ResearchBuzz

I loves me some new ways to explore large pools of frequently-updated information. (Dear ThinkGeek, please slap that on a t-shirt. Love, Tara.) A play I found recently is WikiMindMap, at http://www.wikimindmap.org/ .

Basically you start by entering a search — I found general works better — and WikiMindMap will start plotting out all the different ways your search can go. Unfortunately I started with the search cows and got some really bizarre entry about how cows were invented and sent back in time to work in bullet factories in 1775.

After I stopped laughing I did another search — this time for coffee and got a much more prosaic response. A “mindmap” — one of those diagrams that starts with a central idea and then sort of runs off in all directions — appears. Some parts of the mindmap are single concepts, while some are additional categories that you can expand. The coffee search included concepts like Persian and Ethiopia, and additional categories of information like History, Cultivation, and Economics. Hold your mouse over a category part of the mindmap to see an extract from Wikipedia. (Note you also have the option to zoom in on the WikiMindMap. If you do that you might not be able to see that window that appears on mouseover.)

Clicking on the green icon next to a concept recenters the map so you can start over again with exploring another topic. You can also move the map around by clicking and dragging; once a few categories have been opened, maps get pretty extensive.

I picked a topic I know very little about (plasma TVs) and did some mapping to see how much I could learn. I don’t know if I got much more educated than I would have going straight to Wikipedia. I DID notice that the mapping application immediately gave me a head start on the proper vocabulary, which would be a great help if I did additional Web searching.

I tried searching for famous people with the same idea in mind, and out of three people (Sun Pin, Carl Von Clausewitz, and Jimmy Carter — sorry, I have rather an odd stack of books on the desk at the moment) only one name generated enough information to be useful (Jimmy Carter). But that search brought up a lot of keywords that might be interesting to use in an associate search, like stagflation and Camp David Accords.

Nice tool. The only thing I’d like to see is an easy way to grab a screen shot and e-mail it somewhere (from within the site)…

Real-time traffic in Google Earth. MESSED UP! (In a good way.)

PublicRoutes.com adds new cities.

Reverse Geocoding with Google Maps. Oooo.

Checking for copies with DOC Cop.

This seems counterintuitive: Environmental Disasters Reduce the Likelihood of Pro-Green Votes by Members of Congress

Wikipedia merrymaking down under.

On Computers got a redesign! Very nice.

Ball State University headed to Second Life.

What do laptops and hypothyroidism have in common? Both tend to give you unsatisfactory battery life. (But Synthroid sure helps!)

Database — foreclosed properties in Missouri. Fee access.

Acer buying Gateway. This upsets me a lot. Every time two computer makers consolidate, it seems like us end users end up with fewer and crappier choices at the retail store. I like Gateway fine (I sure like them more than I did 10-12 years ago) and I like Acer fine. But I don’t like less choice.

Tracking volcano and hurricane activity — with Google Maps…

Updates to Yahoo Mail.

new WWI diary in digital archive.

A Wiki for the Philippines.

With two coconuts and some bamboo… sorry, wrong professor. THIS professor is Clement Yu from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he’s come with a metasearch engine for news. What impressed me was its scope — it covers about 1800 news search engines across about 200 countries and territories. After all that it has the terribly pedantic name Allinonenews; you can try it at www.allinonenews.com.

From the front page of the search engine you’ll find some top news stories already picked for you. And the lead story is … the Michael Vick plead? The AG resignation? No; the end of the Notting Hill Carnival. Actually I find that rather refreshing. (Don’t worry; the Vick and Gonzales stories are both on the front page if you really want to read them.) A nav on the left of the page shows several other categories through which you can browse.

Searching is by simple keyword. Feeling festive I did a search for carnival. I got a small set of results (about 30) with an invitation to click for more results. I did that and got a total of 288 results.

I could see no way to list the results by date — not good — but I did see a link to get results in RSS format. Results include the usual title-summary-URL. From the front page of results I noted sources from the UK, Germany, and Australia. (Searching for Shinzo Abe brought equally diverse results.) A link at the top of the search results allows you to leave comments about the quality of what you’re finding.

It should be noted that all sources searched should truly be considered search engines … CNN is not in my opinion a news search engine, but a source. But that’s okay. Still a wide variety of results here covering all kinds of sources.

Did I mention the RSS feeds? AllinOne has a page devoted to them. You can get keyword-based feeds, topic based feeds, or feeds from popular queries (interesting idea.)

This site is so not Web 2.0 — at least not in the design sense. The stark layout and simple logo may leave you thinking it’s 2002. I don’t care. I liked the range of sources the search result got, and the depth (some queries got me stories from back in 2000.) For a developing/extremely major story I don’t know if I’d use AllinOne; for a basic search/overview I like it a lot. Now if only I could easily get it to search results by date…