The project is in its pilot phase so there are a limited number of
materials available. Worth browsing are the guiding principles and timeframe (the expected
rollout for the project is Q4 in 2010) as well as the positioning messages for different target audiences.
Named target audiences include journalists and participants in secondary and higher education. “Corporate
Communicators” are named as a target audience too, which makes me uneasy. I’m sure that the message is not
going to be, “Have at it! Spin your clients left right and forward on Wikipedia!” but I still worry.

Another “target audience” that the Bookshelf project is looking for is people willing to make
screencasts about editing Wikipedia. I thought there must already be resources like that available; a
quick look at YouTube shows that there are least a few screencasts already made, like this
well-made video from the American Society for
Surgery of the Hand.

The Bookshelf Project Wikispace also has resources for discussion and development of tools as well as
“open questions.” Actually there’s only one open question at the moment but I’m looking forward to the
answer — what’s a good open source alternative to Camtasia?

The list of titles is at http://books.google.com/books?as_pt=MAGAZINES&rview=1. This is a cover/grid view; there’s also a list view if you prefer. You can filter the magazines displayed by those which have full view only and those which are public domain only. I didn’t see any magazines that were listed as public domain only, but when I restricted my results to those magazines which were full view, I got several dozen titles, from The Alcalade to Yoga. Some highlights (to me anyway): Billboard, Dwell, Popular Mechanics, and Popular Science.

This is great! I’m so glad that you can see all the magazines that are available on Google Books (and I’m astonished and happy there are so many!) Now for the next possible trick — how about being able to search a set of magazines at a time? (Instead of just one of them or all of them?)

In the case of GazoPa, you can upload an image, enter an image URL, or even draw an image to find similar results. (There’s also a keyword search.) I decided to specify a URL and found a lighthouse picture at http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2601/3838951221_459f5276cb.jpg. Here’s the search result I got:

As you can see GazoPa seems to be looking at background color and element arrangement; in this case it seemed to be looking at “Tall element dominating image with partly-cloudy sky in background.” This led to all kinds of images, including trees, buildings, and even the Eiffel Tower, but no other lighthouse images in the beginning of the search results.

GazoPa has options with its search, though, that will tweak what you’re getting. You can choose an emphasis on shape or color or more. I tweaked the search to focus on shape, and here’s how the search results came out:

You can’t see it but I did actually get some lighthouses in this first page of results. The emphasis did seem to be more on
buildings, though there’s a hummingbird feeder and at least a couple of people in this first page of search results. Switching my
search emphasis to color brought me lots of sunny skies, but the subjects of the picture were all over the map.

I could not leave GazoPa without trying the “draw something and find something similar” tool. Sadly my drawing talent is limited so I contented myself with using the basic drawing tools to draw the occasionally extremely mean “Hat Guy” from xkcd — the one with the black hat. (He’s a stick figure so he doesn’t tax my skills too much. You can see an example of Hat Guy here.)

I did get one stick figure in my search result, but I was bemused to discover that most of my search results were, not to put too fine a point on it, tripods. Apparently I’m better at drawing a straight line than I thought.

I don’t know if I would use GazoPa to find similar images. I would use GazoPa to explore photographs in a fun way, and to try to get ideas for visual images. Useful to me … but I’m not sure if it’s useful in the way it was intended.

So anyway. Google announced at the end of October that it has partnered with MySpace and Lala to make it easier to find song or album or artist information. Google has also partnered with Pandora, imeem, and Rhapsody to provide pointers to related music. This isn’t the first time that Google has gotten into music search, but this version looks more integrated with the regular search.

Just do your music search from the regular Web search. Google’s music search did fine with Venus Hum and Hush Sound, but didn’t find anything when I searched for Bonobo, even after I prefaced it to DJ Bonobo. So what kind of data do you get with Google’s music search? Let’s look at an example search for Chris Joss. Do a regular search for Chris Joss and you’ll get this at the top of your search results:

In this case you get a shot of an album cover (though not a shot of a recent album cover) and links to songs. Clicking on a song will give you a popup window to play the song via lala. Links to other sites will give more information about the artist; a link to Pandora, for example, opens up the artist’s information page.

Google’s music search also allows you to search music lyrics and, theoretically, get the right song. A couple of the searches I tried didn’t work, and a couple of them did. Searching for Won’t you carry me home did not find the song from Hush Sound. Searching for You are a runner and I am my father’s son did not show the song from Wolf Parade (though it did show up in the search results.) Shortening the search to I am my father’s son found a song from Dan Hill. I wondered how Google’s music would handle covers, so I searched for heard my bulldog bark. Google did return a song, but it was Stagger Lee by Lloyd Price, while I was thinking about the version by Professor Longhair. (Which Google of course has no way of knowing, and I realize there are lots and lots of covers of Stagger Lee.)

