Last week I had a terrible cold. So when I read about this new exhibit from the National Library of Medicine, I knew I had to write about it. (GAHCHOO!) Sorry.

The new exhibit is An Iconography of Contagion: A Web Exhibition of 20th-century Health Posters, and it’s available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/iconographyofcontagion/index.html. This exhibit is adapted from an exhibitition that was hosted by the National Academy of Sciences in 2008. There is explanatory text but the heart of the exhibit is about two dozen posters. The posters date from the 1920s to the 1990s, are from all over the world, and address a variety of health concerns.

Items include a 1935 poster from China about tuberculosis (summary: don’t spit on the sidewalk), an odd 1944 poster featuring a fly wearing shoes (many shoes) and a Kenyan poster about sleeping sickness. Posters not in English are translated.

This is a pretty brief exhibit (especially if you’re used to Library of Congress exhibits where you might see jillions of posters and prints in one place) but the commentary is good and the choices for the exhibit interesting.

I read an article in Wired last week that made me very happy: Popular Science is now online as entire archive, and it’s free! The magazine has teamed up with Google Books to make its archive available.

To search, you can start at http://www.popsci.com/archives, but I found the page a little narrow to go through the results. So I did a little messing around at Google Books and found that http://books.google.com/books?as_pt=MAGAZINES&q=intitle%3A%22popular%20science%22&rview=1 got me a cover view of 1,327 magazine results matching the title “Popular Science”. Or you can start with the Google Books query intitle:”popular science” and add any keywords in which you’re interested. (Make sure you go into advanced search and get your results from magazines only.) A cleaner URL to browse all issues is http://books.google.com/books/serial/HVhlMMQLVhcC?rview=1.

I did a search for intitle:”Popular Science” monsters and got 547 results, from “New evidence spurs hunt for Loch Ness monster‎” to “SPLIT Logs Easily, Without Expensive Splitters, Monster Mauls.” Results include a thumbnail of the cover and details about which issue it is. It doesn’t look like you can get results by order of date, which is unfortunate — looks like results are in order of relevance.

Results take you to individual pages with your search terms highlighted. May I please recommend the 1967 article “I used at real computer at home and so will you”.

Google Books (or in this case Magazines) still drives me a bit nuts because of the ways that you can’t sort results, and sometimes the “scrolling down” through the pages makes me overshoot things I want to read, but man, they’re adding some great content.

Good news for folks with hearing impairments and folks who don’t have hearing impairments but sometimes just can’t figure out what other people are saying (that would be me.) YouTube announced last week that YouTube videos (at least those in English which have voices clearly speaking and aren’t drowned out or muffled by background noises, music, etc.)

Apparently there are twenty hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute (which personally I find mindbending) so as you might imagine it’ll take a while for everything to be autocaptioned. I did some random searches (for things like lecture, speech, items that seemed like they would be better suited for autocaption) and didn’t come across much. I did find a lecture on the Theory of Relativity that had been captioned, so you can see what it looks like. Captions are at the bottom and a CC icon shows up in the tool bar at the bottom of the video.

You can click that icon to turn the captions on and off, but you can also change settings as well — you can change the size of the captions and also use an auto-translate feature to have the captions appear in another language. It’s machine translation, of course, so it won’t be perfect.

Speaking of that, the transcriptions are machine transcriptions as well — so you know they won’t be perfect either. Owners of posted
videos can download auto-generated captions, correct them, and upload new versions. If your videos have not been captioned yet, you can also request that they get the captioning treatment — a “Request Processing (English Only)” button lets you put your video in the queue, while YouTube assures you “We will try our best to get some results in a few days.”

This announcement is great but I suspect we’re not going to really see the full impact of this until months down the road, when the mighty YouTube transcribing golems have had time to do their work and captions become a lot more common. I’m looking forward to the transcriptions becoming available in other languages, so I can use the translate feature.

I hate bookmarks. I really do. I always find way more things to bookmark than I can possibly keep organized. And though I will bookmark things (you kind of have to after a while) I despair out of getting any proper use out of what I’ve saved.

Google, last week, announced a compromise between creating lots of bookmarks and saying the heck with it. Now, searchers can mark interesting search results with a star. And the starred results will show up at the top of your search results the next time you do a search that leads to those pages.

