While Google Calendar has been getting most of the press these days, I noticed a few new features over at Google Scholar that were quite impressive.

First, in an effort to help folks stay up-to-date on current research in a given field (their example is quantum computing), you can change the sort ordering from everything to "Recent articles". The good folks at Google then attempt to rank the articles "by looking at the prominence of the author's and journal's previous papers, how many citations it already has, when it was written, and so on" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/keeping-up-with-recent-research.html).

Trying this out for my own personal interests (Virginia social history), I was pleasantly surprised at how well the actual results were that got returned. In fact, the top result was Pulitizer Prize winning author Rhyss Isaac's Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdon. Not too shabby for a computer algorithm ;)

The other, perhaps more interesting (and more useful) item is the ability to export results to citation managers (you have to set it in the preferences). They currently support BibTeX, EndNote, RefMan, and Refworks. This seems to work reasonably well...at least for modern works. My test case was a book we're digitizing published in 1863 (Bastiles of the North). Probably because its from a citation, and not the actual work, I never got to the import stage in RefWorks.

Now, if Google would just open up their search API for GoogleScholar...

It's been a while since I've posted anything, but now that the baby has come and things are settling down a bit, I thought I'd get back into the habit of posting.

Google has a new beta for their search results that it is pretty nifty. Instead of having links to the images, groups, etc. at the top of the page, it displays them on the right-hand side with a bar that shows the relative number of hits for the given result.

Actually being able to see this is pretty easy, you just need to set a cookie name "PREF" with the values

Here's a link to set it also: Google Results Beta.

After you've set the cookie, refresh your Google results page and you should see the new interface.

The Register is reporting the Google is at work on a Linux distro based on Ubuntu. I was introduced to Ubuntu about a month ago (thanks Phil) and have to admit it's a really nice distro. I was especially impressed with the ease of installation (on one CD opposed to Fedora's four), the graphical apt-get utility, and the detail available on their wiki on how to do just about everything. I was actually able to install the Sun Java 1.5 SDK in about 10 minutes on Ubuntu (opposed to the approximately 45 minutes it took to do it in Fedora).

Ubutuntu is definately worth checking out...even before Goobuntu is out!

I've been using Thunderbird as my RSS reader for a a while now...and it does a pretty decent job. However, with the flurry of posts about the Google RSS reader, I decided to also have a look. There's an option to import your feed from other programs, but this requires OPML format.

Unfortunately, there's not an option to create this output file. After a little digging, there actually is a way to get Thunderbird to export the OPML from your aggregator. I found this post by Dougal Campbell where he basically fixed the bug that hid the export/import function in the "Manage Subscriptions" portion.

All you need to do is exit Thunderbird and download his patched newsblog.jar file. Then, go to your Thunderbird installation home (Program files\Mozilla Thunderbird\chrome) and rename newsblog.jar to something else (he recommends 'newsblog.jar.orig') and put the patched version in there. Now, when you start Thunderbird and go to manage your subscriptions, you will see the option to import and export OPML files.

Then just head over to Google Reader and upload the file. It takes a little bit to upload the file (I suspect they're getting hammered pretty hard right now). You'll probably also want to remove the "patched" newsblog.jar and rename your newblog.jar.orig to its original name since it's not part of the normal distribution.

Like many, I've been playing around with Google's blog search today. From a university library perspective, it's interesting to see what people are saying about the library. While playing around with the searches, I noticed the little Live Bookmark in Firefox that allows you to subscribe to a search. Very cool!

This got me thinking more about how our library catalog is being used. It would be really nice to be able to generate RSS from search results in the library catalog. It would be nice to be able to set up searches in the catalog that monitor specific resources in the catalog. Since I'm thinking out loud, this could probably be done reasonably easily with an asynchronous gateway using the Z39.50 protocol...hmmm; sounds like a project!

Today I discovered that the Google maps implementation that I had wasn't working in IE. Basically, when you navigated to the page with the map on it in IE, you were presented with a nice message that the browser couldn't display the page, and gave you a 505 error.

At first, I thought it was how the cookies were being set by Google, but after doing some digging, I found out that it was because of how IE handles JavaScript. Without getting to deep into what was going on, moving the script code to the bottom of the page fixed the page so that IE could render the page properly. Now the only issue that remains is how the scripts render the information box. Right now, it moves everything around oddly. The information box pops up, but you have to scroll to get to the information (http://swem.wm.edu/directions.cfm).

I was just playing around with Google Maps today to provide a link from our address to Google Maps to get directions. I saw a nice hack from code.google.com to do this.

Our library's address is Landrum Drive, Williamsburg, VA. To create a link to this, you create the following link:

This basically passes an address to Google Maps, but it doesn't give a title for the address on the right hand side, or on the pop-up. To handle this, in the link, just append

to the anchor. This overrides the default "address" title in the pop-up, and adds it as the title on the right side.

I thought this was a fairly elegant way to provide directions from any address on our site. But what if you want to show a path to somewhere?

Let's say that I want to give some friends directions to a local watering hole (The Greenleaf Café). You can create a link like so:

I only wish we had this a few years ago when our Special Collections moved from the library during our renovation!

Hopefully you've had a chance to check out Google Moon. A funny thing happens when you zoom in all the way that proves the moon, is in fact made of cheese!

Google has also claims that Google Moon is a direct result of their Copernicus Initiative. They have even set up a site to begin hiring for their Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering (GCHEESE).

I just ran across Google's Research Publications. There are some really good articles written by researchers at Google. Two of my favorites are Who Links to Whom: Mining Linkage between Web Sites and Extracting knowledge from the World Wide Web.

The latter is especially interesting as it lays out the intellectual underpinnings of using the entire Web as a research tool for a particular point in time. They close the paper with several important questions for researchers (and probably a nice Masters thesis): "The problem of uniformly sampling the web is still open in practice: which pages should be counted?...how can current models [of the web] be refined to improve accuracy, while keeping the models relatively simple and easy to understand and analyze? ...How can the accuracy of community identification be improved, and how can communitieis be best structured or presented to account for differences of opinion in what is considered a community?"

This really lends itself to business research when attempting to target advertising, develop products, and discover new markets.

Here's a live example of using the Google Map API to create a customized map: Map example.

I won't jump on the GoogleEarth announcement bandwagon, but I have to admit that it's caused countless hours of lost productivity as I've navigated the virtual Earth. There was a less publicized release yesterday of equal significance (at least in my opinion). The good folks over at Google Maps released an API that allows you to roll your own "interactive, draggable, zoomable, maps (with satellite immagery)."

The first step to start playing with this is to go to Google's API signup and get a key (you'll also need a Google Account). If you're like me, you'll probably skip over the first paragraph that tells you that you need the server AND directory that requests will be coming from. For instance, To generate maps on this blog, I would need to get a key for http://swem.wm.edu/blogs/waynegraham/. Once you're key is generated, you'll a very basic version of an API implementation for Palo Alto. You'll notice the longitude, latitude is passed to the API through the GPoint class. Unfortunately, the API doesn't include geocoding (latitude and longitude in decimal format), so you'll have to go elsewhere to find this information. Google has a link to a query for free geocoding websites, but I liked this one from ajm Software. You can also try Microsoft's TerraServer web service for the same info.

Like all Google code I've encountered, this API is really easy to use...even with map overlays! In the past, I've seen people have to set up something like ArcIMS or any other publically available software to do this same thing.

Now, for my really simple example:

The resulting map looks like this with an action listener that displays the HTML "Earl Gregg Swem Library" when you click on the marker.