It’s the time of year when people take precautions against the flu by getting a flu shot. But, what if you don’t know where you can get a shot? One way to locate where you can get a shot is using Google.org’s Flu Trends. Their mash up with the American Lung Association quickly finds a location by zip code.
That’s nice but what caught my eye is the flu trend indicator-created based on Google search data. Here you can monitor flu activity as it travels across the U.S. Pretty neat. Now I can get a sense of how wide spread the latest bug is that’s going around the office.
What intrigues me is the use of search data to create the trend data. We all know Google has been collecting our data and doing something with it. Here’s one example of what they are doing. If Google can create predictive models from their search engine, can we?
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Whew! I don’t know about you, but my October sure flew by. Just getting back to normal work load and with that I return to my usual doodadding. This week I’m going for an engaging visual find and I think I’ve found it in MahShelf. MahShelf is kind of similar in concept to LibraryThing. What’s the twist? MahShelf lets you post your digital comics, manga and graphic novels. It’s really fun to browse. Since it’s new, the amount of content is still under development. One find pertinent to a library session I recently gave is the Smithsonian Dibner Library’s Portraits of Scientists and Inventors. Unique content that I might not have found.
Much of the other content includes comics, manga and books with lots of images.
MahShelf has a couple of 2.0 features: commenting; tags (browsing to search the collection) and a community forum section.
I liked that the community section is a Meebo room. Nice blending of other applications!
I can imagine libraries linking to this collection or to specific books to enhance their collection or their web pages. Would it work if a library had a program where participants created books and then uploaded? I think that would be fun but then again, I’m no artist. Think I’ll go enjoy others’ talents!
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Need a quote quickly? Try out Quotes Daddy. Search for quotes by tag, author or quote. Then share to your social network or bookmarking site, embed or save to your free Quotes Daddy account. I wasn’t going to make an account but then I saw it enabled me to take advantage of it’s sharing features. When I logged in, a tag cloud displayed showing that the largest category is funny quotes.
It’s fun to browse the different categories and see the range of people quoted. You can also browse by small images of the popular people. The usual dead white men are included: Nitsche, George Barnard Shaw, Aristotle but many of our contemporaries are as well: Oprah, Dan Qualye, Zig Ziglar, Anthony Robbins. Surprised? Me too! Other authors are folks like you & me. I didn’t see a whole lot of user submitted quotes, but Quotes Daddy does have a User Submitted Quote of the Day feature –nice way to highlight this.
The last notable feature is the short bio you get after clicking on a person’s name. In addition all of the quotes from that person are displayed.
If you want to include a quote in a formal piece of writing you might double check the quote…which ya’ll would do anyway right? 
Otherwise, nifty collection and fun to use!
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Last year about this time, Laurie reviewed Trailfire which lets you make and share comments on web sites. bubblecomment does this with video. Yup, in 3 easy steps you can annotate a web site. Enter a url, record your comments using your or their internal camera and share bubblecomment’s unique url with others. Of course how many tries it takes to record a comment you like is up to you! 
The basic service is free you get 30 seconds to comment, it can be played 50 times and is active for 30 days. If you find that you really like the service you can commit to a paid service for $35.95/year. Paid “members” can record comments up to 90 seconds, can add and track thier comments in the bubblecomment system and their comments are available up to 6 months or 1000 pageviews. Not too bad!
Besides being fun, I think this could be used in lots of ways. Take a look at my test here. Forgive the poor lighting, etc. my first try!
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Here’s a fun way to send greetings. I found POSTCARD.FM over at Emily Chang and thought it was worth sharing. The gist is: create your own audio postcard and email it to your recipient. All you have to do is fill in the blanks by finding a photo and a song on your computer. Then, enter your friend’s email. After the files upload, enter your email, a note to your friend and send it off. Your friend receives a cute card.
It’s super easy-as long as you have an mp3. My mac didn’t like the mp3 format so I switched to a pc to create my card. As of this post I haven’t received my card yet so I can’t post it yet. In the meantime, hop on over and send someone a card!
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Though most of us read our feeds through feed readers, new options for for subscribing to feeds via our email accounts are popping up. One example is Feed My Inbox.
Seems strange to add feeds to email when it is already hard to keep on top of email-why add more? For me it’s all about getting what I want to the top of the pile. For example, a friend introduced me to a blog that really makes me think and puts me in a positive frame of mind…this I want to be sure to get to. Accessing it from my email, makes it happen and, if I don’t have time, I can always delete today’s email, read the next day’s and do catch up if I wish.
If I no longer want to subscribe, I can easily unsubscribe from a feed within the email. Quick & easy, nice!
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Are you like me? You’ve heard of Knol but haven’t really looked at it yet? Knol presents itself as a peer-reviewed encyclopedia with articles or knols written by named contributors. Sounds pretty good, but with closer reading I learned that anyone can contribute, though authors are expected to be experts and are encouraged to collaborate with other experts. Thus, this is peer review in a looser sense than a scholarly article type of review.
My first impression of Knol is mixed. My partner & I compared our searches-mine on library topics, hers on botany topics. I got some interesting results-gaming in libraries, library 2.0, libraries and the future. Botany, well, not much, though there are a good amount of gardening articles. Uneven coverage likely is a reflection of Knol’s newness.
