Advocate's Studio

Frequently, I am asked the question: “how do you find new material to write about on your blog?” Material comes from many sources and the size of my info-flow is directly related to my obsessive curiosity about stuff in general and technology and business development in particular. I fuel that curiosity with a number of web-based tools.

I have discussed RSS and the able reader programs out there in prior posts. I have highlighted Twitter search functionality, Friendfeed and a few other tips and tools to refine the process of fishing for value in the endless internet stream here in the Studio.

Lately, I have been looking to streamline my content in even more effective and efficient ways, as well as pull from new sources that I haven’t yet tapped. My two newest information mining and massaging sources are Feedly and Lazyfeed. I will be highlighting Lazyfeed in this post.

Lazyfeed is a real-time, streaming RSS reader, akin to Google Reader and Newsgator Feeddemon in some ways, and unique in others. It’s main selling point is that Lazyfeed does not require that you search, select and manually input your desired RSS sources. Instead, Lazyfeed pulls blog posts for you based on your selection of topics of interest or “tags.” For those who are unfamiliar with “tags”, they are a form of metadata keyword assigned to any sort of digital information that offer an easy means for sorting and searching that information at a later date.

Lazyfeed’s main screen shows an ever-changing lists of posts on hot topics of general interest at the top and a list of saved tags that shift as new information bearing the tags is found. There also are Getting Started buttons that allow you to: tap an overview; find Hot Topics; manually enter topics of interest; start getting Live updates; access your saved stuff; and, tie in your own topics for “Lazy Me” by entering your own tagged accounts, like blogs, delicious bookmarks, flickr, Twitter, etc., for a more personalized experience.

Here is a shot of my home screen here:

You can see my saved tags on the left. Clicking on the tag will show me all results bearing that tag.

How do you enter these tags? Lazyfeed allows you to browse the streaming topics and “save” any of interest. You can enter tags in the search box or click on tags on the browsing screen to redirect to more relevant information. Once you “save” a tag or entry, it will show up on the left side of the page, updating continuously as new information bearing the same tag is developed. As new content in a particular topic comes through, that topic is shifted to the top with bold text, to get your attention. By “saving” a tag, you can then come back later to access it and give it a more thorough read. Lazyfeed will also offer related tags to flesh out your feed with even more relevant information.

Lazyfeed’s interface shows synopsis of the RSS results in an easy-to-scan organization. When you click a post title, the entry expands and offers you the ability to go off-feed to the actual post.

With the “Lazy Me” topic generator, the relevant tags from your selected sites are produced on Lazyfeed in real time updates. For example, from your Twitter account, all hashtags bearing your selected tag will be streamed in. All tags from Flickr photosets will be pulled and provided. Delicious bookmarks bearing your selected tags will be harvested. And all blog posts from blog sites that you manually input that bear the appropriate tag will also find their way into your “Lazy Me” feed.

A downside is that you cannot save or share posts to other applications or services, like Twitter or Friendfeed with a single, on-site click, but are certainly workarounds, such as sharing buttons in your browser (hello Firefox!) and clipping / snipping tools in applications such as OneNote and Evernote.

I first learned about Lazyfeed from Louis Gray’s post on the subject as the service was debuting about a month ago and have been playing with it ever since. I find it to be a great supplement to my existing readers as it allows me to pull relevant information from other sources not already in my reader subscription lists. I highly recommend heading over to Louis’ great post offering a more thorough description of its benefits.

There is much about Lazyfeed’s look and feel that remind me of Skygrid, the real-time financial news aggregator that sorts information by corporate symbol, rather than tag. The everchanging, shifting list of news blurbs looks very familiar, while the information sources and triggers are clearly targeted at different audiences.

If you are a looking for novel, up-to-the-minute sources for news in the real-time realm (who isn’t on the internet these days?), then Lazyfeed is well worth your time investment. It is still in invite-only beta, and I believe you can request an invite from them. I also have been given three invite codes and I am more than happy to send them along to the first three people who email me at the address under my contact page.

Happy (lazy) hunting!

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Google, Bing, Ask, Hakia, Wolfram Alpha – nice information gathering tools to be sure, but do they really target exactly what you want you are looking for?

An often-overlooked option is creating a custom search engine that hones in on the sites and searches that you are most interested in. John DiGilio discusses the custom search engine option at LLRX in his article Bridging the DiGital Divide: Custom Search Engines Put You In Control.

DiGilio discusses two options: Google Custom Search and Rollyo (“Roll Your Own”) and mentions a third, CSE Links.

These tools allow you to direct your search at specific sites, include specific parameters and, essentially, cut loose the extraneous from your results. I have created a Google Custom Search engine that targets the websites of State Insurance Departments and related agencies and organizations, which is particularly useful for finding form filings and legislative news. I have compared results on my custom search site to general Google results and find the former more tailored and on-point.

