Michael archive at infodoodads

Author Archive for Michael

Missed us? We’ll be back soon!

Published by Michael on January 26, 2009
Categories: Uncategorized 1 Comment

Dear infodoodaders:

You may have noticed that over the past few months our posting frequency has taken a sharp decline. Two of us have had babies, one of us just finished grad school, another few are knee-deep in the tenure process and goodness knows what else. You may think to yourself “is infodoodads dead? what’s going on?” This is something we recently considered amongst ourselves. However, we all enjoy infodoodads and miss writing. It isn’t yet time to let go.

Let us share with you our vision of the infodoodads to come. Instead of unconnected daily posts we are going to bring to you month-long conversations around a central theme. The deluge of web 2.0 in years past has begun to lose momentum and we think it is time to change our focus and purpose accordingly. Our monthly themes will be broader than a single tool and consider more of the why’s, how’s, who’s, what’s, where’s, and when’s. We invite you to participate in more than a “wow, neat tool, thanks!” sort of way (although that is still fully welcome!), but contribute to the dialogue we hope to inspire. For those of you with a bit more to say than short comments, we will welcome guest posts.

Please mark your calendars for February 1 and look forward to our first theme of the new infodoodads! Hint, it’s about video!

The infodoodads team

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LIFE photo archive - Google scores again!

Published by Michael on December 26, 2008
Categories: Photo and Searching 0 Comments

It’s been out for a month already and I’m slightly embarrassed to have just heard about it. Google is hosting an image archive for LIFE magazine, not just the amazing published photos, but also the millions of archived photos that nearly no one has before seen. In November about 20 percent of the photos had been scanned and Google expects to finish the project in just a few months. I really enjoy this photo of Governor William Stratton playing with his great dane. gov. stratton w great dane

You can go to the link above or include source:life in your Google Image search to limit to that collection. This collection goes back as far as the 1860s and can be browsed by decade, or by a short list of popular topics arranged by broad category (people, events, etc.).

I wonder what other large image collections will become available to the public? Earlier this year the Library of Congress released a photo archive on Flickr. This seems to be a pretty new thing for Google, they’ve indexed online images for years, but hosting as well? That’s news to me. Unlike other images found in the Google Image search, these images contain a limited amount of metadata, tags (they call them labels), related images, as well as a custom page template.

If you find a photograph you cannot live without, there seems to be a link on most photos to order a framed print from LIFE magazine using Qoop, an online photo, book, and other media production and sales site. Otherwise, you can use the photos for personal non-commercial use, though the larger versions have a LIFE watermark in the lower-right corner.

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cheese cupid - makin’ love with cheese!

Published by Michael on December 15, 2008
Categories: Food 4 Comments

This title got your attention right away, eh? Good, it’s well worth it! I was browsing on Facebook, not an uncommon activity for me, when an advertisement popped up that I actually wanted to click on. It said “Cheese Cupid” and I was immediately intrigued.

Cheese Cupid is produced by the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, the dairy organization of Wisconsin. This post is a continuation of the foody goodness that Sam began on Thanksgiving weekend.

cheese cupid screenshot So what’s CC do? Unlike OkCupid which matches you with potential friends and mates, Cheese Cupid matches up drinks with cheese! There are four drink categories: white wine, red wine, beer, and liquor. Within each of these categories are several drink choices, make a choice and a new page pops up describing that drink and its properties and cheeses it would pair with well. You can then click on one of the cheeses for detailed information about the cheese.

Folks, remember to keep your volume up when visiting this site. A sultry female voice introduces each drink when you go to its respective page! The same goes for your click on a cheese and its pop-up window. Below all of this information you’ll notice a changing bar of information along the bottom which includes fun facts about Wisconsin dairy production and cheese! Such as: “Wisconsin produces one of every four pounds of US cheese.” dang! or “Approximately 90% of Wisconsin milk goes into cheesemaking” wowie!

While on the idea of pairing cheese with alcoholic beverages, I did a little searching and found a few more fun resources:

From our good friends at Beer Advocate: Beer and Cheese (a great intro article for pairing beer and cheeses with many suggestions)
Anyone in the Northwest should be familiar with this cheesemaker: Tillamook! They teamed up with a Northwest microbrew favorite: Widmer Bros. Brewery to offer 1:1 beer:cheese pairings.
An interesting blog post at NOLA.com pointing out many reasons for beer to be a more soid pair than wine. I heartily agree!

