While reading a New York Times article about voice recognition and speech synthesis I learned about a new audio and video search engine, Everyzing. While the search engine itself was interesting, I was struck by the fact that the first thing you find in searching for Everyzing and in visiting their website is not the search engine page itself, but a page about the company’s business. And it is not centred on the user - it’s centred on the content providers. Specifically, the company is touting its skills in search engine optimization of audio and video content. So even before it hits the mass market it is already planning to make money by helping deep-pocketed media companies to get their media found by searchers ahead of others who don’t have those resources.

I tend to think of search engine companies and search engine optimization companies as being enemies but this reminds me that the relationship is a lot more complex.

Google’s Book Search gets most of the press but Microsoft has also been active in the large-scale digitization of both in copyright and out of copyright books for their search engine. At least until recently. I hope Microsoft’s short-sighted decision to phase out their book digitization programme does not encourage Google to do likewise. We academics have also lost out - the same decision also put paid to Microsoft’s “Live Search Academic” engine which shadowed Google Scholar.

I just found a free, open source Windows word frequency counting tool. If you are afraid you are using the same words over and over you can see for yourself, or you can figure out who your favourite theorists are based on the number of times you mention their names. The uses are endless. You do have to export your writing to a text file, though (or paste the text in) and it can be a little slow to generate the list. Enjoy!

Update: by an odd coincidence I just ran across a similar tool but Wordle is web-based and produces “word clouds” which are less precise but certainly prettier. Here’s a Wordle map of my draft theory chapter:

LSE Research Online has been substantially re-vamped since the last time I looked. You can browse a mix of full text and abstracts of work from our department here, and if you register you can make saved searches that email you when new material arrives or which you can subscribe to as RSS feeds. This link should be to an RSS feed of full text items from our department as they arrive (please comment if the link does not work).

Note: The repository is not even close to representing the entirety of the department’s output (it currently contains 195 items, 81 of which are available in full text) but hopefully it will become increasingly useful as staff and students learn about and use it.