Simplicity

Nice Friends - Indah.  Juggling a lot of balls in the air.  Still a journalist among other daily roles.  Say halo to her.

Searchrolls Plus - Portuguese News.  New searchroll on Portuguese press.  Timely in light of new crisis in Timor Leste (aka East Timor aka Timor Timur aka Timtim).

Arianna’s Top Political Blogs - Confused about the rightward drift of the US?  Clear your mind by consulting this liberal searchroll compiled and arranged by Arianna Huffington.  It’s sure easier than scanning all these massive blogs through bookmarks or your RSS feed.  You don’t have one of those yet?  Shame on you. Go right to Bloglines and get started immediately.  Free.  Very flexible.  Use a tool like Google Blog Search to locate just the right blogs for your feed if Bloglines’ own blog finder doesn’t turn up the blogs you need.

Our Net - Google Spreadsheet.  Works right in your browser.  More chipping away at Microsoft.

Tabblo - Construct an interactive photo gallery.  Still beta.  Promising.

ajaxWrite -  Another good entirely web-based word processing program.

Nice Blogs - Sarwono Kusumaatmadja.  Still a voice of reason and reasonableness.

Language - Translators Workplace.   Vast site for interpreters and translators.  Huge number available for work in Indonesian.

Just in case you haven’t noticed, many more announcements of new sites now appear on my internet-studies list than in this Shifting Sidebars series.  There are also practical limits on how many worthwhile new sites I can place in Simplicity’s sidebars.  Sooooo …

For several years now, those of you who follow indonesian-studies list have had to endure my non-insular view of the field.  That is, it should not just be interdisciplinary but also touch on (at least) several other specific subjects.  In yet another experiment, I set up a few days ago five new lists on Yahoo! Groups on precisely these specific subjects.  So those of you with less expansive views of Indonesian studies will no longer see so many ‘extraneous’ postings on indonesian-studies.  Instead, you can read them in their ‘proper’ places.  To wit, for those interested, there now exist

southeast-asian-studies
east-timor-studies
islamic-world-studies
american-society-studies
internet-studies

and any of you are welcome to join.

This is the first public announcement of their existence.  I have also put links to them in the right sidebar under Nice Lists.  Well, they may indeed turn out to be ‘nice’ lists but in truth that remains to be seen.  The types of postings will be similar to those in indonesian-studies, i.e., scholarly documentation, major news developments, alternative viewpoints, and special resources.  I do not expect memberships to be large, but having these particular lists with the particular postings selected will make it easier to join (especially with me) in collaborative research projects and papers, using tools like wikis. 

Basically, I use as postings selections from materials I scan everyday.  So sending some prime choices doesn’t involve all that much extra work, especially since in most postings I simply provide the URL for the source.  I would not even have considered trying to do new lists had not Yahoo! recently made very substantial improvements to its email and list configuration options.  Email is now much faster, so is display on the lists’ homepages, and spam control is tight.  I have selected the same configuration for all the lists (and brought indonesian-studies into the new pattern, too). 

The key parts of the new lists’ configuration are these –

• anyone can read postings freely on the web, even if not a list member,
• only those joining as list members can send me materials for possible posting,
• all such postings should be emailed to me at johnmacdougall@comcast.net,
• the lists are unmoderated but only the moderator/s can post (a great timesaver),
• signing up as a list member occurs immediately, and anyone can join.

Searchrolls Plus - A bunch of new searchrolls.  Indonesian News in English by Elizabeth Coville aka Nice Friend Liz.  Blogger Indonesia - Search a select list of Indonesian blogs.  You can also  find  other searchrolls of specific long-time Indonesian blogs (individual and aggregate) with almost no effort.  Beasiswa - Scholarships for the enterprsing.  Go to the basic search box on Rollyo, type keyword beasiswa, and the family of related lists produced by unnamed searchroller/s Beasiswa Scholarship.  Plus their Situs Pemerintah 1 and Situs Pemerintah 2.  And how can you pass up Chinese Cookery.  Available searchrolls have greatly expanded in variety and number now, though there are many total gaps and half-finished searchrolls.  Look around.  It’s worth a few minutes to save hours of untargeted searching later. 

Mashups - Peter’s Booklist.  For free, get book reviews from the fee service Booklist Online via
Amazon’s licensing of Booklist (and other reviewers’) content.  On the search page, hit Google
or Yahoo (Google yields slightly better results in this case), or both, then type your searchword, such as pramoedya, then read as many reviews as you wish.  Of course, Amazon would like you to buy any books you like from, guess who, Amazon. 

World Press - USA Today.  Most widely read newspaper in US, followed closely by Wall Street Journal.  Everybody else is quite a ways behind.  Believe it or not.

Our Net - Yahoo! Search Guide.  How Yahoo! orders results on its various search services.  Another useful Yahoo! reference page is its Webmaster Resources and Yahoo! Search Feedback (last two not in sidebar).

Sphere.  New blog search engine which tries to do a little more.  After looking at the blog search results, try the newest (beta) add-on, Featured Blogs (on your search topic), and especially, Related Media (separately covers photos, news, books, and podcasts).

AlltheWeb LiveSearch - The venerable search engine AlltheWeb offers a new search interface which works magic.  Watch the screen after you enter your search term/s.  You get search suggestions and a GoTo drop-down menu option which, like Sphere, takes you quickly to other resources.  AlltheWeb is one of few major search engines with solid Indonesian-language holdings, so you’re likely to find more such material here if your search term/s occur only in Indonesian.

Google Notebook.  If you don’t yet have a webpage clipper/grabber add-on or standalone program, you might want to give Google’s flexible new offering a try.  You must be signed in to your Google account to use it.  It works right in your browser.  Available for quick download as a Firefox or Explorer extension.  Myself, quite happy with ScrapBook.

Google Page Creator.  Yes, Google will let you create your very own website.  In minutes.  Only a slight exaggeration. 

Google Trends.  Lets you see what the world is searching for — via Google’s web search engine. One of the most fascinating tools Google has yet created.  Type your search word/s.  You get — on the results page — two search volume and news volume timeline graphs, then, in three tabs, the Cities, Regions (actually, countries), and Languages in which all this searching occurred.  As an experiment, try everything using keyword ‘Indonesia,’ then try ‘Bantul’ to see the power of this tool.
Very powerful instrument for net researchers.

Nice Blogs - Tajuk Radio68H.  Maintained by Nice Friend Air  on the sometimes erratic Blogger service.

Well, I tried to get you a legal copy of Celtic Woman’s soaring The Soft Goodbye for Nice Songs, but failed.  Lyrics easily available. I got my much-played copy via the now fully legit Napster (endless music for a monthly subscription fee).  But … you may be able to hear it five times for free if you go to the Napster homepage, search for The Soft Goodbye under Track in the drop-down menu, and then register (later paid download optional).  The free full-length sample songs are a new feature I’ve not tried, so, no guarantees.  If it works, you get a lot of high-quality streaming music free as an incentive to signup.  Is this note a Napster commercial?  Ahhhhhh, ya.