Wolfram Alpha uber-geek search engine

Now live and on a screen near you – the Wolfram Alpha search engine that can answer nearly every question…

some answers may not be exactly what you would expect! Such as the answer to What is the meaning of life? (42)

Yes, maths can be cool.

Using Tags for image searching but creatively!

Check out http://www.taggalaxy.de/ which allows you to search tags in Flickr for related images – so what? The good thing about this is the presentation! Think GalaxyQuest and you’re nearly there… what an amazing idea! Really useful for difficult to reach kids who can’t seem to get inspiration for their art work.

There are resources for Powerpoint advice (the excellent TED style presentation advice for instance) to make much less text dependent slides. Why not use wonderful images from Flickr, Picasa etc as your backgrounds?

Information / Internet Literacy when validating web info

Ok, I know this is familiar territory.
It is worth doing as a reminder — How to read a web address? Domain name comes after the www bit; is it a name you know and/or trust? Is it a personal page? if /users/ or a tilde (~) or random percentage mark appear it probably is personal opinion rather than real facts. What does the extension mean? This is the .gov.uk or .com or .org bit. There are some unusual extensions which can easily be looked into closer by google searching them. The .edu sites should be US universities and .ac.uk for UK universities but still look out for personal web pages when validating a site.

Google to inherit world, possibly

Here’s a little brain teaser…

Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.
Robin Morgan

And one more thing…

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
Marshall Mcluhan

Alright, you’re thinking whats this gotta do with G**gle? Well read on dear reader…

The New York Times asks the question, is G**gle moving towards world domination? “In a few years you’ll be driving your G**gle to the G**gle to buy some G**gle for your G**gle,” read one posting on Slashdot.

Read more on G**gle’s world take-over plans athttp://www.politicalgateway.com/main/columns/read.html?col=247

This isn’t just conspiracy theory stuff look at this BBC news report at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4662280.stm

G**gle to take the Micr*S*ft crown within 8 years??? Search system, Email catalogue, Photo storage, Outlook spamming, TV, whats next an OS? A dummy-machine?

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
Marshall McLuhan