News Timeline by Google

Google is good at adding new cool tools. These are available on a special Google Labs page and people are encouraged to check them out, experiment with them. A new tool is Google News Timeline. It displays news and related search results on an interactive timeline. If you like to follow issues and look for trends, this tool seems useful. It is a mix of text and photos, drawn from TIME Magazine and Wikipedia.

COLUMNS and their search options: SHOW: day, week, month, year, decade
SIZE of news item: small, medium, large

Time Magazine covers are included, but can be eliminated. For example, if you wanted to see what was happening for a certain year, you'd see 4-5 TIME magazine covers in each month or week block, depending on what you wanted to show.

You can also enter a name, such as your own name. It was fun finding news items appear at the top of the columns that mention my name! Oct 2002 item from School Library Journal; 2007 item from WebWire.

Gesture Technology

An April issue of Businessweek has an Info Tech article on "Soon TVs and PCs May Work Like the Wii: Real-world devices with gesture-reading abilities are set to debut next year." The article starts off with a description of an avatar receptionist in Microsoft in Redmond, WA. The digital person peers out from a computer PC, talks and responds to visitors' gestures and voice commands. This reminds me of Microsoft's earlier experiment with an attractive but short-lived digital assistant (Ms. Dewey) in 2006?

Microsoft isn't the only company interested in gesture technology. Hewlett-Packard plans to add some gesture features to its Touch-Smart PCs, according to HP Personal Systems Group CIO Phil McKinney. This could be useful as assistive technology. Like any new technology, we will be surprised by how people actually use it -- or not.

YouTube EDU -- Higher Education Videos and Channels

YouTube now has an "edu" section for college and university videos and channels. Search by topic, directory, most subscribed, most viewed. Lots of videos on commencement, on promoting the campus or welcoming students, lectures, and special events. UCBerkeley, Stanford, CSU Sonoma State, UCDavis, and UCLA each have hundreds of videos. The number and quality will continue to grow. Check to them out!