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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
One thing about Google, if a product doesn't work, they get rid of it and try something else. In the digital world this is easy as, of course, and the only cost is the time and labour it took to set up the product in the first place.
So, this week, Google has given notice that a number of non-starters are biting the dust: Google Wave, for one, that seemingly exciting concept that just never excited anyone. Also going is the Friend Connect service that predated Google . My suspicion is that Google will eventually go as well; even though it's got a number of users, it's just come too late into the scene to compete with Facebook, however much people complain about the latter.
The Google Timeline feature vanished almost without fanfare, and some social media aspects of Google ReaderYour text goes here have also gone recently - in this case with some backlash from the users. If you don't use a particular programme you don't miss it of course. If you've invested quite a bit of time in it, of course it's another story.
There are other less well-known items that have gone, including Knol, a would-be Wikipedia that just never made the grade. Knol was launched in 2007 to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles.[Does this already sound like some other site?] Google has now created Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress.
Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.
Annotum comes with some high expectations; whether it will fulfil these, or whether it too will go the way of the dodo, is yet to be seen.
A concern everyone who has any amount of data on a computer is how best to back it up. The old hardware models are fine, but have some issues. For instance, we have two back-up drives, one of which will automatically pick up any changes you've made when it's plugged in. The drive recommends that you keep it plugged in at all times, but that seems somewhat counterproductive to me. I don't know whether it would be affected if the computer had a meltdown, but I'm not keen to discover that.
Consequently I have to plug it in every so often and catch up. The second back-up drive doesn't do anything automatically, so you have to go through your computer's files and figure out what might need updating. It's a bit of a job, but at least there's plenty of room on the thing.
And then there's the Cloud. I tried Dropbox at while back, when I was still at work, and one day, when my son sent me umpteen photographs via Dropbox, I discovered that the back-up system at work wasn't doing a complete back-up because of the files that Dropbox
had dropped onto my computer. At that point I closed the programme up, and didn't use it for a while.
I've started to do so again, because in spite of the two drives, neither of them is 100% secure. One lives in another room in the house, which means if the house burns down we've lost both the computer and the back-up. The other one lives in the car, so at least it means if the car crashes things are still safe at home, and vice versa. Nevertheless, it's not ideal.
Dropbox is rather like this second back-up drive: it only picks up what you manually tell it to save. This is fine up to a point, but it's easy to forget that you've changed something somewhere in a brief foray into a seldom-used file. Furthermore, Dropbox has a limited capacity, and I was quickly getting to the extent of it.
So I looked at SugarSync.com. It has the advantage of giving you more space in the Cloud for free, (3 gb) so I did a
bit of shuffling around, put the less-used files on Dropbox and the regularly-used ones on SugarSync.
The advantage of the latter is that once it's uploaded everything for the first time it keeps on updating any changes automatically. It's okay if you get all the files you want on there the first time you upload; after that you're supposed to use something called Magic Briefcase. This, however, puts the files in a separate folder, rather than in your main folder. Transferring them to your main folder is achievable, but it seems difficult to get them into the right folder; at present some of my folders are sitting inside a folder they shouldn't be in, on the Cloud. Still as long as it does the job, that's okay.
I've also tried another Cloud option, that of Google documents. This is an efficient enough system, and it seems to have an unlimited capacity, like everything else related to Google. It's rather fiddly doing it, however, and it's easy to forget that you want to save things. On the other hand, I've put all the variations of my musical scores on there as I've made changes, and if I really wanted to go back and find something I'd done earlier, I could. I think the other two Cloud systems I've mentioned keep a certain number of old versions of files, but not an endless stream.
So maybe Google wins out again!
Recently Google eliminated the operator from its search tools. Well, that wasn't exactly an operator I'd ever used, I must say, but that's just me. I find that either a straight Google search or one encased in quotation marks suffices for anything I want.
Anyway, they've replaced it with something called 'Verbatim'. Verbatim isn't easy to find, I must say. You have to have a search results page open already, and then, looking down the left side, you'll find at the bottom of the first list, the word 'More.' Click on More and another list will come up, including 'More search tools.' Finally, if you click on that, Verbatim will appear. Seems very long-winded, and to me, if Verbatim was actually that important, it would higher on the list.
I tried it using my name and the word Grimhilda, which is the name of the musical I've written. It comes up without any problem. But then, as far as I can tell, the results are pretty much the same as if I'd used the normal search box.
Seemingly the major difference is that with Verbatim, you'll get what you ask for: not checking of spelling, or any of the following:
personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before;
including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive]);
finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to “floral delivery” when you search [flower shops]);
searching for words with the same stem like “running” when you’ve typed [run]
making some of your terms optional, like “circa” in [the scarecrow circa 1963].
I've been missing out all this time, obviously, by not knowing about that little plus sign. Or have I? Maybe I'm just not fussy enough when it comes to searches. Or perhaps I've now discovered a strikingly efficient tool that I'll use all the time.
We'll see.
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