Usability in the Movies -- Top 10 Bloopers

This Alertbox from Jakob Nielsen arrived in my inbox just before Christmas, but there is still plenty of time over the next few days and the New Year for us to do a bingo card for the movies' top 10 usability bloopers. I love Nielsen's grossly understated summary: "User interfaces in film are more exciting than they are realistic, and heroes have far too easy a time using foreign systems"! Do read the full article. Usability in the Movies: Top 10 Bloopers  (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/movies-usability-top-10-bloopers/)

My own favourite snippets are:

"1. The Hero Can Immediately Use Any UI
Break into a company - possibly in a foreign country or on an alien planet - and step up to the computer. How long does it take you to figure out the UI and use the new applications for the first time? Less than a minute if you're a movie star. In reality, we know all too well that even the smartest users have plenty of problems using even the best designs, let alone the degraded usability typically found in in-house MIS systems or industrial control rooms."

Forget about another country, planet or in-house system. I quake every time I run a workshop and have to use the computer and system provided by the training suite rather than my own laptop. Do they have Firefox (answer usually 'No'), which version of IE do they have (5, 6, 7?), what does their firewall block? (Worst experience I had was a session I did on the importance of audio/video in competitive intelligence; every search tool and relevant site that mentioned audio or video was blocked, and the organisation was a brewer but their new ISP had blocked all sites mentioning alcohol).

"2. Time travelers can use current designs
If you were transported back in time to the Napoleonic wars and made captain of a British frigate, you'd have no clue how to sail the ship: You couldn't use a sextant and you wouldn't know the names of the different sails, so you couldn't order the sailors to rig the masts appropriately. However, even our sailing case would be easier than someone from the year 2207 having to operate a current computer: sailing ships are still around, and you likely know some of the basic concepts from watching pirate movies. In contrast, it's highly unlikely that anyone from 2207 would have ever seen Windows Vista screens."
I keep hoping that none of us will ever have to see Windows Vista screens but I fear that we are doomed in that respect. There are times when I am glad I kept my old DOS manuals. There are still situations in which being able to drop down into command line mode saves so much time and effort as well as solving some very simple problems that are made unimaginably complex by Windows.

I can particularly identify with number 4 "Integration is ease, data interoperates":

"In movieland, users have no trouble connecting different computer systems. Macintosh users live in a world of PCs without ever noticing it. In the show 24, Jack Bauer calls his office to get plans and schematics for various buildings. Once these files have been transferred from outside sources to the agency's mainframe, Jack asks to have them downloaded to his PDA. And - miracle of miracles - the files are readable without any workarounds. (And download is far faster than is currently possible on the U.S.'s miserable mobile networks.)".

Forget about different systems, some colleagues and I had great fun (NOT!) trying to read a Microsoft Word document in what we all thought was a common Word format that everyone's versions of Word could display correctly. And we weren't talking about ancient or bleeding edge 2007 versions either :-(

And number 9 in Nielsen's list "You've got mail is always good news:

"In the movies, checking your mail is a matter of picking out the one or two messages that are important to the plot. No information pollution or swamp of spam. No ever-changing client requests in the face of impending deadlines. And you never overlook information because a message's subject line violated the email usability guidelines."

I'm afraid Nielsen doesn't go far enough here. In the movies the hero/heroine logs into their email and the only message that pops up on the screen is the one that reveals the key to the whole mystery. Come on - let's see them having to do some work to get to the vital information. How about having to run Mailwasher on top of the ISP spam filters or a desktop search tool to dig around in the totally unstructured collection of read email sitting on the computer? Then we won't feel inadequate next time we are desperate to track down that seriously important message buried in a pile of rubbish.

Blog Tag: 5 things you don't know about Karen Blakeman

This is a blog tag game and I blame Phil Bradley for sucking me into this this, who blames Danny Sullivan, who blames .... I have no idea. The game is that having been tagged (by Phil!) I have to tell 5 things you didn't know about me and 'tag' five people to do likewise!