Sadly, I did not get to test this myself. Google announced the new feature on March 3, but as I’m writing this a few days later the new feature has not yet rolled out to me. It will be available for all logged-in users eventually, though, so I’ll keep looking.

In the meantime you can see how it works with Google’s blog post. Search results and maps will have stars. Click the stars and the next time you do a search result that you’ve starred, it’ll show up again at the top of your results. Clear enough. The items you star will also sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar.

I like this level of favoriting results as I don’t have to try to keep anything organized. Furthermore I like it better than Google’s SearchWiki, which it is replacing, as I didn’t like the idea of reorganizing Google’s regular search results. With this the starred results are separated out at the top, and it’s easier to see what’s going on.

But there was one very important question I didn’t see answered in Google’s announcement, and I don’t think it’s a question that it’ll answer. Will starring search results change a Web site’s pagerank, or whatever Google is calling it now? If one person stars a page I doubt that will make a difference, but how about if ten thousand people do? Will it change? What if ten thousand people star and page and then suddenly a tenth of them unstar it?

I think I was about five years off. Several years ago I was thinking about the potential for location-based searching, and I thought it would be a big deal Real Soon Now. But it’s only really taken off in the last couple of years, and it’s only now that Google’s overtly introducing it into the main Web search. Remind me not to try to time any stock purchases.

Anyway, Google announced Friday morning that there’s now an option to refine your searches by location. But you’ll have to make sure your “Show Options” nav is open, or you’re gonna miss it.

I did a Google search for pizza then opened the Show Options nav on the left. All results included “Social” and “Nearby” links, and opening the Nearby link refreshed the search results so they did, indeed, show pizza places near my location. And most of them were actual business Web pages, with only a couple of directory results (one from Yellow Pages, one from Yahoo.) In the middle of the results is a large Google Map with a list of businesses picked out by the usual red pin markers.

There were also options to change the location or change the scope of the locality (either city, region, or state, and it defaults to region.) I changed the region to Boston (except why would I eat pizza in Boston when all that awesome seafood is available?) and got an instantly-refreshed list of results.

Combining this search filter with other ones was kind of hit and miss. I was certainly able to combine this local search to limit it to only pages I had visited before. On the other hand when I tried to get the latest results for pizza in Boston it seemed to fail, as did an effort to limit my results to a certain kind of content.

When I’m looking for local business information on Google I’ll usually start with a Google Maps search and then use the information gleaned from that search to expand into regular Web searching. This handy search filter is going to let me skip a step.

Oh, New York Times, how you irritate me with your constant talk of a paywall (I don’t care if you institute it, I’m just tired of hearing the endless coy reveal and discussion. Paywall or get off the pot.) But no matter how much the NYT gets on my nerves, I always forgive it after a visit to the Open Blog. Latest from NYT Open: version 3 of the Congress API, which was announced late February. Version 2 of the API will be supported until June 2010.

There are several new additions and changes to the new version. New responses for the API include a list of members leaving office, chamber schedule, votes by date, and member sponsorship comparison. Changes to responses include vote responses (which now include bill information), member bio responses now include current party and state attributes (and some social media information if available), and bill details responses now include version information. You can get an overview of all the changes here. Full documentation is here.

So how can you put the new API to work? The Open folks have put together a sample app at http://nytcongress.appspot.com/ that compares voting records between a pair of senators (they’re random; refresh the page to see different pairs.) You also get a list of bills that the pair has cosponsored with links to additional legislation information. (You can get the code for this application at http://github.com/dwillis/NYT-Congress-API-Demo.) There’s also a forum available for discussion of new applications but it’s not active at the moment.

More great stuff from the NYT Open blog. Maybe as the US government starts releasing more data sets the NYT will start integrating some of that information into its APIs?…

Rafe Needleman had an article on CNET about a new search engine, Buzzzy (note the three z’s), which searches Google Buzz. But it searches other sources, too, and divides them out in interesting ways.

Buzzzy lives at http://buzzzy.com/ with a simple keyword search on its front page. I did a search for Toyota.

