Archive for April 2008
ebrary has a free offer for Library Week.
Dunkin Donuts on tax day: buy coffee and get a free donut.
Yow: getting cyber-SLAPPed.
Hey! Identifying 19th-century printers with Google Book Search.
UCLA is on iTunes.
State of New York now has a racing license search.
Librarian in Black covered Computers in Libraries.
New photographs at the Washington State Historical Society.
New release of Live Search Maps.
And by a little, I mean 90 seconds. Flickr recently announced that Flickr would be hosting video. But only up to 90 seconds, and only for Flickr Pro users — those who have paid for the service, in other words.
This may seem like a very conservative way to get into online video, and it is. And considering the intellectual property headaches Google is still going through, the continuing evolution of how people are watching video online, and the core mission of Flickr in the first place, it was the right thing to do.
If you want to see what’s being offered, you can view a video pool at http://flickr.com/groups/video/ . If you pick one, like this video of a cat getting a bath, you’ll see that it’s embedded and has comments, tags, and pools like a photograph.
If you want to search for these videos, look to the advanced search. You’ll see that you can limit your search to photos/videos, or to CGI/animation. (Why there isn’t one option that allows you to limit your search to moving images is past me.) You’ll also want to check the option that allows you to filter your results by media type. Choose videos. (Does this include animation or not? Not clear.)
I couldn’t search videos, filtering video content only, and get search results without a keyword. So I did a search for the and got over 7000 videos. Sorting by most recent found a variety of things, including what looks like very short vidblogs, travel videos, and pet videos. (There’s one video of a Welsh Corgi puppy attacking a stuffed rabbit that made my computer explode in a cloud of cute.
I know that you can get RSS feeds for tag searches on Flickr, and the Flickr sites indicate that video results can show up in Flickr RSS feeds. But I couldn’t find any way to get just the latest videos as RSS feeds. It’s possible that I’m missing something very obvious.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that there’s been such a move toward custom search engines in the last couple years — it does get difficult searching through the twenty kazillion pages available on a general search engine. Search engine tool Topicle http://www.topicle.com/ currently has over 1100 user-made search engines to browse through. You may also make your own.
You can search for search engines, browse by recent or popular, or browse alphabetically, from Aad50 to Zivity. The numbers with each search engine indicate how many URLs are being searched.
I choose to search Kitchen Appliance Search, which has 11 URLs. When you choose a search engine it’ll drop down beneath the main form. All the ones I looked at appear to be Google Custom Search engines. Seems like a much easier interface to use, though. Anyway, I did a search for spatula and got at least 280 results — the custom search engine results form did not provide a count. Grr.
I had better luck with more specific search engines — there’s one for automotive forums, for example, and Taguchi Testing. The URLs for each search engine are listed beneath the search form; you have the opportunity to rank each URL that’s in the search engine, as well as report spam. If you really dig a particular search engine, you can add it to your browser or even embed it on your Web site.
What I didn’t understand looking at this site was why there were so many search engines searching just one URL. It would be nice if there was a function to filter those out. It’d also be nice if there were a way to get an RSS feed of the latest search engines — people come up with some really interesting topics…
