Advocate's Studio

Plug your search terms into Google and come up with the sites that have paid or engineered themselves to rank highest in the results order. Plug your search terms into SweetSearch and pick from websites whose rankings are based on their reliability and credibility.

According to Lifehacker’s Kevin Purdy, SweetSearch premises its results on the rankings employed by FindingDulcinea, an aggregator of scholarly websites. Only 35,000 of the best sites, rated and approved by SweetSearch’s researchers, are indexed. Pages from the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, educational and public institutions rise to the top, while psuedo-educational sites are swept aside.

While a visit to their page reveals that SweetSearch is obviously geared towards students, it doesn’t take a PhD in rocket science to realize the value for any researcher looking for the right information on the Web. If you like the idea of losing that first step of sifting through your Google results for the most credible site links, check out SweetSearch.

One fantastic source of relevant information is the stuff distributed by the thought leaders on a given subject in a given community. One assumes that the information such thought leaders consume, process and then pass forth to others is of a greater value than, say, the average random post floating by in a galloping stream of content.

When considering where to mine for value, one cannot ignore Twitter, although one might like to. I say this because I myself have felt the frustration of reading a section of the stream and only finding information of little to no relevance to me, despite my constant effort to cultivate and pare follows and group them in lists. Simple search may not be enough: when I enter a keyword, I am often met with a barrage of information ranging from spam to sham from users I have no prior connection with and, therefore, no basis upon which to assess the value of their contribution.

There may be some answers to these issues in the pipeline. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb writes about a new service that is not quite open to the public called Curated.by.

Curated.by is a tool that allows you to gather and share collections of tweets on topics of interest. Once the collections are created, you can share them, embed them on a web page, or, more imporantly, subscribe to the collections of other users.

I have no first hand experience with the service yet. It is the creation of Bastian Lehmann, who interestingly enough was responsible for another Twitter trend tracking tool (say that five times fast) called Zensify that I wrote about here (link)  in the Studio over a year ago. The interface sounds simple enough: drag and drop tweets into a collection created on the site, or use a Chrome extension to collect tweets right on the Twitter web page.  Check out Mr. Lehmann’s own Flipboard tweet list here, to get a sense for what a Curated.by list might look like.

I see two excellent uses for this tool: (1) create a list of valuable tweets that compliment your own expertise or subject matter and embed or share them with others to show your powers of curation; and (2) find the curated tweet lists of others whose opinions you value on given subjects so that you can cut down the time spent in Twitter finding the shiny stuff. This would be an example of personal serendipity with a slight lean toward search on the Relevance Matrix discussed in my prior post.

Curated.by is not the only option out there. My longtime fav legal content publication tool, JD Supra, also offers an application within Facebook called Social Transcripts that allows you to enter one or more keyword terms, collect tweets and share them in a tab on your Profile page. Once at day, the application will publish a note containing your transcript to your Facebook friends. I tend to pay attention to the information highlighted by people whose insight I value, so Social Transcripts from valued connections are similarly promoted in my mind.

Mr. Kirkpatrick also notes in his post another curation service, this one for blogs, called Curated.info (link here).  Curated.info collects and bundles blog subscriptions. Removes some of the heavy lifting if you can find bundles created by users who know what they are talking about.

It can’t be overstated: effective Web use is all about efficiency. And with time being money or money being time or something like that, tools like Curated.by, Curated.info and Social Transcripts can only help.

Still trying to grok relevance in our current Internet state of affairs? Simply put, relevance is the degree of value and importance that a particular item of data holds for you. Filters and tools help us sift through the irrelevant to find the relevant. Different tools fit different needs – relevance is directly related to how particular information is uncovered, how it is intended to be used and its degree of implicit veracity and support.

Skeptic Geek Mahendra Palsule has put some brain cells into mapping relevance with a visual representation that sorts the tools in different need quadrants.  While I believe the purpose of Mr. Palsule’s exercise was to determine the front runners in the battle for our attention raging among startup tech companies. I think the mapping also serves as a decent primer for any web user to get a sense of what tools will yield which result. Check out his map below:

Just to clarify, search vs. serendipity addresses the range of behavior from actively looking for something specific to simply happening upon something of value. Popular vs. personalized reflects the range between data that is hot across the masses compared to info that is ranking high within your own social circle.

