Visual Imagery and Tag Clouds

I like what the search engine bing is doing with catching images on the home page and links around the picture like a cloud to other relevant interesting searches. It seems really neat on the outside but the search results end up being a bunch of random things about penguins. This really illustrates the inadequicies of search engines. Some mobile providers have advertised voice recognition where you ask any question to your phone and get some answer from an online search engine. This usually only works well if the exact question was asked on answers.com or a similar site, that is if the phone even understands your voice. I like the images on bing though. A pathfinder for example might have an inspiring image that has a translucent cloud of the relevant topics but with more refined searches even vetted links.

Being a teacher librarian today involves technology. The management, access and organization of information have always been a part of being a librarian. Teaching these skills to students should be our central focus. There are interesting things going on with information on the web. Sites such as netvibes allow you to aggregate different forms of information from the web. This brings together various news feeds, social networking sites, emails and other continuously updating information. You can also add bookmarks or links to commonly used websites you're always going to. You can add a range of search bars and image searches making them all available from a central location. They call this a dashboard. Instead of your gas and oil temperature (which i never need to know anyway) you can have a host of other real time information conveniently organized. With maps and news scrolls it is a lot like a highly customizable yahoo homepage. Like yahoo, I would like my news feeds to scroll and be able to have pictures if they're attached to a news piece and I so choose. Something I havn't seen yet. There are always new widgets to add to the dashboard, not all of them seem to work though.