You might notice from the first results that Buzzzy is denoting different content sources. Take a look at the left nav; you’ll see links to get results from places familiar like Friendfeed, Twitter, and Google Reader, and places less familiar (at least to me) like AutoSavant.

There are also some timeline options, as well as the ability to limit your results to certain types of media or to links only. For example, I can do a search for Toyota, specify Twitter as a search, and then limit my results further to just links. And even better than that, you can get the results as an RSS feed.

I’m still not deeply into Google Buzz but I like how Buzzzy lets you divide up and filter the results. Worth a look.

Thanks to Creative Commons for the heads-up about Peer 2 Peer University, which has announced its second round of free and open online courses. Read this and sign up quick, because the registration deadline is February 28…

What the heck is P2PU? The tagline for the site is “Learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything,” which should give you a good overview. The site, which is run by volunteers, is trying to create a source for high-quality, low cost education.

Currently the site is in its second phase of courses, which will run from March 12 to April 23. You can get the course list at http://www.p2pu.org/course/list. Courses offered include “Solve Anything! Building Ideas through Design,” “Managing Election Campaigns,” “Intro to Concepts in Behavioral Economics and Decision Making,” and “Climate Resilient Cities”. You’ll have to register on the site before you can sign up for the courses.

I don’t know what’s on tap after this next round of courses — pilot phase three? — but you can follow Peer 2 Peer U’s blog at http://blogs.p2pu.org/.

Yahoo! and Twitter have recently announced a partnership. (See Yahoo’s announcement here) and Twitter’s announcement here.) Twitter notes that Yahoo will be getting the “firehose” — the full feed of public tweets. Since Twitter users post 600 Tweets per second that’s a huge amount of data. And judging from the Twitter growth curve, I think that number’s going to go up.

Anyway, the immediate result of this partnership will be that real-time Twitter updates will be integrated across various Yahoo properties, as well as search. As a matter of fact, you can see that now; if you do a search with Yahoo you’ll see that there’s a new tab for results from Twitter. You can see in the screenshot that videos have been pulled via Twitter as well. I do not think these results update in real-time like Google’s do; I left the page open for several minutes and never changed. I know the search term Toyota is (at least for the moment) generating more traffic than that.

There are some other plans for a Yahoo/Twitter future as well. People will be able to access their own Twitter feeds across Yahoo’s properties, and they will be able to integrate content from Yahoo properties more easily into their Twitter streams. Yahoo describes this integration as taking place “later this year.”

On the one hand, I can easily see this as a necessary part of Yahoo’s future, even though this integration is coming a bit behind Twitter/Bing and Twitter/Google. It seems like Yahoo has fairly aggressive plans for integrating Twitter content, and 50 million tweets a day is a lot. But. But but but. What is Yahoo going to do to make these 50 million tweets a day more meaningful to its users?

There are already lots and lots and lots of Twitter tools out there. Some of them are unique and offer a lot of value, a different way of looking at this huge stream of content. I don’t think just having that content and integrating it into search is going to end up being meaningful to Yahoo. How is the company going to shape it, how is it going to be filtered? What kind of processing-to-increase-value is Yahoo going to do?

Simply integrating a tweet stream into search isn’t enough. Especially for Yahoo, it isn’t enough. I have faith that Yahoo can do more (Yahoo Pipes is still awesome, Flickr is consistently fantastic) but I want to see it.

CBC News has noted a new site from Hot Docs, which it describes as “the largest documentary festival in North America.” The new Hot Docs site has well over 150 documentaries from Canadian filmmakers (along with some other content) and it’s all available online for free. The site is available at http://hotdocslibrary.ca/en/ (that’s the English, non-Flash version.)

The front page has several sets of films you can go through — films by young filmmakers, films for educators, the most popular films — but I went straight to the browse tab and started poking around. The browse page is at http://hotdocslibrary.ca/en/browse.cfm. The documentaries are listed by title though they’re also sortable by year and by director. (The oldest dated documentary in the database was from 1951.)

The first doc in alphabetical order is $4 Haircut, a 6-minute short (with a groovy oompa tuba soundtrack) about a guy who, well, gets $4 haircuts. It shows his methodology and experience and while you might not expect a short featuring mostly a guy sitting around waiting to get a haircut to be interesting, it was. The documentary is embedded in the page with the usual volume control, pop-out to full screen, etc. The page also contains a summary of information about the documentary (director, producer, editor, etc.) In this case, the documentary also had extras, specifically transcripts in English and French.

