Regular readers, if there is such a person, will recall my experiment before Easter with Google Alerts.
For those interested in how my Google alerts have turned out, it has been a mixed experience. On one hand, one Google alert did turn up several references to this blog, so clearly Google is indexing it. On the other hand, it also turned up a really random selection of references, some of them going back a number of years - a 12-year-old conference paper, a radio interview, and a short paper on The Fabulous LILO, Swinburne's metadata application profile. Why?
Try it out for yourself here.
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Derek Whitehead
What this blog is for
This is a blog which started in 2007 when I was standing for election as vice president of ALIA (the Australian Library and Information Association) - to communicate with members and canvas issues. It also continued during my year as president, which ended in May 2009.
It morphed into a more general blog, and I used it to communicate on a variety of issues - libraries, copyright, the internet, but particularly, just words. Over time, it became a blog mainly about language.
It morphed into a more general blog, and I used it to communicate on a variety of issues - libraries, copyright, the internet, but particularly, just words. Over time, it became a blog mainly about language.
It lapsed in 2012 but I have decided to revive it, and it will be about language and maybe sometimes some other things. Neologisms are unavoidable and an endless source of interest and fun. Talking with a bilingual person, and attempting to learn a language, I have also become more vividly aware of the confusing strangeness of many idioms. I will post about idioms later.
Please promote it to your friends. My short-term goal is to attract a second follower, but I have longer term goals too.
Blog Archive
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2007
(137)
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April
(24)
- Word of the day
- Word of the day
- Wikipedia - the seminar
- Word of the day
- Interesting week for university librarians
- Word of the day
- Word of the day
- Word of the day
- Au revoir, ILMS?
- Word of the day
- Blog changes direction
- Wikipedia again
- Word of the day
- Google Alerts
- Word of the day
- Values
- Have a nice Easter . . . last chance to vote
- Famous librarians
- Word of the day
- Library workforce ... and thank you Jenelle
- A great survey (no, that's not an oxymoron)
- Word of the day
- Librarians as Change Agents
- Word of the day
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April
(24)
Links
About Me
- Derek Whitehead
- Melbourne, Australia
- Derek is an Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University of Technology and at RMIT University, and the Chair of the Australian Digital Alliance. He retired in January 2015 as CIO and Director, Information Technology Services at Swinburne, and has had a long career as a librarian and copyright officer. He has had a long engagement with the internet since his involvement in the establishment of the pioneering Vicnet service in 1994. Derek was awarded an OAM in 2002 for services to libraries and the internet.
1 comment:
The issue here of course, is that computers have not yet passed the Turing test. I think the alerts are based on Google's web crawlers finding new things, where the definition for "new" is "new to the index", so if a site moves, or the crawler bumps up against it for the first time (the web is a big place after all), then to the crawler it is new; the crawler isn't smart enough to read the text and find out what the real truth is (just like the crawler isn't smart enough to distinguish between Swinburne the institution and Swinburne the founder).
I personally have some Google news alerts set up, and most of the stuff I get off those is actually news, presumably because this space is better defined, more visible, and more comprehensively crawled than "the web" Occasionally I get a weird thing that is five years old and has just been moved into an archive, but usually what I get is an interesting read.
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