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watson

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 6 months ago

 

 

 

[watson]

xxhttp://www.intellext.com

 

summary of the application

watson is a fascinating tool developed by the folks at intellext. i've take to calling watson a "reverse search engine. it sits in residence on your desktop (you can hide it away much like the macintosh dock) and monitors what you are writing in word, powerpoint, outlook, firefox, internet explorer. it then determines key terms in what you are writing and goes of and does a search on them. returning with search results before you even know it's looking. you can customize the sources watson searches on from a list of about 30 sources including msn, yahoo, and google news, wikipedia, linkedin and myspace, the wall street journal, scirus science journal, and most of the major search engines. you can specify specific sites or domains you'd like it to search. you can have it search your desktop and email or you can link it to microsoft sharepoint. watson has a free version and a professional version ($9.99/month to $199.99/lifetime).

 

personal effectiveness xxx

watson is a great little tool. i mostly use it when i'm blogging to check out other blogs and sources regarding the topic i'm blogging about. but i think the really power of watson comes in it's ability to attach to proprietary datasources. i mentioned this to intellext's marketing director last spring and low and behold, in the new version early this summer, they support easy connection to microsoft sharepoint. now, i'll admit that i'm sure i wasn't the only one telling that, but it feels good to feel like i had an impact. imagine working on a proposal at work and while you're typing away, watson identifies three similar projects that have been proposed in the past that you never heard of. voila! your proposal just went from solid to "blow them away." or you're preparing marketing materials for a product and watson just happens to find all of the customer comments on the product's predacessors for the past 10 years. you're a star! i'm convinced watson can do the searching i've described. the real question is whether your company's data is ready to be found.

 

learning effectiveness xxx

search engines in general are among the key tools for informal learning, but it think watson stands out as a better tool than google and yahoo because it can be aimed at whatever data source you need to know and because it has the ability to find information that not only are you unaware of it's existence, but you may not even be aware that you need to be looking for it. i've already mentioned some scenarios above that are informal learning in the workplace. it's not difficult to see that the same sort of proactive search could benefit an academic student or researcher as well. it is a bit disappointing that i don't see questia or citeseer or any of the other academic databases represented in their add-ins list.

 

coolness xxx

watson is very cool. the interface is easy to use, the sidebar is generally unobstrusive, and the quality of the searches is top-notch. it's a bit uncool that they don't currently have a mac version. the potential for watson is really amazing. if you could talk to it, you'd feel like you were in a science fiction movie. beam me up scotty, this review is done.

personal effectiveness=
learning effectiveness=
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do you know a competitor to this application?

if you know of a competitor to watson and it's not in the list below, feel free to add it to the list by filling out the form to the right. that will put it on my radar screen for possible review.

thanks!

 

 

topic homesummary tableeelearning wikieelearning blogfaq

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