I browsed through the shorts and found a number of topics — one film was about ginsing. Another featured Geddy Lee. A third was about Thomas Edison and sound reproduction in technology. They ranged from under ten minutes to around fifteen to 32 minutes in the case of the Edison documentary.

The videos loaded really quickly, there was a wide range of content, and it was all free. If you’re at all interested in documentaries check out this site.

If you watch commercials on American TV you know what kgb is. The company’s commercials are weird enough that they kind of burn into the brain. If you’ve missed it, here’s a quick overview: kgb is a text answer service. Text a question to 542542 and get an answer. Of course, the answer costs you 99 cents and whatever data charges apply to your cell phone plan.

Now you can get some kgb answers for free. kgb has released, in beta, a database of its answered questions. It’s available at http://www.answers.kgb.com/. The site is described as having “millions” of questions, but I didn’t see an exact answer count.

The front page of the site has featured questions with links to answers (kind of an Olympics theme going here) along with popular questions. There’s a category listing at http://answers.kgb.com/categories/all. And of course you can do a keyword search. I searched for What is the most popular cartoon character?

I got six answers. The interesting thing is that two of the questions were very similar — What is the most popular cartoon character and what is the number one cartoon character ever? — but had two different answers. The answer to the first question was Homer Simpson, while the answer to the second question was Bugs Bunny. Every answer I looked at included a link to an online source for the answer, so both answers had evidence to back it up.

On the other hand that’s a pretty subjective question. So I asked, What’s the tallest building in the world?. Of the five questions returned that included that information, four of them had the same answer (Burj Khalifa, though it wasn’t always referred to by that name.) The fifth answer noted Tapei 101 as the tallest building in the world, a title it lost after Burj Khalifa was built. So I wouldn’t immediately trust these answers but instead would use the answers and the source URLs to do some investigating of my own. (kgb has several buttons that allow you to share and respond to answers; it would be good if the site also had a “Please doublecheck this answer I’m not sure it’s correct” button.)

If the question for which you’re searching is not available, you do have the option to send in your question for the usual 99 cent fee.

I wouldn’t trust this site nearly as much as I’d trust a librarian reference service. On the other hand, the site is free and fast, and the sources with the answered questions give me places I can start my own research. Take a look!

What is it with all the beer sites I’ve been finding lately? I don’t even drink beer. Maybe one day I’ll find a site that covers Craft Root Beer. Anyway, the Brewers Association has put together a Web site to highlight a great deal of information about Craft Beer. It’s called Craft Beer, strangely enough, and is available at http://www.craftbeer.com. There’s a lot to this site but I’m going to focus on what puts it into the category of “online information collections,” which is why it got into ResearchBuzz.

(I didn’t know what craft beer was — beer made from scrapbook materials? — so I looked it up. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbrewery it’s beer made using more traditional methods.)

Looking for a local brewery? Hit the Get Local section of this site. (This section searches breweries in the US but there’s also a place to search for non-US breweries.) You’ll be able to search for breweries by state or by keyword search. I looked for breweries in Minnesota and got a long page of results, from August Schell Brewing Co to Wellingtons Backwater Brewing Co. Listings feature both microbreweries and brewpubs (an eating establishment that also brews beer) and generally include address, phone number, and Web site address.

Perhaps since you are interested in craft beer you are a member of the American Homebrewers Association. This site also has a way to search for brewpubs and breweries that offer discounts to AHA members. I looked at Minnesota again and found over a dozen locations that offered discounts. Discounts were spelled out in the listings (generally something like 10% off food.)

If you’re interested more in events and less in locations, there’s also a calendar available. I took a look at March 2010 and found only on event; the 2nd Annual Myrtle Beach Beer Fest. This part of the site doesn’t seem as populated as the brewery listings.

As I noted at the beginning of this writeup, CraftBeer.com has a lot going on. In addition to the listings of breweries there are a number of other features, including recipes with beer, details about many different beer styles (chili beer? PUMPKIN BEER?), a history of beer, and details about homebrewing.

