Library clips

Been using IceRocket search engine lately, what a great up and coming search tool.

Most unique thing I’ve found is that it is the only general search engine that generates RSS feeds..now that FindForward has stopped doing it.

ADDED 5/05/05: Google alert generates RSS feeds for Google (more involved process going through a 3rd party)…and lets not forget FyberSearch.

ADDED 16/05/05: see this post for MSN RSS search feeds.

Also has quick RSS subscriptions, so far icons for Newsgator, My Yahoo! and My MSN.

Some features:

• Search the web
• Search blogs (apparently the most so far)
• Search news
• Search Images
• Search Multi Media (songs, audio books, movies, etc.)
• Search Phone Pics (I guess this is similar to images)
• Search People (Find A Friend)

Advanced search (web search) has phrase searching and a site search box.

Results are great for usability:

• thumbnail snapshots
• open in a new window icon
• info label - hover for sites stats from alexa
• archive label - links to Internet archive:Wayback Machine (to see history of the webpage)
• quick view - this is the best of all, it shows a small scrollable version of the webpage (incase you don’t want to commit to the full click)

  in this mode you can maximise the view even a bit more, and there’s even a link to add it to your favourites

All these features can be customised in the preferences page.

Also has a search history page

That’s not all:

There’s a toolbar

Icespy - recent Icerocket searches

Email A Search - send an email from your phone with the search term and wait for the response.

RSS Builder - it even has a tool for website or blog owners to publish their own RSS feeds, and it’s FREE!

How to Save the World post, My Blog Taxonomy, and some Technical Notes illustrates the blogs new taxonomy. (Not sure if this is a traditional taxonomy - akin to a physical taxonomy where an item in only filed in one category).

It got me thinking on how I use my blog categories. It seems I’ve started using them as subject terms, but I don’t like the idea of where this is leading as the list will get too long.

I prefer them to act as broad containers that may go 2 or 3 levels as the taxonomy mentioned above…and of course they don’t have to be a strict taxonomy, they can be just categories. (traditional 2nd or 3rd level sub-headings can be amongst 1st level if they want, who cares, as long as it reflects your content and is not rigid).

So, using broad names as categories is good for browsing, but what about retrieval…you can always use the search facility.

Better still why not have tags on every posts, but call them subject terms.

This way the categories represent a general topic summary of your content…and the tags represent specific subject terms of your content.

So every blog posts could have a category topic and also subject tags.

Before you publish the post:

• apply your blog category/s
• apply your subject terms…these subject terms will link to tag names in a personal social bookmark manager

When you have published the post:

• then bookmark the post in a tool like Furl with the appropriate subject tags

The extra step is that you have to bookmark every post straight after you publish a post…otherwise if you forget, that post will not appear under that tag.

Also, somehow display a subject term index or zeitgeist or tag cloud (whatever it’s called) in your blog.

Or you could put a link on the side bar called Subject term index, which goes to your Furl account, there lives all your subject terms (they are called topics in Furl, and the icon looks like a folder).

Wow, this also becomes a search engine for your blog, as you can search full-text in every subject term (topic) in the full-text of the whole archive, in essence of your whole blog content.
Only thing is you can’t search for a blog post in multiple categories, unlike del.icio.us.

This is also great for those of you like me whose blog is on a free-host (who knows the future of your blog, it may end tommorrow) as Furl cache’s all bookmarks, so your content lives on and can be cut ‘n paste into a new blog.

To top it off, if it was available, get some code for a Furl search box on your blog…with 2 choices, search for a subject term or search full-text.

Then you have created your own personal search engine for your blog, instead of using Blogdigger or Technorati.
Although, doing it yourself with Furl, you have to index every post yourself and you can’t do fancy link searches on your personal search engine as it only has your posts and no other posts from the blogosphere.

Common Craft - Social Design for the Web: Wiki This- A Model for Customer Support Using Blogs and Wikis further explains from a previous piece that I commented on.

Transferring the essential information from a blog or message board and archiving it in a presentable format like a wiki (the information in the wiki can link back to the original blog posts).

I wish I did this, instead I keep all the information I like in a social bookmark manager like Furl. This is good to store and share information, but it lacks the clarity in presentation of a wiki or a simple web-page. The natural third step is place items of great importance or use in a wiki format or your own webpage.

This is simple but great insight, a company may be working on a particular project; gathering all relevant information for this project from the blogs of the company and archive them in a wiki, listing them in one list/s you can scroll down.
It’s not neccessarily long term, the wiki may be just set up to serve the purpose of a project, once finished the wiki is there for retrospective purposes.

I think an intermediary step would be to quickly store the relevant posts into a bookmark manager (as an organised scrap book), and at the end of the day commence the refining process by reviewing these posts (that are now organised into tags) and paste them into a wiki.

Also note that some social bookmarking tools have a HTML exporting function that could dump your items straight into the wiki (I think?)

Although I do like the Wiki This! bookmarklet, straight from blog (flow) to wiki (stock).