That’s been changed. Colonial Williamsburg has started an “eMuseum” which currently has 3300 items but promises to add information on the whole collection over time. It’s available at http://emuseum.history.org/code/emuseum.asp.

From this site you can look at highlights of the collections (collection highlights include “American Furniture: From Virginia to Vermont,” “Great Silver Collections from Colonial Williamsburg,” and “Pounds, Pence & Pistareens: Coins & Currency of Colonial America.”) or you can do a search. I did a search for chair and got 223 results. Results include thumbnails and are provided six to a page.

I got interested in a corner chair and clicked on its image for more details.

The details page had an exhaustive description of the chair which I couldn’t follow, not being fluent in chairconstructionese (”The bases of the splats are let into open mortises on the inner faces of the rear seat rails and then covered with black walnut inserts…”)
There are also details about the age of item, place of construction, how it came to Colonial Williamsburg, and — most interesting to me — commentary about the chair itself, including details about its design, history, and possible artisans. If you want a better image of the item, click on the thumbnail in the details page to get a larger image in the popup window. Still not as large as I’d prefer, though…

If you’re at all interested in antiques, visit this museum. And if you’re looking for search terms to try, give silver a whirl. Some beautiful items.

You can do a simple keyword search here looking for odds or just looking for everything. Everything finds things like articles, which were interesting enough that I didn’t mind them being included in my search (and they weren’t so numerous that you lost all the odds information.) I did a search for coffee. I got 158 results! Results include category divisions over to the left as well as breakdowns for age, income, gender, etc. To the right you’ll see odds. I saw odds like “1 in 2.08 The odds a person 18 or older will drink regular coffee in a day are 1 in 2.08 (US, 1/2007).” and “1 in 66.67 The odds a boy 6 – 11 drinks coffee at least once a day are 1 in 66.67 (US, 4/1987 – 8/1988).”

Click on the odds for an item and you’ll get a visual representing the odds as well as a space for comments, who found that particular set of odds interesting, etc. (I didn’t see any comments in any of the odds I looked at.) Coolest on the details page, though, is the list of odds that are close or exactly the same as the one you’re looking at. So I know that the odds of an adolescent girl 12 – 19 drinking coffee at least once a day are exactly the same as the odds that an Asian female 25 or older with a bachelor’s degree and no higher has an income of $30,000 – $32,499. (They’re both 1 in 20.)

Now if you’re a librarian you’re probably asking the same question I asked when I started browsing the site: where is this data coming from? The detail page also has a button marked “Sources & Definitions”. Click it and you’ll get information on the source, rounding information, and even an appropriate way to cite the data presented.

Most of the stats I came across were demographic but they were still fun. If you register and create an account (it’s free) you can start your own book of odds, which allows you to track odds, send odds information to a friend, etc. Worth a visit. Oh, and before you leave the Book of Odds site be sure to visit the “About Us” page. I got a big laugh out of “Book of Odds is not a search-engine, decision-engine, knowledge-engine, or any other kind of engine…so please don’t compare us to Google(tm). We did consider the term “probability engine” for about 25 seconds, before coming to our senses.”

The front page of the site has the most recent Google Doodles spotted from all over the world. There’s the Halloween Doodle, of course, spotted in several different places, but looking a little further I found doodles for the character Asterix, for Thanksgiving, for the bar code, and for several I can’t determine because they’re in languages I can’t read.

Click on each doodle and you’ll get a YouTube video for it (even for the barcode one), the latest news stories containing the keyword related to the doodle, and the latest blog posts.) Oh, and what appear to be tweets though they’re also marked as blog posts. The ones I looked at for the Google barcode doodle had nothing to do with the doodle per se… they were so random as to be almost surreal — but I’m sure the less generic keywords work better.