Michael Fagan, ex-Microsoft guy and all around Nice Young Man, has revamped and re-released a tool he developed quite a while ago. Quizify, at http://quizify.com/, allows you to either enter a term list or link to a list of terms, then get a flashcard-type quiz that tests you on those terms.

The site has several examples of Web pages with term lists that turn into quizzes, but I wanted to make my own. After one failure I tried http://www.kodak.com/global/en/consumer/glossary/termsA.shtml, which is a list of photographic terms beginning with A, and asked Quizify to make a test out of it. Quizify found 17 questions, and displays them before you take your test. Clicking “run quiz” starts the test.

Quizify shows the definition and you have to type in the name of the thing being defined. If you get it right the quiz continues. If you get it wrong, you’re prompted to answer it again. You can also “give up,” see the answer, and the quiz continues.

Note the quiz does not just proceed in a straight line through the questions. It’ll ask questions in a random order, sometimes asking the same questions twice. I was taking another quiz and got one answer wrong, and Quizify seemed to go back to that same question several times.

The site worked really well with taking information from an external list and formatting it properly. The only time it didn’t work was when there was HTML in the definition. In the case of Kodak’s definitions, “Aspect Ratio” included a link to another Kodak definition list with an answer. Quizify broke that link. I don’t expect Quizify to fix links like this but maybe link HTML should be removed completely from the definitions?

This is a deceptively simple site but I could see where it would be very useful. If you’re a teacher and you already have a lesson plan page that includes a definition list, it would take just a moment and Quizify to turn that list into a flashcard-type study aid for your students.

Are you interested in the history of New York? You might want to check out a new site which is a collaborative project between nine Reference and Research Library Resources Councils in New York State. The site is called New York Heritage and it’s available at http://www.newyorkheritage.org.

The site contains information from over 160 collections from library, museums, archives, and other resources across the state of New York. You can browse the collections but unfortunately the browsing is by institution, and actually seeing the holdings of the institution requires a mouse click. In other words, the browse page does not let you review all the available collections in one click. So you might like searching better.

I searched for chickens (I tried several other search terms, but this one got me a nice mix of various kinds of items.) I got 40 results, including photographs, newspapers, church directories, interviews, and a very odd postcard featuring a group of people, each holding a chicken. Items include a thumbnail: click on the thumbnail and you get to the original institution’s page for the item. The original pages vary in their presentation but the ones I looked at had a lot of detail and additional information. I was especially impressed with http://www.wnylegacy.org’s presentation of newspaper archives. What a treat.

If the simple search doesn’t get what you’re looking for, there is a more advanced search that lets you specify fields. And there’s a short link list to other New York resources. But what I’d really love here would be a subject headings list. On the other hand, if I got to explore 160 collections related to the state of New York via a subject headings list, you might not see me for days and days…

A couple weeks ago I covered Google’s new feature that allows you to monitor pages even when they don’t have RSS feeds. A few days ago reader LP e-mailed me and asked about the new feature, “Did it work?” And I realized I had completely forgotten to write a follow-up post. So yeah, about Google Reader’s new page-monitoring feature….

The first great thing about this feature is that it taught me how many Web pages do in fact have RSS feeds. I went to several places meaning to monitor the page for pages, only to discover that RSS feeds were available now. Yay!

I did find some places that did not have RSS feeds, though; the best example is probably the Twitter lists that use Tweets from ResearchBuzz. The URL for the list is http://twitter.com/ResearchBuzz/lists/memberships but I didn’t know of any way to track when new lists were added to this page. So that was my test case for Google Reader.

Every change to the page is a new entry in Google Reader. The screenshot above shows an example of an entry. There’s no context on the page, and if I wasn’t familiar with the page content to start with, the entry wouldn’t be useful (in other words, I wouldn’t share it.)

I also tried the Google Reader with http://www.ted.com/pages/view?id=348, which is a list of upcoming TEDx events all over the world. Again, I didn’t get any context, just the line that changed.

One Google Reader update monitor I did failed. I was trying to monitor a particular business in Google Maps because I wanted to see what kind of reviews they got. I think this might be my fault, however. I looked up the business in Google, and then used the extremely-long-and-awkward URL supplied by Google as my monitoring URL. Google never got an update for that page, and complained that the page didn’t exist. I’m going to try it again using the link supplied by Google on the business’ page.

