Hopefully I’m not becoming a google blog but I came across another new google offering called trends. It lets you see the search history for specific terms or compare mutliple terms. It also plots events from the news. It’s kind of an official mashup of google search, news and finance. It’s also an interesting use of the data logs they have.

I think alternate interfaces to a dataset is an interesting area to play in. The more rich data you have the more interesting the various things you can do with that data becomes. I probably don’t need to mention WPopac. Some people at our library have played with experimental interfaces for digital collections, in this case the Making of Modern Michigan. I’m not sure what the base system is but some of the interfaces being played with are a wiki, google maps, timelines, tag cloud and subject directory based on wordnet.

You can read more about these over at patronizing.org, a blog by one of our library coders, Josh: