ResearchBuzz

If you were looking for more buzz, here you go: Conduit has announced a new Community Trends index, available at http://www.conduit.com/community/communitytrends/ . Conduit calls itself a “platform for building online communities via community toolbars” and claims over twelve million users. Trends here are based on searches done across communities.

It looks like the trends here are monthly, and include several different categories including sports (rugby is very popular), Web games, pets, and so on. You’re not going to find items that have just turned up in popular culture or on the news page, but I was surprised at some of the things I DID find here (rugby?) and I certainly did find some terms that were unfamiliar (mostly on the Web Games list.)

In addition to the regular trends, this site will also provide monthly vertical highlights and show what’s popular there. This time Green Earth communities and Al Gore came out on top along with words like “climate”, “dolphins,” and “Kyoto protocol”.

One of the real joys of doing ResearchBuzz is learning about other people’s passion for stuff that I have never really thought about. Did I ever consider that some people love old wallpaper? Nope. Could I have imagined that there’s an online database containing information about over 4000 samples of old wallpaper? No way. But there is, and beyond that there’s a great resource that links together many old wallpapering resources.

The historic database is available at http://www.spnea.org/wallpaper/catalog/search.htm. You can leave all the search options (including year, country of origin, paper type, finish, pattern name, etc.) blank and you’ll get a list of all the samples. I did a search for handmade embossed wallpaper and got 25 results. Results are shown in a table which includes the sample’s accession number, year span (start and end), exact year (if available, and I didn’t see any that were available) and a thumbnail of the paper.

Click on the thumbnail or the accession number for more details including sample size, motif, design elements, notes, use, and provenance. Not all notes are available for all samples. Larger pictures of samples are available, but most of them were disappointing to me; too small and too dark. Just enough to show me that some of those handmade Japanese samples from the 19th century are amazing looking, but not enough detail to see how amazing.

While we’re standing around talking about historical wallpaper, let me also mention a great Web site devoted to the subject, http://www.historicwallpapering.com . This site has a huge link list of companies which sell reproductions of historic wallpaper as well as links to articles on preservation, collections of historic wallpaper, and other related topics.

I’m looking forward to the city of Toronto’s database…

One of my favorite things is to find Web sites that I like anyway and find that someone has done something external to improve them. I found a site that’s done that with Craigslist; it’s called ListPic. The URL is http://sfbay.listpic.com/, which is San Francisco, but ListPic works for whatever city you want to look at.

Here’s how it works: pick a city and then pick a category you want to review. For example, furniture. Instead of the usual text listing you’ll get a grid that shows listings with thumbnails of images broken out by date. Don’t find the pictures large enough? Use the slider at the top of the page to make the pictures larger. Click on an item to get a popup window with the text of the ad and contact information, along with options to get the ad’s permanent link or to e-mail the ad to a friend.

You can also filter the displayed items you get by keyword or by price (minimum and maximum.) For the cities where there’s a lot of traffic, like San Francisco, I recommend this highly.

I see only two real problems with ListPic. First off is that unless you do some narrow searching it can take some time to load the result pages (but I’d still rather do it that way than have to galumph through a bunch of individual ad pages.) The second thing is that sometimes the pictures don’t match the keyword. For example, I might be searching for futon but get some pictures of dresser drawers, beds, etc. I’m assuming this is happening when people have several items available for sale and might have pictures of only a couple.

There’s a very brief about page available at http://www.listpic.com/about.html. I really like this site; great stuff.