For me, the gold standard for page monitoring remains WebSite-Watcher, a client-side application available at http://www.aignes.com/. However it is for Windows only. Until it’s available for my operating system, I think I’ll keep using this new feature of Google Reader.

I have mentioned before the Internet Archive and its wonderful collection of free live music. Now you can bring some of that music to your own site with a new Live Music Widget, as announced by the Internet Archive last week.

The widget is available on Widgetbox at http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/internet-archive-free-music. You can do some customizing of width, height, theme, etc. However the content remains the same; new music as it’s added to the archive.

When I took a look at the widget it included music from bands including The Grateful Dead, Donna the Buffalo, Cracker, and Drive-By Truckers. Now if it had a built in player that would be even more awesome, but alas….

The widget was created by Jeff Kaplan (or at least some user calling themselves “JeffKaplan”) of the Internet Archive. This is the only widget available from this user. Will be perhaps be seeing more on the way?

By the way, if you like this widget, don’t forget to check out Dewey Music, which I covered last month in ResearchBuzz. Great stuff.

Hat tip to ResourceShelf to the pointer about a new resource from the National Library of Australia — the ability to search about 18,500 images from the Library’s collection by color.

You can try it yourself at http://ll04.nla.gov.au/ . It’s pretty simple; pick a color from the color grid on the left. (There’s a menu beneath it to more precisely specify the color for which you’re searching.) As soon as you pick the color you’ll get images from the Library’s collection. I picked a subdued yellow and got nine images which looked like drawings, paintings, and possibly a photograph.

You can click on an image and you’ll get an overlay window showing the image and what colors it has in it. But that’s all. You won’t get a larger image, you won’t get any more detail about the image, and as far as I can see you won’t even get a link to the original image in the archive.

So this is an interesting toy, possibly useful for designers who want to look at the way color is used — but it’s not a sideways tool for discovery in the National Library of Australia’s image collection.

Last week, the College of the Holy Cross launched a new 3D online database of birds. Extant, recently extinct, and fossil birds. This new Web site is called the Aves 3D Web site and is available at http://aves3d.org. This site contains about 200 three-dimensional models of bird bones from 98 different species. The models were made by non-contact laser scanning of skeletons.

From the front page you can do a keyword search or you can browse several different ways, including by scientific name, common name, or skeletal element. I browsed through the common names which goes from “American Flamingo” to “Stout-Legged Moa”. I thought the “Bohemian Waxwing” looked interesting, so I chose that bird. The Aves 3D Web site had one model available for that bird: a breast bone.

You will have to have Java enabled (and in my case even though I did have Java enabled, the site repeatedly complained that I didn’t, much to my bemusement, though I could certainly view the models) but if you do an applet will start that will allow you to click and drag the model around and view it from all angles. You can also zoom. There are instructions for moving the model but I couldn’t get those to work.

After you’ve finished goofing around with the model, scroll down. You’ll see additional bits of information including some notes on the bird, specimen and technical information (who scanned it and when) and some still photographs of the specimen. If you register for a free account on the site, you’ll find that some of the models (though not all) have free digital models available for download.

Holy Cross plans to add new models to the site weekly so I expect it’ll grow significantly from its current listings. I can’t say this is a resource I’m going to refer to every day, but being able to interact with all these skeletal elements was fascinating! Plus I was very impressed with how quickly the Java applets loaded. Take a look.

Google announced on Friday that it had acquired Aardvark, a “unique technology company that lets you quickly and easily tap into the knowledge and experience of your friends and extended network of contacts.” Social Q&A? Anyway, once Aardvark was bought it was put into Google Labs, hopefully with comfortable quarters and hay or gingersnaps or whatever it is aardvarks consume.

Actually the Labs page, while providing you with a few more details, basically just points you to the actual Aardvark site at http://vark.com/.

Before you try this out, you’ll have to register. The front page gives you a giant box to ask a question, but you actually can’t ask anything until you register. You have to give your name, birthday, city/state, and gender. You have the option to register via Facebook and import all your data, but that made me a bit leery so I skipped it. Once you’re registered you’re asked to supply areas of expertise so you can answer questions as well as ask them.

