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Friday, 30 August, 2002 |
BotSpot - This site gives you an idea of what sort of things bots can do. I'm particularly interested in their section on tracking bots, chatterbots and website management bots. I've also tried some of the personal assistant bots, but they were a bit silly and distracting.
agentland.com - This site has the most annoying pop-up ads everywhere (are they trying to drive people to get one of the pop-up zapping bots?). On the other hand, the site is worth a look just to talk to Cybelle, the site's chatterbot. She's prettier and has more personality than ALEX :) If you can stand the pop-ups this site has an even more bots/agents available for download as well as helpful articles and links about bots.
5:00:07 PM 
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What is legal truth? - The University of Pittsburgh Law School has an automated bot-assistant named Alex, which can answer your legal questions. I asked Alex to help me find truth in the law, and got the following response:
"I can connect you to an overview of insurance law."
I thought I was in the wrong profession, but it turns out I just have to switch practice areas. [Ernie the Attorney]
I was experimenting with ALEX this morning. I didn't get very far when I tried to engage her in a normal conversation. She didn't even know any jokes - unlike many chatterbots. I found ALEX most helpful when I just put in single words or short phrases, like "constitutional law" or "international law". Over all I'm quite impressed.
4:38:38 PM
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Meet Mr. Anti-Google. A crusading webmaster says the popular search engine's page-ranking algorithm is "undemocratic." [Salon Headlines]
This was a fascinating article. It doesn't surprise me that some people wouldn't like Google. I hope that I've never put it on a pedestal. I can kind of see the point behind this person's complaint - but my view of Google is strictly from a searcher's perspective. Democratic or not, fair or not, most of the time, Google gives better results than any of the individual search engines which preceded it.
Of course Google isn't perfect. The whole premise that a site's popularity says something about its quality or value is quite shaky. Be that as it may, it's very helpful research tool. It will be interesting to see how Vivisimo develops.
4:14:45 PM
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The NY Times on Virtual Reference [The Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk]
Two small issues with the article. Number one is the sentence, "Increasingly, librarians, fearing irrelevancy in the age of Google, are chasing their patrons in cyberspace, and around the clock." Yes, it's another in the never-ending string of articles that makes it seem the entire profession is on the decline because of the WWW and one search engine in particular, Google. As noted on this weblog over and over again, Google is a wonderful and important tool, not THE solution. We must market not only the services, databases, books, etc. that we provide but also the many skills we offer the public.
Gary, I heartily agree with these thoughts. Maybe this is a simplistic or naiive, but I think it's better to be friends with new technologies like Google and bots and then they won't be your enemy. Librarians are in a position to know and use Google better than anyone else - and be aware of when it works, what sort of information it provides and when it's better to try other research methods.
I have this image from when I did some bodysurfing in Australia. If you're in the water and you see a large wave approaching, you basically have two choices - get the hell out of the way and hope you reach the beach before the wave crashes, or swim towards the wave and ride with the crest. Both involve risk, but if you hesistate and just stand still, you'll certainly get knocked over.
3:53:53 PM
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A Guide to Electronic Discovery. With electronic discovery now the norm in civil litigation, this Primer from Law.com is a timely guide to the subject. [Inter Alia]
This is very interesting information. Even better, it gives me a chance to participate in flouting Law.com's silly no link policy (see www.dontlink.com on August 16). I generally like Law.com; they have often have very interesting articles and they gave me a nice pen at last year's AALL meeting :) So why are they so obtuse about this issue?
3:28:16 PM
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Last night I downloaded and installed MacReporter. I was most impressed. It works very smoothly in the OS X dock - accessible but unobtrusive. MacReporter isn't an RSS aggregator. That's not a problem for me because I already have Radio's aggregator, but it may be an issue if you want a one-stop shop. MacReporter is very reasonably priced shareware ($12). I think I'll keep it and use it - especially since it supports my favourite Australian newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald.
My only complaint - and this is really about news aggregators in general, not just MacReporter - is that there's simply too much information. Skimming through so many headlines is tiring - if you do it for too long the information ceases to mean anything. That's why I need a filtering tool.
2:38:09 PM
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Monitoring Changes in Web Pages. The article highlights services and software products for tracking changes in Web pages. [TVC Alert]
This is a very helpful article for someone like me who's still agonizing about which one to use. Actually, the one that I'm leaning towards now, BotBox, isn't even mentioned. So am I totally clueless or am I on to something? It must be the symptoms of my information overload - I'm testing BotBox because I love the idea that it will filter for me!
2:14:50 PM
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