(My comments, as always are in parens)

Web 2.0 Tools

Technorati- her favorite blog search tools.
blogs about x
blog posts tagged with x
blog posts that mention x
videos tagged with x

Can search however you want- granular as you can get. search just descriptions of blogs to find blogs about a certain subject or find posts tagged with a subject.

Can look for a post that has a certain word, which brings up lots of garbage.

Video not their strong suit, but you can search that way.

“Librarian of Fortune”

episodic games- video games where they release stories. each episode takes less than 20 hours to complete. every 3 or 4 months there’s a new game. each one stands independently.

search ing for phrase “episodic games” in technorati.

technorati has a truly advanced search.

authority- look for how many times other blogs point to that blog. Spam blogs are a problem. Technorati has a clever way of determining authority- if one blog links to another, it counts as one vote. If the same blog links to the same other blog again, it still counts as one vote.

Total Authority number- a secret sauce.

Some topics will only bring up authority numbers of no higher than 50 because no one’s talking about that topic. Other topics have blogs with authority numbers in the 1000s. She uses technorati to filter for authority to get thoughtful, meaningful content.

Claimed blogs- people who are serious about their blog. Claimed blogs go into the directory. Example of parenting blogs. Blogs that are claimed are probably the blogs that are written by people who are more serious about a topic and about their writing.

Click on authority number to see what people say when they link to that blog- get a sense of why people are talking about something.

Twitter

140 characters- small thoughts.

way of seeing what one portion of the blogosphere is saying about something. Follow a person’s activities.

Unlike Facebook and LinkedIn “status” updates, twitter has an archive (she’s assuming the absence of the fail whale!)

Can use it to track breaking news, initial reactions to an announcements, hot speakers at a conference. Twittering is easy and doesn’t take more than a cell phone.

She has yet to discover a real in-depth research use for twitter (hmm… maybe she needs more librarian friends on Twitter!)

Searching podcasts.

• podcastalley.com
• pluggd.tv

Limit words to “series” rather than “episode”. People who podcast usually keep podacasting around the same subject. Podcasts are not plain text, so search engines have a hard time knowing what podcasts are about. The only descriptions are what people put on the page before you click through to the podcast itself.

RadioLab (lurve RadioLab!) librarianesque

Think about where you’re going to find podcasts rather than searching for them.

• Federal Govt – tinyurl.com/ytcco4
• University lectures – MIT Courseware tinyurl.com/2t2rfj

It took a long time for the govt to get good, rich content online. Govt and Industry have really jumped on the podcast bandwagon. University lectures are online as podcasts. Univeristies have realized that they’re not giving anything away, but are enhancing their reputation by putting lectures online. MITOpenCourseWare – most visited courses are all really hard core science and technology.

iTunes has started distributing a lot more content. Most educational podcasts are free and you can subscribe.

Podcast chunking

how to fnd a podcast when you have a topic you want but not a site to start with?

moving beyond metadata to speech recognition. “chunking” of the search results – searches transcripts of the podcast. you can jump to the part of the podcast that’s relevent to what you’re searching for.

• search.everyzing.com
• podscope.com

You wind up getting a lot of stuff, some of it isn’t relevent. Really best for looking for something obscure.

Tracking discussion boards.

emergency services use 800 mhz range and she had a client that was interested in this. first question: who would care about 800 Mhz interference? There’s one person in each county who cares A LOT about this. How are they talking to each other? A bull board or a yahoo group? Yahoo group had 3 discussion groups on that topic.

• BoardTracker.com
• Twing.com
• BoardReader.com

If what you’re looking for is obscure, this is exactly the place you’re going to find the answer.

Q from audience: do you have to sign up for these boards, usually?

A: not usually. If they’re spidered through a search engine, they’re usually open. The one exception is Yahoo Groups and you just have to join.

Serph.com

Web 2.0 meta-search tool – blogs, social media sites, social news sites, social bookmarking sites.

Caps results at 300 results. Generally not a big deal, but something to keep in mind.

Addictomatic

entrancing. tather than aggregating results in one page, they show you each tool and show you the results for each. (plus, cute robot!) Wonderful, but very distracting

Intelways

It does a search in google. Regular old search results. Series of buttons under the search box with all manner of search engines and sites. Quick way to start and cover a broad range of resources.

Above search box, you can change the kind of buttons underneath- only image search, only news search, only social search.

(comment from my colleague the newshound: this is really good!)

It’s not metasearch, it’s just a frame with a super-quick way of comparing search results. Reference search is particularly helpful.

LinkedIn.com

really nerdy way to connect to other people

use it and other SN sites to find who to call. Like having a rolodex on steroids. Nice way of knowing where to go next- can connect through LinkedIn. Useful tools for getting to soft information that you can’t get online.

Facebook

Started for college students. The interesting thing for LinkedIn and FB is that orgs are realizing that they can create community online through these sites.

ZoomInfo

Another way to find people. On the other SN sites are information you have provided. ZoomInfo is the reverse. Looks for mentions of people and uses lingusitic analysis to find out what that information is. It figures out who people are and where they’ve worked. Has links to the pages they used to figure that out. Also pulls in information you might not have found otherwise- member of boards, etc.

Q: how important does that man have to be for you to find all this?

A: This just pulls informaiton that happens to mention this person. He doesn’t have to have a webapage himself, they just have to be mentioned.

Now everyone’s going to go and ZoomInfo themselves!

TouchGraph.com

They’re trying to sell their software, which they do by showing applications of this technology. Visual representation of your connections and their shared connections You can only do this search on yourself

Spokeo

Creepy-o

Pulls information from areas where you’re talking about yourself. Twitter, FB etc. But also Amazon wish list and stuff you’re selling.

Anonimity through obscurity.

This aggregates everything about you online. Guy with cufflinks and carrot up his nose.