SHUSH!

It has been a while since I have felt moved to contribute to Shush! but I am so excited about this tool that I simply have to share it. The tool is called Prezi and it is a really slick piece of software for producing presentations.

Instead of the very linear approach of MS Powerpoint, Prezi adopts a ‘mind map’ style of presentation - meaning that you can move from a big theme to a little one, and jump to a related area with a squeak of your mouse - great if you wish to be flexible when interacting with your audience. (Traditionalists can still define a straightforward ‘path’ through their presentation and navigate using arrow keys if they prefer.)

Limited use of Prezi is free; you can see sample presentations at http://prezi.com/; and the presentation that got me all fired up? - that was Theo Andrew’s and it’s available here.
Go on - take a look!

Rather than post an excited rant about Google Wave, the upcoming communication system to end all communication systems, and what it could mean for us, I’m just going to link to the excellent rundown on Mashable:

http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/

Read and anticipate. If you find that even halfway interesting, be sure to check out their other Wave posts as linked to at the end.

Are you bored of PowerPoint presentations? I have just found this website 280 Slides where you can create Mac style presentations on the internet. They look very snazzy and it’s really easy to use. Best of all it’s free of charge and all your files are stored on their server so you can access then anywhere in the world as long as you have the internet and you don’t have to worry about remembering your memory stick. You can also import the slides to PowerPoint after you’ve created them if you fancy it!

 Give it a go!

Or should I say ‘Cool’ . . . . 3 previous employees of Google have set up a rival search engine in the hope it will compete with Google. This is a huge task as according to hitwise.co.uk in the 4 weeks to 28 June 2008, of all UK searches, 87% were on Google. Yahoo came in second with just 3%!

The Cuil website is even more minimalist that Google, check it out at: http://www.cuil.com/

Thanks to Roddy MacLeod, Joss Winn and the JISC-REPOSITORIES mailing list, I’ve just had great fun generating tag clouds for various web pages and chunks of text. A tag cloud or word cloud is a visual representation of how frequently specific words are used in a block of text. So the more frequently a word is used, the bigger it will appear in the tag cloud. You can see the Shush! word cloud on the blog’s home page.

TagCrowd and Wordle are both tools for creating your own tag clouds from web pages and text files.
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Do you have a tendency to be forgetful? Work, home, study…Do you wish there was an easier way to organise all those jobs that need doing? (more…)

I’ve just come back from my annual pilgimage to the ‘Online Information’ exhibition in London. There were the usual range of information products, seminars and freebies, and a few new toys to get excited about.

Checking out a couple of presentations to share with my colleagues, I came across ‘Slideshare‘, “the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web”.

The purpose of my visit was to find Karen Blakeman’s ‘Searching without Google: alternative tools for more expert searching’.

Both Slideshare and Karen’s presentation are worth a look. But don’t forget - if you want further information you can always ask your Academic Librarian.

Whether or not you consider yourself to be a “visual learner”, this site could save you a lot of stress.
www.bubbl.us is a free online mind-mapping tool. This means that you can create visual structures of essay plans, project plans etc which are easy to edit - you can add, move, edit or delete the bubbles really easily.

An added bonus is that you don’t need to download anything, and if you register with your email address you can then save your maps online and come back to them later from another computer. You can also print them or export them as jpegs for emailing.
It’s incredibly easy to use and I’m dead impressed with it

No, not some cheesy dating agency or a poorly spelt vending machine for carnivores.  Instead Meet-O-Matic looks to be an interesting tool where you can simply use it to set up and arrange meetings and its absolutely free.

This overcomes the problem of some of your invitees having one type of diary software and some having others.

They define its use in the following: “You work with Meet-O-Matic by 1] selecting possible (’suggested’) dates for meetings, then 2] sending email which directs prospective participants to a custom meeting-response-form on the Web, and then 3] monitoring progress as response forms are filled in and constraints are resolved.”

I’ve had various invites to meetings using this system and it has so far worked well, so worth a look.  http://www.meetomatic.com/tour.php

For some time now I’ve been reading all my RSS feeds through Google Reader. I’ve forgotten what most of the blogs actually look like - everything’s filtered though Google’s interface, and being able to star and tag items from a variety of blogs using one system is - well, I can’t realistically say it’s invaluable, but it’s certainly very nice.

Anyway, I’ve also had a Nintendo Wii for a good while now, and that has an Opera-based web browser that’s operated by the Wii’s motion-sensing remote control. It’s a well-implemented browser and it’s pleasingly decadent to slouch around browsing the web on the TV, controlling it all with effete hand gestures like Oscar Wilde waving away a poorly presented platter of grapes.

