Some big news yesterday was the announcement of the Bing/Twitter/Facebook deals that will see the three services sharing info and working together in all kinds of interesting ways. One of those ways has now gone live, and it’s Microsoft’s Bing Twitter search. It looks a little like Twitter Search, only better, and much more broadly useful.
What do I mean by that? Well, for one, you have Twitter’s trending topics, but more than the 10 you normally see, and they’re arranged in a tag cloud. I also noticed that some from the official Twitter search page aren’t actually present, but it looks like it’s cut out the hashtagged, frivolous stuff, and left the more meaty subjects. Read the rest of this entry »
It seems to be new Google features discovery week, with new search parameters for searching the web in real time, and now a Labs feature called Fast Flip making an appearance. Fast Flip is a visual browser of online publications, designed to give you a quick snapshot of what’s being blogged and talked about at many major news sources at a glance.
If you’re looking to take the pulse of the web at any given moment (and you don’t want the static or excess sensationalism that goes along with using Twitter), Google Fast Flip is as good a place as any to start. It sort of feels like a concise, pre-filtered Alltop that provides a macro level view of some of the web’s most influential and respectable news sources. Read the rest of this entry »
When it comes to collaborative projects, there’s one area where I’ve found it particularly easy to trip up, especially if you’re working with a team you never see in person. As you put together the initial research for a project — maybe interview notes for a series of blog posts, great examples for a web site design, or the figures for a marketing plan — keeping the information organized and accessible for everyone involved can be a major hassle. Read the rest of this entry »
I read about a study over the weekend that suggests the number of competitors can impact our motivation to compete. The researchers found that with a small number of competitors, people had increased motivation to compete, but even with equal chances of success, our motivation can drop when we are faced with large numbers of competitors.
“The simple act of comparing yourself against someone else can stoke the fires of competition. When there are just a few competitors around, making such comparisons is easy but they become more difficult when challengers are plentiful. As a result, the presence of extra contenders, far from spurring us on by adding extra challenge, can actually have the opposite effect. Garcia and Avishalom call this the “N-effect” and they demonstrated it through a number of experiments.” – Ed Yong
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I often need to remind myself that the way I use Twitter is probably not typical when considering the population as a whole. Like many of you, I am online most of the time: sitting at my computer or checking in with my iPhone when I’m away from the laptop. Since I’m always connected and usually working in some form or another, I read tweets frequently and post many times per day.
According to some new Twitter research published on the Harvard Business Blog, my usage is unusual: Read the rest of this entry »
Hi, my name is Dawn, and I am an information junkie.
I love learning new things and sharing them with others, and you can see this trend by looking back across my posts here on WebWorkerDaily and elsewhere. You’ll see many posts focused on finding and consuming information. As I write this blog post, I’m sitting in a coffee shop getting ready for a meeting with someone who has agreed to spend some time demoing Yahoo Query Language (YQL) to help me learn even more techniques to feed my information habit.
I’m also an avid Twitter user, primarily because it is a quick way to consume a variety of information, from keeping up with personal friends to discovering new tools to little nuggets of useful information. Read the rest of this entry »
Many of us spend large parts of our day searching for information. After attending Social Web FooCamp over the weekend, I’ve been thinking about how I search for information using a combination of social and algorithmic methods. When I talk about “social search,” I’m referring to using your network or other human beings to find information. In essence, you’re relying on the knowledge of other people, instead of using Google or another search engine, which uses algorithmic methods to determine the best results. In Sam Dean’s recent post, “5 Free Online Answer Sites for Tech Questions,” he shared five sites where you can ask questions and get answers from people with subject matter expertise, which is a social approach to finding information.
Algorithmic searches, on the other hand, are great for finding information when you know enough about a topic to formulate a strong query that will return highly relevant results. These searches work best for me when my question has little ambiguity and when I know enough about a topic to formulate a good search query. Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
