Greetings Professor! I hope you're actually reading through my site and not just reading this note because I worked super hard on it! I'll try to brag as much as I can here about all the wonderful things I did.
The Good Stuff.
Site Navigation
- The top bar is designed for easy navigation through the actual project. For instance, the drop down menu for tools and resources is convenient and there's a one click stop to specialist tutorial and background information
- The side bar is more index like, with the intention of grouping together information in the site. So it doesn't list for instance ALL the links to tools I evaluated, but rather has a link to the tools tutorial index page from which you can access other parts of the site. I also think it has great skim value (my LHC professor would be proud). And I love my picture in the tool bar which adds some flavor to each flavor on my wiki. Clicking it also leads you back to the home page. I tried to steer away from too many pictures on a page if they were unnecessary.
- I tried to be thoughtful and guide someone going through this site. For instance, I linked to tools index at bottom of each tools tutorial page so you wouldn't have to scroll all the way to the top to select another tool.
- I discovered horizontal bars! They helped me breakdown content. For instance, in the background page, I used bar to separate the information I give from the area in which I found more links/resources for additional information.
- I used tags! For instance, you can read my news blogs at news tag.
Site Content
Tool Tutorials: Quality over Quantity was the theme for my tool evaluation, which definitely took up most of my time. I definitely did not cover ALL the different version of tools we discussed in class. Instead, I discussed how I used 3 or 4 from each and discussed how I used them.
Example 1 Blog search: Included background information, overall commentary and alternatives to tools that I used here. Also has I review of three blog tools I used in detail. For most other tools, the two are on the same page, but in this case, I was concerned about the length of the page, and separated the two.
Example 2 Change Notification tutorial: I not only have the two functions described above, but also had separate pages for the actual email alerts and page change alerts I received. I want to make sure you don't miss them.
Sorry about the quality of my screenshots, I have a PC and was using this program but its resolution apparently isn't very good.
Resource Evaluations:
- I reviewed 11 websites (2 companies, 3 news, 3 industry/org, 2 personal) that were important and also included some just for fun links that you should check out.
- I reviewed 8 RSS feeds (3 blogs, 2 Google news feeds, 3 news)
Current Events: This has three portions.
- Shared RSS Feeds from Google Reader
- Summary of News Events - I summarized 40 events
- Google Custom Search Engine with link to tutorial page which shows the sites on it.
Specialist Tutorial: I tried to separate this logically with lots of links dispersed in between.
- Part I being learning about the industry with what I have on the site (introduction on home page, background information, news summary etc.)
- Part II Going forth to search by yourself
- Where to get RSS Feeds
- What happens when there's none
- Multimedia search
- Part III Tips
Background:
This is last because in terms of this project, this was probably the page I spent the least time on. The objective was to just offer a brief overview and then get to the actual information search portions. If I had more time, I might have expanded into each company a little bit more.
Some Concerns
- Query Structuring: I didn't know that much about the coffee industry going into this, so I had some difficulties structuring queries. I began with just ["Coffee"], ["coffee industry"] etc. But due to the nature of this project, which on the information side, focused more on news events rather than background information, my queries eventually got narrowed down to just company names like [Starbucks] or ["Starbucks News"]. I didn't see any need for special syntaxes like [intitle:] or [site:] because I could find most information from the major websites I described. Similarly, in other searches like blog or images, my queries were rather simple, but they gave me what I wanted.
- Didn't use Yahoo! Pipes because I felt the news sites I was examining already had category breakdowns and I did not need the tool to help me filter information.
- Did not evaluate UM Library resources even though I used it to find some information for background research. It has good sources like those here. This is because unless the "analyst" is part of a company that has also bought subscriptions to these journals, she wouldn't have access to these. So I don't think comparing these sources to "free" deep web sources would have been fair.
Start Navigating! You can use About Wiki links to help get you started as well.
Thanks for reading.
