Google Maps: Great Barrier Reef

You guys. This is so cool.

You can now explore the Great Barrier Reef via Google Maps Street View!

Check out this little video to get a glimpse




I am not much of a creative person, so the fact that someone said, "Hey, let's use Street View to go underwater and explore and post it to the internet so other people can enjoy it" absolutely blows my mind.

To read more about it and try it out, check out this blog post from the Google Blog.

Thanks, Google. You da best.

Power Searching With Google

I just finished my "Mid-class assessment" for the Power Searching with Google free online course being offered this month, and thought I'd do my own assessment of the course itself. You know, because I can't be the only one getting assessed.

At this point in the class, I feel that it is definitely worth the $0 I paid for it. Don't get me wrong, I've learned a couple tricks, and the course is very well organized, and the instruction is clear and concise (plus Daniel Russell is just adorable), but I certainly wouldn't pay for it.

On Twitter, I compared it to taking a grammar class--I inherently know all this stuff already, but it's nice to actually see the rules and the why and the how (and Lord knows some people really do need this).

Things I've learned:

• Word order matters. I'm kind of ashamed to admit I didn't know this.
• They use an acronym for the results page (SERP--search engine results page). Not sure why that's necessary.
• You can use the "filetype:" operator to filter results to find PDFs or DOCs or what have you.
• You can use a hyphen to "subtract" search results. All this time I've been using Boolean NOT, which apparently does NOT work.

Generally, it's been a positive experience so far. Even if they included an entire lesson on using Ctrl+F. I mean really.

If you want to take the class, you can still sign up through today.

Search Terms

In the past week, people have found my blog by searching the following terms on Google:

+ hazelnut julian of norwich

+ wardrobe with tights

+ can leopard print be a neutral

+ is leopard print considered a neutral?

+ paper on st. gregory of nyssa

+ pirate libraries

+ saints of the catholic church   I'm pretty pleased with this (though perhaps wary of the "paper on st. gregory of nyssa" one--you'd better not have plagiarized my blogpost!) because it means people were looking for information, and I somehow helped them find it! Although I'm not sure exactly what their needs or purposes are, and a random blog post is generally not a reputable source for anything serious, I like to think that somehow my being here either answered their question or at least acted as a stepping stone. And that's kind of fun.   Also, YES! Leopard print is a neutral! I will always stand by that.

Marcia J. Bates and the Google Bookcase

In this week's reading we have an article written by Marcia J. Bates in 1989, in which she talks about better ways to facilitate online browsing--making it more like real-life browsing, or what people are familiar with.

One thing she says is, “If the interface can produce a picture on the screen that looks like the books on a shelf, the searcher can transfer a familiar experience to the automated system. If then, a mouse or similar device makes it possible to, in effect, move among the books, a familiar physical experience is reproduced and the searcher can take advantage of well-developed browsing skills.”

So. Have you SEEN the video for the Google Chrome Bookcase?



We live in the future!

Technology amazes me.