Saturday, 3 December 2005
Dot-eu domain about to go live
Expect to start seeing sites in the .eu domain within the next few days. The new top-level domain goes live on December 7th but only trademark holders and public bodies will be able to register during the so-called "sunrise period". Registrations for the domain, which will be handled by Eurid, will be open to the rest of us on 7 April 2006.
Firefox 1.5 released
The latest version of Firefox, 1.5, has been released. New and improved features include:
* "drag and drop" feature for tabbed browsing so that you can re-arrange the tabs
* Improved pop-up blocker
*Addition of Answers.com now included in the integrated Search box.
* Improved Live Bookmarks feature for RSS feeds.
* New Automatic Update system
* New Clear Private Data tool so that you can clear all private information, such as history and form entries, via one settings window.
I have also noticed that it displays pages significantly faster.
You may find that some of your extensions may be disabled because Firefox thinks that they are not compatible with this latest version. I initially had a problem with Flashblock, Googlebar, TinyUrl creator and Pagerank. Checking for updates will sort out most of the "incomptibilities". For the rest, try the Nightly Tester Tools extension. Primarily intended to check for new nightly builds of Firefox, it also has an option that tells Firefox your existing plug-ins can work with the latest download. There is a chance that an extension could cause problems but it worked OK with my collection.
* "drag and drop" feature for tabbed browsing so that you can re-arrange the tabs
* Improved pop-up blocker
*Addition of Answers.com now included in the integrated Search box.
* Improved Live Bookmarks feature for RSS feeds.
* New Automatic Update system
* New Clear Private Data tool so that you can clear all private information, such as history and form entries, via one settings window.
I have also noticed that it displays pages significantly faster.
You may find that some of your extensions may be disabled because Firefox thinks that they are not compatible with this latest version. I initially had a problem with Flashblock, Googlebar, TinyUrl creator and Pagerank. Checking for updates will sort out most of the "incomptibilities". For the rest, try the Nightly Tester Tools extension. Primarily intended to check for new nightly builds of Firefox, it also has an option that tells Firefox your existing plug-ins can work with the latest download. There is a chance that an extension could cause problems but it worked OK with my collection.
Friday, 18 November 2005
See the Cheapest UK Petrol Prices for Free - PetrolPrices.com
See the Cheapest UK Petrol Prices for Free - PetrolPrices.com
This site is maintained by Fubra who are the people behind OurProperty.co.uk. To find the lowest petrol price in your area you just type in a town or postcode. By default it looks for unleaded prices within 5 miles of your area. You can change the fuel type to Super Unleaded, LPG, LRP, or Premium Diesel and the distance to 2 miles (inner metropolitan areas only), 10, 15 or 20 miles. As well as listing the 5 cheapest stations and the price, you can see their location on a map from Google Local.
The data covers over 10,000 stations and there are about 8000 daily updates. Data is provided by Catalist in asssociation with Arval and collected from fuel card transactions that are processed at petrol stations across the country each day.
You can search 20 unique areas or postcodes per week and are allowed to search for each unique postcode as many times as you like. It is a free service but you do have to register to view the detailed information.
This site is maintained by Fubra who are the people behind OurProperty.co.uk. To find the lowest petrol price in your area you just type in a town or postcode. By default it looks for unleaded prices within 5 miles of your area. You can change the fuel type to Super Unleaded, LPG, LRP, or Premium Diesel and the distance to 2 miles (inner metropolitan areas only), 10, 15 or 20 miles. As well as listing the 5 cheapest stations and the price, you can see their location on a map from Google Local.
The data covers over 10,000 stations and there are about 8000 daily updates. Data is provided by Catalist in asssociation with Arval and collected from fuel card transactions that are processed at petrol stations across the country each day.
You can search 20 unique areas or postcodes per week and are allowed to search for each unique postcode as many times as you like. It is a free service but you do have to register to view the detailed information.
Google Print Becomes Google Book Search
Google Print has become Google Book Search with a new URL at http://books.google.com/.
Google say that "This change reflects the ongoing growth of the product and our continuing effort to make the search service more user-friendly... Additionally, users and publishers told us the name Print was confusing: some thought the product existed to help them print web pages."
