ResearchBuzz

I got back from Web Search University late Tuesday night and since I went to work early the next morning I didn’t really have time to write up my thoughts. This was a very whirlwind WSU for me; I got to the hotel fairly late on Sunday and left on Tuesday afternoon shortly after my last session, taking just enough time to sit down with Gary Price and look at some new Ask.com features (which I’ll write up next.)

The two sessions for which I was primarily responsible were both about RSS; one completely, and one partly. When I first starting mentioning RSS at Web Search University in 2004 I got a lot of blank looks. And while there were still some people who didn’t use RSS and were trying to understand it, there were also plenty of people who “got it” and used it.

In fact, based on the questions I got after the sessions, the RSS shift seems to have moved from, “Okay, what exactly is this again and why should I care” to “This is really great, I’m using it a lot, how to I introduce it to my coworkers/patrons/clients without making their heads explode?” Which is an excellent question. I think what I would recommend is showing people individual RSS feeds using a tool like Grazr to highlight the kind of content available. From there, create a list of feeds relevant to your company or institution and show some of the content available. If c/p/c’s show some interest, offer to set them up with a really basic reader like the one available from My Yahoo, or use a tool like RSSFwd to show them how they can get updates by e-mail. Encourage ‘em to notice those little orange buttons all over the place.

Alas, I didn’t have any spurs to create tools like I did last year ala Kebberfegg, but I still have not been able to digest all the questions I heard and think over all the resources I learned about. Stay tuned.

I realized the other day that aside from a news broadcast I watch every morning, pretty much all the TV I watch is timeshifted. (Timeshifted is just a fancy word for saying I record it when it comes on and watch it later.) I don’t watch a lot of TV, but the TV I do manage to watch is always later, usually well after the original broadcast.

Most of the time this doesn’t matter, but occasionally it does when I want to watch a sports event. I want to watch it, and I don’t want to know who won beforehand. Unfortunately when you surf news sites, you have the potential to run into stories or summaries that spill the beans. When I know that one team beat the other, I usually lose my interest in watching the game. I still haven’t watched the Colts/Giants matchup (or rather, Manning/Manning) because I accidentally saw a game summary on Yahoo News. And I don’t want to have to avoid news summaries until I actually get around to watching the game!

So here’s what I’m looking for; someone out there let me know if it exists. I’d like to add an extension to Firefox (maybe a standalone extension, maybe a Greasemonkey script) that would allow me to enter words and phrases. When Firefox visited a page that had more than a certain density of those words and phrases (I dunno, maybe the words repeated more than twice, maybe an actual percentage calculation) a stylesheet would be applied that would render the entire page blank.

I know this sounds a bit cheesy and very easy to get around. But it wouldn’t be for massive security purposes. It would just be a tool so I could enjoy an occasional timeshifted Colts or Cubbies game.

Webmaster Central comes through with some interesting bits about Googlebot and its downloads .

Google Earth and Google Maps get big updates: http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/09/huge_update_to.html.

Google Open Sources OCR code: http://www.ddj.com/dept/opensource/192600114.

Software learns new words from Wikipedia: NewScientistTech.com.

Cute utility that generates signs, official seals, capitioned photographs, etc: http://www.says-it.com/.

The National Library of Scotland is going to start storing blogs: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2090-2351051,00.html.