Wouldn’t it be great to easily create and share screen shots and little videos with people as we chat with them? Now we can, with the Jing Project. 
Jing is a downloadable program for Windows or Mac (thanks!) for capturing and sharing screen images and video. The difference between Jing and other screen capture software is how quickly you can create, upload and share images and video.
When Jing is open, an ambient yellow orb sits on your desktop. 
To activate it, 
just mouse over the orb and it extends three little tentacles
- capture, history and preferences.
Click on “capture” to open a Jing session and capture images or video (and sound if you have a mic). TechSmith linked Jing to a web hosting service so that you can immediately upload your creations, and then copy and paste a link directly into a chat session or blog post to share your content.
The Jing Project is a new venture by TechSmith, the developers of SnagIt, Camtasia and some great usability testing software called Morae. Jing is free for now, as TechSmith is testing out the concept. To get started, try out the video tour .
Here’s a Jing project video showing the cited reference feature on Google Scholar. Here’s a Jing image showing the same thing. The video would probably be better with some voice-over, and that’s easy to do. I’d like to try this with our chat (IM) reference service; it might even be nice to have a few “canned” images or videos to choose from, for example, how to get to a particular database or e-journal from the library home page.
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In the eternal quest for a search engine that will beat (or at least compete) with Google, a new search engine, Hakia, is unleashing its smarter searching to the world (or at least to the half dozen people in the world willing to try something other than Google). But really, YOU should try Hakia! It provides some nifty features that will make it worth your while, if not for every search, than at least for searches that require a little more in-depth interaction between you and that glowing screen.
The bulk of what’s new and impressive about Hakia can be found in its “ScoopBar.” The ScoopBar (which, unfortunately only works with IE right now) takes your search, highlights the relevant items in the search results that are returned, and when you click on a result, even takes you to the appropriate place on the page where your topic is being discussed. This is pretty nifty for those times when the result annotation appears to be about your topic, but then when you go to the webpage, your topic is apparently nowhere to be found. The added value of the Scoopbar may be enough to push Hakia into the next level of search engines - if they can make it adaptable on more browsers. Or at the very least, they will spur other search engines to do a better job of returning intelligent, user-friendly results.
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Several months ago I reviewed goodreads. At the time, two of my family members joined and a couple of friends; I’ve been using goodreads faithfully since then, but of course I wished more of my family and friends would join. Several weeks ago goodreads added their application to Facebook:
I invited a few of my Facebook friends to join and in one day 8 did! I now have 12 goodreads friends in Facebook. This is just further proof that Facebook is climbing to the top of social networking sites (I never did like MySpace, so I’m not shedding any tears). If you haven’t been following along, a couple of weeks ago I wrote a brief review of the recent developments at Facebook.
p.s. Feel free to add me as a friend in goodreads - Laurie Bridges
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Students hate formatting citations. As Jennifer says, not only do they hate it, they don’t really know how to do it. Often students report that the best thing they learn about in library instruction is Citation Machine or Citation Builder. Advantages of these tools are that they are quick to learn, easy to use, and they require no sign-in.
But for students who need to manage large numbers of references, generating them one at a time is not efficient. If students have group projects, or lots of citation information to manage, they might like Carmun.
Carmun is a free bibliography formatting tool that allows students to upload references, to add references or to save references from the web. It also gives them the ability to create groups. Jennifer thinks it would be swell for her big project in Organizational Behavior this term. She’ll start a group in Carmun, and share citations, chat with and e-mail her group members about the assignment. I’m going to bug her to add a comment here after she tries this out. I was having some trouble uploading a bibliography, and with searching for stuff in my library; maybe she’ll have better luck.
There are a few more features to mention: students can rate references in Carmun and tag them with their own keywords. They can search the whole database of references, search on tags, and search for things in their local library. There is also an application for inserting notes while writing. If you want to know where the term Carmun comes from, take a look at the founder’s group blogposts.
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Here it is, my new search engine! Simply type in the name of a country and choose “Country Studies” in the drop down box:
You can use Rollyo to create your own search engine. Just enter up to 25 web site addresses, add some tags, and create your searchroll. If you want to embed a widget in your website (like I did above) visit the “Tools” tab and choose “Put a Rollyo Searchbox on your site”.
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Published by Hannah on July 23, 2007
Categories: Maps
This summer I’m not going anywhere. Okay, I’m going to work, and occasionally to the grocery store, but I’m not really going anywhere fun (sorry co-workers). I’m mostly working in my yard a bunch, but every now and then it would be nice to get out of the house (while not wondering too far from the yard). By checking in on the site Walk Score, I can learn about new places in my community by figuring out what cool things are within walking distance from my house, and I can help alleviate my girlish office figure.
Walk Score uses Google Maps to show where parks, schools, and restaurants are within range of your address (that is if you enter your address and not some exotic address in Paris). It’s a pretty nifty tool to help illustrate the importance of community as well as the benefits of not driving so much. So while it’s a downer that I’m not vacationing anywhere exciting this summer, I can still enjoy what’s in walking distance from my house.
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Most of my investments are mutual funds in my retirement account. I’m somewhat of an odd duck, because I do check on them everyday and and I’m always curious to learn about major trends in the marketplace. Last week I ran across Analyst’s Edge and now I’ve added it to my RSS feeds. I’m hoping the site will give me the inside scoop on the market and perhaps help me manage my mutual funds a little bit better.
