternative for those looking for a snappier way to communicate the value of Booleans (assuming any of you do that any more!).


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Making Money Off of Your Blog - Google Adsense

Published by Laurie on May 2, 2008
Categories: Ads 6 Comments

Within the past several months a few of us infodoodaders have given presentations at conferences about writing a group-authored blog. In the presentation we discuss our decision not to advertise on infodoodads (it would be very complicated); however, I have mentioned that I do make money off of my personal blog–this year I expect to bring in about $1500-$2000. Inevitably conference attendees will approach me at the close of the presentation and ask how I’m making money. I thought a few of you bloggers out there might be interested in this bit of information (though it is not necessarily an infodoodad for you, but perhaps will provide info to readers of your blog).

The main way I generate money on my personal blog is Google Adsense. It’s not the only way, but it does make up about 90% of my profits. If you decide to add Google Adsense to your blog, there are several things I should mention up front:

1) In my blog text-only ads are the ones that work. In Google Adsense you can choose graphic ads, but I found nobody clicked on them, and therefore I didn’t make any money.

2) Color and placement DOES matter. Play around with it and see what works. First my ads were blue to match the color scheme of my blog. Then I changed it up, and finally settled on red, which produced the most clicks (the more clicks your ads get, the more money you make). My advertising clicks also jumped dramatically when I placed the ads in the middle column (out of three columns) and put pictures in the right column. I have no idea why, but there must be some logic to it. You can see what I’m talking about on my blog.

3) You’ll probably make very little money at first. I posted to my blog for almost a year, and barely made $5 a month, then with longevity and lots of written material, my Google ranking bumped up and then I got more clicks, and then it jumped again, etc. I don’t think people who are dedicated fans of blogs click on ads, instead it’s the folks who are new and first-time visitors. Most of my daily visits are first-time visitors.

4) The best information and tips about making money from blogging can be found on problogger.net. They have a great search engine in the top right corner.

To start advertising with Google Adsense, all you need to do is sign up, give some information, and you’re on your way! Of course, you do have to embed some code into your website. The advertising works so well because the text ads are matched to the content of your website/post (and of course it’s Google, so they have all kinds of advertisers).

I welcome any questions you may have about this…


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clipperz: manage your passwords

Published by Jane on May 1, 2008
Categories: Services and Web 4 Comments

We all have different strategies for managing our numerous passwords. My trick is my cute, small notebook. I know, I know we’re not supposed to write down our most important passwords and information, but really, that is not always realistic. So notebook in hand I more or less track my usernames and passwords for many accounts and web sites. Thing is, my notebook is almost full with account information plus notes from meetings, conferences and such. I’m not looking forward to copying by hand all of the usernames and passwords to a new notebook so time for a new system. Enter clipperz.

clipperz

Clipperz offers several services. You can store your usernames/passwords, generate new passwords, store secure data (like bank data) and facilitate direct login to your secure sites.

I tried it out and it’s pretty good. I started entering my information one by one, I didn’t see an import function. I don’t feel comfortable inputting my most sensitive data, so I passed on that option. The data entry goes pretty quickly. Once I hit 5 accounts though, their support clipperz popped up and then popped up again after I offered to donate later. Keep that in mind if you decide to use this service.

What I like most about clipperz is having web based storage of my passwords. I see some room for improvements but for now this can work.


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PicLens - full screen 3D slide shows

Published by Margaret on April 30, 2008
Categories: Photo, Searching, Video and Visual 2 Comments

My husband sent me a link to PicLens a few weeks ago, and it’s really kind of interesting! Hmmm. I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised… The install is quick, and if you’re a regular searcher for images, it does a great job of giving you a view of many images at once. I did a search on Google for images of Morocco, and with PicLens installed, when I mouse over an image, an arrow appears over the image. Clicking on that, I get the “photo wall,” a surprisingly nice interface for browsing photos. Searching Google for images without PicLens just isn’t the same. And PicLens isn’t just for stills — it will do the same for videos, including YouTube video. A left-click and flick of the mouse in some direction, moves the wall of images, and clicking on one zooms in for a larger view. You can easily jump out of the PicLens 3D view, back into the native search tool. You can also search from within the PicLens interface. Links include Google, YouTube, Smugmug, Photobucket, Flickr, Yahoo, and DeviantArt. PicLens can be enabled on other sites as well, so it would be interesting to see it used as an interface to a digital library photo collection, or as a way to browse book jackets or other book art.

piclens


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twine - the semantic web is here

Published by Michael on April 29, 2008
Categories: Web 1 Comment

Maybe. Last week I received my “special invitation” to Twine. When I’m out reading up on new things to infodoodad in the future, I sign up for beta testing and the like for interesting things. Then a few months later I get a curious e-mail and wonder where the heck it came from. Such is the case with Twine.

Twine claims to be semantic. That’s right folks, web 3.0. OoOOoooh. They have a nice page that explains just how semantic they are. I was even able to understand some of this, thanks to the metadata class I am taking this semester.

Enough background. In a few simple words, this is what Twine does: share resources with like-minded people and receive related resources and connections to new people. There are “twines” which are groups of information on a topic–say, library 2.0. Within that twine are “items:” bookmarks for websites, people, contact info, events, video, audio, books, etc. These items are all tagged and described as we are used to. Except. These items are tagged with not only regular keywords but with “people,” “place,” and “organization.” This interconnects items and twines to build further relationships. The intelligent twine will automatically add in new items and information based on current and past behavior. Neat? Yeah, pretty.

You can contribute content on the site, or via a bookmarklet in your browser, or via e-mail.

I saw content of some twines that did not fit very well and were “off topic.” Since Twine is new, I wonder if it may just be inexperienced users posting things in the wrong places. Either way, it would be nice to have an option to repurpose an item to a better-suited twine. There is a cartoon sketch in a library 2.0 twine about telling someone their breath is bad. I really couldn’t see the connection on that one.

Go ahead and try Twine out. They are still in invite-only testing mode, but I imagine that a request for invitation will probably not take long at all.


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Huddle Around Group Projects

Published by Hannah on April 28, 2008
Categories: Communication and Productivity 0 Comments

Heard the term “project management” often enough lately to make you feel like you should actually do something like, say manage your projects?  If so, you may want to give the free version of Huddle a try.  Huddle is an online project management system that allows you to share (and edit - they recently claimed that you may “never need buy software again” as you can just use Doc and Excel files from within Huddle) documents, create online teams, use a virtual whiteboard, and receive updates to changes within your group’s site via RSS.

They of course, have somewhat snazzier versions for a fee, which include the ability to store more data (it comes with 1 GB for free), more work spaces for different projects (3 work spaces for free) and a higher level of security.  However, if you haven’t started using something like Google Docs for group work, or just want a more sophisticated experience (better task lists, sense of community, improved file sharing) you may want to give Huddle a try.


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KnitMap, for when you find yourself yarnless

Published by Kate on April 25, 2008
Categories: Mash-ups, Shopping and Travel 6 Comments

My mom called while she was on vacation recently and asked me to help her find a nearby yarn store. My task would have been much simpler if I had known about KnitMap, a yarn store finder that’s more than just a map. Using KnitMap you can pinpoint not only the nearest available fiber supplier, but also shops that suit your particular needs whether they be food, friendly service, or even wi-fi.

KnitMap lists shops not just in the US, but shops “anywhere that Google maps will work” including locations in Europe and Asia in addition to Canada, the US, and Australia. Available information includes hours and contact information as well as user-provided ratings and reviews of the shops’ service, selection, and atmosphere. KnitMap will help you plan a tour de tricoter or just pick up a pair of size six needles just about anywhere you might go.


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