Discovery Engines

Today we discussed and experimented on the internet with what are sometimes called "Discovery Engines".

Liveplasma creates a visual diagram of music or movies that you might like based on their relationship to a musician, movie, or director that you already like. Liveplasma is based in France and uses data from Amazon.

AllMusicGuide makes recommendations and also, more importantly, gives you biographical information about the musicians in their database. It shows similar artists, influences, followers, and so on.

AllMovieGuide is part of AllMediaGuide and is related to AllMusicGuide, but is for movies.

Amazon will tell you what the people who bought the product you are looking at also bought. When you view the product that you like (book, CD or DVD, for example), you can see what the buyers of that product like. This gives you clues about other books, music, and films that you may enjoy but do not yet know. I recommended experimenting with amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, or other Amazon sites in English. Amazon may allow you to listen to part of a song, download some sample mp3s, or view a music video and so on.

Last.fm allows you to create your own radio station. You can listen to music that is similar to the music that you already know that you like. Last.fm analyzes what you listen do and makes suggestions. It also has a strong social networking function. You can see your friends and what they are listening to, and who is listening to the same music as you. last.fm is in the UK, but wwas bought by the US company CBS. Read about last.fm in the Wikipedia.

The Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB) has a huge quantity of movie information. It will also suggest movies that you may enjoy, that are related to the one you are viewing. It has a good search page, too!

We had a worksheet with some questions about people's recent musical listening and movie viewing. We were able to check out the favorites of people in the class and find other recommendations based on those. These sites can be useful for ourselves, for discovering new books, movies, and music, for finding new friends (last.fm) for selecting gifts for friends, and mostly for the information which is on the sites, especially IMDB and AllMusic.

Searching

The internet makes information available to us easily. It is certainly faster and more efficient than using the telephone, writing letters, or traveling to a library. There is so much information on the internet that finding information becomes a problem. One of our goals in this class is to develop the ability to find exactly what information we want, quickly and efficiently.

We talked about the differences between a search engine and a directory. Read the Wikipedia pages to get a better understanding of the two. Here is the Wikipedia definition of a (web) directory:

A web directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links.

A web directory is not a search engine, and does not display lists of web pages based on keywords, instead it lists web sites by category and subcategory. The categorization is usually based on the whole web site, rather than one page or a set of keywords, and sites are often limited to inclusion in only one or two categories. Web directories often allow site owners to directly submit their site for inclusion, and have editors review submissions for fitness.

Here is the definition of a search engine:

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system, such as on the World Wide Web, inside a corporate or proprietary network, or in a personal computer. The search engine allows one to ask for content meeting specific criteria (typically those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieves a list of items that match those criteria. This list is often sorted with respect to some measure of relevance of the results. Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently.

Directories were made long before search engines, in the mid-1990s. Directories are like lists, and are organized and edited by humans! Yahoo is an example of a directory. The history of Yahoo!:

The two founders of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in a campus trailer in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favourite links than on their doctoral dissertations. Eventually, Jerry and David's lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories ... and the core concept behind Yahoo! was born.

Search engines use spiders, bots, or webcrawlers to visit web sites and record information about what was there in an index. Some famous search engines are Google, Altavista, Ask.com, and others.

Google is relatively new. Although it is a search engine with a very effective indexing technique, Google also has a directory. We visited How Stuff Works to briefly see a description there.

Google is a search engine made by 2 other students at Stanford University who developed a technique called PageRank:

PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank^[1]) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine. While just one of many factors which determine the ranking of Google search results, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of Google's web search tools.^[2]

Dogpile , Surfwax, and Metacrawler are meta-search engines, which search other directories and search engines.

You can find a good explanation of when to use a search engine, and when to use a directory, at this tutorial or this FAQ. This is good advice on searching from Rice University.

We talked about how to use a directory to find reference material, for example, newspapers from various countries, movie screenplays, and song lyrics. We talked about using the Yahoo! directory to find dictionaries, such as OneLook, encyclopedias such as the Wikipedia, and so on.