Once I was registered, I decided on a quick question. (Even though I had yet to build up a network of friends on Aardvark, I could immediately start asking questions. That’s a great point in Aardvark’s favor; other social-type networks are not useful until you’ve built up your own group.) So I asked: What’s a good Web-based app for using Twitter? I have one and use and quite like, but I’m always interested in learning about others. I asked it and then waited. Four minutes later, I got my first answer: “http://www.twitter.com”.

Ah. Thanks, wiseguy. But then a couple minutes later the first respondent amended his answer to include three different suggestions, and in 13 minutes I had four suggestions that included five different suggestions (plus another wiseguy who recommended Twitter.com.) Aardvark e-mails you when someone answers your questions, or you can watch the answers come in on your question page. Once you’ve received an answer, you can mark it as helpful or not. You can also respond to the answer, or just send a generic “Thanks!” You can also check the profiles of people who answered your question, and request to add them to your network.

And of course you can also answer questions. I went and looked at the questions relevant to me, but couldn’t answer them (most of them were about Google Buzz.) You also have the option to answer “Open” questions. I paged through those (I could only see about fifteen at a time) and they varied from asking opinions to needing software help to obvious “homework” type questions to very specific questions about technical and medical issues. I finally found one I could answer and did. I did not get a response from the gentleman who asked at this writing, but as he had asked the question six hours before I was not surprised.

I like this. It reminds me somewhat of Yahoo Answers but the questions are better (more serious.) It reminds me even more of Google Answers, a late, much-lamented service offered by Google (it was shut down over three years ago.) I do see three problems with it, however. First is you cannot access the full list of open questions. Second, there’s no way to conduct what I believe my librarian friends call the “reference interview.” Often I found myself looking at a question and thinking, “I need more data before I can answer this,” or “It depends…” The third, and most problematic of all, is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to search an archive of collected questions and answers, which seems like a tremendous waste. I mean, here you are with a whole community dedicated to asking and answering questions, and you’re not aggregating and archiving the results? Isn’t there a way to search all the questions and answers?

Well, I mean besides searching Google for inurl:vark.com/t/ and adding the keywords in which you’re interested.

Despite that I really like Aardvark. It’ll be interesting to see how Google integrates it into their search tools. I would love to see it as the basis for a new Google Answers.

Google announced last Friday that Google Maps would be getting its own Lab! Google Labs, as you might know, is a place where Google puts niche or in-testing features that users can try if they want to. You can get to the new Google Maps Lab by going to Google Maps and clicking on the green Lab icon in the upper right. If during the course of trying new Google Maps features you have a problem, you can escape the Maps Lab features by going to http://maps.google.com/maps?ftr=0.

There are several new features available in Maps Lab. A few of them are silly (there’s one that puts a Beta tag back on the Google Maps logo, for example) but many are useful. These are the ones that caught my eye:

Drag N’ Zoom — Enabling this feature adds a little magnifying glass icon underneath the zoom tool. Click on that and then drag out a square of where you want to go. Google will zoom down to the square you dragged out. Much faster than zoom-zoom-zoom, move, zoom-zoom, adjust, drag, etc.

Aerial Imagery — This is only available for certain areas, but will give you better imagery of the area below from what looks to me to be a different angle. Google suggests some places to view when you enable this feature — check out the Capitol Building.

What’s Around Here? — This gives you another way to search Google Maps. Next to the Search Maps button at the top, it adds a “What’s Around Here” button that appears to basically find everything in the area that Google has a listing for, then presents it in one giant Chicken-Poxed map.

LatLng Tooltip — Adds a tooltip to the mouse showing the latitude and longitude of whatever location you’re pointing at. I think this is my favorite feature; I’ve been wanting something like this on Google Maps for AGES.

Smart Zoom — Fixes Google Maps so that you can only zoom down to the available level of imagery and no further (no more of the “we don’t have imagery at this zoom level”…)

The What’s Around Here and Smart Zoom features are interesting, but the Drag N’ Zoom and LatLng Tooltip features are going to make my working with Google Maps a LOT easier. Kudos to Google for putting these great new features in a great new Lab.