Like any self-respecting academic, my hard disk is now full of journal articles and other files in PDF form (as well as Word files etc). Microsoft provides a rather rudimentary ‘search for text in your files’ option in Windows 2000 – what I use – under ‘search’ on the start menu but it doesn’t index Acrobat files as standard and I have been unable to get the (well-hidden) downloadable Adobe patch to work.

As it happens I was putting together a course on “Internet Search Techniques”:http://www.nmk.co.uk/search/view.cfm?ItemID=4926 (now finished but I’ll do it again for any organization that wants it) so I had an excuse to do some investigation. Thanks to Jeremy Wagstaff’s excellent technology weblog, “Loose Wire”:http://loosewire.blogspot.com/ (and “this posting”:http://loosewire.blogspot.com/archives/2003_07_10_loosewire_archive.html in particular) I tried out:

• “DTSearch”:http://www.dtsearch.com/ (sophisticated, complex, expensive – aimed at corporate networks)
• “Enfish”:http://www.enfish.com/ (seemed to suck up my computer’s resources and slow it down – not as powerful and still quite clunky $50+)
• “X1”:http://www.x1.com/ – fast and easy to use (though it doesn’t yet support phrase search). They were going to offer a free version, which put it at the top of my list but now it costs $50. You can download a free trial if you want to try it for yourself. Its ability to highlight where in a gven file your search terms appear is very handy. It indexes email (several types including Eudora) and email attachments as well as documents. [obdisclaimer: they kindly gave me a full unlimited license to try it out]
• “SearchWithin”:http://www.searchwithin.com/ – its interface is pretty rudimentary (see below) and in the course of its installation several weird Visual Basic-related error messages happened (though having ignored them there seem to be no ill effects). The search results page is also basic – it doesn’t sort what’s found by relevance and it just gives you the first few words of the document rather than showing you where in the document your search terms appear. However it does have a big advantage over the others – it’s free (it’s ad supported – popping up sponsor ads in your web browser when you launch it and every so often when you use it). It also handles more powerful boolean search queries than X1.
  
  SearchWithin’s rather basic interface

• “Acrobat 6”:http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readermain.html – The latest version of Acrobat Reader has a way to search across multiple Acrobat files built in – but it is slow, and if you are not sure whether the document you want is a Word file or an Acrobat one you’d have to search twice.

So it looks like I will stick to using X1 for the moment – but I can’t help thinking Google or some other search engine provider should really put out something free and more professional (Compaq’s Altavista had a primitive product back in the late ’90s you could download).

Perhaps inevitably, the attempts by people like “NZ Bear” to rank weblogs by popularity have spurred some to try to ‘game’ the system and get to the top of the list. This practice has spurred some discussion by Clay Shirky (an A-list blogger) and others. As Shirky points out if you get into ‘A List’ rankings you will probably get more curious readers and your ranking may perpetuate itself.
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Visual Poetry is an entertaining use of Google’s image search engine. Enter a phrase and it will return pictures based on what Google associates with each word. Try it for yourself, and when you’re done why not try “a musical equivalent”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_humour_entertainment.html#000939 I found earlier?

!http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~u1gs/404.jpg!
(By “Ahkron”:http://www.b3ta.com/board/profile.php?id=10391)
“b3ta”:http://www.b3ta.com/ (an informal art/web design group) does periodic ‘challenges’ on a theme. On the week of 14-21st November they tackled The Victorian Internet and the results (33 pages of them!) are highly entertaining. Note: as is frequently the case with B3TA several of the pictures contain sexual innuendo of one kind or another.
Thanks to “Azeem”:http://www.20six.co.uk/weblogEntry/111l41fe6cld2 for the link.

Mark Davies, the founder of BusyInternet, Ghana’s biggest cybercafe, told the BBC World Service’s latest “Go Digital”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/progs/03/go_digital/24nov.ram programme that Yahoo had threatened to block all purchases to “Yahoo-hosted stores”:http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/index.php from Ghanaian or Nigerian addresses because of the widespread fraudulent use of credit cards from his cafe. To try to head off this problem, he simply blocked all shopping. It’s extraordinary that a major portal like Yahoo could consider redlining entire nations, and that the “solution” should be for a cybercafe to block all ecommerce – particularly in a country where cybercafes may represent the only accessible Internet connection with the outside world.