As well as a name change, there are additions to the Advanced Search screen including options for searching by title, author, publisher, year or years of publication, and ISBN.
Google say that "This change reflects the ongoing growth of the product and our continuing effort to make the search service more user-friendly... Additionally, users and publishers told us the name Print was confusing: some thought the product existed to help them print web pages."
As well as a name change, there are additions to the Advanced Search screen including options for searching by title, author, publisher, year or years of publication, and ISBN.
Saturday, 29 October 2005
Top 10 Search Tips
At the end of every advanced search workshop that we run, the delegates vote on their 10 top search tips. The latest course was run for UKeiG (UK eInformation Group) on Friday, October 28th and was held at CILIP in London. A summary of the tips is given below but a more detailed explanation will appear in the UKeiG members newsletter eLucidate, and in the members area on the UKeiG web site.
1. Use domain/site search to limit by type of site and to search individual sites that are difficult to navigate.
2. Trovando.it for a quick way to run your search in different search tools one by one.
3. Use Yahoo for complex nested Boolean searches.
4. Think about the format that the information might be in and use the filetype options to narrow down your search.
5. "Disappearing" pages: use the search engines' cached pages for recently disappeared pages or the Wayback Machine for older pages and sites.
6. Use the Google numeric range when searching for ranges of prices, distances, weights, temperatures, years etc.
7. Don't give up! If your favourite search engine is not working, try another one or a different type of resource.
8. Graball for comparing the results from 2 search engines side by side.
9. Copernic Desktop for desktop search.
10. Yahoo Mindset to adjust the ranking of results ("shopping" versus "research")
1. Use domain/site search to limit by type of site and to search individual sites that are difficult to navigate.
2. Trovando.it for a quick way to run your search in different search tools one by one.
3. Use Yahoo for complex nested Boolean searches.
4. Think about the format that the information might be in and use the filetype options to narrow down your search.
5. "Disappearing" pages: use the search engines' cached pages for recently disappeared pages or the Wayback Machine for older pages and sites.
6. Use the Google numeric range when searching for ranges of prices, distances, weights, temperatures, years etc.
7. Don't give up! If your favourite search engine is not working, try another one or a different type of resource.
8. Graball for comparing the results from 2 search engines side by side.
9. Copernic Desktop for desktop search.
10. Yahoo Mindset to adjust the ranking of results ("shopping" versus "research")
Monday, 17 October 2005
Business Week Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard
Business Week have released their 2005 league table of top 100 global brands. The table ranks 100 global brands that have a value greater than $1 billion. The brands are selected according to two criteria: they have to be global in nature, deriving 20% or more of sales from outside their home country, and there also has to be publicly available marketing and financial data on which to base the valuation. The table also gives rankings for the years 2001 to 2004.
There is no change in the top 5: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE and Intel. Google makes a first appearance at number 38 sandwiched between Goldman Sachs and Kellogg's, and Yahoo is up two places at 58. Apple has also gone up two places to number 41. Amazon has gone down slightly from last year's 66 to 68 this year while eBay has risen 5 places to number 55.
There is no change in the top 5: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE and Intel. Google makes a first appearance at number 38 sandwiched between Goldman Sachs and Kellogg's, and Yahoo is up two places at 58. Apple has also gone up two places to number 41. Amazon has gone down slightly from last year's 66 to 68 this year while eBay has risen 5 places to number 55.
Monday, 10 October 2005
Email must die!
Email must die! That was the battle cry that rang out this morning at Internet Librarian International in London, with Brian Kelly leading the attack. Quote as posted on the ILI wiki by rakerman:
"Poor metadata - bad subject lines, subject lines not changed..."
"Viruses, spam, flame wars..."
"Email is where knowledge goes to die"It was an excellent presentation and I wholeheartedly agree with Brian. I'm already using RSS, blogs, Wikis and Skype which were all mentioned by him as alternatives but I have been wary of IM, one of the other options he covered. But I am now going to give it a go, especially as May Chang gave some useful pointers to multi-protocol systems in her talk before lunch.
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