Stamp Collecting for Beginners and Philatelists
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This column originally appeared in the American Philatelic Society's monthly magazine, "The American Philatelist." Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.
June 2002
India Study Circle.The India Study Circle for Philately has gone Net. Their new site is live and welcomes anyone with an interest in the stamps and postal history of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, and any related entities.
The ISCP site is useable at first sight. The five sections are lined up across the page with each section's pages columned out beneath them. Listed under Library are "Introduction, Categories, Loans, Additions." There are six pages under "Activties" and five under "General Info."
The simplicity is refreshing and very user-friendly, and if you think there's a relation to another Indian philatelic site, you're right. Webmaster Ron Rice is also the maker of the Princely States Report, which by now you already know for its content and design.
Princely States Report
http://www.princelystates.com
India Study Circle for Philately
http://www.indiastudycircle.org
Search with Authority.
In '95 it was Yahoo!, and in '97 it was Alta Vista. Others have come and gone, and some stayed. But by 2001 Google was the Web's search engine of choice simply because it's simple and satisfying.
Type in what you're looking for and get very relevant, easy-to-follow results in a split second. Though Google seems to have a lock on Web searches, as opposed to serving up Web ads, Teoma is a new company that has set its sights on being your search engine of choice.
Teoma went live in April and says it's able to separate the wheat from the chaff with its Subject-Specific Popularity, which ranks Web pages not just by popularity but by the number of links it has from same-subject Web sites.
This involves Teoma filtering and sorting sites by subject or topic on the fly, a chore that also allows Teoma to offer a couple more collections of resources on their results pages.
A Teoma results page offers up a three areas. The first is the relevant pages according to their search formula. The next feature on all Teoma result pages is what they call "Resources: link collections from experts and enthusiasts," and the third area is "Refine Results," which is actually more than keyword refinements, and seems to act like a dynamic directory.
Together all three provide a wide array of very targeted Web pages without spammed pages, clutter, or mess. Teoma's press releases talk about how Teoma has organized the Web into "communities within communities," and that concept seems to work rather well.
Teoma
http://www.teoma.com
Teoma's slogan is "Search with Authority" and "teoma" is the Gaelic word for "expert."
Mailboats
Parrotheads and "Cheeseburgers in Paradise" don't normally conjure up images of stamp collecting, but singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett, best known for wasting away in Margaritaville, has a record company called "Mailboat Records." Buffett's the son or a son of a sailor and something of an islander of no particular latitude, so that the mailboat is a natural name.
Mailboat Records
http://www.mailboatrecords.com
Though Buffett may not bring stamps and hinges to mind, there's a well-known stamp collecting Web site that was named with a wink and a nod to a favorite Jimmy Buffett song. Do you know which one? The answer can be found further down the page.
