Friday, July 29, 2005

Wondir



  • Each morning when people take their dog to a walk - I take QTSaver to a learning adventure.

    This morning I decided to follow Matthew Koll - I was sure that a guy who can have such an insight about haystacks and needles can teach me new things about search engines.

    The first result I got was a conversation between Gary Price and Matthew Koll on http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3422751
    And on the first paragraph I found interesting stuff about Matthew Koll:

  • He is a pioneer in the web search industry.
  • He was the founder and CEO of Personal Library Software, acquired by America Online in
    1998.
  • He's currently the founder and CEO of Wondir
  • Wondir is a search engine Chris (Gary Price's partner) wrote about in 2002.


In the body of the article I found that

  • In terms of returning answers instead of just documents... in spite of what my new company does (plug here for www.wondir.com). I don't think returning documents is all bad.

    Now I followed the link: "Chris wrote about in 2002" http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/2160071
    And found out that:

  • Koll is also acknowledged as the first to write and speak about the Invisible Web, the vast portion of cyberspace that is unindexed by most search engines.
  • Attempting to organize the hundreds of online "AskA" virtual reference services provided by libraries around the world under a single umbrella, to provide human assistance when search fails to satisfy a user's information need.
  • In addition to organizing library AskA services, Wondir also hopes to tap into the expertise of other volunteer online help programs, including government or social service organizations, civic groups, professional associations, university alumni associations and similar groups.

    The word "Volunteers" is super interesting for me because I want to promote teaching of illiterates by Volunteering retirees. So my intuition led me to a hit – now I'll try to contact Matthew Koll and see if we can cooperate…

    So I followed the Wondir linkhttp://www.wondir.com/wondir/jsp/index.jsp
    In the ABOUT section and found out that

Wondir's vision is very close to ours:

  • To connect people who have information needs with the people and information that can help them.

Our vision is more specific: to reduce illiteracy

Eventually I looked in the CONTACT details and found Wondir's email:


This was a nice morning walk with my QTSaver…now I'll have my breakfast.


2 comments:

Bond Hunter said...

Wondir might be a good connection to have in the recuitment of volunteers to help reduce the illiteracy rate. But it can be used for so much more. Imagine a place the new reader can go for assistance, recommendations and actual tutoring in reading, especially phonics.

Now imagine a place the semi experienced reader can go to talk about book and articles they have recently read, you have the LIT category.

Your idea of recruiting retirees has been done with great results by other agencies like RIF, Applied Scholastics and a program in Philly whose name escapes me at this time.

I know Applied Scholastics has an excellent Phonics booklet as well as a "Small Words List" that do wondirs for reading especially with non-english speaking person.

Bond Hunter ~ Ken
Wondir User and Moderator

zeevveez said...

Thanks for the tips on RIF and Applied Scholastics - I'll follow them. If you'll suddenly remember the name od the program in Philly please let me know.

Meanwhile I contacted Matthew Koll and we started a correspondence. I'm very curious to see where this road leads to.

Zeevveez