My "new" findings about Google

I believe what I found today have been existed for a while. Those are not new to the Google world, but they are "new" to me.

Background: There are several kids in my son's school have "head lice", I ran a search on "head lice" on google and was surprised to find the refine result suggestions at the top of the result page.

Finding: The refinements, I later found a little more information from Google Co-OP health, or so called labels are: Condition info ( includes treatment, symptoms, tests/diagnosis, cause/risk factors), info type (include: for patients, for medical authorities, for health professions, alternative medicine), drug info and publication types (such as practice guideline, patient handouts, continuing education, clinical trials). The results for each label was not bad, I saw medlineplus, CDC websites, emedicine, familydoctor, clinicaltrials.gov, NEJM, and big name medical school websites are displayed on the top on each category. Those labels was assigned by Google co-opers. Here are some basic on how to use Google co-op.

My thoughts/concerns:
- How trustable / authoratative are those co-opers?
- Will they label the sites honestly and correctly?
- Will the labels increase the labelled sites' rank on the search result?

Hey, is this operation using the social software philosophy and bear the same good/evil of the social software?

Another finding is that the Google reader, an online RSS reader, just like Bloglines.

Compare photo services

The online version can be seen from Google spreadsheet at here.

New technologies

Tried SitePal. The character doesn't look professional at all. Probably will not be accepted in our library. Though it may be fun to receive some animated greeting emails from friends and coworkers occasionally.

Noticed the "text to sound" product, since it can speak 52 languages, I thought it will be cool to include translation component into the product. Imaging this, when I type in English word or sentences, the sitepal say it out aloud in Chinese. That will be way cool.

Another video program I tried in the last couple days is the camstudio, a free screen capture software. The program records screen activities and audio into standard .avi file. It can also convert the .avi file to streaming flash file. With little video editing skill, I created a software installation tutorial movie for our staff, it works out pretty neat.

Another two programs worth mentioning are google spreadsheet and Writely. Pretty cool applications. comparable to Office software, but free and stored on the server. Other feathers include multiple output formats (including PDF files) and online collaboration. I will definitely recommend to our library users since most of the public workstations in the library don't have Microsoft Office installed. Thanks to Taneya bringing this to my attention.

Compare Online Photo Services

[Photo]My children

I tried picasa today, I gave it 6 out of 10. An ok photo organizer. Like it separate the folder and album, similar to the "set" concept in flickr. Doing so a picture can be put into multiple albums. But lack of photo description, or keyword function, limited the search functions.

The photo to blog function was not working tonight, maybe because of the network. or because of the beta version blog. Will try later.

As for comparing the all online photo albums: Snapfish, photoworks, shutterfly are more geared to photo printing and sharing function. Traditional online photo services. Picasa is a desktop photo organizing application, with added online album functions. Flickr, a social software, is more focused on sharing, available for everyone to view and to comment, like blog. ( I was surprised to get a comment from Helen. Thank you for your encouragement. ) All photos are searchable and maybe viewed by anyone. Because of the different nature, snapfish and photoworks album sharing is a limited sharing, friends passively receive the link and view the photos you selected for them. In nature, they are commercial photo printing services, with added online sharing feature.