At the moment the doodle archive only goes back to August 30, but the site owner tells me he plans to add all older doodles since 1999. Even going back only to August 30 the site has a lot of doodles, and it’s a treat to see the ones that were put up in other countries. Actually it’s a treat to see any of them. In the course of my searching I don’t see very many of the Google Doodles anymore… the search box in Firefox makes the front page of Google mostly unnecessary, and I visit only when I’m demonstrating something or I want to check for changes.

The front page of the Web site asks you to provide the condition for which you’re searching and a location. If you enter something ambiguous (like “cancer”) the site will suggest topics. The location can be as narrow as a zip code, or a city (Madrid, Spain is one of the examples) or as encompassing as USA.

I did a search for autism in USA. I found 81 global studies but two within 150 miles of my stated point — one in Kansas City and one in Oklahoma City. When you look at the results for your search you’ll get a screen that looks like this:

You’ll notice that there are many ways to filter your search results — by age, gender, type of study, etc. — if you happen to get more than two search
results. Each map pointer has a brief amount of information about the study, but to get more data you’ll have to click on the title of a study, when the map will center on that study and present more context and additional details in a pointer bubble. You’ll also be able to get study contact information, find similar studies, or e-mail the study to a friend. (It kind of bugs me that you have to register to get study contact information.)

What you’ll find really depends on what you’re researching — I found one study of thyroid disorders, and that was in the context of breast cancer. When you review the available clinical trial studies please be sure to check the last time they were updated. Of the two autism studies I looked at, one was last updated in 2005. (The other was updated in the last week.)

The registration thing bugs me but this site has a lot of information and the search is easy to use. Worth a look.

You can browse the site by a variety of factors or you can search by keyword. When I browsed for everything alphabetically I got 12 pages of results that could hold nine listings at a time, so I would guess something over 100 films are available here.

I browsed the films by the highest rated. The first page included the films Camp De Thiaroye (”During WW2, a group of black soldiers fight on the side of France”), La Vie Sur Terre (”Sissako, a Mauritanian filmmaker living in France, returns to Sokolo, a small and remote village in Mali to visit his Father. The arrival of the 21st century is hardly noticed by these people, who are still struggling so hard to merely enter the 20th century”) and Nothing But the Truth (”An impassioned and compelling debut feature film from award winning South African actor and writer John Kani. This gripping story is a forthright indictment on the Truth and Reconciliation process in post-Apartheid South Africa, yet also serves as a poignant memoir of a fractured family trying to come to terms with the past and present.”)

Click on the title and you’ll get details about the film, including a synopsis, length, date it was produced, and language (most of the films I saw were not in English, of course, but every film I saw had at least English subtitles.) Each film I looked at also had material from the film either in the form of a trailer or just an excerpt.

And the material is very well done … it’s just enough to get you interested, darn it. I reviewed the trailer for a film called Ta Dona, directed by Mamadou Kaba. I had a bunch of questions after watching it (Why did the guy set the fire? Was the kid going to be okay?) but when I clicked the Rent button next to the detail page I got the following message: “Thank you for your interest in renting this film. The film rental service is not currently available but will be launching soon.” GAH!

The idea is that you’ll be able to buy credits with your credit card, then rent/stream the videos to your computer. I love the content here (I want to see Ta Dona! I want to watch Ouaga Saga!) and while of course there are some details lacking (how much, exactly, is it going to cost to watch a film?) I’m looking forward to African Film Library getting out of beta and launching its video rental service.

So what are Twitter Lists? You can learn a lot just by creating one. Go to your Twitter account and look for an item on your nav bar that reads “New Lists”. When you click on that you’ll get a popup window that asks you to decide what to name your new list and whether you want it to be public or private, as you can see in the screenshot.

