Twitter: for stalking or following?
By andy | April 9, 2008
So eventually I have signed up a twitter account, I am finding this quite useful… works well as a “micro blog” – frequent snippet updates. I know there are many many people out there on Twitter, and have been for a long time, as a new blogger it is only a recent avenue for me to explore.
I have often seen twitter as more of a service that allows stalking and with the installation of Twibble to my n95, this makes stalking even easier – Twibble allows you to send your location details to twitter.
One or two updates later and I seem to have found my feet with this service. Status updates can be found at my twitter page or in the footer of my blog. If you have twitter and you wish to stalk follow me – feel free, there wont be much location based being posted I don’t think!
Topics: Mobile Devices, Web
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Tags: twitter
Over The Air: Phone Phight n95 Software
By andy | April 9, 2008
Over The Air went ahead as planned providing 48 hours of mobile development, this planned event took place at the South Kensington Campus of Imperial College. The event was heavily sponsored by some big names (BBC, Adobe, Sun, Yahoo, Google, Nokia) to name just a few. If you want to see some photos of the event, why not check out it out Flickr – over the air
You can read all about the event over at www.overtheair.org along with a summary of the event Some very good prototype applications developed and some ideas that sound like they may be very useful once complete! I have outlined a few of the products I have seen or heard / read about, hopefully you will think they are good / useful mobile applications in the (near) future!
Phone Phight: This is a little application / game (developed by lastminute.com labs). It works as the light sabre application but with an additional feature (big feature) – it works via bluetooth allowing you to actually fight (or phight) other n95 users! No more undecided contests…. whoever wins phone phight is the winner!
Show me the way to go home: This handy application gets data from defined sources allowing real time travel information direct to your handset. Departure and arrival information and at present this is limited to the London, UK area but with time I assume will grow and take information from other sources.
There were many other applications developed at Over The Air: BrowserSync looks quite good and the location based platform game based on Yahoo’s Upcoming (event listings).
Topics: Development, Mobile Devices
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Tags: mobile, over the air
Google Searching… `Advanced Search` for Beginners
By andy | April 3, 2008
I know your probably thinking “this sounds like a post in which the title alone contradicts itself” – if you are… you’d be correct!
I have been asked on many occasions about refining results when searching online, taking Google as an example – I am going to go through some basic tips which hopefully will help those “new users” out.
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PATRONISING INFORMATION FROM HERE ON!
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This information is based on the Google search engine, all information is correct at time of posting. Google are constantly changing, both adding and removing features.
Simple Searching…
Typing something in the search box and clicking “Google Search” constitutes as a simple search, the results that are returned could relate to any of the words you entered for your search. The results will go from what Google identifies most relevant (matching most words) down to results that match only one word within your search.
Using Operators (deep breath)…
When searching for phrases you can use a series of operators (symbols) to tell Google what you want it to do. See below for operator usage…
Example Search: has my cat been poisoned
This simple search finds all results with has, my, cat, been,and poisoned in them. In any order, result examples could be…
- has my cat been poisoned
- the parrot has been poisoned but my cat is fine
- have you ever been poisoned
- my cat is called Fred
- my cats have been poisoned and were put down at the vets
| Operator | Usage | Details |
| Quote (”) | has my “cat been poisoned” | This search will return only results that contain the words cat been poisoned in the same sentence (consecutive words). Results 2, 3, 4, 5 would not appear. |
| Minus (-) | has my cat been poisoned -parrot | This search would return any results that don’t contain the word parrot. Result 2 would not appear. |
| Plus (+) | my +cat has been poisoned | This search would not return anything about multiple cats being poisoned. The plus sign tells Google not to find alternative words, so the word cat must be matched exactly. Result 5 would not appear. |
Advanced Searching (made easy)
One way to complete an advanced search is use Google’s advanced search pages this is quite straight forward to complete, rather than go into detail here I suggest you bounce over to Google’s advanced search pages and try some searches. Don’t worry I’ll still be here when you get back…
Specific Searches
As well as searching the whole web, Google allows you to refine your search to a specific area. Below are a few options available to you…
| Prefix | Usage | Details |
| Define: | define: geek | This will return all definitions available online for the word “geek”, substitute the word geek for your required lookup. |
| Site: | site: geekant.co.uk | This will return all indexed pages of the given site (geekant.co.uk), change the site to whatever you please. This can also be preceded by a search term to return all pages from a specific site containing that search. |
| Link: | link: geekant.co.uk | This will return all pages which link to the given site. |
| Cache: | cache: geekant.co.uk | This will return the last “snap shot” of your site taken by Google. |
| Info: | info: geekant.co.uk | This will return all the information Google has about the given site. |
| Related: | related: geekant.co.uk | This will return any pages that Google associates with the given site. |
Conclusion
Google provides both a basic and an advanced search interface, all of the advanced features are available by using operators or refined searched. Some times this can be quicker than filling in the advanced search form, it most certainly is useful background information to searching effectively and efficiently.
Topics: General
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Tags: google, searching
New Blog Design & Development
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