Since I'm shortly going to be retiring I won't be doing any more work on the Apps for Librarians video collection. This is a collection of over FORTY different videos covering a wide variety of different apps. It covers: Browsers Opera Puffin Safari Guiding Tools Symbaloo Pearltrees Making Videos The equipment you need Intro Lite Parrot Teleprompter iMovie Magisto Periscope Videorama Clips Stop motion animation Multimedia Tools Augmented Reality Podcasting Videolicious News-based Apps Mention Nuzzel Flipboard Photography Apps Aviary Google's Photoscan Instagram Photosynth Presentation Tools Adobe Voice Animoto Explain Everything Haiku Deck Padlet Post-it notes ThingLink Productivity Tools Doceri Popplet... Continue reading

I was sent a link to this page by a scout troop leader. Her daughter Willow, was trying to get a 'making games' badge, and came across a site providing links to lots of optical illusion sites. She thought it was really useful, and I agree with her. Plus, it's important for our younger digital citizens to see that the things they find and suggest for others can really make a big difference. So, if you're asked for information on optical illusions, please take a look at 'Fool your eyes with optical illusions' at https://www.eyebuydirect.com/fool-your-eyes-with-optical-illusions THANKS WILLOW! Continue reading

Having thought long and hard, I've decided that it's pretty much time to retire. There are various reasons for this - some are personal (and if you know, you know, and if you don't, it's not that important) and others are financial. Quite simply, in order to do my job properly I need to spend a lot of time in front of a computer every day to keep up to date with what's going on in the world of the internet, search and librarianship so that I'm on top of my game when I teach. However, there are very few... Continue reading

It's not until you find out that you can't eat gluten, or that you have a friend in this situation that you realise what a difficult life it can be. There's gluten in a huge range of things, including plenty that you probably wouldn't consider which means constant checking of labels, since even a very small amount can have terrible consequences if eaten. The Gluten Project aims to make life a little easier for people with this condition. Their search engine has a database of 35,000 gluten free products as certified by the American Gluten-Free Certification Organization (GFCO). That's the... Continue reading

Twitter lists are a really powerful tool, but one that lots of people don't seem to know about. Basically you can add an account to a list that you create. You don't need to follow the person, but it's really easy to just add people when they start following you. Start off by going to https://twitter.com/your_name/followers and you'll see a list of people that are following you. Each person will be in their own little box with a 'Follow' option and next to that, 3 vertical dots. You can choose to follow the person (obviously) and you can also click... Continue reading

I was slightly surprised to get an email from ClearScore recently. They are the company that can tell you what your credit score is, so their database contains highly confidential and personal information about you and your financial details. I didn't think that I'd signed up with them, but clicked on the link, and then clicked again to reset my password. I then got an email back from ClearScore confirming this had been done. I was then able to log into my account - except that it wasn't my account! It was the account of another person with the same... Continue reading

I've been told about Pikwizard, which is an image search engine for royalty free images. I've been playing around with it for a while, and it's really good. It's very clear, there are lots of images available and in the main they were right on topic. I was slightly bemused at one or two entries for my 'library' search (dried corn, pencils and chocolate for example) and it might be an idea to be able to flag some of the tags against images to let the users sort that out. However that's a minor quibble. The images are great -... Continue reading

Very disappointed to see that Audiosear.ch has closed its doors as of the end of last month. It was a really good podcast search engine and I always started my podcast searches there. If you're casting around (hah! See what I did there?) for an alternative, try Listen Notes which is excellent and indexes 415,107 podcasts and over 24.5 million episodes. It's a great tool and while I'm sorry to see Audiosear.ch go I'm not that worried since we've got this one as a great option instead. Continue reading

Google really does seem set on a path of self destruction, at least as far as search engine functionality goes. They've changed the way that the search operator 'info:' works, and it's severely damaged the functionality. As regular searchers will know, info:<URL> used to provide you with lots of useful information. You got a link to the cache that Google had stored for the particular page, web pages that are similar to the page, web pages that link to the page URL in question, web pages from the site itself, and finally webpages that contained the URL being searched. You... Continue reading

In a blog post Google has said that it's making search results more local and relevant. What it's actually done is to make things much more difficult, and far more messy. Let me explain. When you want to search on Google you type in your search and you get your results. If you want to see results from another country, such as the Netherlands, you could go to the Netherlands page, run your search and you'd get results appropriate for that country. It's obviously useful if you want to get local information about a person, place, event and so on.... Continue reading

On one of my courses recently a delegate told me that she was going to be running a Bram Stoker month in November. He was born on November 8th 1847, so this will be the 170th anniversary of his birth. I thought that was a splendid idea, and over the weekend I put together a bunch of resources that might be helpful to anyone else doing something similar. You're welcome to use any, all or none of them, or to take the ideas and create entirely different things. A Symbaloo page. If you visit https://www.symbaloo.com/mix/bramstoker you'll see a mix of... Continue reading

I’ve mentioned the Stands4 network in the past – they are a company that specialises in creating small, very niche search tools, such as Lyrics, Poetry, Biographies and Symbols. Their latest is Anagrams and Scrambles at http://www.anagrams.net/ and they have listed a lot of anagrams by subject. So for example in the category of ‘Classic writers anagrams’ we learn that an anagram of Thomas Hardy is ‘shy hot drama’ and for Mark Twain is ‘twin karma’. It’s also possible to search ‘back to front’ as it were to see that ‘midnight kicks’ is an anagram for Dick King Smith. As... Continue reading