For the most part I found that the artist search worked better than the lyrics search, though I occasionally accidentally confused Google into not giving me any artist search results (Hush Sound got the artist, Hush Sounds didn’t.) The search won’t find everything — a search for Floyd Red Crow didn’t find anything, and neither did searching for David Gordon or Steve Gordon. (Strangely, searching for David and Steve Gordon did get me a musical result.) I will probably not be able to shelve the tricks I’ve developed for finding artists and lyrics using Google’s regular search, but Google’s new music feature will be a help, especially when I want to explore music.

Let’s back up. The New York Times has developed subject headings to index its archives. So you can think “tags” instead of “subject headings” if you like. (Sorry NYT.) And the “Linked Open Data” means that the 5,000 subject headings/tags have been manually mapped to the data sources Freebase and DBPedia. Two very exciting things about this: 5,000 is just a fraction of the NYT’s subject headings — there are in total over 30,000 — and the NYT intends to map and release them all. Further, the NYT is releasing this data under a Creative Commons license!

You can explore what’s been done so far at http://data.nytimes.com/. You can download all the data records in one file (you have to agree to the CC license first) or you can browse by last name. I went and looked at the E’s to see if Elmo had been indexed. He hadn’t, but there were several other people under E, from Eagleburger, Lawrence S, to Eyre, Richard. Each name has an URL associated with it. Click on it to get more data.

I clicked on Herm Edwards’ name which is located at http://data.nytimes.com/57985207950391437243.html. Data here includes the number of mentions in the NYT, first and last time the subject heading was mentioned (I’m suspicious of that “first time” — it seemed like 2001 in most of the names I looked at and that didn’t seem right for the historical figures) and a pointer to the New York Times “Topic Page”. (If you’re looking for the latest news and other information on a figure, in an easy-to-read format, use the Topic Page. It even has an RSS feed.)

Even more interesting than the aggregated data are the pointers to Freebase and DBPedia. Each person’s data URL is also associated with links to pages of data at Freebase and DBPedia. These two pages are in XML and RDF (Resource Description Framework) formats respectively, so they’re less for reading by humans and more for mixing and reoutputting by computer programs.

The NYT release of these subject headings/tags helps pull three data sources together. I expect to see some great tools made from this. If you’d like to see how people are discussing extending and using the new release, you can check out the Linked Open Data community at http://groups.google.com/group/nyt_linked_open_data.

That’s been changed. Colonial Williamsburg has started an “eMuseum” which currently has 3300 items but promises to add information on the whole collection over time. It’s available at http://emuseum.history.org/code/emuseum.asp.

From this site you can look at highlights of the collections (collection highlights include “American Furniture: From Virginia to Vermont,” “Great Silver Collections from Colonial Williamsburg,” and “Pounds, Pence & Pistareens: Coins & Currency of Colonial America.”) or you can do a search. I did a search for chair and got 223 results. Results include thumbnails and are provided six to a page.

I got interested in a corner chair and clicked on its image for more details.

The details page had an exhaustive description of the chair which I couldn’t follow, not being fluent in chairconstructionese (”The bases of the splats are let into open mortises on the inner faces of the rear seat rails and then covered with black walnut inserts…”)
There are also details about the age of item, place of construction, how it came to Colonial Williamsburg, and — most interesting to me — commentary about the chair itself, including details about its design, history, and possible artisans. If you want a better image of the item, click on the thumbnail in the details page to get a larger image in the popup window. Still not as large as I’d prefer, though…

If you’re at all interested in antiques, visit this museum. And if you’re looking for search terms to try, give silver a whirl. Some beautiful items.

You can do a simple keyword search here looking for odds or just looking for everything. Everything finds things like articles, which were interesting enough that I didn’t mind them being included in my search (and they weren’t so numerous that you lost all the odds information.) I did a search for coffee. I got 158 results! Results include category divisions over to the left as well as breakdowns for age, income, gender, etc. To the right you’ll see odds. I saw odds like “1 in 2.08 The odds a person 18 or older will drink regular coffee in a day are 1 in 2.08 (US, 1/2007).” and “1 in 66.67 The odds a boy 6 – 11 drinks coffee at least once a day are 1 in 66.67 (US, 4/1987 – 8/1988).”

Click on the odds for an item and you’ll get a visual representing the odds as well as a space for comments, who found that particular set of odds interesting, etc. (I didn’t see any comments in any of the odds I looked at.) Coolest on the details page, though, is the list of odds that are close or exactly the same as the one you’re looking at. So I know that the odds of an adolescent girl 12 – 19 drinking coffee at least once a day are exactly the same as the odds that an Asian female 25 or older with a bachelor’s degree and no higher has an income of $30,000 – $32,499. (They’re both 1 in 20.)

