May 15, 2007, Vol 1, Issue 14

It seems like every where you turn these days, there is something under construction. And why not? The weather is cooperating, the sun is out longer – it’s a great time to build! But even if you don’t own a reciprocating saw, you can still play “Bob the Builder.”

Read on for some tools (the type that don’t require safety goggles) that you can use to build some groovy things to enhance and improve your research world.

DIY

Google got you going gaga? Yahoo! yanking your chain? Is the Dogpile become unwieldy? Ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust? Us too. Now you can!

You, yes you, can build your own search engine to search only the sites you know and love. Really you can. Check out Rollyo.

With Rollyo, you can easily create your own custom search engines – they call them Searchrolls – and explore, save, and personalize those created by others.

Go see. You’ll be amazed!

Intermission.

Let’s all go to the lobby, let’s all go to the lobby….

The pools open in just over 2 weeks. Yikes. Relax, we’ve got a cool tool to help build a better “you.”

Why not start an online fitness and food journal? Join FitDay. You can track your Foods, Exercises, Weight and Goals and view your Calories, Nutrition, Weight Loss and more.

Seeing that pie chart broken out by food group is very telling! Does that mean we are fit and healthy here at Scherer Cybrarian? Well!? We have good intentions!

DIY-2

Here’s something else you can build yourself. Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator.

Pipes is an online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

And with no fee attached, why not give it a try?

Stump the Researcher.

A reader asks: I remember several years ago reading about some measure of customer satifaction by industry. Do you know what I’m talking about and if it still exists?

And submit your own question – send an email!
Click here for the answer. It’ll just take a minute.

So we hope you will use and enjoy the tools we’ve shown you. These tools that will help you be more self- sufficient; and isn’t that a great feeling?

But don’t get TOO self-sufficient! We’d love to hear from you on those projects you just can’t get to and the ones that are sending you over the edge.

Meet you by the pool in two weeks!