8. Multimedia Trapping

Despite the huge strides in Internet-based multimedia, it’s easiest for search engines to index text-based information, so that’s what’s easiest to find. However, several companies have made huge strides in the development and deployment of multimedia search engines, especially in the past year.

There are several reasons to want to keep up with the latest cool podcasts or the newest audio or the latest video. Many blogs have turned to providing an audio or video format (especially corporate and marketing blogs), and video online has exploded in the last year. For example, sites like YouTube and Yahoo Video have been indexing thousands of hours of content.

You can track multimedia with traps, but you have to do it in a roundabout way, specifically by starting your multimedia search using general, text-based search engines! After that, you can go for specific multimedia sites in a variety of categories, from audio, to photos, to video.

Searching Audio

Why would you want to trap audio? The variety of audio content that’s indexed and available online is almost as varied as the kind of text content. There’s music, of course, but there are also podcasts (like talk shows, with a huge variety of topics), instructional audio, conference calls, interviews, and more. Even if you’re not sure if your topic would be served by trapping for audio, at least try a few queries at the resources we cover here, and see what you find. You might change your mind! We’ll start by using Google’s regular search engine to find audio, specifically MP3s.

Using general search engines

Though it’s unlikely that you’ll find actual ready-to-play multimedia in Google’s Web search results (except for one resource which we look at a little later in the chapter), you can find pointers to multimedia. It just takes a little search tweaking and a special syntax we haven’t looked at yet.

I’m referring to the filetype syntax. Filetype finds pages that have a specified string at the end. Searching for filetype:mp3 yields MP3 files that have been indexed by Google. To narrow your results, you must use very broad keywords (such as reggae, rock, metal, "Dance Dance Revolution", etc.). Using this syntax shows you that Google does index those files, but unfortunately not their contents. In other words, Google can tell you that there’s an MP3 file in a certain place, but not what words are in it, how long it is, etc.

The MP3 file search is, depending on what you’re looking for, either useful in a very narrow way (it certainly gets you few enough results that you should be able to monitor them easily using a Google Alert) or a silly party trick. If you’re doing genealogy searches, for instance, a general Google search for MP3 files might not be helpful. If in your case this type of search falls into the “silly party trick” category, then you can move away from Google and try either some other search engines that are audio oriented or some massive audio archives. In those you might find narratives and interviews with people who lived in the area where your family lived a hundred years ago.

Using audio-only search engines

Audio search engines are all over the map in what they offer and what kind of search limitations you can use. One thing most of them have in common is that they’re not very easy to trap. With that in mind you really need to narrow your searches. Thankfully the first tool we’re looking at, Singingfish, makes narrowing searches really easy.

Singingfish

Note that Singingfish (singingfish.com) searches both audio and video one at a time. That’s the first and most important way to narrow your search results. There are more options on the left side of the page (Figure 8.1).

Figure 8.1. Singingfish lets you narrow without using keywords.

You can narrow your results by format, category, and duration, which is a big one if you’re searching for music. That’s because if you limit your results to files more than one minute long or (even better) three minutes long, you eliminate partial songs and song samples which otherwise will clutter up your results.

You can only display up to 20 results at a time, and Singingfish does not offer RSS feeds or e-mail alerts, so narrow your query and what you’re searching as much as you can so that the page monitor can do its job. On the positive side, you have many opportunities to limit your results, and I find that Singingfish brings in results from all over the Internet.

Ithaki

Ithaki (ithaki.net/multimedia/) is a meta-search engine that offers several different types of searches, including MP3 and MIDI files. You don’t get any search options for its MP3 search beyond keywords, but I find that Ithaki finds a limited and ultimately monitorable set of results. If you want to trap for a more general keyword, like a musical genre, start here. Again, you have to use a page monitor; no RSS feeds or e-mail alerts are available.

Google’s Song Search

Remember how I noted earlier in the chapter that there was one way to directly search for audio content on Google without noodling around with special syntax? This is it—sort of. If your audio interest is in music, you might find this search useful.

There isn’t a direct URL for using this feature. Instead, you start your search on Google. Search for a musician name, band name, or song name. If Google matches it (and in my experience it sometimes misses; Google doesn’t have music results for all musicians), a band name and more information displays at the top of the page. From there, you can drill down into more music results for musicians, album names, and even song names.

