For the best book blogs of 2009 click here!

From the website Book Blogger Appreciation Week:

“Book Blogger Appreciation was started…in an effort to recognize the hard work and contribution of book bloggers to the promotion and preservation of a literate culture actively engaged in discussing books, authors, and a lifestyle of reading.

The first Book Blogger Appreciation was observed in the fall of 2008 and occurs every September. The week spotlights and celebrates the work of active book bloggers through guest posts, awards, giveaways, and community activities. Book Bloggers are encouraged to register their participation for inclusion in a database of book bloggers.”

From cnn.com:

New search engines aspire to supplement Google

“Wolfram Alpha, set to launch Monday, is more of an enormous calculator than a search:
It crunches data to come up with query answers that may not exist online until you search for them. And sites like Twitter are trying to capitalize on the warp-speed pace of online news today by offering real-time searches of online chatter — something Google’s computers have yet to replicate.”  Read more…

According to Wolfram Alpha, I am 16,685 days old as of this writing.  Good to know!

- Alison Ernst, Librarian

I admit it.  I take Facebook Quizzes to procrastinate…and because I’m oddly fascinated by the results.  (Apparently I’m a wooden, icey, Unicorn with an Eagle Spirit Guide and I should live in Memphis…Who knew!)  I came across the following articel which gives me pause…  – Alison Ernst, Librarian

The Hidden Secrets of Online Quizzes

You can have a ball taking online quizzes on Facebook and other sites, but here are some things you should know before you do. by JR Raphael, PC World

“While Web quizzes may be fun to take, they’re also a powerful tool for
companies to collect your data and even your money — and often in ways
you might not notice. We’ll get to the spooky stuff in a moment, but
let’s start with the simplest method of quiz-based marketing:
advertising. The very nature of a typical online quiz requires you to
divulge all sorts of details about yourself. Those tidbits of info are
like nuggets of gold for advertisers craving a way to connect with you.”  Read more!

100 Useful Tips and Tools to Research the Deep Web
By Alisa Miller: Experts say that typical search engines like Yahoo! and Google only
pick up about 1% of the information available on the Internet. The rest
of that information is considered to be hidden in the deep web, also
referred to as the invisible web. So how can you find all the rest of
this information? This list offers 100 tips and tools to help you get
the most out of your Internet searches.

This explaination from our pal, Wikipedia about the Deep Web:

“The deep Web (also called Deepnet, the invisible Web, dark Web or the hidden Web) refers to World Wide Web content that is not part of the surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines.

Mike Bergman, credited with coining the phrase, has said that searching on the Internet today can be compared to
dragging a net across the surface of the ocean; a great deal may be
caught in the net, but there is a wealth of information that is deep
and therefore missed. Most of the Web’s information is buried far down
on dynamically generated sites, and standard search engines do not find
it. Traditional search engines cannot “see” or retrieve content in the
deep Web – those pages do not exist until they are created dynamically
as the result of a specific search. The deep Web is several orders of magnitude larger than the surface Web.”

From our pals at Google:

Google has launched a search feature that makes it easy to find and compare public data.

If you enter terms like “unemployment rate” or “population” followed by a U.S. state or county, you will see the most recent estimates.

“The data we’re including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on. Reliable information about these kinds of things exists thanks to the hard work of data collectors gathering countless survey forms, and of careful statisticians estimating meaningful indicators that make hidden patterns of the world visible to the eye. All the data we’ve used in this first launch are produced and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division. They did the hard work! We just made the data a bit easier to find and use.

Since Google’s acquisition of Trendalyzer two years ago, we have been working on creating a new service that make lots of data instantly available for intuitive, visual exploration. Today’s launch is a first step in that direction. We hope people will

take a more central role in informed find this search feature helpful, whether it’s used in the classroom, the boardroom or around the kitchen table. We also hope that this will pave the way for public data to public conversations.”

For more information about how to use this new feature click here.

Twitter with your brain

“The ideal would be to develop an inexpensive system that would allow the user to communicate through a wired baseball cap that’s hooked up to a home computer system. A somewhat more intrusive system, which would involve implanting electrodes just under the skin, could significantly improve the pace of communication…”  From MSNBC

University of Wisconsin researcher Adam Wilson composes a Twitter message using a system that reads his brain waves.

The Library of Congress, UNESCO and 32 partner institutions on April 21 will launch the World Digital Library, a website that features unique cultural materials from libraries and archives from around the world.

The site will include manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, and prints and photographs – available unrestricted to the public and free of charge.

The browseable, searchable site will function in seven languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish)

Read more…

"Experts say that typical search engines like Yahoo! and Google only pick up about 1% of the information available on the Internet. The rest of that information is considered to be hidden in the deep web, also referred to as the invisible web. So how can you find all the rest of this information? This list offers 100 tips and tools to help you get the most out of your Internet searches."

– Alisa Miller, Online College Blog

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 Wasting time online with searches that don't get you
what you want?

Wishing you knew how to type in a great search that would
incorporate all the synonyms for your keywords?

Want to know how to combine terms in fancy ways?

  Want to use the word BOOLEAN in casual conversation?

If you've answered YES to any of these questions, click
on the link below.

A short video will introduce you to the wonderful world of
boolean searching.

Then, test your new skills with refrigerator magnets.

http://libguides.nmhschool.org/searching

Wordle is a toy for generating
“word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds
give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently
in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different
fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
The images you create with Wordle are yours
to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them
to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.  - from the wordle site

http://wordle.net/