Librarian of Fortune

I already miss Molly Ivins

Molly Ivins passed away today, at age 62, from breast cancer. It's a sad day for every bleeding-heart liberal and anyone who enjoys reading really sharp wit. She wrote her last column just a couple of weeks ago, about the escalation of troops in Iraq. I miss her voice already. A tribute to her and a compilation of her columns is here.

Her last column ended:

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"

Autism in an entirely new light

Autism has always interested me; I find it fascinating to see how differently a brain can function. Temple Grandin, one of the better-known autistics, and one who communicates well and has raised awareness of autism, is a great spokesperson. But reading her work doesn't give you any awareness of the world of autistic people who are labeled low-functioning, and those who cannot speak. BoingBoing pointed me to this amazing YouTube video by a woman with autism, along with a translation of her language. As she said:

The first part is in my "native language," and then the second part provides a translation, or at least an explanation [beginning
. This is not a look-at-the-autie gawking freakshow as much as it is a statement about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.

It's incredibly thought-provoking; she challenges viewers to consider that she is communicating in a fuller way with her entire environment, and comments that it's odd that it is she who is considered non-communicative simply because we have not bothered to learn her language. And, as it turns out, she is very articulate in "our" language as well.

From her web site:

[Autistic people] do have ways of communicating with things around us that are mutually comprehensible for many of us (not all of us, and not all the same things are comprehensible, there seem to be groupings in that regard). Our interests and our reactions are not random, purposeless, or useless, and are certainly not ugly things to be hidden away or trained out of.

Bottom line: watch the video, then go to her blog and read it. She is perhaps the most self-aware person I've encountered, incredibly articulate, and able to bring non-autistic readers into a world that is so drastically different from our own. I am, in fact, beyond words right now...

One way she described her situation was “The lights are on. Yes, I’m home. You’re just not looking in the right windows. Keep trying.”

Just go watch the video and then read her blog.

Ask X - my new favorite search engine

I write a monthly e-newsletter on research tips. The one from this month is about Ask X, a beta version of what Ask.com may eventually look like.

It has pretty much the same information as Ask.com's search results page, but it looks and feels much more functional.

Eventually, Ask X will have a "real" URL;[Just heard from Gary Price that you can also get to it through AskX.com] in the meantime, head over to www.ask.com/?ax=5 and type in your search words. The search results page manages to pack a lot of information into a clean, uncluttered format. Go here to see the results of a search for "customer loyalty" -- a topic I was researching last week.

Wikiseek: a replacement for ODP?

The Open Directory Project was one of the first volunteer-built directories of the best-of-the-web sites, similar to the original iteration of Yahoo, but with categories created and maintained by volunteers. Google and other SEs have used ODP for their "Directory" search. Unfortunately, ODP is running out of steam, energy, volunteers and creativity. It is a quart of milk about 2 weeks past its sell-by date.

But I just discovered Wikiseek and I'm about ready to swoon in excitement. It's a search engine, yeah, but it only indexes pages within Wikipedia and the sites that are linked to from Wikipedia articles.

For years, I've been recommending subject directories as good starting points for research, because they usually include the best sites rather than whatever floats to the top of search engine results. (For example, the heinous martinlutherking.org site used to show up at the top of search results for Dr. King.) And the sites that are linked to within Wikipedia articles are almost by definition reputable and reliable, thanks to the peer-editing of the wiki. So Wikiseek is a way to just search the pages that - for one reason or another - Wikipedia editors believe are important.

I gave Wikiseek a try and I'm liking it. Among its cool features is the ability to limit the results to just those sites linked-to from articles within a specific Wikipedia category. Interestingly, the list of categories are tag-cloud-ish -- the links to the largest categories are in larger font than the smaller categories. A search for avian flu, for example, can be limited to sites from the "Animal Diseases" category (great big font), Epidemiology, Viruses or Zoonoses (tiny font). (And no, I didn't know what zoonoses are either.)

It's still beta, so it feels pretty bare bones right now. But it's sure worth watching.

Another viral marketing campaign

CareerBuilder launched this site a while ago; I just learned about it. Called Monk-E-mail, it's actually pretty cool. The gimmick is that you can select one of three talking apes,give the ape a hat, glasses, clothes and a background (a men's bathroom, snowy yard, baseball stadium, etc.) and then the ape reads your email to the recipient. What's cool is that you can send your message in several ways.

• You can record your message and upload it
• You can phone a toll-free number, enter a pass code and record a message
• You can type in a message and it uses text-to-speech software to translate it into spoken words. You can even select which of several voices you want to use to read your message.

Obviously, it's the last approach that I especially like. It does pretty well, all things considered. As viral ad campaigns go, it's pretty good. For an example of what a Monk-E-Mail looks like, click here for a special Monk-E-Mail just for you.

If this is the answer, what the heck is the question?

I recently learned about ChaCha, a human-search service similar to Yahoo Answers and the now-defunct Google Answers. This still-in-beta site has "thousands of guides" available to discuss your search question via online chat and then deliver web sites that match your information need – imagine the love child of Google and a very harried reference librarian.

This means that the Guide, as ChaCha calls its searchers, has about 30 seconds to process your question and then start feeding web sites to you. I gave it a whirl with a question I had just researched myself. I was connected to a Guide whose ChaCha profile, I later saw, is:

Hello everyone. I am a fulltime homemaker. My husband is a retired Toledo, Ohio firefighter. I have 3 grown sons and 2 absolutely awesome grandchildren. ChaCha rocks!

Her areas of expertise range from American Idol to arthritis, diets, gossip, Toys R Us, and Wikipedia.  This is not confidence-inspiring. (If you're not happy with the guide who initially takes your query, you can ask for another guide, but you can't request a specific guide.)

OK… Here's the transcript of our conversation, with her name changed.