There used to be a really good site called Boolify several years ago, which had a drag and drop approach to building searches. You simply clicked on a building block such as 'word' or 'not' and dropped it into the work area, adding in your terms as you went. The search was then mirrored for you in a search box, and was then executed. Boolify died but has been taken over and resurrected by Kidzsearch and you can find it on their website here: https://www.kidzsearch.com/boolify/ It's still very simple to use, though it can be a little bit fiddly to... Continue reading

It's very tempting to search for your symptoms and other related medical information on Google, but you need to warned; Google isn't exactly accurate with the stuff that it brings back. A search for 'cure for cancer' brings us back lots of interesting stuff, but the top result is from a site called Cancer Tutor, which I'm not going to link to, because it's full of crap. I'll copy a little of what it says however: Many people have cured their newly diagnosed cancer by using a very healthy diet and drinking a quart of carrot juice (with a little... Continue reading

For those with long memories, Delicious was one of the sites to use; it allowed people to bookmark their favourite websites for ease of access. At the time of founding, in 2003 Delicious was a real innovation, as the idea of being able to quickly and easily put stuff onto a third party website and then share that with your friends and colleagues was a really new idea. However, Delicious was unable to keep up with the times as other sites such as Diigo came along to give it real competition. It was sold several times - Yahoo paid between... Continue reading

I'm pleased to say that this book is now with the publishers, Facet Publishing and should be available in about 3 months. This is (as the title of the blog post says) the 5th edition of the title which started life in 1999 as The Advanced Internet Searcher's Handbook. That very first edition didn't even mention Google, which seems almost impossible to imagine. This edition references over 300 different search engines and associated tools. As usual I've started from scratch with it, and while keeping to the same format have added and removed content in almost equal measure. The book... Continue reading

I had an interesting experience today. I got an email sent to my [email protected] address telling me that a direct debit to a specific bank account at a specific bank had been set up. My initial response is to complete ignore this as a phishing attempt. However, there were no links to grab my details and the email address from which the email was sent seemed accurate. A few minutes later I got another email addressed to the same account telling me that my account with a 'Groupon' type account had been set up. I decided to explore, so went... Continue reading

I'd hoped that the nonsense about the 'Blue whale' suicide game had been a flash in the pan, but it's continuing to be spread. The Daily Mail ran another story on it on May 10th and it's about the 'mastermind' behind it; Philipp Budeikin, who I mentioned in my previous blog post; Blue Whale suicide game or hoax? I don't think there's any doubt that this guy is one very sick individual, and it does look as though he created at least 8 social media groups on the Russian version of Facebook, VKontackte with the express purpose of preying on... Continue reading

Facial recognition software really is a thing, and we'll see a lot more of it in the next couple of years. It has absolutely huge implications that I can't even work through myself at the moment, but let's see what we've got already. The first of two tools that I'm going to look at is the 'Celebrity model' site. The idea behind this is... well, let them tell it. I quote: "The 'Celebrity' model analyzes images and returns probability scores on the likelihood that the media contains the face(s) of over 10,000 recognized celebrities. This model is great for anyone... Continue reading

I was first made aware of the 'Blue Whale game' when a concerned parent posted on Facebook a letter that she'd seen from a local school, warning parents about the 'Blue Whale game', which was apparently the cause of hundreds of suicides of young people in Russia, which was on its way to the UK. A second school in my area, then a third sent out the same kind of warning, and another in Basildon also sent letters to parents, based on a discussion with Essex police. The BBC have posted their own article about it, and it's been mentioned... Continue reading

If you haven't taken a look at Ask Jelly yet, you've really missed your chance. I'm betting you probably haven't, which may well be one of the reasons that it's closing. Basically it was a Question and Answer service; people would register, indicate their area of expertise and when people asked questions, they would be pushed through to the appropriate person to answer them - for free. The answer would be posted, people would say thanks, everyone was happy. This type of resource,with the obvious exception of Quora simply doesn't work. We've seen it tried and fail with ChaCha and... Continue reading

I noticed a tweet today: Librarian game time: Go onto @cilipinfo site (https://t.co/1kFAdSfTjM) and, without using Search, try and find the acronym "CILIP" defined. — Phil Gorman (@philbgorman) February 28, 2017 He's quite right. It's very difficult to find, and I was only able to see 'Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals' in the title of the site and in some images. In fact, if you look a bit further, it seems to have changed its name. And the logo. And the colour of the logo. And the font... It appears that the 'Chartered Institute of Library and Information... Continue reading

Sad to report that Icerocket, which has been around for years, is finally closing its doors. There's a note on the home page which says "Icerocket.com will be shutdown permanently on March 8th, 2017. Please switch over to other search engines. Thank you for all the years together!" No reason has been given for the closure. On the other hand, Socialmention* has reappeared. I feared that it had died, but it's suddenly come back online, though what the story behind its comings and goings is I don't know! Continue reading

Just a brief entry to mark the closure of Polyfetch. The URL just redirects to Google now. It was a nice little search engine which allowed you to open several panes at once to compare different websites. Shame that it's disappeared. Continue reading

In common with several others I got an email last Friday morning telling me that TFPL will no longer be offering public scheduled courses from today (Friday, February 11th) onwards, and all currently scheduled courses will be cancelled. Apparently an earlier email had gone out from Chris Jones the Managing Director which said "Following a strategic business review, it has been decided that TFPL will no longer offer publicly scheduled training courses and will transfer our suite of Business Skills courses to ILX Group, another training business within Progility PLC." However, this didn't come to me, or to a lot... Continue reading