The tools noted above are not an all-inclusive list – I can think of at least ten more right now off the top of my head that should fit on this x y axis chart. Nonetheless, the chart provides a great overview of where the different types of tools fit in the overall scheme of how to find, filter and interact with the information most valuable to you.

I strongly urge you to hit the jump to Mr. Palsule’s original article, where he provides a more detailed explanation of what he was trying to accomplish with the table and his FORMAT method of categorizing the tools. If you understand how the tools fit in the bigger picture, you can more readily figure out which tool to use for a given purpose.

If you have an iPhone, you are familiar with Spotlight Search. If you have a presence in the cloud, then the cloud-counterpart to Spotlight might be Greplin (link here). Akin to Spotlight’s ability to search  your entire hard-wired iDevice memory and across applications for the keyword you specify, Greplin let’s you search through all of your public and private content across the cloud-based services you hook up to your Greplin account.

News of Greplin first broke back in March, 2010. Now Greplin is available in private beta. Submit your registration at the link above and select the on-line haunts you wish to connect: Facebook; Gmail; Twitter; DropBox; LinkedIn; Google Calendar; and Google Docs. A pro account, for the measly sum of $45 per year, allows you to also connect to Salesforce, Evernote, Box, Basecamp, and Google Voice transcripts. How totally awesome is that?

If you have been working at all in the cloud, participating in the soc nets, and curating and sharing content, how can Greplin NOT be a winner? I repeatedly find myself searching within the various sites I use for old links or content that I had forgotten to star or favorite or otherwise file in an easy to find place. Not all sites archive. Not all search functions are up to my standards. No more – now all I will need to do is remember that the information had something to do with semantic search or the conference I am supposed to attend in six months and, with Greplin, I’m off to the races.

This is yet another piece in the puzzle-theme I am pressing here in the Studio today: you have to streamline and organize your on-line life. With Priority Inbox, you can take control of the important Gmail tasks first. With relevance filters, you can cut right to the newest information on the Web about your preferred topics. And now, with Greplin, you can quickly put your finger on the fruits of your on-line research and networking efforts – giving you that much power over the most treasured commodity of our time – relevant data.

I was compelled to open and read an article in my Google Reader from Lifehacker’s Adam Dachis entitled Why Technology is So Addictive and How You Can Avoid It (link here). I know, I know. To the casual observer, I probably fall squarely within the dopamine-addled masses who reach for their smartphone or iPad whenever there is a break in the level of external, non-tech stimulation. But I have grappled with this concept over the past several months. Not so much because I fear addiction, but more because I really don’t want to spend any more time on technology than I really must to reach the end I want to achieve.

O.k., English please. What I am saying is that technology, like your average hammer or pencil, is simply a tool. A means to an end. That end differs for different users (and I really don’t mean users in the druggie sense). Technology affords a compelling precision implement, a surgical scalpel, that can lessen the weight of otherwise heavy tasks. Such as staying on top of your area of expertise. Or staying in meaningful contact with people who are important to you, whether for business or personal reasons, and sharing relevant information.

Because of technology, we can now send greater quantity of higher quality communications and information to a larger audience. In turn, we (arguably) can absorb a greater quantity of higher quality and more timely information that might help us make important decisions across the spectrum of our needs. That is why the tech explosion of late has pulled along so many mainstream users – look, Auntie M, I can now get my daily updates on Cousin Lulu without having to pick up a phone, or even write an email.

I am not going to touch Mr. Dachis’ points on tech-etiquette here. I would like to assume that Studio Readers already know how to prioritize human interaction and tech interaction. But I do wish to point out Mr. Dachis’ cause for such addiction and overload issues and suggested remedy.:

One effective way of dealing with information overload is actually organizing information. This may be an obvious one, but most of us think more about organization than actually doing it. You’re going to get organized at some point, so you might as well start now (if you haven’t, that is). Email is one of the toughest things to get under control and there are more solutions out there than you could ever really try. Google’s new Priority Inbox is a great new way to focus on the important messages in your inbox. A Chrome and Firefox extension called Boomerang lets you schedule when you send and receive emails. Communicating through speed appropriate channels rather than funneling everything through email can help, too. You can even offload distractions to an iPad, or another device you have, so you can focus on specific things on specific devices. However you organize your information, just be sure to evolve your system to fit changes in the way your information flows.

