Resource Evaluations:
RSS Feeds and Feed Readers
- Bloglines
- I went to the Bloglines homepage and I signed up for a Bloglines account. I first tried Google Reader as I already had a Google account and am familiar with many Google products but I found that I liked the options that Bloglines had best.
- I first started looking at different sites that I found that had the orange RSS feed sign and I would subscribe to them. Then I got a Bloglines account and I ran a search query first for the Clinton Foundation, then for PEPFAR, then For UNAIDS etc etc until I had subscribed to all the different feeds I wanted.
- I liked to use Bloglines because I had many feeds and this helped me keep all my news together. It also helped because I no longer needed to check Google News and AltaVista every five minutes.
- I probably checked my Bloglines account once a day for this project. Now that I have a Bloglines account it has allowed me to more thoroughly keep track of news events that are important to me.
- Overall, it was a good tool and I am glad I was able to use it for this project.
News Stories:
- Google News & Google Alerts
- I received access to this site just by going to it: www.news.google.com
- I checked the site frequently just because I am a compulsive news checker. I also subscribed to Google Alerts.
- Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to users when there are new Google results for the user's search terms. Google currently offers six types of alerts and the type I used most frequently was News. I had the information sent to me everyday. In retrospect perhaps I should have had it sent less frequently as the news generally did not change that often.
- The Google Alerts would just tell me how my news search query had changed. It was very helpful that way I did not have to keep searching for news on PEPFAR. Once daily, I would get a summary email telling me all the new news stories about this topic. It would also show me all relevant news articles.
- To use this service I had to be very specific about my queries. A lot of my industry is linked to politics so I had to edit out a lot of content at the beginning to narrow my search. For example the Clinton Foundation itself was being vetted during the vetting process for Secretary of State. I was getting a lot of news results in my Google Alerts that I had not anticipated at the beginning of the term. I had to go back and change the query to "Clinton Foundation"-Hillary Clinton. That query gave me much better and more topic related results.
I also used AltaVista. I found the stories to be fairly similar to those in Google News. I preferred the search capabilities of Google News and the time line feature to those of AltaVista. I chose to concentrate my efforts on Google News for news results for those reasons. However; every now and again I would check AltaVista to see if there were any differences between the results of Google News and AltaVista. There usually were not many.
PageMonitors:
- WatchThatPage
- I received access to this site by going to it, http://watchthatpage.com/, and then I created a login name and password.
- WatchThatPage is a page monitoring service for web pages that do not have RSS feed capabilities. I had reports of web page changes sent to me whenever the website content changed.
- The page monitor alerts would show me the pages that had a difference. I could also log into my account to track the changes.
- It was fairly useful; however, that being said I could have just created an RSS feed for it and fed it into my bloglines account. That probably would have been the most useful.
Image Searches:
- Google Images
- I just went to the Google Images webpage.
- Google Images allowed me to search for images related to my topic.
- I had to be very specific in my query. I did not want pictures with people in them because they tended to be overly graphic.
- This resource was useful to my project. I had a lot of text and the pages look nicer with images on them. First, I used Google Images advanced search to find images and I filtered based on news content. The results I received were very useful for my project because it depicts real events going on in Africa related to AIDS relief. These show actual people doing activities to actually help solve the AIDS epidemic.
- Exalead
- I went to the site http://www.exalead.com/
- Exalead was helpful in finding exactly what I was looking for in my queries. I was able to narrow my search using advanced search query. I was able to search according to size (small, medium, large), Content (face etc), file type (gif, jpeg, png), Wallpaper (landscape or portrait), and color (black& white, color, gray scale).
- I was able to search for images without people in them. It was very important that way I did not have graphic images in my search results.
RSS Feed Creators:
- Yahoo Pipes
- I decided to create feeds using Yahoo Pipes and then publish my pipe results. That way I could have a very specific pipe tailored to my project. To do this I used many of the different "Fetch Tools" from Yahoo Pipes. I was able to combine some of my existing feeds into one to get the specific information for which I was looking. I used the fetch feed tool which fetches well feeds. I also used the Fetch Site Feed which uses a web site's auto-discovery technology to locate RSS feeds. I also ran a yahoo search query and used that as feed information. Then I used the filter feature to filter out any strictly medical information. I also did not want anything about Hillary Clinton.
