Glogster – posterise yourself and your class!
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Web services
We thought that this new web service, Glogster, shows great promise.
You can be creative and add images, sounds and text to a poster background – then publish or print as you wish. Simple and refreshing creativity online – you can of course send to friends on social networks too.
The key application is the opportunity for teachers to register both themselves and their class.
Go to the Edu Zone on Glogster, once registered in the ‘edu’ module teachers can maintain control of access to the Glogster creative content and, most importantly, students can only have access to their peers registered in the network of their teacher.
All the admin is done through the teacher email account too. This application has great promise as a creative tool for young people in a mediated environment.
The list of forthcoming application additions also add to the promise of the service.
Get your class Glogstering here!
You can visit the Third Sector Web home page here.
Earth Hour – turn off and make a commitment
Don’t forget that tomorrow – Saturday 28th of March 2009 – is Earth Hourday.
Join millions of others around the planet by turning off your lights for an hour at 8.30 p.m.
Switch off and make a difference.
Take a photo, blog about it, send out updates on Twitter. Add your photographs to Earth Hour’s Flickr group or post your film to the Earth Hour YouTube group.
Put that technology to good use…in the dark!
See more about Earth Hour at the Earth Hour web page. You can visit the site and become part of the Earth Connect movement.
You can visit our Third Sector Web home page here.
Chrome experiments – wild horses couldn’t….
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Web services
Google Chrome, the browser with the fast Java engine, has recently added an experiments page for those interested in the browser wars.
We are, as regular readers will know, constantly interested in browser and search engine development. We do a lot of research for web content, as you would expect, and welcome web developments that parse information in new ways or just plain do it faster.
Visit the Chrome experiments page and see what Chrome can do. The site is best viewed, obviously in Chrome.
Visit the Chrome download page and get access to its functions. Chrome is fast and quick loading on our machines – the development of additional functions and add-ons making it an even more attractive option.
We have reviewed other browsers recently – Q t, Opera.
You can visit the Third Sector Web Home page here.
Yauba – search innovation and privacy
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Search engines, Web services
Yauba is a new search engine, based in India, which is in early beta version from this month.
A search engine that has a nine word privacy policy – a claim made by Yauba because the search engine continually scrubs identity details from server records – (information from the Yauba privacy pages).
What Yauba does do in search terms is present information in ‘intelligent’ categories. The ‘Yauba knows..’ first section is traditional web sites containing the search term.
Yauba then goes on to sort and display information in the following categories – mainstream news, social sites, blogs, ‘answer pages’, images and videos, .pdf files, MSWord files, PowerPoint files and social networks.
There are sponsored results offered but these are, at the moment, clearly flagged on the search page.
We used our eternal ‘trees‘ as a search term and got a quick, diverse and topical mix of sources back from Yauba.
You can also see an introductory video to Yauba from Janeena Basra – member of the Yauba corporate team.
Our verdict – even in beta it is a fast and efficient engine offering an interesting mix of results across diverse sources – with the added benefit of strong claims to protect your privacy. Interestingly, the site makes no great claims about the size of the database available to users, rather the pitch is about the ‘intelligence’ of the search and presentation.
One day all search engines will be like this…?
You can see the Third Sector Web home page here…
Clearing the clutter – with Readability
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Web services
Readability is a arc90lab design and utility experiment. Just sometimes you need to get rid of all the extra clutter and colour on a web page in order to absorb the text or take in a complex new idea.
We know that web designers love colour, ‘Flash’ gadgets and moving gifs. Believe us – we know, but Readability is a way to cut out the clutter.
It doesn’t yet work completely efficiently with all browser or page scenarios, it is an experiment after all, but it is a useful resource we think.
Not the web-designers best friend perhaps, wiping way hours and hours of exciting innovation in a single keystroke, but a useful accessibility tool for the avid web reader.
This last point, about accessibility, is highly relevant. What if you could turn a complex web page into a newspaper style, very large font, wide margin publication?
With arc90lab Readability you can.
It needs Java enabled to run and you can find the arc90lab Readability web page here. It is very easy to add the Readability button to your task bar. Tell us if you found it useful too.
Glasses image by ‘birdbrain’
You can find the Third Sector Web home page here.
Cuil – a search engine redesign
Filed under: Conversation, Search engines, Web services
We still like Cuil as a search engine of choice.
Yes we know it isn’t Google, but the ‘magazine’ style layout of the search results and the linked information immediately available related to your search term – these have always been useful.
Cuil has now undergone a bit of tweaking.
‘The results list is now divided into a wide highlights section for the top results, and subsequent results are shown below in a two-column layout. Combined with our updated snippet system, this makes it easier to scan results and determine if the pages found include what you need’.
The ‘explore by category’ section of the search page has been updated, with new search and display parameters. Page turns on the site now only refresh the search contents, rather than calling the whole page – speeding up the overall browsing experience.
Despite the hype of their launch Cuil is growing nicely.
Incidentally, we compare search engine facility by searching for the word ‘trees’. It’s an interesting search term for comparing word, images and depth of linking for engines.
Other search engines we have recently covered on our tech blog – Joongel, Tag Galaxy and hakia. Read our blog entries here.
You can see the Third Sector Web home page here.
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Tech news from CNN
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- Kanye and how Twitter changed communication
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