This service is of limited usefulness for an information trapper. If you want to monitor a musician for new releases, Amazon’s a much better way to go. But if you wanted to do something really offbeat like watch for songs with a certain keyword in the title, you could do it using Google’s Song Search and a page monitor.

AltaVista Audio Search

If you’re an old-school Internet searcher, you might be raising an eyebrow—who in the world uses AltaVista nowadays? Everybody still uses it for Babelfish, and I recommend also using it for the audio search (altavista.com/audio/default). As you can see from the front page, you can specify several different types of audio, from MP3, to Real, to AIFF. You can also filter your searches by audio lasting more or less than a minute. I recommend you search for more than a minute to avoid song clips. Search results aren’t available in RSS feeds, darn it, but at least you can get 50 results to a page and monitor that. To get 50 results at a time, visit AltaVista’s Web search at AltaVista.com and change the settings to 50 results per page (Figure 8.2).

Figure 8.2. Tweaking AltaVista’s Web search settings makes audio search easier.

AltaVista doesn’t say that impacts the audio search, but it does.

Searching the Internet and even multimedia-specific engines for audio is a hit-or-miss proposition. Fortunately you’ve got an option besides search engines: several different archives contain music, podcasts, and general audio files.

Let’s start with a real hot topic: podcasts.

Searching and monitoring podcasts

Podcast, podcast, podcast! Just like RSS a few years ago, podcast is now officially the buzziest buzzword to fly around the Internet. Everyone’s getting a podcast. Some people are even getting vidcasts. But what the heck is a podcast to start with, and how can it help you with your information trapping? Let’s begin with the basics.

What is a podcast?

A podcast is an audio file—usually an MP3—that’s distributed automatically to audio-playing devices like iPods, or audio-playing software on a computer. It’s distributed via a special kind of RSS file. (Remember what we talked about earlier in this book? RSS is just a kind of XML, and XML is just a text file that uses a certain kind of markup language.) You subscribe to podcasts in the same way you subscribe to RSS feeds.

Podcasts are audio files, but you may also start hearing about vidcasts—which is the same concept only using a video file instead of an audio file. Vidcasts are in early development and the concept is very much the same, so we’ll stick with audio podcasts for the purpose of this section.

What do you need to listen to a podcast?

There are lots of different software packages out there for listening to podcasts. A free program that might do the trick for you is iTunes, from Apple. You may download iTunes for either Windows or Mac at apple.com/itunes/download/. If you have an Apple-brand music player, like an iPod, you can use that to play podcasts. If you don’t, you can play podcasts from your computer.

Why should you listen to a podcast?

Podcasts are like blogs. They’re not quite as numerous (yet) but they’re every bit as varied. I suspect that no matter what your interest, you’ll find a podcast that fits. And podcasts are more portable. If you trap an interesting text news story, you’ll probably end up reading it at your computer desk. On the other hand, if you find a podcast series that’s worth listening to every episode, you can load it on an iPod or a different music player, and take it with you. You can listen to it in your car. You can listen to it while you’re working out. You don’t have to sit in front of the computer.

You may have noticed that there are podcast series and podcast episodes. These equate to blogs and blog entries. A single podcast would be a blog entry. All of the podcast episodes would be the blog. For the most part, you might find podcasts for which all episodes are appropriate to your trapping. On the other hand, you might have an interest that’s esoteric enough that only individual podcast episodes suit your needs. As you’ll see in the next two sections, you have the option to find both podcasts to which you can subscribe and keyword-based RSS feeds of interesting podcast episodes.

Finding podcasts

Let’s start with finding podcasts in general. As you might imagine, finding podcasts is a lot like finding blogs—you can look in search engines and directories.

Podspider (podspider.com) offers both a searchable subject index of podcasts and the ability to search podcasts by keyword (podcasts in several different languages are offered). Podcast listings include descriptions and pointers to the last couple of episodes. Beware! Like blogs, podcasts can be started and abandoned. What’s the point in subscribing to a podcast when the last episode is more than a year old?

Yahoo Podcasts (podcasts.yahoo.com/) lets you search for podcasts or browse a searchable subject index. In addition to searching for podcasts, you can search just for podcast episodes (Figure 8.3). Unfortunately the podcast episodes aren’t listed by date, but you could still try to watch a set of search results via a page monitor. Yahoo Podcasts also lists podcasts that are popular, as well as podcasts that are highly rated by listeners.