So, the 5 things you possibly didn't know about me are:

1. Phil claims to have run the first Internet course in the UK in 1994 but in late 1992 I ran an Internet course for people working in the commercial sector. We spent hours struggling with telnet, veronicas, archies, and gophers and got nowhere very slowly. At the end of the session I uttered the immortal words "Don't worry, this Internet thing will never catch on" .

2. Chris (my husband) and I have walked the Thames Path twice during the last four years. 184 miles from its source in the Cotswolds to the Thames Barrier in Greenwich. Brilliant! Our greatest challenge was identifying public transport that could get us to and from various points along the walk.

3. I am a fervent vegetable gardener specialising in growing tomatoes, aubergines, courgettes, peppers, garlic, and chillies that blow your head off. If you are interested in growing really tasty vegetables, especially tomatoes and peppers, try Simpsons Seeds.

4. We have a tartan tortie cat called Jessie. She is a rescue cat adopted from Thames Valley Animal Welfare and has us well trained. Remind me - why are we getting up at 5 am in order to feed this animal?

5. I am a Thunderbirds fan. F.A.B . Need I say more?

I now tag:

Tom Roper. Great blog that as well as information related topics has racing tips!

Brian Kelly. Well I have to tag him don't !? We all teased him mercilessly at Internet Librarian International this year about being the only web 2.0 speaker without a blog. So he immediately set one up. And very good it is.

Chris Armstrong. This is the fellow to contact about managing e-books. He is also very active in CILIP council and has been involved in the Review of Groups and the Governance Review. Anyone who recommends axing the incomprehensible, hierarchical panel, board, standing committee structure of CILIP gets my vote every time!

Chris Rhodes. My husband who is involved in environmental remediation and energy issues. His blog has interesting but sometimes seriously scary stuff concerning climate change and 'peak energy'.

Christine Baker. Christine does not have a blog but I want to tag her anyway, and she gets out of having to tell and tag. She is the UKeiG (UK eInformation Group) admin person who keeps the whole group running and on its toes, and we all love her. More importantly, she is and has been a great friend to me for many years.

Google launches Patents Search

Oooops, sorry, it hasn't. Google's service only searches the 7 million patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). I am sorry if this sounds tedious and boring to a lot of you, but those of us outside of the US are fed up with Google announcing services that imply they are world-wide when they are not. There is also the issue that the database Google uses for this does NOT, as Gary Price has pointed out (see below), include pre-grant published applications that are published before a US patent is or is not awarded.

Searching patents databases requires a knowledge of the legislation in each country, the terminology used in patents and the best databases and sources of information to use (most of them priced, I'm afraid). What is very worrying about Google's patent search is that many budding inventors and entrepreneurs around the world may think that Google is searching and finding everything that is relevant when it isn't.

If you just want to track down a copy of a known US patent, then this is fine - well, actually, I would go direct to the USPTO rather than use Google. If your search is business-critical and you have to know if anyone, anywhere in the world has already invented an energy generating machine based on cat-purr power then hire a patent search specialist!

More detailed reviews of Google's patent search are available at the following:

Greg Notess - Google Launches Patents Database

Gary Price's Resource Shelf

Search Engine Land - http://searchengineland.com/061213-200005.php

Accoona home page tabs are back!

Well, everyone's blog postings and emailed complaints to Accoona seem to have worked. Accoona has restored the web, news and business search options on its home page alongside the new 'All' option.

Yet more Google oddities

If Google is driving you mad with its erratic behaviour, take heart in that you are not the only one to suffer at the hands of this temperamental search engine. Greg Notess reports on yet more Google oddities in his blog (Super Clustering Google).

Greg ran a search on powells books with his display preferences set to 100 per page. Google only displayed the first four of about 962,000. He then changed the number to be displayed to ten, and Google gave ten results. When he switched back to display 100, the number went up to 18. He then clicked on the message at the bottom of the results screen: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 18 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." That gave an estimate of about 2,810,000 total hits and displayed a full 100 on his screen.

