Well I'd heard of WIKIs BLIKIs TWIKIs but now SWICKI. I've been looking at this free tool this afternoon and it seems pretty good...it is in Beta stage so there may be a few issues still need ironing out, one of them being making it idiot proof for people like me!! I set one up, embedded it on the left sidebar as you can see, but it wasnt returning any results...I had only told it to search for images it seems, when I went back to alter it, it refused to let me...so a support alert has been sent to the kind people at Eurekstar to see if they can surmise what went wrong. I don't think it was anything I did. Update: they did fix the problem, but for some reason the formatting is now doing strange things, so I have removed it until I can get it sorted...shouldn't take too long.
Anyways, this is how they are supposed to work. You create a kind of search facility that "learns" from your users and builds up a kind of "buzz cloud" as they call it of ideas and search themes. So not only can you perform more focussed searches, but you can find out what everyone else in your "community (area of interest)" is searching for or interested in. Once it gets going it provides you with top ten search lists and the like. I would imagine that it does rely on being heavily used for it to be most effective. But how cool would it be as a tool on your intranet site, set up to do focussed searches for any stuff relating to your area of business..a really effective way at keeping staff informed...You can even set up tag lines that will appear as search criteria which you could direct to your products and services and news stories....
As with most things that I have researched, really getting to grips with them does take time, and I shall no doubt have to return to this at some time. For the moment, my mission is to find out what is out there...
No comments:
Post a Comment