…Of course, we’re all data users, so maybe Swirrl will turn out to be for everyone! At my work, we recently compiled a large amount of data in a table on a wiki. The particular type of wiki we use made this a horrendously tedious task. The formatting was wonky, the ability to export was clunky - basically the larger the data set became, the worse it was to work with. Swirrl might provide some relief should we ever try to collect and share data in this way again.
Swirrl is marketed toward businesses, but since it has a free version I could see many different groups using it. At its core Swirrl is a wiki - registered participants can make changes and share information. However, besides having a prettier interface than some wikis, Swirrl also allows you to upload and analyze datasets. A nice feature Swirrl includes in its datasets is the ability to include tags. I can see tagging really enhancing the findability of information in a lot of datasets I work with.
Swirrl comes in a fee-based version as well, but the free version should give you plenty to play around with, and you can always take your data out if you’re not happy Swirrling.
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Published by Hannah on September 29, 2008
Categories: Web
I may just be having a grumpy Monday, but when I started my work computer this morning and saw that my Firefox browser was being updated again, I felt a case of the “what gives” coming on. Okay, okay, so Firefox is mostly great, but ever since Firefox 3 was released in June, I have felt occasional twinges of annoyance. Not all of my add-ons transferred over and Java doesn’t seem to play well with Firefox 3 all of the time (in other words I can’t always watch streaming TV through Firefox), and others complain of memory leak.
So if you are like me and you have been wondering, why the new version of Firefox, here is a brief overview. In a nutshell, I believe the reason for the update was security. As Firefox becomes more popular, more hackers will spend time attempting to hack it, so they’ve put in virus controls, anti-phishing software and more privacy/data clearing options. There are also more parental control features. In addition to security features, Firefox touts their new look, faster loading time and increased customizability. It also uses less of your system’s resources. CNet still ranks it as the best browser available. Bottom line -I’ll keep using Firefox 3, but will be eagerly anticipating improvements once my computer decides to update me to Firefox 3.1!
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Today I heard that some new census data has been recently released for my state, which put me in a data frame of mind. And what better way to absorb some data than in a visual form? Enter PolicyMap. PolicyMap uses U.S. census data, FBI Data, and U.S. Postal Service info, to name a few sources, in order to allow users to map births, burglaries, homes vacant, private school enrollment, even 2008 election campaign contributions by candidate. Choose a region on their U.S. map, pick a data layer of interest and learn more than you wanted to about your neighborhood (I _think_ I’m in a relatively good area for car thefts, but how many car thefts is too many?).
While PolicyMap doesn’t always have a very fine level of data for every region, it can be useful for seeing data in broad strokes for an area. PolicyMap has several subscriptions tiers, including a free one. The drawback to the free tier is that you can’t upload your own data, manipulate it and pair it with the data already available in PolicyMap. The free option still requires registration.
In addition to maps, PolicyMap also allows you to see data in table or report form, so for data geeks like me you can get your data fix in many forms.
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Well, I’m cheating here on my first post after returning from maternity leave. I’m sharing information that’s more of the personal variety than the help-you-out-with-your-information-needs variety. I’ll get back to the more useful type soon (once I catch up with my feeds and adjust to new things around the office, such as Office 2007 - grrr), but for now I’ll just share that Laurie had her baby at the end of August and will be taking a hiatus from infodoodading for a couple of months as she enjoys/adjusts to her little one. Thankfully Sam is still with us, so you’ll still get tons of new info tips (but maybe not as many about dealing with hypochondria).
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A co-worker and I have been working on a poster about how we use del.icio.us in our work setting. As part of our brainstorming, we’ve talked about how we’re not always as consistent as we should be when creating our del.icio.us tags. For example, I have both the tag “search” and “searchengine.” While I’m sure there was a good reason for both of these tags at one point, I’m not sure that having both of them gets me to a source any faster. Some mandated standardization may have been nice - which is where Faviki comes in (surprise!).
Faviki is a social bookmarking tool that uses tags that link to Wikipedia terms. This makes the universe of tags you might choose somewhat more limited, and hopefully more consistent. While this might feel somewhat Library of Congress constraining to some, the organizational options might be freeing to others.