Figure 8.3. Browse and find both podcasts and podcast episodes.

Podcast Directory (podcast.net/) has many different ways you can browse available podcasts. You can search them by location. You can browse them by tag, or by popularity. You can even browse through a video podcast directory. If you have a general interest in podcasts, you might want to subscribe to any of the several RSS feeds that list popular podcasts. And don’t miss the sections that provide extensive lists of hardware and software for listening to podcasts.

Get a Podcast (getapodcast.com/) is basically a podcast search engine. The front page lists a variety of stats, including the latest searches, new podcasts, popular podcasts, and recently viewed podcasts. Podcast listings include a list of recent episodes available for that podcast, a description and number of page views, and extensive episode descriptions when available (Figure 8.4).

Figure 8.4. Want easy-to-review details about podcasts? This is the place to look.

This is a great place to get an overview of what a podcast offers in its episodes.

The resources we’ve just examined are great for showing you what podcasts are available, but you might not want to subscribe to entire podcasts. Instead, you might just want to hunt for episodes that are relevant to your topic of interest. You can do that with keyword-based RSS feeds for podcasts. There’s even one search engine that lets you search the audio of podcasts!

For the resources that follow, all you have to do is run a keyword search and save the RSS feed for that search. You then add the RSS feed to iTunes as a podcast. Bingo. As new podcast episodes match your keyword, those episodes will be automatically downloaded to iTunes. That’s all there is to it! You can catch up with your information trapping by listening to podcasts as you work out at the gym.

Monitoring podcasts by keyword

del.icio.us may sound familiar to you—wait a minute—isn’t del.icio.us a tagging site? Yes! And guess what, you can search for the tag podcast, along with any other keyword in which you’re interested (del.icio.us/tag/podcast). So the URL would work if you’re just looking for podcasts in general, or you could add a keyword to it, like this: http://del.icio.us/tag/podcast+reggae.

Monitoring Del for tagged podcast episodes doesn’t work quite as well in iTunes as the two other resources we look at in this section (there’s no guarantee that a Del user is going to link to an actual podcast as opposed to the podcast’s Web site). But this trap does turn up some very unique finds. Try it for some of the more general keywords that are getting you too many results in other search engines.

Blogdigger Media (blogdigger.com/media/) is a blog search engine, but it also offers a lot of unique searches as well, like this media search. It doesn’t search just podcasts; it can also search video and images too (make sure those options are unchecked if you want to focus only on podcasts). Blogdigger doesn’t seem to have as large a database as some of the larger search engines like Technorati and Feedster, but it offers a number of multimedia searching options.

PodZinger (podzinger.com) is very cool. Up to this point all the search engines we’ve looked at let you search for keywords within a description of a podcast or an episode of a podcast. But PodZinger lets you actually search within the transcribed audio of a podcast! How nifty is that? If you’re trying to run very specific searches, or you keep coming up with keywords that don’t ever seem to make it into episode descriptions, try PodZinger. Bear in mind that automatic auto-to-text transcription isn’t always perfect, and you may have to do some experimenting to get a query that gets you a useful number of results.

Podcasts only sound like they’re really esoteric. Actually they’re based on two longstanding technologies (RSS and MP3) that work very well together. Use them as an opportunity to continue your information trapping while getting unchained from your desk.

Audio archives

Audio archives are often easier to monitor than search engines. An archive is one collection of information, and often resides on one server, so you know it’s being completely indexed. There are probably thousands of music collections online, so I will hit only the highlights here, which include a fantastic old-timer, an unexpected resource, and an amazing archive.

IUMA

IUMA (iuma.com), short for Internet Underground Music Archive, has been around since 1993, offering music in a dazzling array of genres from a dazzling array of artists. Music is available in Real format and in full MP3 songs. Do some sample searching here before you decide what you’re looking for—IUMA offers an amazing number of genres. You may not have heard of any of the artists here but you will find something that interests you, I promise. And bless its little heart, IUMA makes it easy to get updates on the latest additions.

On the front page, look for the New Arrivals section. You can browse recent listings by genre, state, and how recently new material was added to the site (from the last seven to the last 30 days). There are no RSS feeds for this page, but it’s a perfect candidate for a page monitor. Just look out for pop-up ads—IUMA has a lot of them.

