I’ll be honest, I’m probably not the best person to review Scrapbook, a Firefox extension that allows you to save webpages to your hard drive, because I don’t actually do much bookmarking. That said, I did find that Scrapbook offers some really cool ways to mark-up, highlight, annotate, and otherwise keep track of what you want to remember out on the web. Unlike the regular browser-based bookmarking I’ve used, Scrapbook doesn’t just save a link to the page you mark. It also allows you to mark what you found interesting on a page, leave yourself notes, remove parts of the page, and even bookmark links to pages of all different formats.
So if I don’t really do bookmarks, why am I reviewing Scrapbook? Well, last Friday some of my fellow doodaders gave a great presentation (.ppt) about how we do what we do. Part of the presentation included asking audience members for some of their favorite free tools, and one person (sorry I didn’t get your name!) recommended Scrapbook highly. Anonymous audience member, is there anything you’d like to add? Does anyone else out there using Scrapbook have some tips you’d like to share?
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Anyone out there use a Meebo chat widget embedded in their webpage? Plugoo? AIM? Or any of the others? I recently heard about Hab.la and it is a little different than the rest. They even has a special features page just for libraries! The key difference is that the Hab.la widget will maintain the chat session with your patron, friend, site visitor, whomever, wherever they navigate on your site. The other nice feature is that as your visitor navigates, the URL of the page they navigate to is displayed in your chat window. I can see this being especially handy if you are trying to give multi-click directions to a page on your website, you can see the URLs as they go and make sure they do not go to the wrong page.
After reading through their FAQ I noticed that there is currently a limit on concurrent users: 5. For smaller institutions this probably wouldn’t make much of a difference, but I know from personal experience that I have had more than 5 concurrent virtual reference questions. The service just seems to be picking up and is a part-time project of 3 core developers, so perhaps once it gains momentum this number will expand to support a larger visitor user base.
You can monitor your Hab.la widget from any Jabber account (Meebo, Adium, Pidgin, iChat, etc.). For those of you not familiar with it, Jabber is an open messaging technology free from proprietary or corporate influence (AIM, Yahoo, etc.). Institutions can even host their own Jabber server if high security is an issue.
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ChitCh.at, a website that allows teachers to create interactive assignment pages, came to my attention today and I’m very impressed! I admit I’m also a little jealous because here at the university we use Blackboard, and I think Blackboard could learn some lessons from ChitCh.at (why is Blackboard so very 90’s in appearance?).
The target audiences for ChitCh.at are students and teachers in Middle School and High School classrooms; however, I can see lots of potential applications for undergraduates, graduates, and professional development (take a look at a little sample I created: http://chitch.at/klass/626 the enroll code is XCHESFC). Using ChitCh.at teachers can create online flashcards and post assignments and students can respond to assignments and each others work (if you want them to) and hand in assignments.
Still in its infancy, ChitCh.at is headed in the right direction. Take a look at these useful tutorials.
How does ChitCh.at make money? According to their website: “We’re a company, so let’s face it: there has to be a business model here somewhere. Fortunately for you, our business model does not include: 1) Showing ads to your students when they’re logged in; and 2) Charging teachers for using ChitChat. So where’s the business model? For starters, we sell classroom software that interacts with our educational network to schools with ubiquitous or near-ubiquitous computing.”
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The British have done it again! I am so jealous of their interior design and decorating resources. Their magazines are better (Homes & Gardens and Ideal Home), they have wonderful drapes that I can’t get shipped to the U.S. (I’ve tried), and now they have mydeco.com! Using mydeco.com you can create a room in 3-d and then insert furniture and decor from over 500 retailers. And, if you are living in Britain you can then order those items. drool. Would someone in the U.S. please create something similar (even though the U.S. furniture selection isn’t nearly as cool, I’d still be most appreciative!).
Here’s a little room I’ve been working on — it’s super easy! Just sign up and start creating.
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In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been sent 2 videos hosted on blip.tv a site where videobloggers, podcasters and Internet TV producers can post content. Even though I’m not planning to create a tv show, this might be a good hosting alternative for a library wanting to post videos.
One of the videos sent to me was Lawrence Lessig’s announcement that he may run for congress. From here I found other content that was much more substantive than what I’ve seen elsewhere. I browsed the tags, episodes and shows and found a wide range of content –techy stuff; self promotional exercise videos; random library videos and a big mix of other items.
In addition to hosting content, blip.tv also helps with advertising, distribution and workflow.
Besides having an an alternative or an additional site for video hosting, what intrigues me about blip.tv is the potential to see great content not influenced by major networks. Guided by admirable principles, blip.tv gives a great example of what tv can look like in our Web 2.0 world.
