Monday morning was spent in the two-part session: 60 Gadgets in 60 Minutes and Web Tools for Legal Researchers. I know the 60 Gadgets session is a popular one, but it was my first time at this session and I have to say I don’t think I’ll go again. There was nothing really wrong with it, but it was not useful to me. I expected it to be 60 gadgets that would actually be useful in a library/information setting. Lord knows those types of gadgets are plentiful these days and it’s hard to keep up. I thought this session would help me do that.
Instead, it was a session devoted to (mostly) useless crap. I do not need a catapult watch, complete with BB ammunition. The flip-flops with the built in flask could come in handy now and again, but it is certainly not why my employer paid for me to come to this conference.
This is the type of session that makes sense on Wednesday afternoon, when your brain is squishy from a long week and you need something a little more light-hearted. But Monday morning? It’s just not my bag, baby, and in the future, I’ll pass.
Here are the things from this session that I thought were interesting, and a least mildly useful:
• APC USB Battery Pack – $55
• Turbocell Charger – <$20, runs on 1 AA battery
• Solio Universal Charger – solar charging – $200
• Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card – detects Wi-Fi spots and wirelessly transmits pics to home PC – $80 – $130
• Radioshift – $32 – Tivo for radio. Mac OS only – record from database of 50,000 stations
UPDATE: The slides from the 60 Gadgets presentation are online at LLRX, just in case you want to see what you missed.
Next came the ever-popular Gary Price with Web Tools for Legal Researchers. This was a bit of a misnomer as he did not focus on legal tools one bit. And he was called on it by someone in the audience who was wondering where the legal tools were. Gary replied that these were tools everyone should know about and he would not be showing legal information per se. Whether or not these are tools everyone needs is debatable, and I think the real meat of his presentation was too far in to his ubiquitous list of URLs. Fortunately, his entire list is available at http://digbig.com/4xbhr.
Here are the tools he got to before the end of his session. Actually I had to leave about 10 minutes before he finished because of an unfortunate time overlap, but at the rate he was going he probably only got to 2-3 more tools before time was called.
• Hakia.com – Israeli-based semantic web search engine
• Powerset.com – searches Wikipedia entries
• Jux2.com – compare results to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN – This one is cool. It has a tab showing the search results you would get on each of these search engines as well as a listing of the results that were unique to each engine and the results you would miss if you only searched one engine and not the others.
• 1800flights.com – flight status online and on phone
• Summize.com – search Twitter postings based on topic – This was kind of neat in its use to monitor daily trends and hot topics. Of course your trendspotting is limited to Twitter users, but that group is growing daily.
• i-Metro – public transit directions worldwide
• Hopstop – US transit directions
• Earthcomber.com – local stores, restaurants, etc for major cities
• Whatsonwhen.com – database of world events
• Science Info: Scirus, WorldWideScience, Science.gov, CiteseerX Alpha, BotSeer
• feedM8.com – transcoding – shows you how a web site will look on a mobile device
• Archives: Archive-It, CyberCemetary
It was too bad that this session (Price’s only session) was in direct conflict with Mary Ellen Bates’ only non-CE session. It was a tough choice and, given the 60 Gadgets program, I’m not sure I chose the right one. Oh well, ever onward.