Category Archives: miscellany

Sites like del-icio.us, while pro­vid­ing an inter­est­ing (voyeuris­tic?) look into what sites oth­er peo­ple are find­ing inter­est­ing, are pri­mar­i­ly about col­lect­ing things for myself and mak­ing them refind­able. How is refind­able dif­fer­ent from find­able? And fur­ther on how can look­ing at what cues peo­ple cre­ate for mak­ing things refind­able for them­selves inform what we do … 

Continue read­ing “Findable vs. Refindable”

Quickly folks — it’s almost 5 on fri­day but I could­n’t pass this up. Alt Search Engines throws up some odd lit­tle SEs on it’s Friday round up and this one just came across the fee­dread­er. BananaSlug That’s right our Pacific Northwe(s)t Mascot — the banana slug — has got it’s own search engine. and in … 

Continue read­ing “BananaSlug — Pacific NorthWet Search?”

All search engines are not the same and all search engines do not return the same results. Ask each of the big four search engines the same ques­tion and you’ll get four very dif­fer­ent sets of answers. Well duh…  But just how dif­fer­ent are the results? Different Engines, Different Results, pub­lished in April by the good … 

Continue read­ing “TQR — Metasearch Puppy Piles vs. Lone Wolf Search Engines”

The mas­ter has a new book out: “Beautiful Evidence.” There’s an inter­view with him in New York Magazine. I sug­gest read­ing it on-line for the sim­ple plea­sure of read­ing some­thing on a site that makes read­ing on-line if not plea­sur­able then at least pos­si­ble. (Check out text siz­er con­trol just above the title.) Thanks to InfoDesign … 

Continue read­ing “TQR — New York Magazine Interview with Edward Tufte”

The saga of TV sta­tion search wierd­ness con­tin­ues. For the last few days I have been doing a bunch of search inter­face test­ing on the news sites of our local TV sta­tions. I had a stan­dard list of search sub­jects that I ran through all the sites. One of which was “motor­cy­cle chase”. (Other searches … 

Continue read­ing “Personalization of Your News Coverage — Even if You Don’t Become a Member”