Phil Bradley trawls the net for answers to readers' queries.
Q I’ve seen the phrase ‘cloud computing’ appearing more and more often these days. What exactly does it mean?
A I’m willing to bet that when someone first explained the internet to you they illustrated it by drawing a square and oblong for your computer and a line (your communication) going into a cloud, representing the internet. As the range of resources and utilities available on the internet has increased, with word processing, spreadsheets, file storage, presentation packages and so on, more and more people are working ‘in the cloud’. Businesses are becoming more interested in this since there are cost savings and fewer calls on technical support departments and it helps employees become more self-sufficient.
Q Can you recommend any free/open source software that is easy to use (i.e. requiring only minimal or no knowledge of html etc) which might be suitable for creating websites/pages for a library?
A There are many avenues you could explore, but if the library in question isn’t worried about having its own domain name you might want to look at using one of the wiki packages that are around. The creation of web pages, and indeed the entire site, is done within the browser window, making it more like word-processing than using an HTML authoring package. I would suggest taking a look at Wetpaint (www.wetpaint.com) or Peanut Butter Wiki (http://pbwiki.com/) but if you don’t like either of those you could compare different packages at WikiMatrix (www.wikimatrix.org/).
Q Do you know where I could find out about the most popular way that search engines search for people if you only have their forename initials, rather than full forenames? For example, if I was searching for E. M. Forster, I’d like to know if it would be better to search for ‘E(space)M(space)Forster’ or ‘EM Forster’. It’s not really an issue with single initials, but is with more than one.
A There is a difference in the way that search engines work here – they will see a difference between EM and E(space)M. Google, for example, returns an extra thousand results for EM, and Exalead found 10 times as many results for E(space)M. You could try a search for “EM Forster” OR “E M Forster”, but that’s laborious, so you might wish to try “E*Forster” in Google, which will replace the asterisk with anything else. You do end up with an extra 300,000 results (thereabouts), and some of them will not be appropriate (such as E Lucy Forster) but it will be a more comprehensive search.
Site of the Month
FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/) collates everything that your friends are doing on various public networks, such as Twitter, Flickr, in their weblogs, shared in Google Reader and so on. Rather than having to keep tracking them down, you can create a page of Friends and all that information is collected in one neat place, saving lots of time...
Updated: 15 August 2008