[cross-posted from the Digital Curation blog]
I have died and gone to heaven. Spezify “is a search tool that presents textual, graphic, and photographic results in a visual format. Blogs, videos, microblogs and images, couple with web-based versions of more traditional print media to give comprehensive search results.”
For a visual thinker that loves to scour everything from Twitter to YouTube to blogs in search of the latest from galleries, artists, conferences, scholars, designers…Spezify pools and presents information in a visual collage format. It also shows you related search terms (which may or may not be relevant – i.e. an important interntational conference for Contemporary Asian Art is going on right now – so the current search of that term brought up “hotel” as a related term.)
Like Twitter, it also shows you recent “hot” search terms. Spezify displays the information in a giant visual wall that you can scroll in all dimensions. Via Twitter, Cooliris told me that there is a way that I can d/l their program even though I have a PowerPC Mac mini. This weekend I will do so and see if Spezify’s search results can be navigated on the visual wall of Cooliris. This would make for faster and improved scanning functionality.