I’m always interested when new search engines are released. Not because I use them (it’s the boring choice, I know, but Google really does tend to meet my search needs better than the alternatives), but it is nice to see the ways people are trying to manipulate the area. There are some really interesting and inventive search engines being produced now - the focus seems to be more on highlighting the difference and niche aspects of different search engines, rather than trying to produce a GoogleClone.

Chipwrapper is a Google custom search engine encompassing the major UK broadsheets. It isn’t new I understand, but as I hadn’t seen it before, I thought I’d pass it on anyway. It searches across The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times, and is actually pretty successful at finding articles that the newspapers own search engines fail at turning up. I’ve not spent a lot of time investigating custom search engines, but this is a pretty cool use for them, and I’ve found that I’ve used it a fair bit since I found it.

FuzzFind is a combined search engine that searches across Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and del.icio.us. You can then choose the weighting you want to give a particular search engine, which is actually pretty neat. By heavily weighting del.icio.us in particular, you get access to links that otherwise probably wouldn’t have come up. It shows you what ranking a particular response has in each search engine, as well as how many times the url has been bookmarked on del.icio.us, which could be quite useful.

Wikia is the search engine brainchild of Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales. It is self-statedly imperfect at the moment - results appear erratic and almost unsorted. The idea behind it being that user-moderated results will ultimately be more useful than those generated purely by algorithm. It isn’t brilliant yet though. The first hit when you search for ‘apple’ is the QuickTime download page, which, whilst close, isn’t quite right. More uncommon queries don’t get you anywhere just yet - the first hit for ‘European Court of Justice’ is to an article about the Protection of Fundamental Rights in the European Community, which is probably not what you’re actually after. It’s an ambitious concept though, and I’m curious to see how it turns out. I expect, given the collaborative nature of it, that commonly searched for terms will probably end up being fine, but that more complicated searches will never really work on it. It reminds me quite a bit of Maholo, which never particularly interested me either, but Wikia functions more as a wiki than a portal.

I’m curious to know if anyone else really uses other search engines on a day to day basis. Tools like this are great, and it’s really handy to know that they’re there, but I tend not to use anything other than Google. Does anyone have any suggestions for search engines that they absolutely couldn’t do without?

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Firstly, a thankyouthankyouthankyou to whoever nominated us as one of their favourite library blogs in Meredith Farkas’ favourite blogs survey! We are thrilled and delighted to have been mentioned – there may even have been some surreptitious squealing :)

Secondly, apologies are in order for our paltry posting regime of late – I have no decent excuse, begging lack of time and an overabundance of trainees, but happily Davina has returned from her jaunt to the Australian Law Librarians Conference in Sydney, and will soon be posting tales of her adventures there and of the interesting things she saw and heard from the librarians back home.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Jessamyn alerted us to the fact that it’s Banned Book Week this week! So go out and read yourselves a book that someone, somewhere has considered to dangerous to read. Davina will be reading And Tango Makes Three (a heartwarming tale of gay penguin love) and I’ll be rereading my favourite bits of Ulysses, with which I was tortured at university, but have since grown to love. Go, read, enjoy, challenge :)

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I started using Google Reader recently, mostly to see what everyone was talking about, but also because Bloglines had started to become too annoying to use.  And I think I’m converted.  What I’m really loving is the Star feature as it means I don’t have to leave all the good posts marked as unread and I can see everything in the same place.

There’s been a lot of fantastic posts lately which are in my Starred items folder that I really want to share.

To start with is a post by Scott Vine over at Information Overlord that I think needs to be read by CEO’s and managing
partners everywhere.  It’s called Wasting Time - Facebook and other Fallacies.  Scott highlights some pretty relevant stuff about wasting time that all these so called ’studies’ on Facebook seem to ignore.

Kathryn Greenhill at Librarians Matter wrote a good post on power in Library 2.0 called What’s new about Library 2.0? Shift in power.  She raises a good point about the 2.0 movement about the whole ’2.0 is about being user-centred’.  She then goes on to outline where she feels the power has shifted.

So, if being user centred is not new, and Library 2.0 isn’t only about new tools, what is new about it? Why should we lift our heads from the stuff we are already doing and take notice of it? To me, the new element that Library 2.0 brings to our libraries is a shift in power balance - between us, our users, suppliers, software vendors, non-users.

On the topic of 2.0, The Other Librarian wrote a fantastic post titled Under the Hood of Web 2.0 : the top ten programming concepts for librarians to understand. Definitely a useful post to read if you’re into the whole web 2.0 thing and want to know more about how it’s all actually working.

There’s been a lot of talk about the OEDB list of top 25 library bloggers. I definitely agree with the comments many made that their methodology needs a little bit of work. However, as a response, Meredith Farkas has started a survey - the Top Three Library-Related Blogs Survey. The survey is open until September 29 so head on over and fill out your three favourite library blogs.

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I received an email today from The Economist informing me of a new service they have - the Economist Audio Edition. I’m not a podcast person, I tend to tune out when I’m listening, but I can see this being a good way to keep up with the magazine, especially at the moment when the postal strikes mean that it often comes three or four days late.

You can download the audio of the entire issue, or section by section. At the moment though the only way to subscribe to it is via an email alert, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction!

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Meridith Farkas of Information Wants To Be Free, and Social Software in Libraries, is conducting another survey of the biblioblogosphere (the results from the 2005 survey are here), which you can participate in here. I think the results will give interesting insight into the biblioblogosphere and the way that it has been changing and growing. It’ll be nice to have a bit more of a presence from UK and legal library bloggers as well - I think we’ve grown a lot in the last year, and it would be good to see how much.