So, what are your favorite pairings? My personal favorite is a well-aged extra sharp cheddar with a hand-crafted IPA.

PS - I’m planning now to be back to infodoodads after a finishing school/traveling the world/interviewing for jobs hiatus.

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iPhone/iTouch Mania! - Bring on the free apps!

Published by Michael on October 14, 2008
Categories: Mobile, Photo, Productivity and Reviews 4 Comments

This week I want to showcase some of my favorite apps for the iPhone/iTouch. All but one of them are free, I really don’t like having to pay for apps unless they are super special so have only made a few exceptions so far (2 games and 1 noted below).

Twitterific - Microblogging at its finest. It’s easy to set up Twitter to post your tweets via text message, but why waste a text message when you already have a data plan? Install Twitterific and post your tweets for free, plus view your feed from your friends!

Facebook -Keep up with your Facebook social goings-on, a major update was recently released so this mobile version uses a lot of functionality of the “new” Facebook. Very intuitive so far.

IM+ - Instant messaging on the iPhone is a mixed bag. Unlike other smartphones and the like, the iPhone only runs one application at a time along with system functions (phone, text messages, calendar, alarm, etc.) that will run in the background. This means that if you download AIM, Google Chat, Yahoo Chat, etc. you will only be able to use one at a time. Lame! So far, IM+ is the only free IM software to handle multiple account logins at the same time. My only gripe isn’t against IM+ but against the iPhone in general, because the app closes and your connections go offline when the device goes into sleep mode, you go back to the home screen, or open another application.

Klick - The iPhone has a decent camera (don’t throw out your cybershot, folks!) but there is not a built-in app to share these photos with online services such as Flickr. Why should I have to download the photos to my computer and then upload to Flickr when this phone supposedly has this great data connectivity? Enter Klick. Other similar apps are not free or require you take the photo from within their program originally, NOT using the iPhone “Camera” application which leaves you with photos in two locations. Klick can access the native photo directory directly and very easily upload to Flickr. I love this app!

iWant - I used this app to its purpose just last weekend. I was in an unfamiliar part of town with a friend and went to a concert. After the concert we thought it’d be fun to grab a beer in the area at a local bar or pub and chat about the concert. Then we realized that we would have to just start driving around and hope for the best when I remembered iWant. I opened the app, chose the category for bar/pub/tavern and had it show me businesses within 1 mile of my current location. Ta-da! 3 establishments popped up complete with ratings and reviews. We were very happy with our choice, C-Bar, for those of you who live in the Portland, Oregon area.

MySpace - Like Facebook, a iPhone version of the popular social networking site. Many functions are available in this tidy little app, I’ve found it’s actually faster to check my messages here than going to MySpace on my computer!

Pandora - Most of you are probably familiar with this Internet radio site. This freebie app connects you to the exact same site and services. You must have a Pandora account, but the neato thing is that it uses your preferences/lists/etc. from your regular web account, so aside from signing in, there is no tedious setup.

AirSharing - With the exception of music, video, and applications, the iDevices really do not provide a nice way to transport other files on that 8- or 16-GB hard drive. I finally came across this great application, AirSharing which essentially sets up your iDevice as a network drive that you can drag/drop files to/from. Easy to set up and simple to use! Now you can drag around those necessary PDFs, DOCs, XLSs, PPTs, etc. - $6.99 and well worth it.

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zenbe - be zen

Published by Michael on September 17, 2008
Categories: Communication, E-mail and Productivity 4 Comments

Short and sweet this week. This tool, Zenbe (Zen Be), does a lot of neat things, all in one handy package. I’m not yet convinced that this is something I’ll fully try out, but it’s fun to think about.

Zenbe’s primary feature is the ability to combine e-mail from multiple accounts. That’s right, you could compare it to aggregating news feeds, but now, it’s your e-mail. It also has a contact manager, a calendar (that can be shared/collaborated with other Zenbe and non-Zenbe users). There’s also a hybrid feature called Zen Pages–webpages that allow dynamic content pulled into one: calendar, e-mails, files, etc. for multiple people to collaborate. Sounds neat, will have to try it soon.

