ResearchBuzz

Rob Pegoraro starts this column with “There are times when I feel like I’m in a tiny minority of people who don’t hate Windows Vista,” but by the end of the column I’m glad I don’t have to deal with Vista yet.

It’s always weird to learn vocabulary words from the state of Arkansas: vishing.

Is an International Standard Music Number a possibility? I would love this.

Gary talks about the soul of Ask. I love sitting down with him at conferences and talk to him about Ask features and what’s on the plate. He puts everything in a useful context and he’s so enthusiastic!

LOC has a state of the blog. Dudes, keep calling it the Library of Congress Blog. You’re the FRICKING LIBRARY OF CONGRESS! You’re already cool! You don’t need to find a name to make you even cooler.

SNOPES! Say it ain’t so!

Go Wales: Rhondda Cynon Taf Libraries Digital Archive has over 20,000 photographs.

Abbreviations.com adds Definitions.net and Synonyms.net.

Some video tutorials for better learning Google Earth.

Coolness! Yellowstone Park has live streaming webcams.

Yahoo to lay off a thousand people. You know, it’s weird. When I think of Google, I first think “Google”, and then I think “Matt” (Cutts). When I think about Yahoo, I think, “Jeremy” and “Ernie”, and then I think “Yahoo”. That may be meaningless, but I think I have a better sense of Yahoo as a group and Google as an institution.

Hey, take a look at the Honolulu city art collection!

I almost missed the Cute Google Lego thing.

Google News has launched a suggestion form.

Yahoo CAPTCHA hacked. Crap.

Richard Stallman browses via e-mail. Wow, that brings me back. I remember resource lists being published in the late 90s that covered what you could do for information gathering (as I recall it was mostly GOPHERing and ARCHIEing) via e-mail. If he can do it, more power to him!

If I were a striking writer, I would feel very comforted by the fact that Taco Bell has my back.

Display a Google Calendar in Google Maps. I can dig it.

First I hear a rumor that the WSJ may get a sports page and now I hear about the BusinessWeek Lifestyle channel. This is me shoving Cheetos in my eyes.

Get some fake moolah and then make bets on news stories. Sounds kind of fun. A new site called Hubdub (and I’m sure I’m going to spell it “Hubbub” a million times, apologies in advance) is available at http://www.hubdub.com. It allows you to submit prediction-type questions, and bet fake bucks on the outcome of yours and other questions. The site’s free but requires registration.

From the front page you can see the variety of questions that have been asked, including “Will the US Spy Satellite crash into a built up area?” (Current bets are running towards no) and “Will the Writers Guild of America Strike end by February 29, 2008?” (Trending toward yes as a guess.) This summary page provides a bit of information, but far more interesting is the detail page, like the one for Will the MESSENGER probe discover evidence of water on Mercury?.

The detail page includes a graph for the predictions over time, as well as clarification for how exactly the question will be answered, comments on the story or the reasoning behind it, and news stories related to the question. (Hubdub monitors 10,000 news outlets and blogs for the stories; you can suggest sources as well.)

Sometimes the related stories are way off (see “Will Sunderland beat Birmingham in the Premiership League game on 29th of January”) but for the most part the relevancy is pretty good. I wouldn’t use this as my regular news source, but I did find some news stories I hadn’t seen otherwise (mostly the science-related sources and the question about whether Yahoo would make $150 million.)

So I’ve been spending the last several days doing a overhaul of my information trapping services. As you might imagine, I try to monitor a lot of data sources, and it had been a while — a few years — since I looked over everything and thought to myself, “Am I finding/getting everything I want to get/find?” The tools I’m using have been similar for the last several years, but the sources underwent a big shift this time.

Tool Time

The majority of my reviewing and sifting work is done with three tools:

1) A Web Page Monitor — I use WebSite-Watcher, which is available at http://www.aignes.com/. I’ve used it for ages and it’s AWESOME. I discovered visiting the software’s site over the weekend that there’s a Firefox extension available for it now, AND you have the option to install a portable version. I don’t have to rely on Web page monitors as much as I did before RSS became popular, but there are still plenty of pages that don’t have feeds available.

2) An RSS Feed Reader — I was using NewzCrawler for a while ( http://www.newzcrawler.com/ ), but since FeedDemon ( http://www.newsgator.com/ Individuals/FeedDemon/ ) went free I’m giving it a try. I HATE the way it’s initially set up so you can only see ten items at a time — that’s fine for small RSS feeds, but say you’re monitoring the retail releases section at Business Wire? You can go to the Options and view up to 200 items at a page, which is still not enough, but 20 times better. What I ultimately end up using is still up in the air.

3) A Text Editor — I have used UltraEdit ( http://www.ultrae dit.com/ ) for at least nine years. But now a registered version is $49.95, and it might be a little too high for me to recommend it without reservations. For machines where I don’t have UltraEdit — because, holy cow, I can’t afford $50 per text editor for every computer I use — I use NoteTab Light.

What I’m Watching

Using these three tools I went through a lot of the sources I have and made some serious shifts:

1) No more DMOZ. For a long time I monitored Open Directory pages for categories in which I was interested. But there’s so little going on in that directory that it’s not worth it anymore. Yahoo Directory’s not any better.

2) Lots more location-based monitoring. Thanks to Topix and Google’s location: syntax, I can monitor news in certain areas.

3) Lots more keyword-based monitoring. Google News and lots of other sources allow me to generate keyword-based RSS feeds. They’re not quite a majority of my feeds yet (I have way too much general curiosity) but man, they make my traps so much more useful and focused.

4) More love for certain sources. Certain sites like Bloglines have not been getting enough attention from me. I’m fixing that.

I’m still doing an overhaul, so I may do a followup, but I wanted to get this written down…