(Yup, I’m ResearchBuzz on Twitter. I use my Twitter account to post all those short research stories that I occasionally post on the Web site as “LittleBuzz” items. Using Twitter is a lot easier. :->) As you can see from the screenshot I created a list called “Discworld,” with an idea of finding as many of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld characters (or at least their names) as I can. (Alas, it didn’t work too well.) Once you’ve created your list you have the option to populate it. If you’ve ever used Twitter to search for people before, you’ll find the screen for adding people familiar — it looks much like the people search screen. When you find someone you want to add to your list, just use the lists button to add them:

You can also use the lists button with the people you normally follow or who you just come across as you’re surfing Twitter. If you wanted to add John Cleese to a Monty Python list, for example, you can see in the screenshot what it would look like.

I think this is the most screenshots I’ve used in a writeup in a long time. So anyway, you see how easy it is to make lists and add people to them. Strangely many of the lists I’ve wanted to add (people at WRAL, librarians, tech folks) have already been created. So before you start making your own lists, poke around to see if there are any relevant to what you’re interested in.

So how do you do that? So glad you asked, grasshopper. Or maybe I’m not, because at the moment there ISN’T a good way to find lists. You can stumble across them, of course. (Notice I said “poke around” up there and not “use Twitter’s search.”) Some sites/blogs are listing lists they find good, and there are some tools being created that will allow you to find lists, but at the moment your best bet is to see what lists other people have put YOU on. Also look at the people you follow and see a) what lists they’ve made and b) what lists they’ve been put on.

Failing that, use the Twitter people search box for a purpose for which it was not intended. Say I’m looking for lists dedicated to firefighters. I go to Twitter’s people search page and do a search for firefighters. I get several search results. Discarding those that are clearly not about fire fighting per se, I look for a recently updated account. I choose Alameda Firefighters and check out its page to see what lists that account is on. At the moment that account is on five lists, two of which look promising: @SARQandA/fire and @afdcaptain58/fire. If I didn’t find any lists I wanted, I would go back to the search and start over again.

There are lots of things about the list idea I don’t like. They’re hard to find once created, they don’t appear to have associated RSS feeds (??!), I can’t find a mechanism to suggest new items for a list, and I also can’t find a mechanism to create a new list based on an old one, if I want to add more items or adapt a list for my own use. On the other hand, these lists will be useful. I review a lot of Web tools but I don’t normally follow their Twitter accounts because my Twitter feed is already nuts. But now I have created a WebTools list, and will be using that to follow the Twitter accounts of Web-based tools I find useful. (Note: for the purpose of this list I’m defining Web tools as things like Aviary and LovelyCharts, and not search engines.)

I’m going to be catching up for weeks, you know that? And there’s no better place to start than with the Twitter/Bing/Google news. In case you too were at the Fair when the news broke, here’s an overview of what’s going on:

BING

Bing announced its Twitter search partnership on October 21, as well as a specific Web site for Bing/Tweet searching: http://www.bing.com/twitter.

The front page of the Bing Twitter search shows you a tag cloud of topics on Twitter as well as a set of tweets related to hot topics. The Twitter search is pretty basic; I did a search for coffee. I got a set of the most recent tweets containing that word (that updated in real-time, nice, there’s a pause button too) as well as the top links shared in tweets about coffee. Now that’s nice.

On the left side of the search results page I got a list of topics related to coffee. (Coffee Brands, Coffee Cultures, Gourmet Coffee). It would have been REALLY COOL if these links searched Twitter. But they don’t; they take you back to Bing. I was looking forward to more Twitter searching!

GOOGLE

Google’s announcement was on the same day, but unlike Bing Google did not announce a separate place for its Twitter search. Twitter results are integrated into the search results, or will be, I’m not sure which.

Why aren’t I sure? I ran several tests looking for examples of Twitter in Google’s search results. I tried weather in Denver. I got a weather forecast at the top of the page but no tweets. Denver snowstorm? Same thing. I tried earthquakes. I got a great dataset at the top of the page showing recent earthquakes, but no tweets. Google’s new sidebar feature didn’t help me either.

So maybe Google hasn’t quite rolled out its search results with tweets in it yet.

