Tooling Around the Web

One of the most fundamental things found in any home, apartment or car is a toolkit.

Well, after buying a cheapo tool kit at Sears, Charles Knight was inspired to create a tool-kit for another place people spend loads of time — on their phone. In his piece article on Read/Write Web, MobileAnswers is one component he recommends in his 85 piece mobile search tool kit. He says about his creation: “If Mobile is going to be ‘the Next Big Thing,’ you're going to need all the tools you can get in order to be prepared for every eventuality.”

Presearch is a term coined by Answers.com, but has caught on in the general public. Jay Bailey, Director of Marketing, says presearch, along with Encyclodictionalmanacapedia, are “catchy,

descriptive

and don’t sound too much like the words of a Marketroid . They tell a story.” That must be why, there was a recent article about presearch on The Librarian Edge blog.

My father is a great bowler. This is not something that I brag about. In fact, I used to be somewhat embarrassed that this was his sport of choice (you wouldn’t call him the athletic type), but recently bowling has become much more popular. In fact, the Answers.com Israel office had a recent company outing to a local bowling alley, and the New York office is eagerly following suit, with plans in the making. As planning continues, I ran across this article “Bowling deserves recognition as true sport.” The author makes a case for overhauling the reputation of bowling. Stats and figures in the article were provided by Answers.com.

Some other tidbits that Answers.com helped journalist with over the past couple of weeks:

The Easter Bunny: Did you know that in Australia

a campaign was launched to replace the Easter Bunny with the Easter Bilby?

Proxy Weddings: In Montana, neither you nor your spouse need be present at your own wedding: it can be done by proxy. This is popular for foreigners and service men stationed away. Know when else a proxy wedding is popular? When your spouse is incarcerated.

Rush Limbaugh: Bono, Larry and The Edge were first, but now Rush Limbaugh has his own signed iPod, too. What makes Rush rank with Apple marketers? The fact that he has 13.5 million listeners!

Brand News

Columnist Bernie Delinski was pondering semantics when a reader posed the question whether the term “brand-new” was redundant. For if something is new, why does it need a qualifier in front of it? Is it then newer than new? Mr. Delinski turned to Answers.com to see how the site defined the term. He also checked out an alternate spelling, “bran-new,” which reminds me of a fiber cereal, but actually is an alternate spelling of the same term found in Webster’s 1913 Dictionary. With some further investigation, Delinski found that spelling was used in 1700s and 1800s literature, including the description of a "bran-new Barlow knife" in Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn."

Speaking of brand-new, Answers.com’s first ever edition of its blogger newsletter went out last week. A mention was made by at least one blogger, BudiPetra, who said it has “smart” positioning as the

“very first blogger newsletter.”

Aspirin. As I get older, my fondness for these small white pills grows. Now, new studies show that these old pain killers are not only good for headaches, but also help prevent several diseases connected to aging, especially heart disease. A recent study that appeared in Bloomberg reinforced these findings, particularly for women. So what’s the potent ingredient in aspirin?

It’s salicylic acid, which according to Answers.com, is found in the inner bark of white willow, a large tree found in Europe, Asia and North America.

The author behind Sarasota Web Design has admittedly been trying to find an alternative to search engines. In his quest, he tried Brainboost and Answers.com. He says, “I’ve been using both and have been pretty impressed with the results.”