The Process of Seeking New Information

When it comes to researching anything off the Internet I usually head straight for Google. Before the Internet I would seek out materials at the library, which seems to be the general course of action for most people before the Internet became an acceptable option for research.

Ever since I started this class I have been introduced to even more useful tools to my research. Although I still tend to fall back on finding things through Google I am trying to utilize these new tools more. Tools such as social-bookmarking through services like del.icio.us and furl, which I learned about in class.

I did a bit of further research on social-bookmarking for this post and came across the site socialmarker.com. Its a free service that you sign-up for. What it does is make your site links available to all the other social bookmarking sites (47 of the best sites to be exact) it lists them on the site and you can select which ones you want to submit to and which ones don’t. Seems like a pretty useful service to me, especially since I’m so new to the prospect of social bookmarking.

Most social bookmarking sites work by allowing users to research sites on topics and placing links (bookmarks) to those sites publicly for others to check out. It provides a great research tool to discover sites someone might not easily find on their own. I happened to find a really good site for motion graphics just by looking at other users bookmarks on del.icio.us.

A passive approach to researching a topic is to select sites that investigate topics that interest you and subscribe to their RSS feeds. I use Google Reader, as well as NetVibes. Google reader is easy to setup, but you have to already have a Gmail account to use it. For some that already have an established email account having to go through setting up another one for the sake of getting your RSS feeder may be one step to many. NetVibes is a free service that you simply go to their site and signup, no email account creation required. (Unless of course you don’t have one.) I really like NetVibes a lot more than Google Reader (mainly cause of Ajax programming) and also its a lot easier to organize your RSS feeds into subcategories than it is through Google Reader. In NetVibes, if you get a bad feed simply click the x box in the upper right corner of the window and poof no more bad feed. With Google Reader it seems to involve a bit more effort to delete an old or unwanted feed. I mainly keep Google Reader cause it is able to access an RSS feed that I want to read that for some reason I can’t upload to NetVibes.

I found an interesting site that takes RSS feeds and allows you to manipulate the way in which they are processed. The site is called XFruits, its definitely worth checking out. I haven’t looked over it in depth but it is much more involved than simply uploading RSS feeds to a reader. Another thing I found interesting about this site is that you can search other people’s feeds. It provides some interesting results but since the site is available in French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese it can pull up some info that (unless you can read the language) will be a bit daunting to some.

Although, those tools are helpful to my research as stated earlier I still fall back to looking up information through Google. I use to use other search engines like Yahoo.com and MSN.com. Whenever I had a question I would use AskJeeves.com which is now simply Ask.com.

I decided to broaden my search engine selection and came across Dogpile. It pulls information from the four main search engines; Yahoo, Google, MSN (now known as LiveSearch) and Ask. I did a search for some other search engines (curious to know just how many there are out there) and located a rather large list of them on Wikipeida. There are links provided in the list but unfortunately they only lead back to Wikipeida’s explaination of each one. I tried typing some of the names in but ultimately ended up doing a search for a search engine by that name. It would have been more helpful if Wikipedia had simply linked to the various search engines.

Some other good search engines are Technorati (which happens to be a good site to post your blog to) and Putch (an anti-spam search engine) I found through Google Markers. Putch uses Google Markers to help eliminate spam from web search results. Google Markers are an aspect of Google’s Custom Search engines (personalized search engines that users can create) that allow you to label or add sites to your search engine. Its a more unqiue way of searching the web by tailoring the search engine to find information pertaining to a certain topic or group of topics.

If you would like more information pertaining to search engines and databases you can check out Tara Calishain’s site ResearchBuzz. It provides interesting tidbits of information that you can read more about by clicking on the appropriate links. I didn’t notice specific information about search engines but it does provide a rather hodgepodge of information.

Most of the searching I undertake is finding sources to read, in other words text researches. I don’t look to YouTube that often but it is a good source to discover different perspectives for something I’m researching on. When I need visual inspiration I have sought out Flickr to give me ideas. Looking at all the beautiful photography submitted (depending of course at one you are looking at) does help to get the creative juices pumping.

All in all I feel I will always fall back to text research, there isn’t a whole lot of information I can pull from video, still image or even audio research. Unless it is a very specific topic that requires that form of research I won’t use video or audio.