Bigger than a breadbox but smaller than a blog article

I keep a list of ideas for articles. On that list I’ve got some items that are quite noteworthy but that I’m not planning to write entire articles about. Here are some of those items:

1. FantasyFootballNerd.com gets my nomination for most unusual use of federated search. Here’s what the press release announcing the site has to say:

FantasyFootballNerd.com today announced the consumer launch of FantasyFootballNerd.com, a comparison fantasy football website that helps users make informed decisions about draft and sit/start choices. It is the first meta-search engine for the estimated 18 million adults who participate in fantasy sports each year.

Do you have a more unusual application of federated search, or meta-search?

2. Ivan’s Blah Blah Blog has a link to an interesting website that estimates the size of the surface web (a small part of the overall web), some size statistics about the deep and surface webs (the deep web being what the federated search world cares tremendously about), and some fun facts from 1999 about acceptability of response times!

3. The WorldWideScience Alliance video is now available. WorldWideScience is a prominent federated search application that lets users search multiple national and international scientific databases and portals. The DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) introduced the application in June of 2007 and the multilateral WorldWideScience Alliance was formalized last month to govern the global science gateway. The video covers the signing ceremony for the new alliance in Seoul, Korea. The video was of particular interest to me because (1) I attended the ceremony, and (2) my two major employers were in attendance, Walt Warnick, (director of OSTI, brainchild of WorldWideScience, and MC for the ceremony), and Abe Lederman (founder and president of Deep Web Technologies, the company that built the search engine for WorldWideScience and that pays me to write this blog).

Korea is a great country. In fact, I was once an English teacher in the Korean countryside, nearly 25 years ago, before it was popular for Americans and Canadians to become English teachers in Korea. So, attending the signing ceremony afforded me a great opportunity to return to a familiar and friendly place.

4. Roy Tennant has published a book in honor of Anne Lipow. He shares this in his Library Journal blog:

Not long after my good friend, colleague, and mentor Anne Lipow died (in September 2004), I promised myself I would edit a festschrift in her honor. It would be little enough to do for the person who had more of a hand in shaping my career than anyone else. Besides, I felt like it might help me to deal with her loss. I have taken years to do it, but the book is now finally published, as Technology in Libraries: Essays in Honor of Anne Grodzins Lipow.

What a touching way to honor someone’s life and gifts!

5. Mark Bennett, vice president of New Idea Engineering, has posted 20+ Differences Between Internet vs. Enterprise Search - And Why You Should Care (Part 3). If you have any interest in what it would take for federated search to really take off in the enterprise, read the whole series. I reviewed Part I of the series in April.

6. For those of you that are paranoid that Google is going into places you didn’t expect it would, they’re now indexing Flash content. There’s a bunch of detail in the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Got any noteworthy items you’d be willing to share?

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Tags: federated search