ChaCha guide: Welcome to ChaCha!
MEB: Hi. I'm looking for examples of good corporate customer-loyalty programs.
ChaCha guide: searching
[Displays summaries of three sites, from an unspecified search-engine search]
MEB: No, these are companies that offer loyalty program packages TO COMPANIES. I'm looking for examples of companies that have good customer-loyalty programs. For example, Chico's (women's clothing store) is known for its customers' fierce loyalty. I'm looking for similar examples.
ChaCha guide: ok, let me see what I can do
ChaCha guide: Not finding much the other way around
ChaCha guide: but still searching
ChaCha guide: I recatagorized in hopes of finding something
MEB: Hmmmm. The third site you sent me just shows a discussion of someone who's unhappy with cell phone companies. I'm looking for companies with GOOD customer loyalty.
ChaCha guide: still searching
ChaCha guide: I keep rewording it in hopes of finding some sites
ChaCha guide: I am not finding a list of companies, just how to reward their customers, like this
ChaCha guide: shoot, not my appolication is messing up
ChaCha guide: Thank you for using ChaCha!
Status: Session ended
-----

Pretty disappointing – she was looking for a slam-dunk list rather than thinking creatively about where this information might likely be.

Then I did some research into ChaCha. According to a profile on ABC's Good Morning America, ChaCha guides are people who like to search the web and who, after passing a short vetting process, log on and see if there are any questions to answer. The service is free to users; the guides' pay starts at -- hang on to your hats -- $5/search-hour, and caps at $10/hour. Guides are paid immediately (I sort of like that image of trained rats getting their food pellet after pressing the right button), via direct deposit to a bank acount or onto a debit card.

Bottom line? ChaCha is building an advertiser-supported search service that relies on people who work for less than minimum wage, have no verified expertise in any of the areas in which they claim knowledge, and who don't seem to have much experience figuring out what their "clients" want.

It's probably a fine service if you are a rank beginner in using a search engine, and you don't want to ask your kid how Google works. But, IMO, ChaCha does a huge disservice to most users, who think they are getting expert assistance but are relying on -- based on my quick review of Guide profiles -- a lot of students and stay-at-home moms.

My flight to nowhere

I admit, I'm a whore for United Airlines. It's got a hub in Denver, my local airport, and generally flies to where I need to go. So, for several years now, I've managed to get 1K status, meaning I've actually flown 100,000 miles a year. It's not pretty.

This last December, I realized that I had not flown enough to qualify for 1K this year, so I found a cheap flight to Honolulu and back, which just bumped me over the top. I managed to upgrade to business class, and actually got a lot of work done, but what a weekend... Left the house for DIA at 11am on a Saturday, arrived in Honolulu at 8pm, spent the night sleeping in the open-air terminal, caught a flight home at 8am the following morning and arrived home at 9pm. (No hotel rooms for love or money, since I arrived on the day after Pearl Harbor Day.)

I had that too-familiar feeling of being dehydrated, bone-tired and stiff, and I didn't even get a new stamp in my passport. At least business-class airplane food isn't too bad.

Not just for word-nerds

I'm in the middle of reading Prisoner in Trebekistan, a book that purports to be about one contestant's decade-long journey as a Jeopardy contestant. But he manages to insert all kinds of other ruminations that I'm enjoying even more than the behind-the-scenes look at Jeopardy. Among the topics he covers are

• how our brains create memories and when they switch from "record" to "access data" mode
• why changing ingrained habits  is so hard (think big strong concrete-encased neural pipelines that resist alteration)
• love and loss
• the connections between cement, bank checks, sex and baseball

Yes, I've also got Brainiac on my bedside table for when I'm ready for hardcore Jeopardy action, but I'm enjoying Trebekistan right now.

May I whinge for a moment?

I go through laptops faster than I should, usually because the laptop either commits suicide (just ask me about my experience with Dell laptops) or I do something bone-headed (when a new peripheral says "be careful which outlet you plug this cable into", be careful).

Since I travel a lot and jones for a net connection 24/7, I signed up for T-Mobile's Total Internet package, which provides wireless net access over T-Mobile's cellular network, around the world. I bought the required PC card that includes both EDGE and wi-fi reception. OK, all's well. Kind of cool, actually, since I can now get my email wherever I have a cellular signal.

Fast-forward a couple of months. I fry my laptop, 24 hours before I'm heading out of town on another speaking gig. I go into CompUSA (guaranteed worst sales staff in the known universe) and buy an HP Pavilion. I like it; it works with every AV set-up I've tried and otherwise runs well. Sucky battery life, but that's why the airplane gods invented in-seat power plugs. Anyway, I discovered that it doesn't have a PC slot; it has an ExpressCard slot which doesn't support PC cards. No adapter possible from one to the other. I spent three weeks finding what I hope is an acceptable USB adapter. And no, T-Mobile does not have an ExpressCard for their not-so-Total Internet service.

Some day, our grandchildren will roll their eyes when we describe the challenges of changing and incompatible hardware/software changes, kind of like how people roll their eyes when I say how butch I felt when I could configure Trumpet Winsock for an Internet connection.

Thank you. I feel much better having gotten that off my chest.

The passing of an era

After six years of publishing a daily newsletter covering the search engine world, Chris Sherman is hanging up his SearchDay pen and moving on to Danny Sullivan's new venture, Search Engine Land. Yeah, Chris is a neighbor, friend, colleague and excellent travel partner, so maybe I'm biased. But I always looked forward to SearchDay. It offered not only SEO/SEM news but insights into how search engines work, new developments in the SE world, and other resources that any good researcher would like to know about. I'm maintaining my SearchDay subscription, but am also reading the daily SearchCap from SearchEngineLand.

Link: Farewell, SearchDay!.