I have spent enough time struggling with IBM's Net Search Extender, its normalization options, and the particular precedence the umlaut receives (highlighting its German development) that i find myself giggling and guffawing at the Wikipedia article on "Heavy metal umlaut."
I'm also a fan of Queensr˙che, and cheated by cutting and pasting the ˙ (but, lo, there it is on the character palette).
Thanks to DayPopTop 40
I'm not very good at naming things, and even had help in naming this blog. I didn't name RedLightGreen, either, but i've been point person for every internal and many external comments about the name. They're all mixed. So it's with a certain sort of pleasure that i read this Mozilla FAQ about Phoenix Firebird Firefox.
Went on vacation, then got sick. (Sigh, airlines.) While i was out, our President sent the following 'round:
Folks, I love these snarkhunting guys. Their most recent online newsletter is lots of fun. Check it out.
http://www.snarkhunting.com/
One of the things on their website is this taxonomoy of search engine names that they created. Check it out. I think RedLightGreen is an Evocative, Level 2.
http://www.igorinternational.com/webportaltaxonomy.html
Cheers, Jim
I rather think RedLightGreen scores higher in the Evocative level -- it's better than Magellan. (I used the Magellan crawler when i was at the Internet Archive, and i was always forgetting the name.) And TunaBreath, well, no one is about to forget that name! (Um, maybe they should.)
I was relaxing by taking a moment to be indignant over Verisign's disgusting move, and saw this article on The Register: Google - the only archive we'll ever need?
Someone thought Google could be considered an archive (for longer than a month or so)? Someone thought Google safeguarded privacy (in a broad society wide sense)? Ouch.
Two comments seem relevant to the RedLightGreen enterprise, however:
"The implications of Google have real implications for mass social procedure, on how we enquire," said Byfield. "It's so much bigger than terrifying - it's Interesting." and "I'm a librarian, and I like Google," said Steve Cisler from the floor. "But I appreciate the point being made that there are different information domains. There is a whole lot of information that's not on the Internet and may possibly be offline."
...may possibly be offline and residing in those book thingies in a library somewhere. Hopefully, RedLightGreen will begin to be a bridge between that changed way of inquiring and those "possibly offline" resources.
Merrilee Proffit gave her presentation today to the RLG staff. I'm not sure how i feel about how positively folks responded. They seem to think this engine, which will only be promoted at the pilot institutions, will be swooped on and used by the whole country by October. This, after months of struggling with how to reach students at the pilot institutions, seems just surreal. Do students really want to find *books*? (We think students just want to find journal articles.)
...back to work