So far, the only feature that I’ve really explored and enjoy greatly is Zenbe Lists. I *love* to-do lists. Usually I’ll e-mail a list to myself and then look at it on my iPhone throughout the day. That’s okay when lists are short, but sometimes they’re long. I was starting a grocery list a few days ago and it got a little crazy, so I searched around and found Zenbe. It has a native iPhone app for its list function and will sync lists between the iPhone and the web interface. I was able to “check off” my list items as I marched up and down the aisles, it worked perfectly. And best of all, it’s free.

Speaking of iPhone, any iPhone users out there interested in some iPhone-centric reviews? If there’s enough of an interest, it could be fun to share those. I know lately I try out a LOT more of those tools than regular web tools.

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google chrome - tabs with a mind of their own

Published by Michael on September 3, 2008
Categories: Web 4 Comments

Google Chrome just came out and I was kind of excited to give it a shot. I particularly enjoy that in the planning of this browser they anticipate bugs and unsavory things to happen during a typical web experience.

The rundown. Chrome is a browser, similar in function and appearance to the popular tabbable browsers out there: Firefox, Safari, IE, etc. The first thing I enjoy is the lack of clutter, it is clear that the developers wanted to maximize useful screen space, it’s similar to viewing Firefox in “full screen” mode. Chrome treats each tab as its own independently processing application, this is particularly handy when you get a website with buggy scripting that causes the browser to stall. Instead of losing all of your other opened tabs and the entire program, you just lose that single tab. Neat, right? They even have a task manager for your tabs, so you can “end process” one if necessary. I like this feature. A lot.

Aside from the very basic differences (there are many more, but I’d need a lot more room to expand on them) there are functionally some neat things happening. When you open a new tab, a grid of website previews loads on the page, these websites are your most frequently visited sites. This is supposed to be a big time saver, though I don’t see it–if something is bookmarked, all I need to do is go to the bookmark, mouse-wheel click it, and it opens in a new tab, or in toolbar bookmarks, simply mouse-wheel click. Though, now that most of my bookmarks are all in del.icio.us (or should I say, delicious) this truly might be more efficient than logging in, searching, clicking.

Speed. I’ve noticed that most sites seem to load noticeably faster than in other browsers. When doing multi-tasking, this is especially nice since as I mentioned before, each tab is its own process and functions independently. Their nifty comic (I love the idea of using a comic to explain a process or technical something, it’s the perfect mode for non-video text/visual information) of the development process hints to when Windows ran asynchronously and each process would have to wait its turn. Things get ugly when any process fails, because the rest in line will continue to wait, forever.

A little more about the background of the project from the developers:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGmO7Oximw8[/youtube]

Privacy. A feature that would be handy for browsers used by multiple people is called incognito. This feature makes the browser record zero history and private information from content in the designated tab(s).

Let’s see, what else? Oh, right. You can drag a tab outside the window to create a new window of itself. You can drag tabs between windows too. I do a lot more tab dragging lately, this would definitely be handy. Also, the box where the URL usually goes also functions as your search box and history. Download status shows at the bottom of the window, no pop-up!

Currently, my only gripe with Chrome is my dependence on add-ons for Firefox, there are so many good ones and I like them a lot. This may just be the clincher for a permanent browser swap for me. However, it’s definitely my new backup browser! It appears that Google is working on an API for third-party add-ons to be released later on…promising.

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spreed - speed read feeds!

Published by Michael on August 26, 2008
Categories: Productivity 6 Comments

I can’t quite get over the name of this one: Spreed. My mind keeps interpreting it as the fictitious past tense of the verb spree. Argh.

Spreed essentially takes a feed of text, chops it up into bitty 2-5 word bits and flashes them at you at a variable speed. It is supposed to support speed reading and make this feed reading business a much faster ordeal. I’m not entirely sure I buy it. However, the tool IS kind of cool looking. All you do is choose a story from their site or text document you’ve uploaded, it opens in the player which tells you the length of time to play based on the current speed. You can choose to play or alter the speed it plays the story. Anything more than 800 WPM and I lose it.