I tried the same search on Google UK and got a total number of hits of 2,290,000 but it would only display 319. Clicking on the display omitted entries option reduced the number of total hits to 1,340,000. I should point out that the total number of hits that Google says it has found is generally a work of fiction. I have never found it to be reliable unless you have refined your search extensively and are getting numbers in the region of 50 or less. Even then, results can disappear or reappear at random.

I repeated the search in Google Canada, Germany and France and got totally different but equally bizarre results. Needless to say the results totally changed when I repeated the experiment 24 hours later!

Accoona 'loses' news

Accoona is a search engine that I regularly include in my workshops and training sessions, not so much for the web search but for the news section and the SuperTarget options. Yesterday, I was horrified to discover that News is no longer there. Instead of Web, Business and News there is just a single search box. Going through my feeds this morning, I see that Phil Bradley has picked up on this as well but has explored a little further than I had. News is still there but you first have to do a search in the box on the home page. When the results page comes up, the three options reappear and you can then limit your search to web, business or news. Why they have decided to increase the number of clicks I need to make to find the information I want beats me. They won't gain any fans by doing it and will no doubt lose those who already use it for news. One look at the home page and they will assume, as I did, that the news service is no more.

Libraries@Cambridge 2006

The Powerpoint of my presentation, given at the Libraries@cambridge 2006 conference on December 13th, together with the list of resources and further reading is available at http://www.rba.co.uk/presentations/cam2006/

The topic was RSS, Blogs and Wikis: New Essential Tools for Communication and Collaboration.

Advanced Search Strategies - Top 10 Tips

Another advanced search strategies course successfully completed at Manchester Business School with the usual eclectic mix of participants, and a new top 10 tips and tricks at the end of the day. It is interesting that RSS feeds get a mention this time around, and it does seem that more people are starting to use them for news and alerts.

1. Trovando - http://www.trovando.it/. Enables you to type in your search strategy just once and run it across dozens of search tools one by one. Tools are grouped by type, for example web, blogs, audio/video.


2. Remember that each search engine is different. Each has unique search features, has different coverage and sorts yoru results in a different way.


3. Seek out evaluated subject listings and specialist tools for subjects or industries that are new to you. For example Intute (http://www.intute.ac.uk/), TechXtra (http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/), Alacrawiki (http://www.alacrawiki.com/).


4. AlltheWeb Livesearch - http://livesearch.alltheweb.com/. Starts displaying results as you type in your search so that you can quickly see when you start to go wrong. It also displays related and alternative search strategies that can help you if you are new to the subject area.


5. Wayback Machine - http://www.archive.org/. For tracking down copies of pages or documents that have disappeared from the original web site. Type in the address of the web site or the full URL of the document, if you know it. (Note: this is not guaranteed but worth a try for older documents that are unlikely to be in the search engine caches.


6. RSS feeds. More efficient than email for monitoring topics and managing search alerts. IE 7 and Outlook 2007 can both read RSS. If you would prefer to try a web based reader try Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/), Newsgator (http://www.newsgator.com/) or Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader)


7. Keep up to date with who is best at which type of search. For example image search, blogs and feeds. Obviously, this can quickly change so use RSS feeds to monitor announcements and blogs that assess and evaluate what the search engines are doing.


8. Make the most of the Advanced Search options to narrow down your search, for example filetype or format, site search (can be used to search individual sites or types of site such as academic or government sites).


9. Search Engine Showdown - http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/. Excellent site from Greg Notess with summaries of the major search engines, unique features and news on what they are up to.


10. You are not going mad! Pages do disappear without trace and Google does do strange things. Try another search engine or a totally different approach. Above all, trust in your abilities.

UC&R - New Ways to Communicate workshop

I am at this moment at the University College & Research Group's workshop on using RSS, blogs and wikis to communicate with your users, being held at Birmingham University in the UK. There are about 50 of us here and we are all having great fun playing with ePop. Poor 'Trevor' who is at the end of a video link is being bombarded with questions from us in the training suite. He can show us presentations, answer questions and take over our computers to help us find things (scary!). And he is on a completely different part of the campus - now we are sharing whiteboards. Brilliant session from Debbie Carter of the Univeristy of Birmingham.