Go forth and participate!

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Fluther and wis.dm are two new startups that are attempting to tap into the collective wisdom of crowds, asking the user base of the site to answer questions posed to the group.

Fluther is quite cute (it’s squid themed - how can you not like it?) and nicely designed (though I would rather the ‘ask a question’ box wasn’t quite so prominent, as it means I can barely see the questions posed on the front page). The questions asked here seem mostly serious - the sort of things you would ask, as the website puts it, if you had ‘five Uncle Franks to answer your car questions, eight Aunt Marthas to ask about astronomy and six Grandma Gerties to advise you on your garden dilemmas’. I would argue that this shares a lot of the same mental space as MetaFilter - most of the questions are things that you would see posed there, which arguably begs the question of why you wouldn’t just post to metafilter, with a much larger userbase?

wis.dm (as seen at Here we are. What now?) is a slightly different take on a question and answer site, requiring that questions be phrased as yes/no in an attempt to generate discussion. I can see this one being a little more popular, though a lot less useful. It’s very compelling to click on the little ajax-y buttons to answer questions, but far too much effort to click through and actually comment on something. I do wish the ratio of responses was shown on the front page though - I want to be able to see how the votes are swinging at a glance without having to click through. The questions on here are mostly vapid (’Are you sitting in a swivel chair now?’) and I admit that I don’t really see the point - I can’t help but think that it’s another site that’s attempting to be a social hub, when people are pretty much social-site-d out at the moment.

I do, however, think it’s interesting that there are so many places on the internet where people go to get their questions answered. It seems like the sort of service that public libraries would want to be providing - indeed I’m sure there are one’s around that do, I admit that my knowlege of the progressive services that public libraries offer is limited. I think it’d be great though - a site where library users can pose a question to the librarians and users of their local library and have it answered in this sort of way - combining the resources of the library with the wisdom of the crowd, and creating a community feeling at the same time. Does anything like that exist at the moment, or am I being a bit optimistic?

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I’d like to extend a very warm welcome to the UK legal library blogging scene (and gosh but isn’t that a mouthful) to Jennie Law, a law librarian from Scotland! It’s always wonderful to have some new faces in the community :)

We’ve got a whilst to go in matching the American contingent (so many blogging librarians over the water!), but give us time, we’ll catch them up yet!

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Many apologies for the lameness of our posting - we have both been beset on all sides with many many things to do, keeping us from the blog. As some small means of recompense I present you with this, pretty much entirely un-library related, list of interesting links. I don’t remember where most of these came from - they are the result of clearing out a backlog of two months worth of saved interesting links.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension: Awesome visualisation of string theory and dimensions. Makes my brain hurt a bit, but very interesting.

The Crossing: Beautiful flash game by Orsinal (actually, all of their flash games are beautiful, but this one has little deer! What is there not to like?)

blawg.com list of lawlib blogs: Loooooong list of law library blogs. If I wasn’t so information overloaded already, I might even give looking at it it some thought.

Slacker: More internet radio! I don’t think this is new, I just think I missed it, but as the first track it played on the Alternative station was The Decemberists, it’s already won me over :)

iTunes Autorate: An autorater for iTunes that makes me wish I had a Mac. I never remember to rate tracks in iTunes, and having it auto rate things according to how often I skip/play tracks would be kinda cool. Not terribly useful, but still kinda cool.

Five Ways to Mark Up the Web: A Techcrunch post talking about different tools that let you post-its or notes or other bits and pieces on webpages.

Screengrab: A Firefox extension that lets you take screengrabs of the entire length of a webpage, and save it in a variety of different formats. Handy tool.

Boomshine: Incredibly simple and incredibly addictive little online game. Soothing music too. I’ve wasted far too much time playing this.

listeningtowards: Lectures available for download. Amongst the most popular are Kurt Vonnegut and Bill Bryson - there are over 1000 on there, so there’s bound to be something to slip into the mp3 player for those long dull commutes.

Lumosity: Brain training games to improve memory and processing speed - it makes me feel a bit like a computer in need of an upgrade, but it’s interesting to do.

You Don’t Know Jack: has reinvented itself as a web game! C’mon - you all remember it don’t you? And now it’s snarky trivia-tastic-ness is right there in my browser!

The essential guide to piracy: Remember kids, piracy is wrong. But if you’re going to pirate, pirate safe, kay? No one wants the RIAA (or their international counterparts) on their tail.

46 essential KM blogs: Being up to my ears in knowledge management recently has made me check out all the KM blogs around. (Repeat after me - I don’t need another blogging scene to get involved in. I don’t, I don’t)

Entropia Universe: not!Second Life. I haven’t downloaded this yet, nor do I use Second Life, so I’m not really in a position to make comparisons. It’s setting itself up as a competitor though, so it’ll be one to watch out for.

and now, time for sleep. I promise we’ll try and by more regular with the posts now though, really.

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Many thanks to Lo-Fi for pointing out that BIALL now has a blog - I’ll be curious to see how that goes for them.

Though, James Mullan, I don’t know how you manage to write so much - how many blogs are you writing for now?! I’m dead impressed with your writing power :)

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Continuing the theme tonight, Jessamyn over at librarian.net posted a link to a new Livejournal community - lolbrarians.   

Following in the tradition of lolcats and I can has cheezburger, it’s cat macros but with librarians!  I’m looking forward to lots of silly fun!  

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