Beyond the source of the tag options, Faviki operates in much the same way as other social bookmarking tools. Using a bookmarklet to tag pages, viewing tag clouds, inviting people to a network, and viewing the most popular or recent new pages are all part of the Faviki platform. Faviki is still in Beta, so you will likely need to wait a couple of minutes to request an account and get yourself up and running. But after the initial request, your Faviki experience should be pretty smooth sailing.
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The old horticulturist in me was very excited to see that the long-standing extension service has a great new website, eXtension. eXtension goes beyond offering the normal state-based portal to a nation-wide portal to all things extension (motherhood, apple pie, rope tying guides, fire ants, garden advice, parenting and more). Not only does the new eXtension site have a ton of great information, but they have also included many Web 2.0 features that should make the site more interactive and a product of the people they are trying to serve. They even self-describe their site as an “interactive learning environment” (librarians should be jealous). Many of the Web 2.0 features we have all come to expect are here - RSS feeds, comment options, a ratings system, and tag clouds. Check it out, post a question online, read what university experts have to say, or rate a post, because every citizen needs a little dose of eXtension in their lives!
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I have a friend who is all about eating the right foods in their season (she even co-authored a cookbook on seasonal cooking), so this time of year I hear a lot about farmers’ markets, CSAs and what to do with an abundance of lettuce (lettuce soup anyone?). To help figure out what is available in your area throughout the year Epicurious has developed a food by season mapping tool. Just click on your state and a list of seasonal ingredients appears. You can they hover over kohlrabi, for instance, and click on recipes using that ingredient or find out what the heck the particular vegetable is. Overall pretty nifty.
The obvious drawback, of course, is that a state might be quite geographically various (think Oregon, Alaska, Montana) so the ingredients might not actually be in season in your particular part of the state. And locations outside of the U.S. aren’t even included. You can also make yourself jealous about the food that is available in other locales (stinky Texans and their ripe blueberries…). But hopefully the map combined with the Epicurious recipes will have you well on your way to cooking and eating seasonally.
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Once again Google is walking the fine line between creepy and cool. This time it is with their release of (the beta version) Google Health. The cool parts? - good summary pages of health conditions, links to searches by people with similar search interests to yours, links to forums on related health topics, the ability to find other online health support options, and an overall simple to use interface (but what else did you expect from Google?). 
The creepy parts? - okay these are all in the “it could go either way” category, for example if your medical records reside with a select group of providers you can download them into your Google Health account. You can enter in information about yourself (weight, height, medications, conditions) to help beef up your Health account. Granted, when you log into Google Health with your gmail account you need to agree to a number of conditions regarding privacy, but it’s still hard to feel totally safe uploading your medical records to a Google account (and I’m not usually very skittish about this sort of thing).
Google Health will definitely be a interesting player in the health search field. Whether their individualized profile system takes off will be a fascinating look into how users feel about how well their privacy can be protected on the internet.
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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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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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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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If you’d like to make your feedreading experience even more personal than it currently is, try adding FriendFeed to your feedreading experience. Now, not only can you keep up with the gossip news (or, ahem, I mean important news from your profession), you can keep track of your friends’ and family’s (F and/or F) web publishing activities. FriendFeed allows you to see when a F or F posts a video to YouTube, adds photos to their Flickr account, or posts a riveting presentation on SlideShare. F and F can also share songs they liked from Pandora, Netflix faves, or LibraryThing suggestions via FriendFeed. And of course for you Twitter-ers, you can track some Twittering this way.
You do need to sign up (for free) for a FriendFeed account, and then invite your F and F (they don’t just magically appear in FriendFeed’s interface). I think FriendFeed sounds like an excellent alternative to receiving these kinds of updates through email, and that FriendFeed will be a helpful component in helping the different social components of the web to be even more enmeshed. It’s even pretty easy to imagine the leap for a whole class joining FriendFeed to keep track of their progress through a project or to see what updates had happened to blogs, pictures or slides. Hmmm, the possibilities are endless. Let me know if you try any fun options!
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