RUSA has released their list of best reference sites for 2006. There’s a lot of good stuff here. In particular, I like the site How Things Are Made. In the spirit of the holidays, and in the spirit of the episode of Modern Marvels I watched last night that was all about candy making, you might want to check out this article on the making of candy canes.
As reported on Lifehacker, Pluggd is a new search tool that lets you search for a term inside an audio file. It does it by creating a heat map in the audio file’s proress bar, alerting you to where the search term appears, and with what relevancy. You can try it out at the Pluggd site.
If you haven’t checked out the new Ms.Dewey, the new microsoft search tool, you might want to take a look. Is it just me, or does anyone else find this creepy?
Check out Quotiki. It’s a wiki that allows
you to search for quotes. Of course, since it is user run it is subject to
the same potential accuracy problems as wikipedia. But still, perhaps
another useful resource for hard to find quotes.
Justia.com has two services that might prove useful for law reference: Blawgsearch, which lets you search for blogs
dealing with law topics, and Blawgs.fm, which lets you search for podcasts
on a variety of law topics.
As reported by the LibrarianInBlack, Slideshare.net is a site where people can post their Power Point presentations for people to comment on and gain inspiration from. From an cursory glance, it seems like it could be a pretty good resource. I did a simple search on “library” and got back 428 results, with presentations with topics ranging from Content dm Extensions to tips for finding things online.
Although you probably already know this, you have been chosen as Time’s Person of the Year. Seriously.
If we needed an indicator of how culturally pervasive Web 2.0 technologies are becoming, this seems like it.
The Institute for the Future of the Book has sponsored an interesting project, where Mitchell Stephens has posted some of the early chapters of his book, and is allowing people to comment, blog style, on each paragraph.
Read/Write Web has very nice write up about Web 2.0 search engines/tools here. Also, check out their review of ChaCha, a search engine that combines automation and human interaction.
Tag Bulb lets you search via tags in other peoples web entries. It searchs flickr, blogs, and other cool search engines like Riya. Tag Bulb divides your results into several categories based on what medium the result is (such as “images”), or where it came from (such as “blogs”). This is all part of the Web 2.0 trend of making use of user generated content. I don’t know how useful it is right now, but as this concept takes off, it could be the future of internet searching.