- You can either block or permit items that match either all or any of the rules that you set. You can add more rules by hitting that + signA few other useful operators worth mentioning are the Union, Sort and Truncate* operators. TheUnion Operator unifies up to five separate sources of Pipe input. The Sort Operator allows you to sort by author, item description, link, publish date, or title. You can sort in ascending or descending order. The Truncate Operator limits the number of feeds that come out of a specific source. This can be useful if you are trying to minimize the amount of time that you spend looking at your feeds!
- Yahoo Pipes out put websites and web news search output. Information on the President's HIV/AIDS Initiatives, Direct Relief International: HIV/AIDS Epidemic etc etc it is a mix of blogs and search results that have changed. I combined several of my shot gun RSS feeds to give me exactly what I wanted in a short concise manner. I did not need to sort through all my RSS Feeds.
- I tried searching through other people's feeds to capitalize on all their hard work; however, I did not find any other pipes similar enough to what I was looking for to be able to take advantage of that great function of Yahoo Pipes.
Video Search:
- YouTube
- I was able to use the advanced search feature to custom search to find videos of people speaking about doing relief work instead of videos of people talking about why relief work is necessary. While those are great, they do not serve the purpose of my project. I was able to search for videos using YouTube fairly easily. The advanced search feature allowed me to search by geographic location. That was very helpful because it allowed me to narrow my search to Sub Saharan Africa to find on the job testimonial.
- Also using the channel feature allowed me to find videos posted by the specific nonprofits I am studying. The Clinton Foundation has a channel. Also, it allows me to subscribe to the videos being posted. This is useful for my project because it allows me to remain updated about different news stories and videos being posted on the site without having to constantly check the site. I searched for both PEPFAR and the Clinton Foundation. They were the easiest to find results about relief work.
- I searched "Clinton Foundation"-Hillary Clinton for example while looking for results about the Clinton Foundation.
- Overall, YouTube was a very helpful resource.
- Truveo
- I used this site primarily because it allowed me to monitor my sources.
- Using the channel feature, helped me monitor my sources. I have done research for video testimonial and given the nature of my project I have found that often the sources for these videos are not always credible. Also, the different categories (news, sports, tv channels etc) of video types was helpful. I could also find news results to post on my recent developments. That way my viewers that are just trying to get news from my wiki site can get a plethora of different web content instead of just news articles. Also you can see how many views a video has and you can view them by either popularity or how recently they were posted. This is also useful because I can vaguely estimate how valuable this video will be so I do not waste my time watching it if it is not high quality.
- Overall, I found it hard to search for exactly what I was looking for because of lacking search selections.
Web Directories:
I used both Dmoz and Yahoo Web Directories. I did not find either of them to be very useful. There were very few categories that matched specifically for what I was looking. There were many options for NPOs but not working with them just giving to them. Also, there were many disease maintenance sites but none about working to cure them from a business perspective an not a medical perspective. I also tried searching for individual non profits and that was also not useful because the search results just came back with answers on how to donate to them or how to start your own non profit. Overall, this was not a good resource for my project.
Invisible Web
I used Google Scholar as a good starting point for my project. I knew exactly for what you are looking, which made this is a great starting point. It is extremely comprehensive. It helped me search for the key phrases or facts. Also, right now I did not have to pay any access fees. There were a few books that were helpful for my project. I mainly just searched for information on individual non profits.
Turbo10 is a search engine that searches the Invisible Web. This was less helpful, I tried searching for individual non profits and I only received information about how to give to each organization. The topic clusters were all about donations.
Bnet is also a search engine that searches the Invisible Web. Bnet did provide some very relevant RSS feeds which I found to be useful. Other than that I did not find many good articles or books about my topic. Also, many of the articles that were of any use I could only get access to the citations pages.
Below are screen shots of some of my Google Alerts, Yahoo Pipes Results, and Watch That Page Results. I have videos throughout my wiki, and there is an evaluation of my RSS Feeds on the RSS Feed Page.