Daily Archives: October 24, 2005

Mary Ellen Bates, gave a talk called “30 Search Tips in 40 Minutes.” I attended the same talk last year and I highly recommend her talks. As well as sharing cool new sites she focuses on usefulness. Some highlights:

*She mentioned Exalead as having some of the best advanced search syntax capabilities for web searching, including phonetic and approximate spelling. (See my review of Exalead from last November.
*http://www.housingmaps.com/ - maps Craigslist real estate listings to Google Maps so you can see on a map where the listings are located.
*She mentioned, by my count, 11 different Yahoo! products and services, such as Y!Q, podcasts.yahoo.com, Konfabulator, MyWeb, Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, Site Explorer, and more.
*Amazon’s Statistically Improbably Phrases - a data mining feature for searching books that shows which phrases in a book are “statistically improbable”. These phrases provide more unique index terms and then let users find other books with the same terms.

Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, gave the keynote address this morning: “Shifting Worlds: Internet Librarians at the Forefront”. He discussed the latest findings from the project, just as he did at last year’s conference. Some highlights that I found interesting:

For the United States…

* Half of U.S. internet users are now using broadband regularly.
* 2/3 of users have access to broadband even if it’s not their regular method of connecting.
* 20% of Americans have never been online.
* People who are using dial-up today are less likely to switch and upgrade to broadband than in previous years.
* Chat room usage is declining heavily due to other communication technologies like blogs, social networking sites, and instant messenger.

For American teenagers, age 12 – 17…

*They will engage online advertisements if they think they’re relevant (whereas adults are more likely to be turned off by ads).
*19% of teenagers have started their own blog.
*Multi-tasking! It’s all about multi-tasking, including email, the web, cell phones and instant messaging. All at once.

I’m in Monterey, California attending this year’s Internet Librarian conference with 1100 other attendees. Dispatches to follow…