Connections

After reading the chapter "Machines and the web" from Weaving the web : the original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web written by Tim Berners-Lee nearly a decade ago I can see that his goal of creating a semantic web is yet to be achieved.

In my opinion there are both beneficial and worrying aspects about the development of machines that can make sense of data found on the web. For students at school and university any information found on the web would need to be accurate and reliable if computers were so powerful that they could make connections between various databases to give meaningful results to complicated search queries.

Searching a semantic web would be beneficial to a user if the computer could filter out incorrect responses to a search via an ability to "understand" machine readable data. This could reduce the amount of time spent trawling through screens of inappropriate hits displayed for a particular search query. It would save me a lot of time at work if this option was available now!

Davy Jones' Locker

I do not have anything positive to say about Voyage. It is a thoroughly confusing interface to use and I was totally unsuccessful in loading any of my own feeds. All I managed to do was delete the existing RSS feed links at the bottom of the screen. As a visual display it is a total disaster. Floating text on a computer screen is a nightmare for anyone with less than perfect eyesight.

Turkey time

Searching on Kartoo can be fun. An image search on turkeys found photos of roaming, tom, heritage, range, fruitland, grownup, and numerous wild turkeys!



I also did some web searches on Kartoo. These searches often had unusual and irrelevant results unless keywords were very specific to topic and country.

Exploring the FlickrStorm. search engine was really interesting. A search under Warrnambool brought up some great bird photos taken in the area. I could link to Flickr and access the photographer's photostream to view lots more bird shots he had taken.

Paddock view

Auction of St. Helens, the prince of paddocks in Hawthorn on Saturday 4th February [1893]

When searching the National Library of Australia VuFind resource portal I found a reference to a map giving details of a forthcoming auction of 101 blocks of land in Hawthorn last century. The description of the site is very complimentary. "This paddock is without exception the finest land ever offered to public competition in this prosperous and magnificent suburb, being situated on the highest spot within ten miles of the city ; each lot commanding a view unparalelled in any suburb of Melbourne."

Source: National Library of Australia VuFind resource portal

I found the National Library of Australia VuFind resource portal quite impressive. After searching for the Australian author Ada Cambridge I was overwhelmed with the number of additional search options available to me for this writer. There were links to all her titles in the collection and the formats available for each title. Patrons could use tools such as cite this, email, and add to favourites, for all catalogue entries found. The history tab allowed the user to track the strategy used for the search. The addition of a picture of the front cover of a book when it's available would be a useful addition to the portal.

Overall I think that VuFind would assist students to find a far greater breadth of information via a Library's OPAC than they do at present.

Bribery way

I'll keep blogging if you are going to encourage me like this.

Link Freeway

I searched for people employed in my workplace and found quite a few entries in LinkedIn. It's quite surprising to see the number of people who live in different places with exactly the same name. Are they all linked?

I decided not to join LinkedIn because the network does not have much relevance for my job or for someone who is thinking about retirement. It would be a useful tool for contacting and collaborating with people who work in the same profession throughout the world.

Switchback lane

I thought I'd done with all this blogging. But no, we are at it again. I wish someone would give me a bone instead!