I noticed that since the text flashes so quickly, I have to focus to read every word. Usually when I read, I meander and pause and become distracted. Maybe Spreed really does have something…

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gmail - be secure, it’s easy

Published by Michael on August 19, 2008
Categories: E-mail 6 Comments

This week, in lieu of a nifty doodad, you will find this public service announcement instead. I don’t know about y’all but I have multiple Gmail accounts that I use for everything from personal e-mail correspondence, purchasing, signing up for junk you know will generate spam e-mail, and work. For a few of those it’s pretty important that everything remain secure.

It’s a habit of mine to use the secure (https) entry to Gmail, so it didn’t really cross my mind that other people might not be doing it. Unfortunately, they are not. A quick note about https. Note the “s” after the “http.” When you log in to a website somewhere, seeing this in the address bar of your browser is a sign that security is present. It literally means Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer (SSL). Your bank does this, most big online retailers also do this, it’s a good idea. What this does is encrypt the data flow between you and the website, that is, jumbles it up so it is very difficult to decipher. Here’s an article from Webmonkey with a little more depth about this issue with Gmail.

To the rescue, Google has implemented an option in your Gmail account settings to turn this always-on when connecting to your account. Here’s how:

Click on the “settings” link in the upper-right corner of your screen

Scroll to the bottom of the settings screen and change the last option “Browser Connection” to “Always use https”

Be sure to choose “Save Changes”

Will this completely safeguard your web-based e-mail? No. A truly determined person could still gain access, but why should they when there are a few million other people who do not practice any protection?

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cuil - search the largest web index

Published by Michael on July 29, 2008
Categories: Searching 4 Comments

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about Cuil (pronounced cool), the new mega search engine developed by former Google employees and star search engine designer Anna Patterson.

It has the familiar single-box entry, but a startling black background. Their claim to fame is an index of over 120 billion web pages, more than 3 times that of Google. I’m not entirely sure how accurate this is since Google has not published the number of pages they index for years. Either way, I’m happy to have much more available information, however, it does little good if the information is poorly matched to the search.

My stock sample search to try out search engines is to use my first and last name. I tried it with Cuil and to my surprise my staff page at my institution came up in the first page of results. I was equally surprised to notice that this result was for our old web server that has been out of use for months, so the link was dead.

Cuil has some interesting features. One that I like is a drill-down category list. Based on your search it presents you with some popular categories that expand when moused over. Results are given in 3 columns by default, I’m assuming they are in a newspaper-style reading order: top-bottom, left-right. Some results have a nice thumbnail image preview, I do like this.

Overall, I like the simple way that results are presented, the categories are interesting. However, there are a lot of mechanical problems yet. When choosing to view the next page of results I get a page that says there are no results for my search. What about the other 26,000 results I was promised? On the second try it works and my same result is on this page, but with a thumbnail from an image not found on my page. Interesting. Give it a shot!

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tripwolf - hungry for travel

Published by Michael on July 8, 2008
Categories: Mash-ups, Restaurants, Shopping and Travel 0 Comments

This is the first time I have reviewed a travel site for infodoodads. Lately I’ve had a crazy wanderlust and am yearning for travel like none other. Last week I ran across tripwolf as a potential cool tool to play around with to help prep some travel goodness and serve as potential infodoodads fodder. Does the logo remind anyone else of the little Firefox guy?

When I first went to the site I aimed (as usual) toward the sign-up link to dive right in. To my surprise there was a link to log in via Facebook. What? I don’t have to create an account directly on this site??? That’s right, to a point. You do need to choose a username and e-mail address, tripwolf is also a Facebook application and you can choose to integrate or not. I say, why not? Once I logged in via Facebook and I gave consent to access my Facebook information it imported my profile picture and some information about me to populate my tripwolf identity–pretty handy! Now it’s time to look around the real features of the site.

I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do, so just tried typing in “Bulgaria” in the primary search box. The results list contained Bulgaria listed in the category “country” as well as cities in Bulgaria listed as (surprise) “city.” Individual popular places in Bulgaria also came up as sights, perfect! Since I don’t know anything about Bulgaria aside from the recent joining to the EU and their use of the Cyrillic alphabet I figured I would go straight for the country listing and see what was there.

