Toluu

Phil Bradley's weblog

Internet searching, web design, search engine developments and anything that will interest librarians!

wectar - most popular bookmarks on delicious aggregatorNovember 27

wectar - most popular bookmarks on delicious aggregator. This resource is very simple and straightforward - it lists the most popular bookmarks in delicious over specific time periods - 4 hours, a day, a week, a month and a year. It provides details on the number of times a site is bookmarked, the name of the site and other similar or related sites. There's a checking option as well - type in the name of the specific page you're interested in, and Wectar will try and find other related pages. Very nice resource - my only real gripes are that there's a lot of repetition of the same site mainly because people have bookmarked slightly different versions so the results are not terribly accurate, and unless the title is descriptive it's necessary to visit the site to see what it's all about, which isn't helpful. Otherwise, it's a really nice idea!

Own Mine MetasearchNovember 27

Own Mine is a meta search engine that uses GYMA to pull in results. They can either be seen individually or in combination. There is also a chat box that searchers can use to chat to others who are doing similar searches. The demo was a bit weird - it showed someone doing a search for a university, and it just so happened that another user of the engine was from the very same university. Chummy doing the search leaps into the chat box and asks for the best links to said university. To be honest - if I'm busy doing a search, I'm busy doing a search, and I'm not really that interested in stopping what I'm doing to help some random person on the way. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but that's just the way it is.

Second oddity about this engine is that it has some sort of really odd 'incentive scheme'. If you make the engine your home page, visit a certain amount of times, and/or introduce friends, you can get 'shares'. Are these real shares? Can you do anything with them? Are they worth anything? I have absolutely no clue and Own Mine isn't telling me either.

Nothing wrong with it as an engine I suppose - it does the same as plenty of others out there, but the live chat option really doesn't do it for me and the 'incentive scheme' just asks more questions than it answers.

Over 1,000 Web 2.0 applicationsNovember 26

I have updated my I want to: Web 2.0 applications, utilities and resources resource to add in all the new applications and resources that I've found. The list is now in excess (just!) of 1,000 applications. They are classified and annotated in 21 major categories and over 90 sub categories. All the links have been checked and dead resources marked or removed.
The categories include:
Collaboration tools
Communication resources
Discovery resources
Email
Images
Mobile resources
Multimedia
Photographs
RSS
Searching the Internet
Shopping
Start pages
Storage resources
Time management
Training/Teaching applications
Webpage resources
Websites
Wikis
Web 2.0 directories.

It is of course not a complete list - that's not possible, but it should provide you with at least one (if not several) application that helps you do whatever you need. Not something I ask very often, but if you find it useful, please link to the page http://www.philb.com/iwantto.htm with the link 'List of Web 2.0 resources' and/or digg it, add it to delicious or any other bookmarking resources you use - there are buttons at the top of the page. If you find it useful you might also want to subscribe to my sister weblog of Web 2.0 resources,

VADLONovember 26

VADLO is a search engine caters to all branches of life sciences. VADLO allows users to search within five categories: Protocols, Online Tools, Seminars, Databases and Software. I did try and take a look at it, but the subject matter it so beyond my level of understanding I can't really say anything useful about it. I'd be grateful for comments from anyone who can provide a sensible view of it - I couldn't even understand the cartoons!

ShoutEm - Roll your own Microblogging Social NetworkingNovember 25

I'm usually fairly cynical with new applications, but there are always exceptions, and boy have I ever found one here! It's called ShoutEm and it's a resource that you can use to create your own microblogging resource - your own private Twitter in other words.

It's very simple to create a site; just follow through the templates, decide what you want to call it, colours and so on - or just accept one of the defaults and ShoutEm creates it for you. No technical knowledge required. The home page looks instantly recognisable if you're used to using a microblogging system - I've included a snippet below:

However, there are a few differences that you can see at once. I can embed photographs directly into posts, I can link directly to other resources such as YouTube, and play the video directly from the site.

It also has support for geo location sharing and mobile browser support (coming shortly apparently). You can do all the stuff that you'd expect, such as send @messages and direct messages. This is the free version, but they're also creating a commercial version that allows you to have your own adverts (adverts on free version