MP3

MP3 (mp3.com/) started out as a rather small site, then it broke out to be one of the darlings of the Internet era, and then it self-imploded like so many other companies, and then it died, and then CNET brought it back. Like IUMA, MP3.com contains information and songs from thousands of artists in dozens of genres. Unlike IUMA, some of these artists are very high profile. Videos are available at the site as well. MP3.com does not have an easy way to check on new additions like IUMA does, but you can go to the Listening Room, which offers new music streams as they’re added to the site. MP3.com also offers charts of the most popular music in each genre; those are also candidates for page-monitoring software.

MP3.com has current popular artists as well as other music; IUMA has lesser known, but still current artists. But, as you might expect, there are lots of other kinds of music out there, like music that is more than a few years old. While it’s an utter fallacy that everything that’s ever been recorded is already on the Internet (though that would be nice), there really is already an astonishing amount of old music digitized. You can find a lot of it at the Internet Archive.

Internet Archive

Audio is only one part of the Internet Archive (archive.org). It also contains cached Web pages, video, and text. However, the audio part of the Internet Archive is a collection in and of itself. You’ll find recordings of live concerts, open sourced recording labels, presidential recordings, and a lot more. And wonder of wonders, there are RSS feeds available for the most recent additions to the archive!

A lot of what you’ll find at the Internet Archive is esoteric to say the least; if you’re interested in only the latest and most popular stuff you don’t want to monitor the Internet Archive for new music. But if you are looking for new music of a lot of different types, or especially live music archives, monitor this site.

Audio blogs

A lot of us have very emotional connections to music. We have very strong ideas about what we like and don’t like and could talk for hours about what we want to listen to and what we can’t stand. So knowing that, you wouldn’t be surprised to discover that music has its own genre of blog called an MP3 blog. From here you can get all the new music RSS feeds you can stand, but you’ll probably have to do a little digging to find what you like.

Before you can trap you have to find the MP3 blogs that have the music you want. Start by visiting Feedster (feedster.com) or Technorati (technorati.com) and do a search for "MP3 Blog". The number of results you get will be limited enough that you can narrow it just a little further by adding a few keywords for the kind of music you’re searching for (try searching for genres of music or artist names, but don’t get really detailed) and perhaps an artist name or two. The results you get will include blogs that just review music, and blogs that post music, often with the artists’ permission (it’s a great way to get exposure for a lesser-known band).

I have yet to monitor MP3 blogs in a professional capacity, but I personally find them invaluable. I’m interested in all kinds of music, and just by reading the RSS feeds of half-a-dozen MP3 blogs, I learn about music that I can’t imagine I’d have heard about otherwise. If you have some time and you’re at all interested in music, look around for some MP3 blogs and put their RSS feeds in your reader. You’ll get some nice surprises out of it.

Of course audio is not the only multimedia on the Internet. It wasn’t even the first multimedia on the Internet, really. That honor belongs to images. And from images the Internet has exploded into more images—mainly photography—and even recently into video. Keeping up with all these images—and avoiding the ever-present concern of naughty images—is tricky, but it can be done. The next section shows you how.

Monitoring Images

When I refer to images, I’m referring to a wide territory—photographs, cartoons, drawings, maps, illustrations, and so on. Photographs tend to have their own search engines, but the other types of images are often lumped together in image search engines. If you use the special syntax that the image engines offer, you can often remove or avoid certain types of images in your results.

Let’s start with Flickr, since it’s familiar to you from earlier discussions in the book and it consists mostly of photographs.

Flickr

Do you remember Flickr (flickr.com)? It’s an online photo site owned by Yahoo. It’s searchable by tag, and search results are provided in an RSS feed so that you can monitor new images as they’re uploaded to the site. As I mentioned earlier, this is a great place to try out those general search terms that would provide impossible numbers of results on a general search engine, but might give you surprising results on photograph search engines, like screenshots or pictures of events.

Google Images

Google used to crow about the extent of its image search (images.google.com), noting how many images it had indexed and so on. It doesn’t do that now; instead it just primly notes that it has “the most comprehensive image search on the Web.”

I don’t know about that—there’s really no way to compare it to other image searches without an index count—but I do know a lot is indexed by Google, in a lot of different formats. Google Images does not offer an RSS feed of its search results, so you have to narrow your search enough to get it in the scope of a single page, and that means taking advantage of Google Images’ Advanced Search.

