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There is an art of which every man should be a master - the art of reflection. If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all? //William Hart Coleridge//

Stuff the future, do it now!
Provoked (as ever) by a recent conversation with Marg about the shape of things to come regarding search engines - Google etc, I ventured that I thought the answer was to have targeted search engines; and that wikis and blogs are the forerunners of such exotica yet to be imagined. See, I think that when Gutenburg finally got around to developing a moveable type printing press in Europe there would've been a flurry around getting bibles done and then the obligatory spam, and then finally someone would've said something to the effect of - 'Crap, what's a guzonta' or some similar phrase and suddenly there was a need for dictionaries (a good seller to this day) and encyclopaedia (a good seller for people who like paper). As an aside, the first thing I bought when I left school was a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica - we could only access the books at school and oddly enough, I didn't go back to school to do my home work. Why would you? I needed the books at home - and so I wrote cheques for the next 200 years...

Now, of course, *real* learners use the 'hinternet. Oblivious to the obvious: > There is not a flower or bird in sight, only a small screen on which lines are moving, while the child sits almost motionless, pushing at the keyboard with one finger. As a learning environment, it may be mentally rich, but it is perceptually extremely impoverished. No smells or tastes, no wind or bird song (unless the computer is programmed to produce electronic tweets), no connection with soil, water, sunlight, warmth, the actual learning environment is almost autistic in quality, impoverished sensually, emotionally, and socially. //John Davy//

Topic focussed search engines
I believe the future of searching the net lies (at least based on my present understanding) on topic-focussed search engines - almost back to the encyclopaedias of yore. In the best encyclopaedia there was an article and then a sound bibliography - referring the enquiring reader on to other biblios. Almost sounds like bible...

I think now there's a few blogs starting to develop this rather nicely. There are still plenty of blogs (and wikis) that have links from almost every word. I take this to mean the author is incapable of showing commitment to their own thoughts. Imagine if Shakespeare wrote like that - you'd start with Hamelet and end up in the Dannevirke dry cleaners trying to get a deal on getting stains out of sheets...

I've built a blog based topic focussed search engine devoted to aquaculture at [|aquaculture.ako.net.nz]. People from around the world drop by an search within the content I'm building, and then linking off to the various sites I've found and had a read of. I don't build links that are to a commercial operation, unless there is something exceptional, and freely available, there for people to find. How would this work? My theory is I've got a high speed internet access. Many people do not. I have a high level of skill on searching on the internet. If you don't have high speed internet it's hard to develop that skill. I have good English skills. Many people do not - English may well be their fifth language.

So, to tie these things into a congruent whole, I use the scientific (Latin) species names when I'm writing about a specific species. Latin names solved this nomenclature issue several hundred years ago. I have a number of links on the side of the page so people can translate the page from English into Italian, Russian, Greek, Portuguese (Brazilian), Swedish, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Modern Chinese, Spanish, Dutch, Arabic, French, German, Japanese, and Norwegian. Frankly, if you don't have a passing grasp of one of those languages then you won't be reading this either.

Yes, I have some adsense ads on the site - I know some people find this vile. I prefer to remember how I've written for magazines and newspapers and had my volume creating articles surrounded by ads, but I've never received a share of the revenues. So, I do have ads, because a) I have to pay out of my own pocket to make this service available, and a click or two helps out; if not financially, then at least in a supportive, me-too-ish kind of way; and b) it's a further commercial link to a commercial web site if that is what my reader is looking for. It'd be wrong of me to not offer that kind of service. I work hard to provide good links, a good looking site, and something that's spam free. And people are always able to buy their adsense filter glasses which go totally opaque at the sight of any adsense...

Moving on from the aquaculture e-zine, I've had fun creating and experimenting with search wiki. This is a fusion of ideas - a topic focussed search engine, initially populated by myself, and then fine tuned by the users. When they add a term or phrase that's not in the search engine, I have the opportunity of adding it. The wikis I use also add a further navigation of meaning layer by scaling the word cloud by interest/usage. It's a very interesting idea. One of the things I've learned is I can now fully understand that when Google comes up with the alternative 'Did you mean //gozinta//?' it's because people have troubles speeling wrds.

Here are some of the search wikis I've created - have a look and see how they work.
 * [|Agroforestry - forestry and farming] || [|a city gardener: urban green fingers] || [|a healthy and happy cat] ||
 * [|a healthy and happy horse] || [|a love of food, food for love - romantic recipes] || [|a healthy and happy dog] ||
 * [|advanced cancer information] || [|human geography - the development of culture] || [|101-iPod-mobile media] ||
 * [|aesthetic & cosmetic plastic surgery] || [|diet and weight loss information] || [|alcohol and beer brewing] ||
 * [|the best fishing secrets] || [|Advanced Center for Disease Information] || [|Allergic Reactions!] ||
 * [|cellphones and ringtones] || [|Ask Aunt Alice for home remedies] || [|alternative energy biofuels] ||
 * [|arts, crafts, and scrapbooking] || [|body adornment: tattoo, piercing, painting, henna] || [|At Christmas (Xmas)] ||
 * [|aquaculture resources found on the net] || [|aquariums, paludariums, ponds: keeping fish happy] || [|alone: marginalia] ||
 * [|edible vegetable gardens] || [|USA Immigration and Green Cards] || [|true survivor stories] ||
 * [|cellphones and ringtones] ||  ||   ||