A search turned up an article in “Balancing Act”:http://www.balancingact-africa.com/news/back/balancing-act_158.html from May this year with much more detail. According to the Yahoo security consultant:

The point is, 99.999% of purchases from Ghana are fraud. At least 99% of Yahoo stores don’t ship internationally anyway. Our fraud orders are up literally about 1000 percent over last year, almost all from Ghana. The cost to us in time and effort has reached the breaking point.

While it is certainly understandable why the move was threatened, imagine the furore if Yahoo had unilaterally threatened to block, say, all ecommerce from Portugal. This reveals how much unaccountable power these organizations have.

The “World Rich List”:http://www.globalrichlist.com/ site reveals just where you rank relative to global per capita income. As things stand at the moment I don’t even make the top ten percent, apparently, but if you counted capital (and particularly accumulated cultural capital) my ranking would be higher…

Thanks to matt jones | work & thoughts for the link

Two recent stories about attempts by doctors and MPs to make us all a little healthier (this sort of stuff sticks in my mind because my wife is doing a degree in public health). Doctors recently urged a public smoking ban – something I have supported on this weblog more than once – in “2003”:https://blog.org/archives/000920.html and “2002”:https://blog.org/archives/000474.html. Not only does passive smoking kill 1,000 people a year in the UK but it’s extremely anti-social. And today a select committee “suggested”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3242674.stm an easy-to-interpret code to be put on all food that would tell people how much exercise it would take to burn off the calories contained in it.

People often use the Internet to try to get a personal glimpse of what things are like across the world. “Webcams”:http://www.comfm.com/webcam/ give you a peek but they can’t talk back, and travel guides written by travellers for travellers like “Wikitravel”:http://www.wikitravel.org/ or “igougo”:http://www.igougo.com/ but if you want a day by day slice of life account of life in a country weblogs can provide one. A very large proportion are “from the US and Europe”:http://www.blogcensus.net/?page=map but I recently heard about two weblog indexes from further afield sinosplice indexes weblogs in English from or about China and “Blog Africa”:http://www.blogafrica.com/ should be reasonably self-explanatory!

The creator of “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com/ apologises for some growing pains.

‘Right now, we’re adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We’re also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.’

Of course this is a self-selecting sample – those who know about and choose to register with the site – so actual numbers are even higher.

Posted on behalf of Dorothea Kleine – please respond to her not to me!

Dear All,
we are PhD students interested in the potential the Internet holds for Development (capacity building, social capital, NGO networks, participation, e-governance, e-commerce, e-learning etc.). We realize this topic is very complex and that therefore from whatever angle you look at it, it helps to exchange ideas with colleagues who are looking at the same thing, but from a different perspective.

We would therefore like to initiate an interdisciplinary and intercollegiate working group on “Internet and Development”.

We are inviting graduate students (and possibly more senior researchers) from subjects as diverse as Development Studies, Media and Communications, Geography, Information Technology, Anthropology and Economics etc. from across colleges and universities in the London area to join.

One idea of a format would be to form a wider virtual network while meeting as a working group at the “Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research”:http://www.stanhopecentre.org/ in London every two weeks or monthly. The Centre is located at Marble Arch, just across the street from Hyde Park. There would be office space available and we can also book meeting rooms and a conference room free of charge.

Our first meeting for all that are interested will be held on *Thursday, December 4th* at the Stanhope Drinks Party, which starts at 6:30 p.m. at Stanhope Centre (Stanhope Place, nearest tube: Marble Arch). There we can get to know each other and discuss the format of our network, possible themes for conferences and ideas for research projects.

If you are planning to come, or interested in joining but not able to come that day, please email. We are very much looking forward to hearing from you!