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Published by Margaret on February 20, 2008
Categories: Web
(via Emily Chang’s E-Hub)
You know how great it is to be able to make long urls shorter with tinyurl, especially when you’re e-mailing or texting links? Now you can “bunch” several links into one with Linkbunch. This is going to be great for sending results for e-mail reference, IM or text questions. For example, you could send several links about business in Great Britain in one short link. http://linkbun.ch/29h
The recipient can then open the links singly or all at once in multiple tabs ( multiple windows with IE 6) to get started with their own searches. There is also a Linkbunch Firefox extension that helps you capture a whole screenful of tabs to send off in one link.
PS… Michael, a Linkbunch twitterbot will be coming soon…
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The geeky librarian side of me could barely contain itself when I started reading the FAQs for Sortfix - a search interface that remixes searches from search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and dmoz and suggests “power words” and provides drag and drop keyword searching. I am still lamenting the loss of the grokker-powered visual search in EbscoHost, so I am excited to see any other attempts at improving search visualization. While Sortfix doesn’t provide a visual representation of the search results (besides the ubiquitous list), it does give a visual look at the way search terms are put together.
Sortfix uses boxes at the top of the search results list which contain the individual search terms you entered, a box to remove words from your search, and a box of “power words” - words suggested by Sortfix that should make your search more powerful (and which can also be removed). For example, when I searched the cost of concrete countertops, some of the power words were square foot and home maintenance articles. So, I can add power words to my search, or whittle the search down by dragging and dropping words into the appropriate box. There is even a dictionary box to drag words with which you are not familiar - a variety of definitions are available (not to worry).
The advanced search feature allows you to search with “or,” phrase search or synonyms. (An aside - oddly enough you have to sign up for advanced searching and provide demographic data like your age and gender, hmmm). I think this could be a fantastic option in a bibliographic instruction setting where you were trying to explain boolean operators, phrase searching or the importance of synonyms. If anyone gives it a try, let us know how it works!
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Published by Kate on February 15, 2008
Categories: Visual
Today’s doodad is in graphic form–since WordPress and JavaScript don’t play very nicely together you’ll have to head over and check it out at toonlet, a site that makes it easy to create great looking comic strips.
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I learned about this great site over on academhack, a blog geared toward computers and technology in academia. Echo stands for Exploring and Collecting History Online, a “portal to over 5,000 websites concerning the history of science, technology, and industry” produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University , the same group who put out one of my favorite tools, Zotero, reviewed nearly a year ago by Hannah.
The organization of echo is really simple and makes a lot of sense. There is a standard search box which works well. Three general ways of browsing are set up: by category, by historic period, or by content type. Content type popped out as the most interesting one to me. If you want to find sites with just videos, you can hit the videos link and see only historical websites that have video resources. Neat!
Each web resource has its own record that is tagged so you can quickly see what kind of content it contains, the historic period(s) encompassed, and the general category or categories it falls under. You can see these tags in the image to the right. As you can see, some records even contain excerpts and annotations. An advanced search option lets you create your own combination of all of these things in a custom search.
This is one of those sites where I could just get lost browsing through all of the really cool web destinations that include museums, archives, universities, just about every organization type you can think of.
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Via KillerStartups I read with interest about Seeksift. The review states that SeekSift will take your feeds and send them to you as e-mail updates. This is not the part I read with interest. I thought the point of RSS readers was to get non-urgent, but important stuff out of our e-mail accounts.
No, the part that made me perk up a bit was where we find out that SeekSift “acts as a search engine and tracker for similar topics”
To ‘track my own, ‘ I searched for Yahoo and Microsoft and asked that all terms appear in the results. It’s not the most elegant search, but most of the results are posts relating to Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo. I can track new posts on this topic by having the results of the search delivered to e-mail (no, thanks) or I can get the results through RSS. I can read the results on my feed reader, or use SeekSift to make topical searches to generate news for students using our library help pages for course assignments.
There is not much information about Seeksift on their site, although there is a note that the software “accesses publicly-available syndicated data feeds under the auspices of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) . . .” and that there is an option for data feed creators to opt out. I didn’t see a way to subscribe to SeekSift, only a way to unsubscribe.
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Here’s a mind-blowing exercise. Head over to MIT’s Visual Dictionary and try to find patterns in the 79 million plus images compiled on the screen. Okay, once you’re done with the big picture view, click on any one of the pixels, and you will see the 16 images that made up that one pixel. This seemingly random and chaotic “visual dictionary” (more like visual hodge podge in my opinion, but an artist, I am not) is all part of an effort to help machines recognize objects in images. 
By combing through the millions of images freely available on the web, labeling them, and then training the machines to recognize the objects in the images, scientists will be able to….Okay, I don’t really know what all the applications of this research could be. But in the meantime, you can check out the cool poster of this visual display. Click on millions of pixels to see how words were grouped together, and figure out why some regions are yellow and others are blue. Plus, you can help out the researchers by going to LabelMe and helping them to train their robots by labeling a few of the images you’ll find there. Everyone likes to participate in mysterious scientific adventures, and it’s easier than eating green beans for a nutritional study!
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