Really, so much of the handling of our technology depends on implementing efficiencies so that the tech is a helpful passenger rather than the driver of the vehicle. For example, just last night, I spent about a half hour reorganizing my iPad feed readers. I have determined from the past few months that I can cut through my feeds faster if I can read them in an uncluttered, visual format on the iPad. So, I now have two text-based and two magazine-layout-based readers on my iPad, with different feeds in each app. Why? Because I can blow right through the most important feeds on the visual readers in record time. If I have additional time, I can always go to the text-based readers to hit more detail.

The future of the web is relevancy. To me, it is far more important to be relevant than it is to be fast. Along with my post this morning about Google’s new Priority Inbox that will automatically sort your email for you, the list of applications that cater to relevancy while improving delivery speed are growing. Filters like Google Reader’s “magic” setting and apps like Feedly, my6sense, Zite and Lazyfeed are making it easer to spend less time researching and more time creating. My admonition to lawyers, professionals or, really, anyone on the Web is to get to know these filtering systems and use them to avoid overload and the addiction necessary to stay on top of the overload. At first it will require spending more time getting up to speed and implementing your chosen method. But ultimately, you might even end up with enough time to start a new hobby. Like stamp collecting. Or gardening.

Google’s at it again. This time, the object of its affections is Gmail. Today, Google will be rolling out Priority Inbox (link here). In a nutshell, application of this feature will automatically sift to the top of your email pile the messages deemed of greatest importance to you. When enabled, all of your messages will be sorted into three groups – “important and unread”, “starred” and “everything else” – and will be slotted in your inbox accordingly.

Look for the “New! Priority Inbox” message on the top right of your screen (it should be there within the next week or so). Then, simply set it up in your account and click yes when it asks you whether you want to enable the system. There are a few set-up options, such as manual selection of priority contacts and order of inboxes, but most of the magic comes from Google’s ability to read how you read your email. Google looks at how the mail is addressed (whether just you or to a group), which emails you open and respond to (and how frequently you do so) with respect to a particular sender and keywords in the emails you most frequently read. As you use the filter, you can instruct Google when it makes a mistake, such as starring messages that Google thought were unimportant and demoting those Google wrongly pushed to the top. Over time, it will learn your preferences.

Reports from people who have been using this service before the public roll-out indicate that the service is very good, but not perfect. But perhaps they haven’t spent enough time yet teaching the algorithm the ropes.

Obviously, from the email sender point of view, it will be important to consider how to phrase your message so that someone else’s Priority Inbox doesn’t demote your missive to the bottom of the heap. In other words, consider when and how to use group email addressing and what keywords to include in your message to ensure it will rise to the top. Sort of like search engine optimization for email.

Looking forward to trying this out – I get a lot of dreck along with the diamonds in my Gmail inboxes – interested in seeing just how effective Priority Inbox can be.

On a humorous note, I learned that Google considers email that is a cut above “spam” but lower on the priority totem pole to be “bologna” or “bacn“, the latter being email that a person has subscribed to, but isn’t regularly read or responded to. I thought people on the internet thought bacon was a good thing. There I go, learning something new every day again.

If you have been on the Web the past couple of days, you might have heard about Google’s rollout of this cool new feature: make Google Voice calls straight from your Gmail / GChat interface. Google Voice is a fantastic application that gives you the ability to monitor and manage calling with voice messaging, text transcripts, fine-grained call routing and tele-spam control. I previously have covered it in the Studio (link here).

Prior to the new add, using Google Voice to make calls was a little bit of a process, requiring you to institute a call from within Google Voice and then employ the designated phone to actually make the call, or to use third party application Gizmo and set up a gadget within Gmail to do so. The latter option was still a bit of a process and never really worked well for me.

