Knowledge Handler

Information Sources & Information Sifting Techniques

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Location: Independence, Ohio, United States

I am a retired librarian, most recently serving at Indiana Wesleyan University's Cleveland Education Center.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

The Web Future of the Web

The Future of the Web: 2008 is an insightful article by Brian Suda that appeared in the January 2, 2008 issue of SitePoint. He predicts the widespread use of 2-dimensional barcodes by cellphone users, among other non-intuitive conclusions.
-D.D.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Reputation Management Skews Search Results

Computerworld ran an article February 12, 2002 which raised issues about the ethics of "Reputation Management" - the art of minimizing the spread of negative information on the web.

Some techniques, such as watching for negative comments and then rebutting them, add to dialogue on the web. On the other hand, some corporations hire a search engine optimization (SEO) firm to ensure that only positive information appears on the initial search engine result list. The SEO firm may create dozens of websites promoting their client, effectively burying negative comments under a blizzard of corporate fluff that has an artificially high page rank on Google. Thus a researcher may need to scan several pages of search results to verify that there is no "dirt" on a company or individual.
-D.D.

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Mahalo

www.mahalo.com is a search tool created by human "guides" who index articles on a wide variety of topics. Any Mahalo user can recommend the best website for a topic (I suggested www.indwes.edu for Indiana Wesleyan): however, an article on a topic needs to be authored by a guide and then reviewed by at least one editor. This results in a tool that has characteristics of Wikipedia and The Open Directory Project. A nice blog entry with a user's view of Mahalo's strengths and weaknesses is Mahalo: A Powerful Tool In the Right Hands.
-D.D.