Subscribe to RSS FeedTechTips: The “Quora” Question and Answer Service
One of the hot emerging social media sites is a service called Quora. Started by former Facebook employees, Quora is a “continually improving collection” of questions and answers that are user created, edited, and organized. Quora aggregates all the questions and associated answers while allowing users to collaborate on any of them. Yes, question and answer [...]
TechTips: RockMelt: The Social Web Browser
If you are a heavy Facebook and Twitter user, you might want to hunt for an invite and try the RockMelt web browser. RockMelt works like any other browser with one big difference: it integrates Facebook and Twitter. In short, one can use the browser to browse web sites AND keep up-to-date with your friends without opening Facebook or Twitter. [...]
TechTips: URL Shortening
URL shortening is the process of taking a long URL and turning it into, well, a shorter one. For example, instead of using the 168 character URL http://library.ohio-state.edu/search~S7/?searchtype=a&searcharg=+gee+e+gordon&searchscope=7&SORT=DZ&extended=0&SUBMIT=Search&searchlimits=&searchorigarg=ae+gordon+gee, one could use the 27 character shortened URL of http://tinyurl.com/geebooks. The mechanism for resolving a shortened URL is relatively simple. The long URL must first be registered [...]
TechTips: OSU Branded Doodle
Anyone that has had to schedule a meeting with participants across campus departments, or at other institutions, knows how challenging it can be. One emails out a list of possible times and sorts the replies looking for a common time. The process is repeated if no time can be agreed upon. Well, this has been [...]
TechTips: Xmarks Browser Bookmark Sync
I use several computers and a couple different web browsers during any given day. I bookmark work related resources, articles to read, and any number of interesting sites on my Web browser. But when I use a different computer or change to a different web browser, the links I bookmarked on one aren’t available on another. While social bookmarking sites like delicious are [...]
TechTips: Google Wave
The folks at Google released 100,000 invites today to preview their new model of Web-based communication and collaboration, called Google Wave. Since it has been in private beta, one has to rely upon others to explain what Wave is. It has been described “as much of a real-time chat room as a platform for editing [...]
TechTips: Augmented Reality
In the movie The Terminator, the viewer is taken frequently to the Terminator’s point-of view. We know this is Terminator’s POV because there is image digitization and the people he is chasing are more luminous than objects in the foreground and background, which suggests infra-red. In the margins of the view we see columns of [...]
TechTips: Managing Multiple Twitter Streams
A growing number of university organizations are now managing an online presence on Twitter. In a complex organization like OSU’s library system, there could be accounts for news and events, accounts for any number of special collections, and accounts for projects and initiatives. The larger the organization the greater the likelihood that several people will [...]
TechTips: What’s a Hashtag?
Hashtags are used by Twitter users to make it easier to search for tweets about specific topics and events. A hashtag consists of a word or code which is preceded by a “#” which helps denote what the tweet is about. Think of it as tweet-metadata. Hashtags allows specific tweets to be searchable and discoverable along with [...]
TechTips: Searching Wikipedia Using Powerset
Powerset is a discovery tool that (currently) extracts and organizes information contained in Wikipedia and Freebase. A natural language algorithm allows the searcher to use keywords, phrases, or even simple questions. The results page aggregates information from across multiple articles, in essence creating an enhanced Wikipedia article.For example, here is the search results for Thompson [...]