Google Images Advanced Search

The Google Images Advanced Search is available at images.google.com/advanced_image_search. You can limit your search by color (you can search for black and white, grayscale, or full color). You can also limit your search by filetype—GIF, JPEG, or PNG. Photography is usually saved in JPEG format. So if you limit your search to only GIF or PNG files, you’ll tend to have few photographs in your search results. On the other hand, if you limit your search to JPEG format images, then your search results will tend toward photography, although not exclusively.

Google’s Advanced Search also offers the ability to limit your search by image size, which I find handy when I’m searching for large photographs or trying to limit my search to “bugs,” or icons that people use on Web pages. Experiment with the advanced search to narrow your results as much as possible, and then watch them using a page monitor.

Ask Images

Ask is a relative newcomer to image search, but it’s got a lot to offer (ask.com/?tool=img). Unfortunately, one of the things it doesn’t offer is an Advanced Search page. On the other hand, Ask does offer related images searches that might help you narrow your searches. Run a search and take a look at the results page (Figure 8.5).

Figure 8.5. Review search results and get suggestions for other searches.

On the right side of the page is a list of suggestions for narrowing your search. Try these to see if you can get a manageable list of results. You may find that the related searches aren’t particularly useful, and you probably don’t want to expand your search, but the suggestions can come in handy. No RSS feeds are available, so you need to use a page monitor.

Yahoo Images

Yahoo Images (images.search.yahoo.com) also offers an Advanced Search page, which you can view at images.search.yahoo.com/search/images/advanced?ei=UTF-8. Note that you can limit your searches to image size and color, but not filetype. In addition, while the color options are more limited (black and white, or color), the image size options are more extensive (a wallpaper option has been added).

Yahoo Images also offers the ability in the advanced search to narrow searches by the domain in which the images appear. You can also do this in Google Images (just add the site syntax to your search), but unless you’re doing a medical search (narrowing your results to .edu) or perhaps an archival search (narrowing your results to .gov or a country code like .uk or .ca), I wouldn’t limit my search to a particular domain. Again, no RSS feeds, so stick with a page monitor.

Avoiding the naughty stuff

One thing that always comes up when you’re running multimedia searches is the possibility of accidentally running into Naughty Stuff. You know—pictures and video that have less than nothing to do with your searches.

If your searches are narrow enough, you should be able to avoid naughty pictures and content. However, don’t count on that. Instead, use the advanced searches and set the filter to remove adult content from your search results. Filters like this aren’t perfect, but between that and very specific searches you should avoid content that you don’t prefer to see.

But what if the unthinkable happens and you end up getting some stuff in your search results that makes you go ick? Report it; look for a link on the search results page. Some resources we’re mentioning in this chapter (like Flickr) don’t want to have any adult content. And other resources, like Google Image Search, will want to know if a filtered search is letting through inappropriate materials.

Monitoring Videos

Videos online have been sputtering along for the last several years, but it hasn’t been until more people had broadband Internet access that online video content really took off. Nowadays, you can do everything from watch a news broadcast to watch kids play the Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) video game. It all depends on where you look and what you want to monitor.

Google Video

Google Video (video.google.com) is a little odd in that it’s a combination of a video store and a repository for things people upload, as well as a place where institutions partnering with Google can park their videos. Materials might range from a lecture on physics to a cat beating up a hammer (no kidding!). Start with general searches and try to use more academic language. If you do a search for glaucoma, for example, you get stock footage, news stories, interviews, and even advertisements in Russian. While it’s a variety of results, at this writing it returned only 29—which you may feel is enough to comfortably monitor.

Try using Google Video’s advanced search options, which include the ability to find only short, medium, or long videos, and to find only videos that are free. Don’t forget to sort your results by date! That option is also available from the Advanced Video Search page (Figure 8.6).

Figure 8.6. Google Video’s Advanced Video Search page lets you sort results by date.

While Google Video does offer some feeds (including for its most popular and for comedy videos), RSS feeds do not appear to be available for search results. You need to use a page monitor to trap these.

Searchforvideo

Searchforvideo’s front page includes a huge index of categories, as well as a listing of popular videos and featured publishers (searchforvideo.com/). There are also pointers to podcasts that have videos as well. Just glancing at the front page leaves the impression that Searchforvideo reflects a more “pop culture” attitude than Google Video, and searching for glaucoma bears this out: It yields news stories, music videos, and even a few videos from MySpace.