The earlier part of the day was taken up with RSS, blogs and wikis. I kicked off with a general introduction to the subject and Alan Cooper from CILIP's web team talked about how Web 2.0 is being used at CILIP. Rupert Mann from Oxford University Press looked at the technology from the publisher's, and user's, point of view and had some pretty scathing things to say about other publishers's approach and attitude to RSS and blogs in particular. A memorable comment on one US university's attempt at RSS was "No fun at Harvard any more".

Jane Somerwell, University of Worcester, talked about blogging in her organisation and then we had the first of the practical sessions. I am pleased to report that we have significantly increased the membership of the blogosphere with at least a dozen having been set up in the last hour, and the number of RSSaholics in this room is beginning to reach alarming levels. "Stop reading your feeds and pay attention!!"

A fantastic day, great fun, and every one of us learned a lot.

Must stop... time to comment to some of the new blogs :-)

Online 2006 free search seminars

I am now back from a very busy week at the annual Online Information exhibition and conference in London. As well as chairing a conference session and being 'on duty' on the UKeiG stand, I gave two free exhibition seminars on search: 'Top tips and tricks for better web search' and 'What's new in search'. These are now available as Powerpoint files.

Please note that they are just Powerpoint slides and are not annotated. So unless you were present at the seminars, the significance of some of the screen shots may not be immediately obvious - in fact they may be downright obscure. Also, she compiled these using the latest Microsoft Office 2007 suite and in the conversion to the more commonly used versions of Office some of the slides may have lost something in the translation.

LibraryThing UnSuggester | Don't read THIS

Fed up with reading the same type of book or want to try a completely different genre? Then head straight for LibraryThing Unsuggester
I came across this in Tom Roper's Blog. According to LibraryThing Unsuggester it "takes 'people who like this also like that' and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest."

I was very impressed with the unsuggestions for the Seven Pillar's of Wisdom: Confessions of a Shopaholic, Sushi for Beginners, and the Harry Potter paperback boxed set. You can't get much different than that! I was rather disappointed, though, with the first two on the alternative list for The Ragged Tousered Philanthropists. That is until I discovered that number one (America: a Citizens Guide to Democracy Inaction) is tagged as humour and the number two (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) is classed as chick lit.

Ideal for helping you choose the perfect Christmas gift for that oh-so difficult to please relative :-)

Advanced Internet Search Strategies - Manchester Business School

If you want to get in some serious practice on the latest Internet search techniques before Christmas there are still some places available on the workshop that I am running at Manchester Business School on December 5th. The event is held in the Eddie Davies Library at Manchester Business School, Booth Street West.

Although it is being held at the business school, the workshop covers sites and techniques relevant to all subject areas and types of research. There is ample time for practical sessions so you can try out some of the tips and tricks yourself. Also, the number of participants is kept small enough for me to discuss with each person the search tools that are relevant to their specific research area.

Details of the workshop and a booking form are on the
MBS web site.

Please contact me if you have a question about the content of the workshop, but for all queries regarding bookings please contact the Business Information Service at MBS on tel: 0161 275 6502/3, Fax: 0161 275 6505 or Email: bis@mbs.ac.uk

New ways to communicate: a practical approach

I shall be presenting a keynote at an event organised by UC&R in Birmingham on December 6th. Details are as follows:

New Ways to Communicate: A Practical Approach. Using RSS, Blogs and Wikis to Communicate with your Users.

Venue: Learning Centre, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Campus
Date: Wednesday 6th December 2006, 10am - 4pm

As the Internet has developed, so has the potential for reaching information service users. This event will consider how information professionals can best use modern tools such as RSS feeds, weblogs and wikis tools to communicate with users and colleagues, and to develop and promote their services.

