As promised I’ve posted an interview with OPML blogger Lisa Williams, though we didn’t find much time to talk about OPML! Instead we talked about her community blog project, h2otown, which rocks. And her power use of search and RSS. It was super fun and informative. Hopefully we’ll get to catch up and do an interview about OPML soon, which is why I contacted her in the first place!
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Check out Monitor This, a fabulous service that builds an importable OPML file of RSS feeds for any search you input – in 22 search engines at once! It looks great. I’ve just subscribed to some searches this way and we’ll see how it goes.
I was told about this by Lisa Williams, with whom I began an interview this morning. (I love it when people are down for long IM interviews!) It’s a real good interview, too. Lisa is awesome. I love her approach to research – and not just because it reminds me of my own but with different tools. We haven’t really even begun to talk about OPML either – and that’s the reason I asked her for an interview.
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This is interesting, you’ve read about the bizarre combo of Google refusing to give up US search documentation on one hand but agreeing to censor what Chinese users can see at the behest of the Chinese government on the the other hand. Check out what Google China users see when they do an image search for Tienanmen. That’s a popular page to link to in the blogsphere today.
Witness the shocking difference between that and, for example, a US Google user’s image search results for Christopher Columbus. Comparably benign, are they not?
So while it would be no small technological achievement for Google to successfully hide the images that the rest of the world associates with Tiananmen from the Chinese people themselves, I would contend that they still have a ways to go before they can rival the scale of cultural “information organization”/obfuscation that goes on all the time in the United States.
Like what? US history aside even, how about the following:
We may be able to find these things on the internet in the US (the fact that they are true is bad enough) but how often do we discuss or consider them? Isn’t the effect similar at least?
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From Will Richardson’s blog comes this anecdote from a trip he just took to meet with 100 tech coordinators from Pinellas County Florida schools. He found that a greater number than would have been the case in the past knew what blogs, podcasts and wikis were. Only about 10 knew what RSS was.
Richardson concludes the wrap up with this:
As we were discussing the concept of readers as editors, I showed them the white supremacist created Martin Luther King site . Well, actually, I showed a picture of it since it was being blocked at the time, and after pointing out the obvious racist tenor of the site, I asked how many could go and find out who owned that domain, who created and updated it.
There was a deafening silence.
Not. One. Person.
Mercy.
Well, I’m guessing that some readers here could find the following info useful: Whenever you want more info about any web page, there’s one place I recommend going. Who owns the domain name? What has the page looked like in the past and throughout it’s life? How much traffic does it get? Who is linking to it? How can I know when it changes in the future? These are just a few of the questions you can find answers to at the awesome meta tool URLInfo by FaganFinder. I often use particular tools from this set individually, but there’s really no reason to know more than this one page: faganfinder.com/urlinfo. Make sure you check out the “cache” tab, item “internet archive” when you’re there.
The direct answer to Richardson’s question is that you look up the WhoIs info to learn who owns the domain. But why stop there? Thought that might come in handy.
If there is more specific info than WhoIs on who specifically updates a page, somebody let me know – it’s news to me.
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I’ve had the honor over the last few days to do an email interview with Mark Cuban for Net Squared. Turns out he’s a reader of this blog – cool! We talked about:
I hope you’ll check out the interview and the rest of the work being done at Net Squared.
Link: Thoughts on Adoption of New Web Tools: An Interview with Mark Cuban
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In the spirit of exploration and a couple of other things, I’m hereby claiming this blog in technorati. Unfortunately, the javascript means of doing so doesn’t appear to work. Has that been anyone else’s experience?
While you too may want to claim your blog inside Technorati, don’t let Technorati claim you or too much of your mental space. Other very good blog and tag search engines include:
I know that Technorati has lots of features that those don’t, but I just don’t want other good options to be forgotten. There are many more, of course. Del.icio.us tag “Blog_search” has some good items.
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Online researcher Gary Price was gracious enough to do a long IM interview with me last week and I’ve posted it over at the Net Squared blog. Price is the editor of ResourceShelf, a news wire of databases and research resources, and the News Editor at Search Engine Watch. Lots of good info shared.
We focused on the following topics:
I hope you’ll check it out and look around the rest of the Net Squared site and conference info while you’re there. Interview with Gary Price
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