October 2009 Please note that some links may have expired due to the ever-changing nature of the Internet. Let us know if you find anything unexpected or offensive so we can remove or change a link. Youthwork magazine and CCP ltd are not responsible for the content of external sites accessed from youthwork.co.uk Speed surfers Finding tools on the Internet to save you time, not slow you down is John Allan’s mission this month. Two questions for you. First, how is it that hardworking youth workers, who are pretty conversant with cutting-edge technology and have a reasonable budget from their church, can sometimes give talks and lead sessions with embarrassingly poor Powerpoints, scratchy DVDs and even (horrors) ten-year-old OHP transparencies? Why do some of their facts, statistics and stories sound a bit sketchy, or even sometimes need to have cobwebs blown off them before use? Simple answer: time. They haven’t got enough. Second question. How is it that other youth workers can have fabulous presentations, immaculate personal blogs updated five times daily, and wonderful video productions that wouldn’t be out of place at Cannes, and yet they don’t seem to be doing a lot of actual youth work? Same answer. Time. They don’t know how to organise it… so they spend a lot of it prettifying their materials, rather than putting them to use. Whichever end of the spectrum you’re at, time is probably the enemy. What we all need is a way of speeding up the finding and processing of information so that we can have the best stuff at their fingertips without needing to spend all day locating it. So this month, let’s focus on speed. How do you sift through the Internet haystack and come up with the needles you’re after, without spending all your life getting there? After all, last year Google reported it had indexed one trillion web addresses… Well, one answer could be Google Squared. It looks like Google, but it claims to be ‘a search tool that helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify’. And it works well for many topics (although it’s spotty: failing completely with ‘youth ministry’, doing miserably on ‘nineteenth century hymns’). If you want a super-fast collection of essential data, it could save you hours. Wolfram|Alpha is a new kind of ‘computational knowledge engine’ which can answer questions from its own internal knowledge base. It can do calculations, amass instant information about historical events or famous people, and even tell you ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’. (When I asked it if God existed, though, it answered modestly, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think a poor computational knowledge engine, no matter how powerful, is capable of providing a simple answer to that question.’ Aww, poor thing; you feel like sending it an invitation to an Alpha course…) You always use Google? Try Microsoft’s new Bing. The way it groups results is clearer than Google; YouTube videos in the search results will play when you hover your mouse over their thumbnail; images are displayed on one infinitely-scrolling page; web pages can be peeked into before you actually go there. It all adds up to greater speed… and more time for youth work. And other new search engines can help too. Hulbee generates a ‘cloud’ of other suggestions you can try if your initial enquiry doesn’t hit the spot. Spezify presents its results in colourful boxes, with generously-sized thumbnailed pictures, helping you identify the right result faster. Scoopler updates its results in real time, which means you get the latest news items, blog comments and Tweets, live as they happen – useful for following a breaking news story or sports event, though a bit irrelevant for content that doesn’t change much. Each of them is better for different kinds of task. Keep them all bookmarked, then use the most appropriate each time! If you’re looking at a useful web page and you want to find others like it, where do you go? In Internet Explorer 8, use the ‘Suggested Sites’ feature, and you’re motoring immediately. In any other browser, go to Google and type ‘related:’ into the search box, followed by the address of the site you’ve found already. To get back to familiar sites quickly, try the new Opera 10 browser (still under development, but blazingly fast) with its ‘Speed Dial’ feature taking you straight to favourites. (You can do the same in Firefox with the Fast Dial extension; it’s saved me hours this year already!) Later this year, the controversial Phorm will also help you find content that’s based on your interests; but you can already use Zemanta to add relevant pictures, links and news items to any blog page (or even e-mail) that you write. One click and it’s all there waiting for you. No need to spend hours tracking down relevant content; it’s delivered to you on a plate. So there you go. Click around and learn some speed tricks. Then junk the ten-year-old OHP transparencies, write up your blog in half the usual time, and amaze yourself with how much more you can do. John Allan is based at Belmont Chapel, Exeter, UK, and is a regular contributor to Youthwork magazine. Back to main page