Tracking tutorial resources

A distinct feature of the Net lies in providing innumerable resources for learning almost any all subject for free. Tens of hundreds of on-line tutorial packages and audio/video teaching materials on a variety of subjects are available.

For instance, persons using PowerPoint may find the (http://www.awesomebackgro unds.com /powerpointtutorials.htm) site useful.

Students of computing will welcome the tutorial materials hosted on `Virginia Tech' (http://courses.cs.vt.edu/ <108,sym,126>cson line/). Learning modules on subjects such as algorithms, data structures and operating systems are presented on this site.

For locating such tutorials, a multitude of tutorial directories are in place. The W3Schools (http://www.w3schools.com/) with several on-line tutorials is meant for web developers. The `Technology Tutorials' (http://www.internet4classrooms.com/on-line2.htm), which contains a huge collection of tutorials on different computing technology related subjects such as MS-Office, Internet and web page development is another of the same kind.

Besides these, lots of new pedagogical resources are being rolled out almost everyday. The explosion of such teaching/learning resources has led to a hunt for special tools to find/track the new ones. Now, let us explore some of them.

Search engines

Pixel2life (http://www.pixel2life.com) is a tutorial search engine gaining popularity among netizens. The service has a database of more than 15,000 tutorials on different computing related subjects such as JavaScript, Perl, Visual Basic, Visual C++ and so on. Pixel2life is quite dynamic and to help you easily track the latest additions to its index, the service features a web feed also. By subscribing to this feed you can monitor the latest tutorials being churned out with your newsreader.

For getting help/tips on computer related troubles, you may check out the service Help2go (http://www.help2go.com/) which has web-feed capabilities as well.

TutorGig (http://www.tutorgig.com/) can be used to find tutorials on computing related subjects.

Another tutorial related service worth a look is `MyTutorials.com' (http://www.mytutorials.com/) whose goal is to develop on-line tutorials collaboratively. Here, anyone can host a tutorial that can be read/edited later by others. On `Mytutorials,' you can find tutorials on different subjects that include computers and health (http://www.mytutorials. com/tutorials.asp).

`FyberSearch Tutorial Search' (http://www.fybersearch.com/tutorials/) is another source for tutorials/lessons. By just entering the name of the topic on its search box you can collect several links to tutorials on the subject.

Learnthat.com (http://www.learnthat.com/tutorials/), Wannalearn (http://www.wannalearn.com/), eXtropia (http://www.extropia.com/tutorials. html) and TechTutorials (http://www.techtutorials.net/) are other tutorial directories worth exploring.

New search tools

One way to tame the ever-expanding ocean of web information is to create specialised search services focussing on specific subjects. The search service, Omgili (http://omgili.com/) which indexes web based discussion forums is an instance of such a trend. The service offers special commands to search for information on a discussion thread's different aspects such as topic (intopic) and reply (inreply).

Another type of special search engines gaining ground is the `answer search engine,' whose lofty goal is to provide direct answers to the user's questions. Brainboost (http://www.brainboost.com/) mentioned in the past is a famous example. The newly launched Lexee (http://www.lexxe.com/) is the latest in this category.

These services come handy while searching for factual information. Factbites (http://search.factbites.com/index. html) is another search tool competing in this sphere. You may get better output if you require information on a specific subject/phenomenon.

For instance, if you type the word `pollution', the service will list out materials related to this topic from different on-line sources.

Tools to mine the live web

Sources include blogs and the wide array of social bookmark services

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The newly released search service Wink, which indexes data from the Net's tagged content sources like Furl, is the latest entrant. Along with the tag-based search output, Wink provides normal Google web search results also.

Numerous tools by which netizens can generate/access real-time content with ease are available on the Net.

Tens of hundreds of blogs spanning diverse subjects and the wide array of social bookmark services are some of the web sources where one can find latest information on any subject.

The distinguishing feature of such a Web source is its real-time/dynamic content. This part of the Web, with fast changing information packed on it, is generally called `Live Web.'

The incessant flow of content from `Live Web' sources presents formidable challenge to netizens, who want to keep up with this ever-changing information landscape. Here, we will examine a set of tools created for helping us tame the live web.

Several on-line services for regularly monitoring live web sources and collecting/presenting information in a searchable/browsable fashion are in place. The popular news aggregator Google News (http://news.google.com), which periodically scans more than 4,500 news sources automatically, is a good example.

Blogosphere, where thousands of bloggers discuss/disseminate latest news on almost every conceivable subject round the clock, is a prominent constituent of the live web.

Tools developed for scanning the thousands of blogs and filtering out trends/relevant content will help you mine live web more efficiently.

Memorandum, the blog aggregation service that shot into prominence recently, is one such tool.

The service regularly analyses content on blogs related to a specific area and displays the latest important content.

Currently memorandum delivers information from two types of blogs-technology (http://tech.memeorandum.com/) and politics (http://www.memeorandum.com/).

As the readers of this column may already know, blogs and other live content sources host news feeds for helping us monitor the latest information available on them.

Generally, netizens subscribe to these news feeds or RSS feeds with a desktop/web-based newsreader.

Services for displaying web feeds on other channels are emerging. For instance, the free service Immedi.at (http://immedi.at/) offers an awesome solution for reading your favourite feeds in your IM client. The service sends you instant messages as and when the content of your feed changes. It supports popular IM services such as MSN messenger and AOL.

The significance of `Immedi.at' lies in its mixing of two real-time tools — RSS and IM. Normally, to track information, each time you have to visit the news aggregation site or switch over to the aggregator program running in your desktop. But with `immedia.it,' you just have to keep your IM client on.

A summary of updates on your favourite subjects/sites will fall on the IM client automatically as and when it happens. More mix-up tools of this kind may surface in the future.

Besides blogs and news sources, another set of products powering the live web is the wide variety of social bookmarking services.

These services thrive on user-generated content and closely monitoring the quickly changing content on them will help you keep up with the information race.

Many netizens view the front page of the famous social bookmarking service Del.icio.us to get information on the latest sites being bookmarked by its users. In fact, this is an excellent means to locate the latest on-line products being churned out by web developers. Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) is so popular that numerous postings appear almost every second.

To tap this live information flow and display the postings in real-time to del.icio.us viewers, an innovative service called Livemarks has been set up. LiveMarks (http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/livemarks/) scrolls del.icio.us bookmarks as soon as the users post them on to del.icio.us. It is really exciting and addictive to experience this service, where every second a new site appears.

A feature of on-line bookmarking services and some blogging systems is the facility to attach tags or labels to the content being posted.

Services for tracking tags and aggregating tagged content from different on-line sources are in place. The tag aggregation service, Technorati (http://www. technorati.com/tags/), featured in the past, is a valuable product in this genre.

The newly released search service Wink (http://www. wink.com/), which indexes data from the Net's tagged content sources like Furl, is the latest entrant in this segment.

Along with the tag-based search output, Wink provides normal Google web search results also. Along with its excellent search service, Google offers several other products/services that include Google Base, Google Alerts (http://google.com/alerts), Google Book Search (http://books.google.com/), Google Desktop (http://desktop.google.com/), Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/), Google Reader (http://www. google.com/reader/), Gmail and so on. Perhaps you may wonder how to keep up with this constantly growing service base or remember each of them.

Google Services Guide

This is no more a hurdle. Just visit the site Google Services Guide (http://googleservicesguide.blogspot.com/), which hosts an exclusive, alphabetically organised list of almost all products and services released by Google so far. Currently more than hundred services are listed here.

Source: Netspeak.

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