Tangled up in Purple » google

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

nix — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:42:34 +0000

I was interested to see Dorothy’s post about searching (and tagging)

On the other hand the same teacher instinct was apalled by how little progress we have made teaching people how to search in a way that will return the information they are seeking. Particularly using appropriate key words to refine our searches.

I have been constructing a similar post in my head. Beware the river of consciousness that follows.

Recent work that I have done with teachers has lead me to wonder about how we seem to have hit skills in a roundabout sort of way. I’m often asked to work to help teachers get skills in using ICTs to present kid’s work or to show off the finished product – PowerPoint, Photo Story, iMovie or Movie Maker. Or teachers want a bunch of websites to use in their classroom programme.

If I suggest spending time looking at search techniques or alternatives to Google, they say that they know how to use Google. And then, I watch as they type a web address into the Google’s search bar.

Just over a year ago I wrote a post about the core things that computer users of any age need to know. Turning the beast on, where and how to use right click context menus and saving and retreiving files. I also said that we need to have some internet skills. And one of the most important of those skills is to understand the difference between an address bar and the search box.

As I see it we’ve taken a whole language approach to the concept of information and knowledge literacy and while we bemoan the fact that many kids can’t sort out the fact from fiction we can’t see that at the moment many adults don’t know how to tell either.

A few weeks ago my son’s science teacher was horrified that one of her students might use the Wikipedia for information. “Don’t let him use the Wikipedia,” she told me, “It can be changed!” We were in the middle of the mid-year interviews and I was asking why she was accepting material from him that contained unreferenced facts and information.

I am regularly informed that the Wikipedia is an unsafe place to look for information. Often times the person who kindly tells me this has just discovered this at a professional development course. My response depends on the environment but I have been known to tell people that, “Yes, I know, they have even let me edit Wikipedia articles.”

The Wikipedia is no better or no worse than any other website – if you understand its purpose and its place in the ecology of the internet and information. It’s a great place to start your research but a bad place to end.

In her post Dorothy talks about the way that Google has gently removed us from the reality that poor spelling and loose thinking won’t get us what we want.

I guess what I was seeing at the Googleplex was a testimony to the failure of this approach. When Google came along with their user-friendly search engine they not only made it simple to do an advanced search (just click the Advanced Search button!) but they seem to make intuitive sense of our paltry efforts. Whether it is poor spelling and grammar or people who simply type in a question, Google seems to be able to to supply a list of intelligent results.

I think we have to go one step further back – yet again – and look at search engine design and search engine purpose. It’s not always about helping you find the information that you want, but about directing you to what it wants you to see. We need to step away from the Google (and Google Advanced) is good / Wikipedia is bad mode and take a look at the myriads of other options that are out there.

Don’t Forget to Pay the Bills

nix — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 01:19:30 +0000

On the surface it looks like I haven’t been blogging much of late. Actually I have – it’s just that I stopped going as far as publishing my posts. In an effort to tidy up at least one workspace this weekend, I present a not-quite-finished discussion about cloud computing, data safety and trust.

Very few of us actually stop to read the terms and conditions when we sign up for the newest interweb application. Google has our news, email, our documents and our most private browsing history. We give Flickr, Facebook and Bebo all of our family’s and friend’s secrets. We try and be droll in Twitter and then complain bitterly when their servers buckle under the load.

But we don’t think about paying the bills. And sooner or later they have to be paid. If not with our money, then with something else …

Every weekend I give myself time to catch up with Boing Boing (the directory of wonderful things). One of last weekend’s treats was a link to a talk about moving stuff off the cloud and back to our own spaces.

From Danny O’Brien’s slides (couldn’t cope with the video for long – it gave me motion sickness):

The sacrifice … is user autonomy. If you decide that Google Docs doesn’t work the way you want, you can’t tinker with the software and fix it. If you want to share a map on your Web site, you need Yahoo!’s permission. If you want to use a new social networking site, you have to re-enter all your personal data and re-invite all your friends. The data and code belong to someone else, and they’re hidden behind servers that you, the user, aren’t allowed to touch. — Evan Prodromou, identi.ca

Regularly I find myself an unwilling participant in games of “lets play with the latest toy”. I’ve done the synchronous co-construct in a Google Doc often enough to know that the constant refreshing will drive any real thoughts of collaborative writing out of the window.

But regularly I am seduced by the promise of true collaboration and aspiring to true geekhood. So once again I sit with my co-constructors waiting for the Google Doc to stop scrolling, surreptitiously checking my email while in front of my bedazzled eyes every websearch, every GChat, indeed all of my email and shared files are quickly searched and indexed.

So should we panic? Afterall Google’s mantra is “don’t be evil” and they are the good guys … right?

According to Tim O’Reilly in an essay about Open Source and Cloud Computing, it will be alright in the end.

In short, we’re a long way from having all the answers, but we’re getting there. Despite all the possibilities for lock-in that we see with Web 2.0 and cloud computing, I believe that the benefits of openness and interoperability will eventually prevail, and we’ll see a system made up of cooperating programs that aren’t all owned by the same company, an internet platform, that, like Linux on the commodity PC architecture, is assembled from the work of thousands. Those who are skeptical of the idea of the internet operating system argue that we’re missing the kinds of control layers that characterize a true operating system. I like to remind them that much of the software that is today assembled into a Linux system already existed before Linus wrote the kernel. Like LA, 72 suburbs in search of a city, today’s web is 72 subsystems in search of an operating system kernel. When we finally get that kernel, it had better be open source.