According to their website Analyst’s Edge is “user generated news and community for the finance world.” Analyst’s Edge is very bare bones, with an RSS feed and forum, but that’s to be expected since they just launched it two weeks ago after they built the site in just 4 days. As far as I can tell, anyone can post a news story, you just need to sign up and submit (I haven’t done it since I don’t have any news).
I’m a business librarian, and this is the first social-networking finance and news site I’ve run across. Does anyone out there know of anything similar to Analyst’s Edge?
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Flip.com might be old news to teens (or people who work with teens) but it’s new to me. Brought to you by Condé Nast (yup, the magazine people), Flip.com is a social site centered around a digital scrapbook called a “flipbook“.
Flipbooks are a sort of a cross between a scrapbook and a slideshow, and flipbook topics range from the student who started a (very successful!) club to HelpDarfurNow to the person who just wanted to share how “Movies Move [Her].” Flipbooks can include music, photos, videos, text, and all kinds of graphics, and members can rate and comment on flipbooks.
Since Flip.com is free to users it’s not surprising that advertising is prominent on the site but there are advertisements worked into the flipbooks in both expected and surprising places. Among the illustrations available to decorate your flipbook are little cartoon drawings of very specific items like Bumble & bumble hair products and Vera Wang “Princess” perfume. When setting up your profile you can choose which advertiser appears on your profile but not *if* an advertiser will appear on your profile. Also, I was a little disappointed to find that although my email won’t be sold, it will be “shared” unless I contact Condé Nast specifically to request that it be kept private. There’s no “opt out” radio button, just an email address buried in the FAQs, so it seems unlikely that many of their members take that step.
Flip.com definitely has a “teens only” feel to it, but in a good way; it doesn’t feel like they’re trying too hard. They focus on safety without being alarmist by letting teens know how they can either solve problems on their own (by deleting comments, blocking users, etc.) or take it to the next level (by reporting it to Flip.com or to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline.) Flipbooks seem like a fun, useful way for teens to share information, whether it be about vegetarianism or vacations.
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I don’t know about you, but when I fill out online wish-lists I feel a little greedy, “Hi mom, I want this exact gift and nothing else will do!” Somehow it just takes all the fun out of gift giving. For example, my husband is a glassblower, so whenever we’re getting a gift for a wedding I’m wondering, “Do they really want that yellow crock pot or would they rather have a hand-blown piece of glass?” It’s a real conundrum.
However, with SizeMonkey you can put the fun back into gift giving! Using SizeMonkey as your wish-list or registry you simply enter in your favorite colors, your clothing sizes, your favorite drink, favorite restaurant, the type of metal you prefer (no gold for me), and anything else you think is important.
I’m going to force my family to fill out profiles on SizeMonkey. I’m going to surprise them with gifts this Christmas and they are going to like them!! 
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Thanks to those of you who filled out the survey. We will be taking your excellent comments into consideration for future infodoodads!
If the survey respondents are any reflection of the entire readership, it appears that we have a significant number of newer readers. Welcome aboard! See the photo below:
To the question about the types of infodoodads reviewed, there was an overwhelming response that we were “just fine.” A few folks responded to wanting and not wanting more library-centric reviews. I may drop in an extra library doodad every now and again.
Here are some of my favorite written responses:
“more about guybrarians, please.” - I’ve been thinking about this. I’m going to post a collection of a guydoodads next week.
paraphrased “criteria for infodoodads consists of two points: 1. make my digital life easier, 2. needs to be free” –Yes, exactly!
“However, this is one of my favorite blogs.” Yay!
Some favorite infodoodads of the past: chowhound, instructables, sputtr, wikimindmaps, flickr geotagging, workhack, remember the milk, crazedlist, color jack, trulia, facebook, newsmap, wufoo, clipmarks, and the list goes on!
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Free + database = Freebase, “an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge.” I’ve been holding out on writing about Freebase, although I have a keen interest in MetaWeb Technologies’ open project. My hesitancy stemmed from wanting to understand more about how Freebase differs from Wikipedia, waiting for my invitation to look around in Freebase, and not wanting to make a fool of myself talking about the semantic web.
So, now I’ve had a chance to add a small bit of information about the Oregon State University Beavers Baseball team to Freebase. Hey, if the Beavs can miraculously win the College World Series two years in a row, how far off can the semantic web be? Laugh, it’s okay… but smart people like Esther Dyson and Tim O’Reilly have faith in Danny Hillis.
Users can openly contribute information to freebase just as they do with Wikipedia. Large datasets can be uploaded and licensed under a Creative Commons License. What makes freebase different from Wikipedia is that users can also add and edit the structure of data. Categories and types are applied; relationships and ontologies are created. These structures are created by the community. Controlled vocabulary via wiki. The idea is that the additional structure will 1) make it easier for developers to build applications on freebase, and 2) make “deeper and more interesting searches possible.“
Freebase encourages developers to use the MetaWeb Query API and freebase content to build external applications. One of the applications featured in the tutorial searches for and visually displays relationships between movies, actors, and directors.
It will be interesting to see what happens with Freebase as people add content and structure to it. I don’t know if those who want to develop applications on it are the same altruistic people likely to build Freebase. Possibly. But I do know a fairly altruistic group of people who gravitate toward organization. Librarians certainly recognize the power of categorization and relationships between concepts and types. For those of you who have always wanted to organize the Web, here is your chance.
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