Speakers include:
Keynote: Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services and UKeiG
Alan Cooper, CILIP Web Team

Cost: £35 for CILIP members, £50 for non-members (inclusive of VAT)
A limited number of free places are available for students currently studying for a degree in library and information science. Lunch is included in the fee.

Further event details may be obtained from:

Clare Langman, UC&R Group West Midlands Chair and Co-Events Secretary,
Information Specialist (Engineering and Life Sciences),
Library and Information Services, Aston University,
Birmingham B4 7ET
Tel: 0121 204 4513
Email: c.langman@aston.ac.uk

Let's Get Wiki'd

The slides from my presentation "Assessing the Quality of Collaboratively Collected Information" are now available on my web site. This was part of the Let's Get Wiki'd event organised by CILIP's East of England Information Services Group. It was an excellent day covering the whole range '2G' internet services such as Library 2.0 and Web 2.0 Dave (Pattern from the University of Huddersfield), Mashups (Richard Wallis, Talis), Social Bookmarking and Connotea (Joanna Scott, Nature), and wikis and the semantic web (Nick Kings, BT). I understand that links to the other presentations will be available on the ISG web site.

I now have a short break from presentations and workshops, but the next series kicks off quite soon at the end of November at Online Information 2006. I shall be giving two free seminars on Tips and Tricks and What's New in Search. Details of these and the full programme of free seminars and masterclasses are available on the Online Information web site.

Windows Live - linkfromdomain command

This a new command from Windows Live search (formerly MSN Search) that gives you a list of links to other pages from your specified domain, for example linkfromdomain:rba.co.uk. This can be useful if you have a trusted source of information and want to see what other sites they recommend or link to. It can also be used as a means of assessing the bias of a site so that you can see the diversity, or lack of it, in the pages that the site 'references'.

Firefox Addon - Resurrect Pages

This is the prefect Firefox add-on for the dreaded 404 message, or if you want to see which version of a page the search engines have in their cache. You can try five page cache/mirrors in turn: CoralCDN, Google Cache, Yahoo! Cache, The Internet Archive and the MSN/Live Cache. The search engine caches usually only have copies going back days or, at most, weeks but the Internet Archive may have copies going back to 1996. If you have installed Firefox 2 you may need to use the Nightly Tester Tool add-on to persuade Firefox that Resurrect Pages is compatible.

Assessing the Quality of Information: Top Tips

Or: Paranoia 'r' us

This is a list of Top 10 Tips that the participants of Assessing the Quality of Information compiled at the end of a workshop held at TFPL in London on 31st October 2006. On a scale of 1 to 10, most of the delegates started out with a paranoia level of around 7 or 8. By the time they had worked through half the exercises a couple of them had increased that to 25-30! Paranoia had eased off slightly by the end of the day and at least they had a toolkit at their finger tips that they could use to help evaluate and assess the quality and validity of information.

1. Check who is behind the domain name of a web site using www.allwhois.com . The contact details sometimes just give the ISP or service who organised the domain name for the web site owner but at least it is a starting point if you need to contact the owner to discuss any issues about the content. If someone really wishes to hide, they can use an agent to do the registration for them and in that case there is little one can do to track down the real owner. Note that you can only find out who owns a domain name; you cannot take a person’s or company’s name and find out which domain names they own.


2. Try the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) (www.archive.org) for tracking down pages or sites that have disappeared. Type in the web site URL or the URL of the document/page you have ‘lost’. This can pick up pages no longer cached by the search engines (see number 3 below). This trick is not guaranteed: some sites have asked to be removed from the archive or have designed their pages so that they automatically refresh to the most recent page. This can also be a useful tool for reviewing how a company presented itself on the web in the past and how organisations have evolved, both of which can be useful components of assessing quality.


3. Look at the search engine cached copies of pages for more recent past pages. This is especially useful if the current web page that you found via Google et al does not seem to resemble your search strategy in any way. The cached copy is the copy that the search engine has in its index and it will also highlight your search terms within the page.


