Given that I've already been to office hours a bunch, I'm pretty sure you have a good idea of how my Wiki works. I put in a lot of effort to make sure that it was formatted to be easy to follow (for an incoming analyst). My start page tells you to first look through my Background page, which gives a brief background of Apple and its three main products. Every page on my Wiki has a link taking you back to the previous page, and the main pages have home buttons to take you back home (thanks for the help with that).
After learning about the background information, the next stage is my Reports, where I have made a report every week since the beginning of October. Every day I went through my Blogroll and looked for the most important articles. When I found a good article, I read it and provided a brief summary. This is meant to be a representation of the type of information an Apple analyst must analyze.
But the real bread and butter is my Sources page. I spent several hours simply organizing the links on this page to make it best for the reader (who's probably never heard of any of these) to follow. For each resource, I discussed how it applies to my search, how I used it and how well it worked, as well as additional information. I felt like since we are writing to another person, it would be much easier to read and understand if I worded it in an articulate paragraph as compared to the strict template in the syllabus. I contemplated adding an evaluation number in addition for each resource, but it didn't really fit with the format of my reviews. Just because I give a resource a 3/10 doesn't mean it's a bad resource, it normally just means that I didn't like it. I know that if I saw a 3/10, I probably wouldn't even try it out (and I want the incoming analyst to try every resource). Therefore, I stated my experience and what I thought, but always encouraged the reader to experiment with every resource for himself/herself.
One thing to note: For my General Search page, I didn't include all of the techniques we learned. I could've written pages and pages on all the techniques and their applications. I decided to only cover the basics, but I included two additional resources (Google and Yahoo uses) to provide all the syntax available on the Web. I know I personally would not want to be bombarded with pages of search syntax (I would just get lost). The most important thing is that I discuss all the useful syntax I used for my project (this is what's most helpful for them to learn). One other side note: I didn't include any Deep Web resources because they were not applicable for my project.
While creating each source took a significant amount of time, I would say the most time consuming part of my Wiki was the Reports. Each week I filtered through all of my RSS feeds, found and read articles, and summarized them. In total, I probably analyzed about 70-80 articles in about two months. This was pretty difficult given that we had to write blogs, do exercises outside of class, and work on both my Background and Sources pages all the meanwhile.
I am very content with how my project worked out and I think I did a good job working on the Wiki throughout the entire semester (and not cramming it all in the end). For this reason, I don't think I would've accomplished much more with extra time. I guess my one change would've been to work more with Feed43 and Yahoo Pipes. Of all the resources we've covered in class, Yahoo Pipes is definitely the best (by far) and you can do so much with it! I wish I would've done more experiments with Yahoo Pipes (I did make three Pipes, but I had a lot more ideas). Additionally, I had a mountain of trouble when we went over Feed43 and therefore decided not to use it for my project. If I had extra time I would've experimented with Feed43 and included it.