We found the topics featured below the fold helpful to get a sense of what type of content to expect and to get a feel for the collaborative nature of knol creation. I especially liked the How to Backpack knol. This is a good example of a community engaging with the content. You can also check out the article’s revision history. These two features are the most intriguing to me because I can see how Knol could be incorporated into instruction.
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Here’s a handy site: RepairPal. Try out this site when you want an estimate of a car repair or you can check out their auto repair encyclopedia for info about repairs. It’s super easy to use, just select your car’s make, model, year and then choose which type of car service you want to estimate. To those unfamiliar with auto repair jargon the last one can be challenging, so just bop over to the encyclopedia by clicking Expert Advice to get a basic understanding of repairs.
What I like about this site is that I now have a ballpark number to work with. My car is almost at the100k mark and might be ready for a new timing belt. RepairPal estimates the cost at $328-450 and, breaks this down between parts and labor. Nice. Even though this number may not be exactly correct, I have a sense of how much to set aside. And, if the bill is quite different from this, I’ll know to inquire about why.
RepairPal is such a pal that it even suggests shops in your zip code. Ok, maybe I’m overstating this a smidge because this feature is essentially a GoogleMaps/MapQuest mashup. But still helpful. Try it out!
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If you’re not entirely enthralled with Cuil, the new search engine that Michael just reviewed, you might give Searchme a try. What a fun search engine this is!
Searchme presents results visually and offers visual cues to refine your search. For example, my test search on primary sources included filters for libraries, history, us government and others. I really like how the web pages of the results display and that I can use the horizontal scroll bar to quickly “page” through results. Below the visual results is another option to view the results in a text format. One neat feature is seeing my search terms highlighted in the web pages results. I want to underscore how refreshing this approach to viewing results is, it’s so much more engaging than the typical static presentation.
Another notable feature is searchme’s concept of “Stacks”. Stacks are essentially folders containing your search results. I think it’s pretty cool that I can email, view or share my stack. If I want to add a site, I can do so as well. Now that I think about it, this just might beat del.icio.us (gasp!) because honestly I sure would like some more visual cues than what del.icio.us offers when reviewing saved sites. Of course del.icio.us’ focus is different.
When you go to searchme you might be presented with a black or Night Theme instead of my preference of the light blue Day. (I get enough enough dark skies here in Oregon.
For my parting shot, I will share that I was happy with the relevancy of the results I got from the several searches I tried. I didn’t feel that I needed to weed through numerous irrelevant content. If searchme didn’t do a good job with ranking results, it’d be just another startup, but with the combination of solid hits and good looks, searchme may stick around. Good results plus a fun display means I’ll be back.
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Ever stay up entertaining yourself with something for much longer than was deserved? Last night, my partner and I found ourselves toying with The Free Dictionary which includes pronunciations of words in other languages. First we just played with comparisons of American and British pronunciations. Such clear enunciation and accents!
Then we scrolled down and practiced Spanish, French, German and most enjoyable Italian. Who knew compost is pretty much the same in French, German and Italian but totally different in Spanish?
The translation aspect is similar to WordReference which Laurie reviewed last fall. WordReference includes other languages like Russian and Portuguese, forums and other language dictionaries.
Check out The Free Dictionary home page and you’ll find a medical, legal, and financial dictionary in addition to the standard English dictionary. These are almost hidden by the other fun features like Word of the Day, Hangman, Article of the Day and more.
Definitely a site for word lover’s and not just for those who want to pretend to be Italian for a few minutes.
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Ever find yourself keeping Firefox open when you shut down your computer for the day so when you next start your computer all your tabs will open? I’m sure many of us cruise along with our work and find ourselves battling ‘tab bloat’ or ‘tabitis’. Enter Taboo, a Firefox extension, that saves your tabs & lets you retrieve them in a grid or calendar form. I have included a shot of the grid form.
Taboo includes a handy search box to help you weed through and find a stored site. After selecting your site, you can view details about it and add a short note.
So why would we use this when we have del.icio.us and many other bookmarking tools? For me, Taboo sparked my interest because sometimes I want to keep sites around for the duration of a project and then I’m done with them. Others might appreciate being “returned to the page, at the proper location, with the back button history intact and the form fields filled in.” Beyond that, it’s just super easy to use.
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Today I’m going for a lighthearted entry to ease into our 3 day weekend. Ahh! I expect most folks will spend the weekend relaxing and for some that means shopping. I have two shopping related doodads to share.
First up is Pixsta. What makes Pixsta holiday-fun is its visual search. Scrolling over the wheel display of clothes rotates each item offering details and a like for purchase. The display encourages quick scanning and I found I could easily see what did and did not interest me. 
Even though some of the items were a bit slow to load and some of the date last updated was a couple of months ago, I think Pixsta has pushed visual search forward and made shopping online just a bit easier.
Next up is Shoetube where shoe lovers can meet others and salivate over the latest trends. Now, I’m not into heels or pumps–at all–but I still was amused by their The Daily Shoe video series. To check out what people-including a 3 yr old cutie-are wearing check out their series Walk on By.
Shoetube, good fun.
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