Now, if you have a Google Voice account (which presumes a Google Gmail account) and a computer outfitted with a speaker and microphone, you are good to go. All you need to do is download the Google voice and video plug-in utility onto your desired computer, sign into your Gmail / GChat account and look at the top of the Chat window. There you will see a little phone icon and “Call Phone” link:

Click on that button and you will then see a little phone keypad pop up in the lower right hand corner of your screen:

Type your number in and hit call. It’s that easy. Of course, calls made through this interface show up in your Google Voice dashboard and will show up in someone’s caller ID as your Google Voice number.

All U.S. calls are free and international calls are extremely cheap. Hit the money link shown above the keypad to access an international rate menu and see for yourself. Combine the easy-to-use new Google Voice on your desktop via Gmail with Google Voice on your cellphone and, PRESTO – instant, free, agile telephony solution for your personal or business needs! You can’t lose.

Want more about GVoice and Gmail? Check out Google’s own video below:

Grammar. It’s cool. And now it’s high tech, with a new iPad app. Terminology for iPad offers that “special something” for your writing just in time for the start of the school year. The app contains a searchable dictionary and thesaurus. They can be used off-line, in case you can’t hook into the ‘net for your word fix. But, if you do have Web access, you can find additional information on your desired word or phrase via Wikipedia and Wiktionary. Mark your favorite words for fast future searching. Best of all, the interface is simple and clean, making your lexicographically-inclined pursuits that much easier. Tighten up your next brief, business report, email or term paper, or simply pull out a killer word out for Scrabble or Words with Friends with Terminology.

Let’s face it. Even the most editorially-inclined among us has come to rely on the spellchecker as a second set of eyes to minimize spelling gaffs and basic punctuation issues. But maybe your writing issues are deeper than spelling and spacing. For you, there is Phras.In (link here). This web-based, beta tool will take alternative versions of a phrase, run them both through a Google search and compare the results. The phrasing that yields the most hits wins.

Phras.In is built on the assumption that the crowd rules the day. This, of course, is not necessarily true when it comes to proper English grammar and usage. However, it is certainly true of colloqial phrasings or commonly-accepted wordings. Thus, as indicated on the site, Phras.In’s best use might be for someone who speaks English as a second language and who wants to adopt a more natural, native tone.

So, how does it work? You are given two boxes in which to type your alternative phrasings. As you type them, the number of Google hits for the phrases are displayed to the right. The phrase “the cow jumped over the moon” received 48,300 hits, while the phrase “the moon was jumped over by the cow” got a whopping 27 hits, primarily from sites explaining the perils of the passive voice. I knew this because I hit the “contextualize” button, which reveals a few lines from the website surrounding the desired phrase.

Phras.In worked fast and well for general purpose comparison. If nothing else, it saves you the time and effort of crafting your own Google search and reviewing all of the page results. Well done, Francesco!

Maybe I should have said tabular, but still, this free report from Experian Simmons, entitled the 2010 Social Networking Report contains lots of data on recent increases in social media usage, confirming suspicions that social media networking is indeed on the steep rise. The entire report can be downloaded after filling out some basic information or you can view it online (link here). I thought it worthwhile to quote the follownig two paragraphs from the introduction to give a flavor for the findings:

The 2010 Social Networking Report provides the hard data behind this consumer revolution, including the fact that fully 66% of online Americans use social networking sites today, up from just 20% in 2007. Social networking is an increasingly addictive activity, with nearly half of those who access such sites (43%) reporting that they visit them multiple times per day. While users of social networking sites may have initially signed up to better keep in touch with friends, a growing number say they now use sites like Facebook to connect with family members. An astounding 70% of social networkers keep in touch with family via their various online networks, up from 61% a year ago.

Fully two-thirds of all online adults today have visited a social networking site in the last 30 days, up from 53% in 2008 and 20% in 2007. Social networks have most thoroughly penetrated the young adult market, as nearly 9-in-10 online 18-to 34-year-olds visit such sites today. But even older Americans are tapping into social networks, with 41% of online adults age 50 and older making monthly visits to sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.