Sunday, September 14, 2008

Voyage RSS Feed Reader

This is an attempt at a three dimensional feed reader. Headlines float in space in varying layers of clarity. The ones closest to you are easier to read and are more up to date, the layers behind being older. Up and down arrows on your keyboard will take you back and forward through these layers. The lack of clarity of the distant headings is frustrating.
I personally did not find it very usable or attractive to use, and the navigation is quite difficult. It is necesseary to enter the URL of the feed you wish to access, there is no bulk upload facility, feeds must be entered one at a time, and it is not possible to create an individual account on this site.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Kart00

Kart00 is one of a number of search engines that uses pictures rather than text to display the relationships between retrieved internet sites. The search results are displayed visually using “peaks’- the bolder ones indicating the relative importance of the results retrieved. The mapped sites and topics are also listed in the navigation bar on the left hand side of the screen. A red triangular marker also appears on the screen allowing you to search on the site or pull up related sites. Contour lines also establish links between topics. The intention of Kart00 is to combine the power of both the logical and creative aspects of the brain. Using this search approach appears to take longer, and tends to bring to prominence unusual and peripheral aspects of a search topic.
Since serious research is approached through rational, logical analysis, a search engine that logically ranks results according to relevance would appear to be more beneficial. Kart00 however offers more entertainment value.