Searchforvideo’s default configuration for its search result is a grid, which shows only the source of the video and a thumbnail. Be sure when experimenting with queries to use the detail button at the top of the search results page so that you get snippets and a little more context about the video (Figure 8.7). Notice you can also sort your results by date.

Figure 8.7. Be sure to use the detail button to get a results page that’s much easier to quickly review.

Searchforvideo doesn’t offer advanced search, so you need to rely on keywords to narrow your search down. On the other hand, you can get RSS feeds for your search results, so you won’t have to rely on a page monitor.

Yahoo Video

Yahoo Video has a monster number of videos indexed, so general searches get you in trouble here (video.search.yahoo.com). On the other hand, it’s also got a great Advanced Search page, so you have several options besides keywords for narrowing your search. On the front page are featured videos, with tabs available for Popular Videos, Videos by Category, and Tag.

A search for glaucoma delivers 299 results as of this writing, which is far more than Google Video or Searchforvideo. Fortunately, the Search Results page brings you an excellent level of detail, providing information such as the file type of the video, length of the video, and source (Figure 8.8). At a glance you can tell if a video is ten seconds long (probably not very useful) or an hour (an hour long video devoted to your topic could prove very useful).

Figure 8.8. Yahoo Video will bring you a lot of search results, fortunately via an excellent results page.

Since you are getting so many results, be sure to take advantage of Yahoo Video’s Advanced Search. Here you can narrow your search results by the length of the video (try limiting your results to videos that are over a minute long), by the size of the video’s play screen, by the file type of the video, and by the domain of the video (Figure 8.9).

Figure 8.9. Yahoo Video’s Advanced Search page. Try limiting your video searches by domain.

I can’t imagine how anyone could use the file type to specifically narrow search results (other than just getting fewer of them), but experiment with the domain restrictions. Searching in .org domains only, or .edu domains only, tends to deliver fewer results, which themselves are more academically slanted.

Yahoo Video Search does not offer RSS feeds; you have to use a page monitor. You might find with the number of results you get that it’s better to do several searches for your keywords—one restricted to each major domain—and monitor each of the results pages.

YouTube

I don’t know if YouTube was the first online video site out there, but it’s certainly the most popular video site and has helped spur the explosion in popularity of online video sites (youtube.com). YouTube hosts the videos that you’re searching, so you see immediately that the level of detail in search results is very useful, though you might not get as many results as you would on other video search engines.

Let’s go back to the example we’ve been using for this entire section, glaucoma. If you run a search for glaucoma on YouTube, you get fewer results than other engines (15 as of this writing), but you also get information like tags, user ratings, duration, and context (Figure 8.10). So there’s more detail here than there is even in the Yahoo Video search results.

Figure 8.10. YouTube has limited results with lots of detail.

When you click on the name of a video you go to that video’s page. Here you can see how many times a video’s been viewed, what it’s rating is (YouTube users can rate a video up to 5 stars; not all videos are rated) and see comments on the video (Figure 8.11). (Often comments point to other similar videos.) Detail pages for videos also have pointers to related videos, which might give you ideas for tags or ideas to search.

Figure 8.11. Detail pages point you to other videos and review current ones.

You can get RSS feeds from YouTube, but it’s a little awkward. You have to edit a URL. YouTube offers RSS feeds for tag searching. The RSS feed for a tag search looks like this:

youtube.com/rss/tag/keyword.rss

Simply replace keyword with the word you want to track. For instance, you’d use the following URL if you were doing a search on glaucoma:

youtube.com/rss/tag/glaucoma.rss

If you want to use multiple keywords, you’d simply use a plus sign (+) between the keywords:

youtube.com/rss/tag/glaucoma+surgery.rss

In the cases where you’re finding that tag search is not working, or you want to do very extensive, keyword-dense searches, try using a page monitor on your search results.

The Future Is Now

If you’re a long-time user of the Internet, you might find it challenging to adjust to the idea of trapping multimedia. Hasn’t text always been king? However, with broadband becoming the de facto standard for accessing the Internet, the constant rise of personal expression online, and even the popularity of cameras in cell phones, it’s clear that multimedia isn’t going away. In fact, it’s going to get more and more popular.

You may find you have to do more query experimentation with these resources, as well as develop different strategies for reviewing what you find. But I think you’ll find that it pays off. Multimedia can provide information in a much richer context than regular text.