Can we afford to wait?

Deployment

Great Stories on the Internet

nix — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 02:48:53 +0000

Last week at our Nga Taonga Cluster Teacher Only Day Dorothy Burt challenged the audience to Google themselves occasionally. I couldn’t determine, from the nervous titter, whether many people actually had but here I am ready to say that I regularly Google myself.

And what a fascinating interweb life I have led. The first Google Link finds my website and lists my contact information. There are some old listerv messages about technical issues that I had when I was trying to share our first broadband connection and some pages from when I was classroom teaching and even some nonsense from yet another bout of trying (unsuccessfully) to organise myself GTD style.

I found myself all over the usual social networking culprits. There are lots of pages about me in sites that I haven’t signed up for, judging by the information inside them they are frontends for various database leechers.

And then there is my writing. According to one blog, my

prose is the most beautiful I have ever read – almost a hymn to language.

and another fan of mine says

She writes so poetically and her stories are so sad; about isolation and betrayal. (Chefleur’s Caprice)

Unfortunately not everyone likes my writing quite as much as these two fans. Frewrious Spew said that a book I published in 2004 was rubbish. Jess, writing three years after I published that particular little potboiler, is a little kinder but still said my storyline was silly and that I needed to think less about being risque and more about the relationships I was writing about.

I could make a fairly substantial wager that most of my friends (both in real life and online) didn’t know that I was a writer and had several of my books published. I could also lay good odds on the fact that my Australian heritage would come as a surprise to most people who know me. When I found out it came as a surprise to me too.

Despite what some blogs, newspapers and even one year ten reading list say I am not the writer of The Bride Stripped Bare. The writer of that novel was unmasked as Nikki Gemmell – note the slight difference in speling between Nikki and Nicki?

It’s all a bit silly really and even a cursory check of facts would reveal that I am not a writer of the calibre of my sort of namesake. However, the people who wrote these blog posts, newspaper articles (actually it’s a blog post too) and put together the college reading list all made a simple spelling error. And, that error remains on the internet to be seen for years afterwards.

These errors get picked up my people who come looking for information. Sometimes it’s a child – who puts the wrong information into a school project. Other times it’s adults who don’t cross-check their facts and then make other more damning assumptions.

I am quite happy if people think that I am able to write poetic prose – hymns to language. But what if I wasn’t? And what about the other Nicki / Nikki Gemmell? She might not want to be confused with someone like me.

To Google

nix — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 22:08:59 +0000

The Independent Online reports that Google is attempting to defend its trademark against media who use the word ‘google’ as a verb.
via Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuausion:

Beyond the sheer legal issues, one of the places where this of course gets fuzzy is in the definition of “media.” How in the world do they expect to enforce this when every blogger under the sun uses the phrase on his/her own sites? It’s part of the pop culture.

Is this another step towards Google’s world domination – the Evolving Personalized Information Construct where Google gain control of the media? This comes from the company who say that one of their ten principles is that “Democracy on the web works”

In the words of a great Kiwi Philosopher:

EDIT: 16th August 2006 – BoingBoing’s take.

Google Maps Mashup – NZ!

nix — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 20:24:29 +0000

Google Maps Mania (a blog devoted to all things Google Maps) has a post about some New Zealand Google Map Mashups (What is a mashup?)

One of the mashups is a street map index at Mayo. I entered “Summerland Dr” and was immediately taken to my own street in Waitakere City. I tried to be tricky and put in “Rimu Dr” which is in Wairoa, Hawkes Bay and … it found my parents’ place. Roadwatch has a speed camera index and Tagzania (not specifically NZ) is trying to tag the whole planet.

Google Maps – just type in New Zealand!
Wikipedia links:
Googlemaps
Mashup
Tags

All of the necessary information to be able to do this is freely available on the web. Google are happy to share the API so that we end users can have a play and create our own Google Map Mashup. It could be an interesting project if someone had some spare time.

Linkfest

nix — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 06:22:29 +0000

I’m in the middle of a site tidy up and so I am in a posting mood. Long may it last.

Podz has a great tutorial for getting Wordpress on a USB memory stick. I can verify that this does actually work and is a handy way of demonstrating how Wordpress works. Get the tutorial here – not forgetting all of Podz’ other great helpfiles.

According to ZDNet, Google are planning their own version of GDrive. The idea originated when GMail (Google) decided to offer 1 gigabyte of storage to their email account holders. A clever programmer designed a Windows extension to allow people to use their GMail storage space as a virtual storage drive. Now it looks like Google are going to offer the facility albeit in some cases as a paid service. It’s interesting to note that a similar service is being offered by Box.net.

Fix those annoying Firefox memory leak issues.

A map of ships in the world’s oceans.

A UK investigation over pricefixing in the music downloading business. Not something we need to worry about here as there isn’t that much choice at the moment. A report from Wired Magazine.

Back to tidying up my site.