ResearchBuzz

Why yes, I am still catching up. I’m ALWAYS catching up. Anything else? Anyway, WorldCat.org has officially launched: http://www.worldcat.org . It’s in beta. Over 10,000 libraries in the OCLC cooperative are searchable from this one little box. How groovy is that? (And if you’re having a hard time wrapping your head around this, or the fact that there are over 70 million entries for items in this database, check out http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/grow.htm, which’ll give you a window to watch stuff being added into the database in real-time. I found this fascinating. I am a nerd.)

From the front page you can do any kind of search that you’d do in the library — search for a person, subject, title, etc. I did a search for Robert J. Conley since I’ve been on kind of a westerns kick lately. I got 86 results. The results are listed on the right but a nav showing the authors and formats were on the left. I was expecting fiction books, but WorldCat surprised me by also offering sound recordings and other non-book material. Listings contain item details like ISBN, publication date, publisher, etc. Once you’ve found an item in which you’re interested, you can narrow down your search by country, state, province, or even postal code. There are additional tabs that allow space for reviews and details; I didn’t see any reviews for the Conley books I looked at.

The plain ol’ WorldCat search box is interesting enough, but WC has some other offerings as well. First off you can create an account with WorldCat and get a search box for WorldCat on your own site. You can also get a list of WC on other sites and a list of search toolbars and browser plugins that support WorldCat.

The main drawback to WorldCat is the main drawback of any online library catalog — most of the time the materials aren’t actually available. All you’re looking at is a catalog entry. But all the searches I did brought me results above and beyond the books or formats I would have expected. Time to head to the library….

Google recently announced that they’ve created a new site with Webmaster resources, oddly enough called Google Webmaster Central. You can check it out at http://www.google.com/webmasters/. Normally I think of sites like this as for Webmasters who are really into SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) but I think anybody with a Web presence could find this useful.

The resource center is actually a series of tools. The first one allows you to enter a URL and get information on whether Google is indexing your site, whether pages from your site are included in Google’s search engine, and the most recent date that your home page was successfully indexed. Google then follows with a soft pitch for its Sitemaps product. If you enter a domain that has no indexing, however, Google just says something like, “Hey, we haven’t indexed any of your pages. Subscribe to Google Sitemaps!” The page does link to some general Webmaster information, but I’d love to see some kind of checklist that newer Webmasters can go through so they don’t get stopped by something really silly (like someone on their team well-intentioned-but-badly-informed throwing up a robots.txt that blocks the entire site, etc.)

A set of Webmaster tools lets you submit sitemaps for your domains, but you’ll have to verify ownership of the Web site first. You can do that either by putting a special META tag in the header of your site, or by uploading an HTML file to a specific directory. If you’re using blog software like Movable Type, WordPress, etc., the META method is easiest — just edit your template and you’re good. Once you’re verified, you can submit site maps for your domain, see any crawling errors, and analyze your robots.txt file. (Which I guess addresses some of the issues I had in paragraph #2.)

You can also see where your site ranks for certain queries searched at the Google search engine. This might appeal more to the SEO and SEM crowd. I’m a bit bewildered that ResearchBuzz ranks so high for a search for RedRoller, but I don’t know what I would do about it.

This site also features a roundup of ways to submit content to various Google properties (very nice — great to see all this in one place), a series of Groups dedicated to Webmastering and Google (hmm… not as busy as I would have thought), the Google Webmaster blog o’ course, and a Webmaster help center that will try to answer some of the common Webmaster questions/problems with Google.

Even institutions and personal sites could benefit from making sure their site is indexed and checking to see what problems (if any) Google is having with a site crawl. (How useful if your site going to be for your patrons if they can’t find it?) On the other hand, Google’s challenge will be is providing useful help to a range of Web wranglers — from beginners to experts — without giving away too much of their “secret sauce” (which of course they don’t want to.) Meanwhile I’m going to play with these sitemaps tools for a while…

Last February I reviewed a site called PodZinger. PodZinger, if you don’t remember, does machine transcription of podcasts and then makes the material searchable, which is just lovely. (And as far as I know they have that arena pretty much to themselves, which boggles the mind.) PodZinger’s at http://www.podzinger.com/ .

PodZinger has done some updating since I last covered them in February so I wanted to do a quick overview of what’s new. First is the scope: PodZinger is now searching more than a quarter-million audio AND VIDEO episodes. In addition to English, this now includes Spanish-language content. The Spanish search page is at http://www.podzinger.com/index.jsp?il=es .

PodZinger now has a Zing Index, where you can see what’s being talked about, which podcasts/vidcasts are being most viewed, etc. Right now the theme is labor day celebrations; if we don’t get a Zing Index to see which candidates are being talked the most about during election seasons, I’ll be deeply disappointed. Zing Index at http://www.podzinger.com/ZingIndex.jsp.

While you’re visiting PodZinger, check out BlogZinger at http://www.blogzinger.com/. There’s information here on PodZinger features but also views on podcasting in general, themed podcast lists (podcasts that cover TV shows, etc.) and pointers to podcasting/vidcasting commentary. Nifty.