BOTH OF ‘EM

I’m glad the search engines are getting into real-time search. It’s about time. I’m glad Twitter is extending its reach. But I’m disappointed that these searches don’t do more. There ought to be a way you can search verified accounts only. There ought to be a way you can search within a bio at the same time you’re searching tweets. Now that the search engines are beginning to embrace the real-time products of sites like Twitter, how about using those groovy search powers to extend them a little?

There are several ways you can browse this site. You can browse it by year, from 1955 (which has one photo) to 2008 (which has over 60.) Photos for each year are presented in a page of thumbnails, which you can narrow down further by photographer, nationality, organization/publication, category, and prize won. Click on a thumbnail to get a larger version of the photo, and click on the “Photo Information” button to get more details about the people and things in the photo.

You can also browse the archives by photographer (all the photographers are listed in alphabetical order) or you can search. Search allows you to cover a variety of factors including year, photographer, nationality, etc. You can also search by category but this is hit and miss because different categories cover different years. I searched for everything in the “Humor” category (which is actually “Humor and Happy News”) and got 54 results covering 1973 to 1989. Pictures are listed by year, with thumbnails, and it works the same as browsing by year — click on the thumbnail for a larger picture, and on the “Photo Information” button for more details about the photo. Pictures in this category included a baby riding a scuba diver, a very happy winner of a Zulu dance contest, and Ronald Reagan with half a shaved head.

Essentially this tool gives you the ability to create keyword-based RSS feeds for New York Times content, but also enhances that essential idea with a couple of extras.

Here’s a snapshot of the site. First thing you do is enter a topic or keyword in which you’re interested. The tool will suggest other terms based on the keyword you initially entered. (As you can see I entered Washington and the NYT had lots of suggestions for that.) Next you choose which keywords you want to add to your custom feed. (You can add several if you like.) When you enter keywords, the tool will evaluate the feed, testing to see how many articles in the past 30 days include your term(s) (or, if it’s a very active term, how many articles in the last one day included your term(s).) This is AWESOME; you’ll know right away if a feed is going to contain too much/too little content without having to run tests.

Once you have a term or set of terms you like, enter a title for the feed and click the “Subscribe” button. The NYT will kick out a RSS file that has a pretty good snippets from NYT articles as well as the occasional image.

The only thing that even bothered me a little bit about this tool is the fact that you have to enter your own feed titles, which would slow things down if you wanted to create a lot of feeds. Other than that these extras as terrific. Highly recommend this tool.

The front page has an “on this date” feature, an article from Wikipedia, and a feature that probably wasn’t intended to make me laugh. The reference page has a “People in the News” feature listing, well, people in the news. The first one was Lil Wayne. The second one was Shakira. The third was … Dave Barry? I don’t know what Dave Barry did to be in the news — clicking on the name took me to his Wikipedia article which didn’t have any current information — but I love that he ended up on a list with Shakira and Lil Wayne. You GO Dave Barry.

So anyway. You can also use Bing’s reference page to ask natural language questions ala Ask Jeeves. I asked my usual Why is the Sky Blue?

Bing returned the first nine of over 46,000 Wikipedia results in a 3×3 grid that I quite liked. The pages in the grid contain title, sometimes an image, and a brief snippet that serves well for context. The results page also has the option to turn off the highlighting for your search terms, as well as get the results in a much more boring list form — no thanks. Clicking on article title takes you to the Wikipedia article, but the content is contained on the Bing site.

I tried a different search: What is the best cabbage roll recipe? The search results page said, “Searching Wikipedia and Freebase” but I still got results only from Wikipedia. This set of search results didn’t do as well — Bing seemed to get hung up on the word “roll” and the first page had results like “Spring Roll” and “Jiaozi.”

I like this grid layout! I think though I’ll have to do more searches to get a better idea of what Bing’s semantic search is looking for. The results were okay — and presented in a far more usable format than I’d get searching Wikipedia itself — but I might have to adjust my questions a little.