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)…

I don’t know if I would use this tool to find derivative content on Wikipedia, but it’s an interesting way to browse. Similpedia, at http://similpedia.org/index.html , allows you to enter a URL or a block of text and get Wikipedia entries that are similar to what you’ve entered. In the tests I ran, I didn’t get results that were so similar that there was lots of matching text, but I got results that were closely enough related that the searches led to interesting browsing.

So the Idaho Potato Commission Web site is http://www.idahopotato.com/ . I did a search for that URL at Similpedia, and got a list of ten pages. The pages ranged from Almond Potato to Blackfoot, Idaho, to Potato Paradoxes, to Fauxtato. (Fauxtato?) Eight of the results were potato-oriented, with only two results Idaho-oriented (including the page for Idaho’s 2nd congressional district.)

I then took a search from a FAQ on the Web site, the following text:

“Potatoes should not be frozen from a raw state. They will turn black and the texture will be soft upon thawing. Potato dehydrators (who earlier had invented the instant mashed potato) struggled with any attempts to create a frozen French fry by cutting up the potatoes and attempting to freeze them. Frequently they would just turn to water and mush, similar to trying to freeze a fresh onion whole. The scientist that solved all this was Ray Dunlap, who worked for the J.R. Simplot company in Idaho. He discovered that by precooking or blanching the potatoes this stabilized them and made it possible to freeze them to be thawed later without breaking down the cellular structure. This happened in the late forties to early fifties. One of Simplots biggest customers later on was Mc Donald’s which made their fries fresh. As they grew, the labor time and the convenience of using a frozen fry outweighed this signature fry and they initially switched over to Simplot product exclusively. Now frozen fries are the most commonly used form of potatoes for consumer consumption. Potatoes are inexpensive, so either pre cook them and then freeze or toss when you have too many and they have started to have a skin that wrinkles or sprouts.”

… I ran that search on Similpedia. I got nine potato-oriented results, including cooking methods, brands, and that fauxtato thing again. But I also got odd result — the page for Hamburger Station.

The excerpt above is over 200 words, and worked well. However when I tried paragraphs of fewer words — 50 and 75 — I got much more inconsistent (almost useless) results. Blocks of at least a hundred words at a time are recommended.

An interesting browse option, especially if I don’t know a lot about a subject.

Amazon has been adding community-type features to its Web site for a long time, as one can see from its product pages — users can add tags to products, start discussions, and even add information to a product wiki. Now however Amazon is offering a catalog-wide wiki called Amapedia. It’s not called a wiki, but it’s sure what it looks like to me. Amapedia’s in beta at http://amapedia.amazon.com/ . Upon further inspection it looks like an aggregation of all the wiki’d products from the main Amazon Web site.

The front page doesn’t mention “wiki”, it mentions community. And it has an example article and a tag cloud for you to browse through as well as a simple keyword search. Active big tags at the moment include things like camera, fictional character, and strategy game. I did a simple keyword search for licorice, which gave me a list of products from Amazon’s site. None of them had articles. From each item in the search results you could create an article yourself or “watch” for the article. You’ll have to be logged in to be able to watch for the article.

You used to be able to get keyword alerts from Amazon when products matching those keywords became available. It was a lovely idea and then it was pulled. So lemme get this straight. You can get alerts for an article about a product but no longer for a product itself, right? Grrrr…Unfortunately you can’t just do a search for a keyword and then watch that keyword; searches that don’t match a product or article give you only the option to create an article. (My search for tapdancing butterball gave me only the option to create an article. Amusingly, the first real product result for that search was the DVD of Gone With the Wind.)

Back to regular search. A search for Harry Potter brought several results of items that did have articles, both books, video games, and one parody. Though the pages had Amazon product shots and what I’ve come to think of as “Amazon tabs”, every page has both a link to its history and a link to edit. Looks like a wiki to me. Unfortunately most of the articles I looked at just had a tab of product information and a product shot. (The parody article was extensive.)

In addition to the tag cloud searching and the simple keyword search, there’s an advanced search that allows you to do a general search (like DVD or game) and get a series of filters you can apply. For example if you did a search for dvd you might get filters allowing you to narrow down your search to cartoons or TV shows. The Amapedia also has a “random article” function, which I found was the best way to get populated article pages and examples of what people were using Amapedia for (product descriptions and reviews, manuals, and occasionally scholarly discussion of an author/subject.)

Like the watch feature. Like the idea of a wiki for Amazon’s products, but it needs populating!