One of the things I've been meaning to blog about for several weeks now is the Zimbio Public Portal. I've also been meaning to have a play with Windows Live Search Macros. So with Beyond Google set to go live in the next couple of weeks, I thought I'd give them both a quick run through in case they're worth mentioning at an appropriate point in the course conferences - or even via the course team blog (depending how we work it - it's behind the firewall and private to the Course Team at the moment).
Zimbio offers easily customised, topic focussed public portals. The straightforward portal set-up procedure allows you to add feedrolls, searchrolls, several flavours of 'tracker' - for news, blogs or images, as well as a group blog, shared notepad, member forum and live chat. One neat touch is the ability to see member presence status on a variety of IM services, a component I know Marc Eisenstadt in KMi has been looking for for some time...
The trackers allow you to set up saved keyword searches, which can be added to, edited or deleted by members, with the results being fed live into the portal.The linkroll and feedroll display member saved links news item headlines from member added feeds. Portal pages also come with OPML web feeds, so you can effectively receive all the portal news components remotely in your own feed reader.
With just a little imagination, you can see how a service like Zimbio could be used to provide an easily customisable, course related portal.
As an example, I set up a quick Beyond Google page on Zimbio - and here's the corresponding OPML feed.
As ever with using public services on a 'closed' course, membership issues may need resolving to lock down certain features so that they are only available members of a given course cohort. As it stands, Zimbio is still perhaps a little too general in scope to be used out of the box as a key component of an online course offering, but it does raise useful questions about the 'live content' and search related components that can be included in a topic or course specific portal.
Turning now to Microsoft Live Search Macros, these "enable you to quickly create a search engine that is custom tailored to any topic area". Each of these macros is similar to, if rather more flexible than, a Yahoo search builder (which I blogged about here). In particular, Live Search Macros allow you to combine the full range of advanced search limits in a string that will be added to any query you make using the macro.
When constructing a macro, it's possible to preview the result on your own query, and compare the results with the 'raw' search in a two column display. While this feature is very useful, I take issue with the usability: the comparison page open up in a new page, and as far as I can tell it's impossible to tweak the macro within that page - you have to go back to the macro construction page to do that. With Live Search making such a big play in terms of AJAX based interactions, I fully expected the preview search to appear within the macro cosntruction page.
When I've had time to 'tune' some demos using these services, I'll blog them again, along with more links and a few screenshots.
Posted by ajh59 at September 24, 2006 11:37 PM