Google rolls out Knowledge Graph

To me, this looks a lot like the innovations we’ve seen in the last year or so in Westlaw.  Google explains that they are building on the searches others have done and what they’ve found useful.  They are trying to differentiate concepts that all my have the same word.  ‘Taj Mahal’ is the given example. Does the searcher mean the building in India or the singer or the restaurant down the street?

Search on Google for Taj Mahal

You can read Google’s press release from yesterday at: Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings | Official Google Blog.

One big difference? Google is free.

Zotero

I once saw a tweet that referred to Zotero as the author’s ‘secret academic boyfriend.’  I don’t know that I love it with that kind of intensity, but I did have cause to be grateful for it today.  My colleague and I were discussing the WordPress workshop and I wanted to run past her the help guide for WordPress that illustrates a nifty exercise for deciding what to blog about – really, one of the harder questions that our students will have contend with.   Thankfully, I had saved it into a folder I made in  Zotero in my Firefox browser, making it a cinch to pull it up and share it with her.

Zotero is a Firefox add-on and it runs within the browser on your computer. It provides a place to organize links to resources and even upload documents. It then lets you output bibliographies in a variety of citation formats (including Blue Book). You can sync it another computer or online.  Pretty nifty.