If you find yourself searching the same issues over and over again and have specific results in mind, consider the custom search option and tap into that “do-it-yourself” aesthetic.

In another attempt to meet Wolfram Alpha head-on, Google has ushered in another “search” option: Google Squared. Squared collects unstructured data and automatically imposes a structure on it. Search results are pulled from various open sources and are organized in a spreadsheet-type format. Hovering over the cells will reveal the source.

A primary difference between Alpha and Squared is the lack of human oversight in the latter option: squares are automatically generated without human “curatorship.” Another weakness appears to be an overweening reliance on Wikipedia, with all its foibles and faults.

However, for a quick, chart-like presentation of data on a particular topic, Squared offers a nice alternative. Check out this “square” for smartphones (took about 15 seconds to generate) here. The smartphone square automatically created columns for image, description, weight, size and memory. Note that not all cells are complete – ostensibly because Squared couldn’t locate the unstructured data. I also note that generalized categories can yield results that may be too broad and require some tailoring. Familiar territory, for sure, when it comes to searching on any engine.

You can save your squares under your Google log in. You also can manually add items to Squares – good for comparison purposes.

Welcome to Google Squared, another tool to consider for inclusion in your search tool box (or bar)!

Hat tip to Resource Shelf.

As promised last week, Microsoft has trotted out its new search engine. It’s called Bing and you can find it here. PCMag has a great review and slideshow of the search engine here. True to its semantic genetics (including the Powerset search engine that Microsoft previously purchased and incorporated), Microsoft is calling Bing a “decision engine” rather than a search engine. Bing offers suggestions for related concepts and information, with answers to inquiries, rather than just links to other pages, offered right on the search results page. You can get even more information from suggested links when you hover over a result entry. You can get “deep” links, such as search boxes for FedEx or UPS tracking right on a Bing results page. Bing’s pages are not spare, but can include images of current events, landscapes or other “bling” (sorry – couldn’t resist ).

Rather than review each element of Bing and how it handles matters such as travel, shopping, images and video and news, I recommend you go try it yourself. Check out the PC Mag article linked above for a comprehensive list of features and the page slide show. While many web commenters are echoing the famous refrain “it’s not a Google killer”, Bing looks to be a promising hike along the evolutionary path away from the popular-by-number-of-links search option.

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Have you been hankering to try Wolfram Alpha’s new computational, knowledge-based search engine? Are you wondering if it is the next best thing in search? Well, I am playing with it right now, in another tab, and I have my own impressions.

For those who are still unsure of what Wolfram Alpha is, you can get the long, broad and sweeping answer at their “about” page. The short answer is that it is a search engine that “computes” answers for you by accessing a knowledge base treated or overlayed with algorithms / coding that Alpha can easily “read”. Or, if you ask Alpha this question “wolfram alpha”, you get this:

If you click on the “use as an internet domain link” on the above page, you get this:

I am fascinated with this new form of search interaction. But it is not the quick and dirty search service that Google offers and any comparison should end with the fact that they are both described as “search engines.” First, it takes some time to load the search page, much longer than it takes to load a Google page. Then it takes much longer to get an answer to your search inquiry, but that is expected. Alpha is not merely responding to your “query” with a list of pages ranked by hits. It is actually computing your answer by dipping into its information resources and providing a calculated response. The plus side is that you can be assured that your answer is most likely correct (unlike Google where the only assurance is that your answer has been hit by tens of thousands of other searchers).

The downside is that you have to consider whether Alpha is the best source for the particular information you are looking for and then you have to be very careful how you phrase your query. Take a look at Alpha’s search tips box:

Alpha is great for quantitative questions, but not so good for qualitative questions. And even for quantitative questions, you have to be careful how you pose them. Talking to Alpha is much like talking to Spock – you will be treated to literal logic that is responsive to your request but may not be what you were looking for.

For example, my first search query was “distance from earth to sun.” Alpha got hung up on the words “distance” and “sun.” It defaulted on distance to astronomical units (AU) – how was Alpha to know that I meant miles? It did default to our Sun, but not before noting that it could not be sure that our Sun is what I meant. Fair enough.

I then asked it for “miles from earth to sun.” No answer. I then entered “miles from earth to sol.” No answer. I then entered “earth to sol” and, voila, I got astronomical units, kilometers, meters and miles. I also got a “corresponding quantity” of 4.5 micropascals, with an equation for how to get this amount.

When I finally got my answer, I got everything I was looking for and more. No question that my answer was accurate and scientifically solid. But getting there is more than half the battle and it helps to throw any notions about how to search in the more traditional formats right out the window.

Wolfram Alpha now has its place in my search arsenal – I added it to my Firefox search bar tool. But I will not be turning to Alpha for answers on every query. No doubt Alpha will evolve and will become more powerful as more information is made accessible to it. Give it a try yourself – I would love to hear about your impressions and results!