As you can see in the images below, this is an incredibly rich interactive site. Users can rate destinations with what else? wolf prints, and edit them wiki-style. Bulgaria is currently lacking a one-line description in case any informed person feels so inclined. The country has tags, recommendations from friends (a la Facebook), and sections for relevant media: YouTube vids, Flickr photos, etc. There are also sight categories that users themselves populate: culture & sights; beach & relaxation; and outdoors, sports & adventure. There is an ever-present Google map at the top of the page to orient you to the current destination. By choosing “Play with map” you can filter the destinations displayed, which is great if you’re looking for cultural sights, restaurants, etc. As a note, Google Maps doesn’t always have the best detail for international areas which I noticed in Bulgaria.

As you find destinations that interest you, you can add them to a sort of “shopping cart” that they call a guide, which you can later print as a PDF and take on your trip. I’m not exactly sure which information this PDF guide provides, since I can’t get it to work on my computer. A box pops up and says it is being generated and an animation loops over and over for several minutes to no avail. As a newer site, it’s still in development I’m sure.

To get a more detailed experience, check out New York City — note the ability to drill down to neighborhood on the right side of the map. I can see this being particularly useful in metro areas. Adding new locations is a snap, I just added one of my favorite Portland, Oregon locations: Voodoo Doughnut. I’ll let you explore tripwolf on your own now, but if you’d like, feel free to friend me, my username is: mikeypage10. Happy travels!

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zoomii - where amazon has shelves

Published by Michael on July 1, 2008
Categories: Books and Shopping 8 Comments

I don’t really like shopping for books online. I do enjoy reader comments, but unless there are several and they all gave 1 star out of 5, I’m still not convinced. I like looking at book covers, a lot. As an information professional I should probably exercise my logic and dig a little deeper, but I always fall off the bandwagon: I judge books by covers and I like browsing at bookstores.

Enter: Zoomii, launched June 16. Think of it as a mash-up of the Amazon storefront. Book browsing in bookstores is a fun experience for me. The new and popular books usually have their covers turned right toward me, books are divided in broad categories, new books and bestsellers are all thrown to me at the front of the store, it’s great. Zoomii takes this type of organization and applies it to books sold on Amazon.com.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHuMbNzFKmw[/youtube]

Browse books with Zoomii and add them to your Amazon cart. Zoom in, zoom out, click and hold your mouse to drag the screen to other sections, this works much like any of the popular online maps. When you’re finished, check out as usual. Or, if you’re like me, load up your Amazon cart and then go check your list against your library catalog.

How about eliminating that middle step and create an overlay option like this for our library catalogs? General bestsellers/subject sections, or maybe even our own most frequently used items–I think a lot of us might be surprised to see what really gets used the most.

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linkup - deep web for jobs

Published by Michael on May 27, 2008
Categories: Personal and Searching 2 Comments

Keeping your options open? Looking for the new big thing? LinkUp offers a way to search the jobs that don’t show up in Monster or other big job sites. I was initially really excited about LinkUp because well, you know, I’m graduating later this year and am scouring the web for librarian jobs like you wouldn’t believe [personal sales pitch: if you’re looking to hire a fabulous young librarian who has a good head on his shoulders and makes killer brownies, send me a note: infodoodads.michael@gmail.com] and keep seeing the same jobs recycled in the same places.

However, once the results showed up I was a little disappointed. A search for “librarian” in the location “Arizona” brought up 2 results. Both were for corporate positions, which is interesting, but one of the links wasn’t even valid anymore. I know for a fact that there are more library-related positions available than that. Changing librarian to library produced many results, but mostly software engineer positions–not something I’m qualified for, yet. So if you are a software engineer, this could be an excellent tool.

The user experience exists in a tabbed browsing system. Your results are in the first tab and any jobs you view from those open in new tabs–all within the webpage, not your browser tabs. I really enjoyed this feature a lot. All in all, the interface is simple and very useful, but the search engine obviously needs some more refinement.

Aside from the job search, they offer a resume storage/submission system. It appears to be fairly standard, in comparison to other sites though it does offer a tracking feature which would be convenient if applying to many jobs in the same time frame.

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Author Archive for Michael

Missed us? We’ll be back soon!

LIFE photo archive - Google scores again!

cheese cupid - makin’ love with cheese!

iPhone/iTouch Mania! - Bring on the free apps!

zenbe - be zen

google chrome - tabs with a mind of their own

spreed - speed read feeds!

gmail - be secure, it’s easy

cuil - search the largest web index

tripwolf - hungry for travel

zoomii - where amazon has shelves

linkup - deep web for jobs

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