As the release date for Wolfram Alpha draws closer, I thought it would be a good idea to update my earlier post.
Yesterday Stephen Wolfram offered a sneak preview at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Two interesting articles are also available, one by Frederic Lardinois on a demonstration given by Wolfram on April 25 and the other a response to the Berkman Center preview by Larry Dignan.
And the question everyone seem to be asking is, will this replace Google? Well…
Is Wolfram/Alpha a Google killer? Probably not. Wolfram/Alpha’s approach, however, is notable and it’s easy to picture it being used in the enterprise. Wolfram’s demonstration could be summed up as an intersection between analytics and generic Web search. Wolfram/Alpha gets you an answer instead of pointers to potential answers. “It tries to tell us useful information based on what it can compute,” said Wolfram. ”The goal is to provide expert level access to anyone at anytime.”
In an earlier post I talked about the importance of “user engagement and visual aesthetics” in presenting information. A fine example is Prezi, an online presentation tool from a Hungarian company that allows you to create amazing non-linear presentations.
The ideology of Prezi is based [on] our natural knowledge on how to coordinate ourselves in space; traditionally all information we have had to process and store used to be linked to physical space. That is where our minds have developed good skills in orienting ourselves. Despite all this digital information today is mostly presented to us as a moniker of printed matter. Of course printing has served us well to store (and shape) information for the last six centuries, however, with the wide appearance of computing we saw the same old pattern: old forms got translated to new media without exploring its full potential. Most of the computer systems which present us with information today use the old paradigm of prints and slides: arranging information on a framed 2d static space.
Prezi also allows us to take into consideration the influence of typography on information and perhaps offers the possibility of incorporating kinetic typography into our presentations.
Kinetic typography can be seen as a vehicle for adding some of the properties of film to that of text. For example, kinetic typography can be effective in conveying a speaker’s tone of voice, qualities of character, and affective (emotional) qualities of text…. It may also allow for a different kind of engagement with the viewer than static text, and in some cases, may explicitly direct or manipulate the attention of the viewer.
Hopefully, applications like Prezi will allow us to better express the richness and complexity of our subjects when we give presentations, and for the audience not only to be better engaged but also be moved by what we have to say.
Londoners Alfie Boyd and Claire Wilson have set up a system to hand out free paperbacks every month at various London tube stations as an alternative to free newspapers.
So, when is this coming to the TTC?
Three items that may be if interest:
- search-cube is a new visual search engine that allows previews of up to ninety-six websites, videos and images. Combining results from Google with images from Thumbshots, it creates a rotating 3D cube that the user can manipulated to browse the results. While it lacks any ranking capability, it is still an interesting variation on the search engine. Would it be a good way to present search results from an OPAC?
- Trying to collaborate on a project and need to share your computer screen? Have a look at Pocket Meeting, which can do just that for a one time fee of $5. A quick user review is available from ReadWriteWeb.