So there’s the Wii browser and Google Reader, and now the twain have met in Google’s tailored Wii interface, which scales the size to fit the console’s non-HD output and takes advantage of the remote functions. You can try out the Wii interface in a standard browser - it’s still pretty impressive, though much of the impact is lost.

It’s an interesting way to surf, heading as it does in the opposite direction to mobile web technology. Efforts have been made before to bring the web to the living room - recall the Bush ‘internet TV’ of the early 00s - but Nintendo and Opera seem to have cracked the problem this time; scaling and reformatting of pages work fluidly, and the user interface removes the need for a mouse and keyboard without creating further problems in the process. Google’s Reader only sweetens the deal with its homogenised, custom-built interface - and similar sites are appearing, such as obviously-named video portal WiiToob.

Sony have a Playstation 3 browser in the works, which may offer an interesting alternative, as well as their Home project - potentially a front-room Second Life contender. Arguably it’s time to consider, as Google have, how to approach these emerging channels - flashes in the pan, or the early signs of a paradigm shift? I see the Wii browser as a halfway point - still tethered to the ‘traditional’ internet - long, uninteresting URLs remain unavoidable - but hinting at how our relationship to the web might evolve as those clumsy, unreliable PCs become less and less important.

The Wii’s News Channel deserves a mention here, too - a fascinating web-driven application that presents you with a 3D model of the Earth that you spin around and zoom in on to view regional news stories, presented as stacks of paper dropped on the relevant country or city. It’s a remarkable application - extra marks for the way the words on a page shuffle themselves around like letter-beetles as you zoom in - that would be a perfect addition to the sofa’n'papers section of the library.

One of my most-used Firefox extensions is Scrapbook. As you might imagine, it lets you collect Things You Find On The Web into a virtual scrapbook. You can simply bookmark pages or archive them (or parts of them) to your hard drive for offline access, edit the pages, add comments to them, combine them, create standalone notes, and organise the whole mess as obsessively as you please. Naturally, there’s a search function thrown in there, and more besides.

When we visited America I captured a collection of webpages on local information and places to visit using Scrapbook, and was then able to quickly browse or search through them without needing a wi-fi connection. It’s also a quick way to back up pages you’d miss terribly if they disappeared, and I now consider it an essential tool for any web research I have to do.

You can do all of the things Scrapbook offers without it if you’re committed enough, and I used to - but I look back on those days as an age of unnecessary labour and administrative hassle. It’s a fine example of what Firefox can do for you and another step towards the browser as operating system - chances are you can do the same in Opera if you browse their Widget collection.

Google SketchUP is a free piece of software and is ideal for modellers and designers from designing a new kitchen or garden or something more complex such as buildings or even your university campus!

Extract from the SketchUp homepage:

Developed for the conceptual stages of design, Google SketchUp is powerful yet easy-to-learn 3D software. It combines a simple, yet robust tool-set with an intelligent drawing system that streamlines and simplifies 3D design. From simple to complex, conceptual to realistic, Google SketchUp enables you to build and modify 3D models quickly and easily. If you use Google Earth, Google SketchUp allows you to place your models using real-world coordinates and share them with the world using the Google 3D Warehouse.

Google have launched a competition called ‘How would your campus look in 3D?’ Follow this link Build Your Campus in 3D Competition. And for the winners an all-expense-paid visit to Google.

http://sketchup.google.com/

Here’s another useful screen capture tool - FastStone Capture.  Like Snippy, it lets you copy chunks of your screen, but FastStone Capture then lets you do a lot more with it.  Check out the ‘Capture scrolling window’ facility which allows you to copy the whole of a web page - not just the part you can see on screen.

FastStone also offers some clever looking image handling products.  Image Viewer is an image browser, converter and editor - if your application won’t recognise your image then use Image Viewer to save the image in another format.  Alternatively, use MaxView, another product for viewing and manipulating images - have a look at the FastStone website for details of all their freeware.

Personally speaking, I love finding out about new free gizmos on the web - so if anybody reading this knows of a really useful freebie, please do let me know.

Snippy is a great free screen capture tool. You’ll need to download a small program first but then just click on the Snippy icon in your toolbar and select an area of screen.

Both rectangular and freehand snips are possible. The resulting image can be saved to disk (several formats are offered) or pasted straight into an email, document or whatever.

Sometimes the simplest things are the best.

Everyone knows that the purpose of a search engine is to locate web pages containing your search terms.  That’s what they’re there for, and some of them are very good at it.  But will the results you get from Google (say) be the same as the results you get from using the same terms in Yahoo? 

The answer is probably not.  (more…)