ResearchBuzz

Google announced last month that Google Australia has officially come out of beta and that they’ve officially launched their operations in Australia. At the same time Google has launched street maps for Australia and New Zealand.

And as long as we’re talking about mapping, I also wanted to mention something that I’ve known about for a while but haven’t gotten around to writing up — Ask.com offers walking directions http://maps.ask.com/maps on its map site.

Ask’s mapping service works very much like other map services. You provide a starting point (it can be as general as a city name or as specific as an address) and an end point. You can also add additional points if you’re taking a more complicated trip.

By default the Ask service will provide you with driving directions. But if you’ll look at the top of the driving directions you’ll also see a tab for walking. Click on that and you’ll get walking directions — no matter how long the trip is. Yes, even if you want to go from Dover, Delaware to Boston, and you don’t mind walking for 152 hours, Ask has you covered.

Of course walking directions also have more practical use. When I was in New York recently, I wanted to visit a local bookstore. The driving directions I got from mapping services were very “around your elbow” for a walker, as NY has many one-way streets. The walking directions, however, were a lot easier to use. Sometimes the walking directions may overcomplicate things a little, though — try mapping out walking directions in your neighborhood. A couple of times when I tested it, Ask’s directions added a few 1/10 of a mile twists and turns down streets that weren’t really necessary.

The American Textile History Museum has announced the Chace Catalogue, an online collection of items from the museum. The catalogue is currently in its “pilot” phase, but there are still over 500 items to view online (the eventual goal is to make all the Museum’s collections available online — over 15,000 items. You can visit the catalogue at http://www.athm.org/online_catalogue.htm.

The currently-available collections are the coverlet and spinning wheel collections, with a selection of other items available. The advanced search page allows you to do a search by keyword, with an advanced search available for field and date searches (Use the “Choose a Value” option if you’re unsure or want to browse.)

I did a keyword search for “wheel” and got 205 results. The default result listing provides object type, maker (or “unknown”), date made (sometimes as specific as “C. 1825-40″, sometimes just “18th century”), and a link to view. (There are also listing options to show pictures with the search results, or a detailed listing that lets you browse each result one by one. Look for the options at the top of the results page.)

Detail pages contain a little more information about the item (materials and size) along with an extensive description of the item. There’s also a small picture to the right of the details that’s not clickable. You can get a larger picture of them item by looking at the bottom of the detail page for the “Related Media Item”s and clicking that picture. It’ll open a larger picture in a popup window (though sometimes not large enough — there’s a fascinating vertical spinning wheel that looks like it should have been used by MC Escher.) Some of the items have multiple pictures (coverlets might have close-up pictures of their patterns, a picture of a particular part of the item showing how it’s cut a certain way, etc.

An announcement about the new online catalogue and additional information are available at http://www.athm.org/news_chace_catalogue.htm.

Ahh.. the concept of tag clouds applied to specific information. What fun. Though I think in this case the clouds are going to have to be a bit more specific before it’s particularly useful.

Stock Cloud (available at http://www.stockcloud.net/ ; in beta) is just what it sounds like, it’s a “tag cloud” that consists entirely of stock symbols. The larger the symbol, the more press releases it has issued. The press wire being used in generating the cloud is Market Wire; a good wire but it would be amazing to see this with a wire that has monster traffic — Business Wire, maybe?

Anyway, click on a symbol and you’ll get a page of information. The page will tell you the number of releases encountered, provide a chart with stock information, list business partners and contact information, and provide a list and links with the latest press releases concerning that company. (The “About” page for Stock Cloud says “We’ve been a bit less then successful extracting business partnership data” so I don’t know how far I’d trust those business partnership listings.)

What a great idea; unfortunately it just left me hungry for more. I would love to see the following things:

1) More wires! If I were PR Newswire I would jump at the chance to provide press releases for a site like this — it’s a unique interface to what’s often a huge hard-to-browse mass of information.

2) An attempt to discover timing — A lot of the stock symbols I looked at ended up being penny or low-price stocks. If I could discover patterns in press release timing and then map them against the stock’s performance, I think I would find interesting data points.

3) The ability to filter by time — There’s no indication on the front page of the timeframe for the cloud. It would be interesting to see how a cloud of a day, week, month, etc. changes. (Comparing cloud snapshots over a series of weeks would be awesome.)

4) The ability to filter by sector — A cloud that has any ol’ symbol is missing a bit of context. How about the ability to show clouds by sector? Or by geographical area? Or search for a keyword and then generate a cloud?

A very cool site. Unfortunately it’s so cool I can think about a hundred more things I’d want to do with it!