Do you have a particular hobby or interest that you have compiled a collection of Webs sites and blogs for? Do you keep extensive bookmark lists for these collections? Are you frustrated that you need to visit each of those sites? Do you finding yourself sifting through pages of results that come with a generic Google search? Are you looking for a way to search only those sites you compiled that focus on your interests?
You can do just that with the Google Custom Search Engine.
Custom Search allows one to harness Google’s indexing to create a search engine that is tuned only to search sites of interest.
For example, say you like to keep up with what is going on at the various Library Labs projects. This requires one to look at a list of experimental labs sites and then visit each one. With Custom Search, one can create a Library Labs Custom search in about five minutes. If one is interested in see what other labs are doing with the online catalog one can simply point to the URL of the search site or generate a search box that can then be embedded into web sites, blogs, whatever.
For developers, Google has released an API that lets other services connect to Custom Search. This allows one to create, update, and delete search engines without going through the Custom Search control panel. To learn more about the new API, read the programmer’s guide.
Keep track with the possibilities of Custom Search through their project team blog.
-Eric Schnell
April 27th, 2009
Most readers should have at least heard of Twitter by now. Twitter is one of many social networking micro-blogging tools which are available. Simply defined, micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows individuals to publish brief text or multimedia updates.
If you are a Facebook user, you become a micro-blogger every time you update your status, comment on someone elses status, or add stuff to a wall.
Micro-blogging messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, digital audio or via the Web. The content of a micro-blog is different from a traditional blog in that it is typically more topical and shorter in length and size. With Twitter, it’s all the news that’s fit to print - in 140 characters or less. The micro-blog is the same as the traditional blog in that it can be utilize it for both individual or work-related activities.
Some people are quick to write-off micro-blogging (e.g. Twittering) as simply a time drain. They argue they don’t care that people are eating their corn flakes or they are taking their pet to the vet. If one is only getting such updates they are simply either following the wrong people or not taking full advantage of the tool.
For example, the other week a service called CoverItLive allowed me to tap into a conference Twitter feed so that I could keep up with the happenings at Computers in Libraries. A professor in media studies used Twitter to replace at least three classroom technologies. Many libraries, including the Library of Congress, are now using Twitter to communicate with their users. Joe Murphy did a nice presentation about how to use Twitter in libraries at the 2009 ACRL Conference
The problem right now is that the micro-blogging landscape is very similar to that which existed of the early days of email. Back then, proprietary dial-up entities like Prodigy and CompuServe were competitive and they didn’t do a good job connecting to one another. It was more likely than not that one could send only send messages to people inside the same service. Similarly, getting a micro-blog message published across multiple services is a challenge, although services like ping.fm help to syndicate messages across social networking sites.
There are too simply too many micro-blogging services than could possibly be listed in this post. Yammer is touted as an enterprise version of Twitter. Plurk integrates video and picture sharing. Pownce integrates file sharing and event invitations.
-Eric Schnell
April 6th, 2009