Now if you’re a librarian you’re probably asking the same question I asked when I started browsing the site: where is this data coming from? The detail page also has a button marked “Sources & Definitions”. Click it and you’ll get information on the source, rounding information, and even an appropriate way to cite the data presented.

Most of the stats I came across were demographic but they were still fun. If you register and create an account (it’s free) you can start your own book of odds, which allows you to track odds, send odds information to a friend, etc. Worth a visit. Oh, and before you leave the Book of Odds site be sure to visit the “About Us” page. I got a big laugh out of “Book of Odds is not a search-engine, decision-engine, knowledge-engine, or any other kind of engine…so please don’t compare us to Google(tm). We did consider the term “probability engine” for about 25 seconds, before coming to our senses.”

The front page of the site has the most recent Google Doodles spotted from all over the world. There’s the Halloween Doodle, of course, spotted in several different places, but looking a little further I found doodles for the character Asterix, for Thanksgiving, for the bar code, and for several I can’t determine because they’re in languages I can’t read.

Click on each doodle and you’ll get a YouTube video for it (even for the barcode one), the latest news stories containing the keyword related to the doodle, and the latest blog posts.) Oh, and what appear to be tweets though they’re also marked as blog posts. The ones I looked at for the Google barcode doodle had nothing to do with the doodle per se… they were so random as to be almost surreal — but I’m sure the less generic keywords work better.

At the moment the doodle archive only goes back to August 30, but the site owner tells me he plans to add all older doodles since 1999. Even going back only to August 30 the site has a lot of doodles, and it’s a treat to see the ones that were put up in other countries. Actually it’s a treat to see any of them. In the course of my searching I don’t see very many of the Google Doodles anymore… the search box in Firefox makes the front page of Google mostly unnecessary, and I visit only when I’m demonstrating something or I want to check for changes.

The front page of the Web site asks you to provide the condition for which you’re searching and a location. If you enter something ambiguous (like “cancer”) the site will suggest topics. The location can be as narrow as a zip code, or a city (Madrid, Spain is one of the examples) or as encompassing as USA.

I did a search for autism in USA. I found 81 global studies but two within 150 miles of my stated point — one in Kansas City and one in Oklahoma City. When you look at the results for your search you’ll get a screen that looks like this:

You’ll notice that there are many ways to filter your search results — by age, gender, type of study, etc. — if you happen to get more than two search
results. Each map pointer has a brief amount of information about the study, but to get more data you’ll have to click on the title of a study, when the map will center on that study and present more context and additional details in a pointer bubble. You’ll also be able to get study contact information, find similar studies, or e-mail the study to a friend. (It kind of bugs me that you have to register to get study contact information.)

What you’ll find really depends on what you’re researching — I found one study of thyroid disorders, and that was in the context of breast cancer. When you review the available clinical trial studies please be sure to check the last time they were updated. Of the two autism studies I looked at, one was last updated in 2005. (The other was updated in the last week.)

The registration thing bugs me but this site has a lot of information and the search is easy to use. Worth a look.

You can browse the site by a variety of factors or you can search by keyword. When I browsed for everything alphabetically I got 12 pages of results that could hold nine listings at a time, so I would guess something over 100 films are available here.

I browsed the films by the highest rated. The first page included the films Camp De Thiaroye (”During WW2, a group of black soldiers fight on the side of France”), La Vie Sur Terre (”Sissako, a Mauritanian filmmaker living in France, returns to Sokolo, a small and remote village in Mali to visit his Father. The arrival of the 21st century is hardly noticed by these people, who are still struggling so hard to merely enter the 20th century”) and Nothing But the Truth (”An impassioned and compelling debut feature film from award winning South African actor and writer John Kani. This gripping story is a forthright indictment on the Truth and Reconciliation process in post-Apartheid South Africa, yet also serves as a poignant memoir of a fractured family trying to come to terms with the past and present.”)

Click on the title and you’ll get details about the film, including a synopsis, length, date it was produced, and language (most of the films I saw were not in English, of course, but every film I saw had at least English subtitles.) Each film I looked at also had material from the film either in the form of a trailer or just an excerpt.

And the material is very well done … it’s just enough to get you interested, darn it. I reviewed the trailer for a film called Ta Dona, directed by Mamadou Kaba. I had a bunch of questions after watching it (Why did the guy set the fire? Was the kid going to be okay?) but when I clicked the Rent button next to the detail page I got the following message: “Thank you for your interest in renting this film. The film rental service is not currently available but will be launching soon.” GAH!

The idea is that you’ll be able to buy credits with your credit card, then rent/stream the videos to your computer. I love the content here (I want to see Ta Dona! I want to watch Ouaga Saga!) and while of course there are some details lacking (how much, exactly, is it going to cost to watch a film?) I’m looking forward to African Film Library getting out of beta and launching its video rental service.