I heard about Middlespot last week, and wanted to tell you about this new take on non navigational search. This powerful search platform works like regular engines in that you input the topic you want to explore, but differs markedly in the presentation of results.
Middlespot still offers a list of text based results, but it also offers a checkerboard of miniature screenshots so that you can make a scanner assessment of which of those results might prove most useful to you.
What you do is you select the visual results you find most potentially valuable and move them to your workpad. Then, you can grab others, conduct other searches if you desire, then explore all of the promising results at once from your middle spot -- that work pad. At least that is how I have used it. I am sure there are other processes to use, but this one seemed a big time saver to me, and I liked the glut of gratification that work pad makes possible.
Here's how they describe their own service:
middlespot.com workpads allow you to gather together only results that you find relevant to your research. You can collect search results together that are from multiple searches, over any amount of time. We've even built a number of tools that allow you to add to your workpads even when not using the middlespot interface.
workpads are feature rich. You can rename them to better reflect what they contain, leave a comment describing the contents of the workpad, open the entire workpad in the middlespot.com interface, and add any url you want. Your collected result is stored as a screenshot that you can uniquely annotate with your own comments. You can also have as many workpads as you want.
to make accessing your workpads easier over multiple sessions, we've placed your workpad tabs on the start page of middlespot.com.
Another excellent set of features comes through the ability to share the results from your work pad with others. Through this powerful offering, you can make search and research truly collaborative and communal.
This offering is not the way to find a place to buy a book or something. But, if you are doing bona fide research on a topic, as I do on multiple occasions every day, this tool can be a welcome addition to your process.
Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.
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