I’m getting a little geeky today – for folks who don’t lean as geeky, I’m going to just remind you of my favorite handcrafted online store: http://www.etsy.com/. You might want that leading up to the holidays. Now for the geeky set… Last week Google announced some big changes in how they are going to share … Continue reading
Category Archives: Research
Finding dead web sites
I think I’ve talked about this amazing tool before but it just came up for me again. The Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org) keeps older versions of web sites. They don’t keep every web site, but they keep a lot. Also their funding seems precarious so some years they archive more than others. So say you want … Continue reading
Good Search
I know I’ve talked about Good Search before – but this is such a good time of year for a reminder of Good Search. Here’s the quick take: Use Good Search as your search engine http://www.goodsearch.com and your favorite charity will get a penny. You have to specify your charity; you can get a list … Continue reading
Fact Checkers
We had a great time watching the debates with my family. Everybody came away with a different opinion and everybody questioned at least one statement. So I thought I’d look up some political fact checkers before the next debate. I hope you find them helpful too: FactCheck.org (http://www.factcheck.org/) monitors the factual accuracy of what is … Continue reading
Wikia
Well I’m still in Dublin and my Internet access is still not stellar – so today I’m going to mention something I read in the newspaper over the weekend. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) founder, Jimmy Wales is building a search engine that is going to debut is December. Wikipedia is the popular community-written online encyclopedia. It has … Continue reading
Beyond Google
Despite what Google would like us to think, there really isn’t a definitive engine. None of the search engines catalogs all of the web sites. So it makes sense to know about a few of them and to know how they work together. Many of the search engines share databases, which is part of the … Continue reading
LibriVox
I ran across a super fun site today – LibriVox (http://www.librivox.org/) -their catch line is “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.” They catalog and store audio recordings of books in the public domain. Through LibriVox you can download an old favorite or read and upload arecording of an old favorite. I think the … Continue reading
Internet Info on Katrina
It’s been hard to watch the events unfold in the South during and after Hurricane Katrina. It has also been interesting and heartening to see how the Internet community has created opportunities to help – demonstrating once again the global nature of the Internet: Craig’s List of New Orleans is a community bulletin board where … Continue reading
Access Yesterday’s Web
Today’s Byte is short and sweet. I have mentioned it before, but not in years. The Wayback Machine This site archives web sites. Search for a URL and it will provide links to how the site has looked through time. I love this site. I use it when I want to see an earlier iteration … Continue reading
Google Scholar
Google has yet another new feature – Google Scholar. It indexes scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. It debuted late last year. I think it’s a neat tool – but it has some pros and cons: Pro – It filters out a ton … Continue reading