For searching news, a search engine is probably better, since you can search for keywords and search only news sources at Google News.

Tasks at Blogger

Here are some things you can do at Blogger. Show me what you can do.

• Make a blog (or make two blogs for two languages, or make three blogs for 3 languages).
• Notify me of your blog (by e-mail or by posting here).
• Make a profile (but don't give away too much personal information).
• Make a post. (Write several posts. Keep posting.)
  
• Say hi.
• Tell your goals and plans for the future.

• Write about your studies, thoughts, or your daily life experiences.
• Upload a picture (to your profile, or your header, or inside a post, or to your sidebar…)
• Add links
• (add hyperlinks to your posts and/or sidebar)
• (link to other students and teacher's blog)
• (link to sites that you like and use)
• Use some styles (colors, bold, italic, font, size, bulleted lists, etc., etc.)
• Manipulate or change your template (add elements)
• Adjust your settings to your liking (privacy, etc.)
• Help your fellow students by showing them how to do things.
• Make another blog at Wordpress or another blogging platform to compare features.
• Add comments to other student's blogs.

These are some basic blogging skills that you should master!

Words of the Day

Here are some vocabulary words we studied today:

.com
.edu
.gov
.mil
.org
a browser
a click
a copyright
a design
a format
a layout
content
DNS
Email
GIF
Home Page
HTML
HTTP
Hyperlink
infringement
Internet (Net)
JPEG
MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)
MPEG
Search Engine
TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/
TIFF
to click
to copyright
to design
to format
to lay out
URL
Web Browser
Web Crawler
Web Server
World Wide Web (Web)

These words also came up in our discussion of daily life:

Lolita Complex (He has a Lolita Complex.)
transvestite (I saw a transvestite at Nezu station.)
cross-dresser, cross-dressing, cross-dress (Does she like to cross-dress?)
anniversary (They celebrated their Silver Wedding Anniversary.)
Hungry Jack (Do you want to stop at Hungry Jack's?)
whopper (I'll have the Whopper, please.)
onion rings (Watch out! Those onion rings are hot!)

Why are we doing this?

A student asks:

How do we use our blogs?
Could you tell me about it concretely?

First of all, I wanted you to experience making a blog. Some people have never done it before, so they will see how easy it is to do it. Perhaps they can even teach others. You can make a "test blog" to try out the platform, and if you do not like it, move to another platform. It is a learning experience just to make it.

Secondly, I hope you will use it for writing English posts. Blogger automatically adjusts and changes the main page to your language, which was Japanese. However, you can re-set the language to English. I didn't tell you to do that because it could cause you to make a mistake, like accidentally deleting your blog! However, if you are comfortable, you can change the blog-management language to English. And, of course, I imagined that you would write your blog entirely in English. You can write about your everyday activities and thoughts, if you like, but especially about the experience of learning English. I hope your blog is entirely in English. It is OK to make a bilingual blog that has the same content in both languages. Or, you can make an English blog for your English writing, a Japanese blog for your Japanese writing, and another blog to write in a third language. A blog is just like a notebook, I think, but it is virtual.

One post that I asked you to write was about your goals and dreams. Please write about your short-term goals for this class and this year, your medium-term plans for the next 3-5 years, and your long-term goals and dreams of what you want to do in your life.

Another task that you can do is to write a profile. Do not write too much if you are concerned about your privacy.

Creating the blog, you will find that it has the potential to communicate with a worldwide audience (if you want it to). This will change your writing because the audience is not just the teacher. This is called a "community of practice", a group of people who are really using the English language as a community. However, if you want to write a more private journal, you can set your blog to only Blogger members, to the members of our class, to only yourself, or to only the members that you choose. Let me know if you want to do that.

Look at the settings of the blog and be sure that it is set up the way you want it to be. Practice inserting links, quotes, uploading pictures, and various possibilities.

Hello

Students:

This is a page where we can post information about our seminar class.

When you have created your blog, please send me the URL so I can link to it from here.