Web Standards Project Curriculum Framework

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) just announced the WaSP Curriculum Framework. The framework's goal is to identify the skill sets and competencies that aspiring Web professionals need to acquire to prepare them for their chosen careers. Outlines for a set of foundation courses that can be readily adapted into an existing program at a college, school, or university will be released in March 2009. This curriculum framework is intended to be a "living" curriculum with contributions from web educators and web professionals.

The WC3 Question & Answer blog post on the proposed framework states, "After years of hearing people lament that we would not get a better web until we get better ways of teaching the Web to the professionals (of today and tomorrow), is very exciting to see the recent crop of community driven efforts to provide material and guidance for the teaching of Web technologies."

New Google Knol

Google has launched a beta of Knol — kind of like Wikipedia with a twist. Google defines a knol as "a unit of knowledge" and explains that a knol is an "authoritative article about a specific topic".
Just like Wikipedia, anyone can post an article. See Web Design Best Practices for an example. :-)

Alexa : More than Search Results

Alexa lives up to its tagline: A Web Information Company — providing more than search results. You can use Alexa to find out more about a web site: with displays of an overview (including a screen capture and contact information), traffic statistics (when available), sites linking in, and a direct link to the Web Archive to view how the site looked in the past.

Do You Grok Grokker?

Grokker offers both an outline view and a visual view of search results. This provides a way to easily drill down into topics of interest in an organized manner and search within the results. Grokker searches your choice of Yahoo!, Wikipedia, and Amazon Books for information. An interesting twist is that Grokker can be licensed by businesses as an enterprise search management tool to mine their databases for information.

TouchGraph: Visually Show Connections Between Web Sites

TouchGraph's Java applet will visually display connections between websites related to the search term you enter. There are three flavors of TouchGraph:

• TouchGraph Google offers an intriguing method to explore a topic when brainstorming.
• TouchGraph Amazon visually displays books related to a topic.
• TouchGraph Facebook provides an new way to explore your friends and connections.

KartOO: A Mind Map of the Web

Continuing this week's topic of search engines — you may want to explore your favorite topic using KartOO. This visual search engine builds a mind map of websites related to your search terms. Somehow, exploring a cloud of websites is more fun than looking at page after page of text-based search engine results. :-)

New Search Engine - Searchme!

Searchme is a visual search engine that begins to show you results while you are typing your keyword or phrase. In addition to the expected search engine results page (SERP), Searchme displays the home pages of the web pages in a "deck" across the upper part of the page. A handy tool for those who think visually!