4. Use links to and from the site or page to find pages that are similar to a known quality page (pages of similar content tend to link to one another), or to see what other people saying about the page in terms of quality and the authority and of those that link to it. Use Windows Live (www.live.com) . For pages that link in to your known or ‘suspect’ page use the link and linkdomain commands.Link will find pages that link to an individual page, for example: link:www.rba.co.uk/sources/stats.htm
   
   Linkdomain will find pages that link to anywhere within a web site, for example:
   linkdomain:rba.co.uk
   
   To find out what page a site links to (can give you an idea of bias, political stance, ideology etc) use linkfromdomain, for example: linkfromdomain:rba.co.uk


5. Use ‘hoaxbusting’ sites for if you are suspicious about a site or a ‘well known and accepted fact’. Examples are:
   www.snopes.com
   hoaxbusters.ciac.org
   www.vmyths.com (concentrates on virus myths and hoaxes)
   www.regrettheerror.com
   


6. If relevant and appropriate double check information and data with other independent sources (not always possible and you may find yourself going round on circles chasing sources that quote each other!)


7. Use the search engine advanced options to focus your search. For example the domain and site command or box to limit your search to, for example, UK government sites (gov.uk), academic sites (.ac.uk, .edu etc), a known trusted site.


8. Use different search tools and their features to give you results that are prioritised in a different order or for suggestions on alternative search strategies:
   Yahoo – search.yahoo.co.uk – for results sorted in a different order from Google
   AltheWeb Livesearch – Livesearch.alltheweb.com – for results that change as you type and suggestions for alternative search terms
   Ask – www.ask.co.uk - for ways of narrowing down or broadening your search
   Exalead – www.exalead.com - for its unique advanced search commands and related terms
   Windows Live – www.live.com – for its link, linkdomain and linkfromdomain commandsThink about using different types of resources for example reference sources, video/audio, blogs and RSS feeds (yes, there are some good ones around!). Have a look at Trovando (www.trovando.it ) for some starting points. And don’t forget evaluated listing such as Intute (www.intute.ac.uk) and, for business, Alacrawiki (www.alacrawiki.com ).


9. If you are looking for up date to market research etc. use market research content aggregators to identify who is publishing on a topic and go direct to the publisher. Individual publishers do not always give their full catalogue to the aggregators, may embargo their information for weeks or months, and may have more up to date information on their web site. You can also sometimes get a better deal by going direct to the publisher.


10. Dates. Compared with structured databases, proper and accurate date searching is almost impossible with Google et al. A web page is assigned a date by the web server when it is loaded or reloaded onto the web site. It is not when the information was gathered or written. The web server date is the one that the search engines look at when you use the date option in the advanced search. Neither should you automatically trust the date that so often appears at the bottom of a page. It may be accurate and reflect the date of the content, but pages can be set-up to incorporate the date the page was loaded or reloaded onto the site, the date when minor changes are made, or even today’s date :-( If the date is not obvious from the content, contact the author.

Two additional general points were made in conclusion:

• it is important to build up your own personal collection of sites, relevant to your sector and applications, and that you have already quality assessed and trust


• errors and misleading information are not new and pre-date the Internet era. Nothing has changed in that mistakes and bias in the media - whatever form - are a fact of life. What has changed is that everyone now has the opportunity to become involved in creating and perpetuating myths and mis-information, which means that we have to wade through so much more rubbish and spend more time separating the gold from the dross.

Internet Librarian International - Presentations available

Many of the presentations made at Internet Librarian International 2006 are now available on the ILI web site. If you want to 'flesh out the bones', try and track down blog postings on the event. Tom Roper's blog is a good place to start.

Searching without Google: the hottest and best of the new search engines

Presenter: Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services
Date: November 8th 2006, half day seminar starting at 1.30 pm
Venue: Manchester Central Library, St Peter's Square, Manchester M2 5PD
Cost: Aslib members GBP 50; non-members GBP 60

There is still time to book a place on this half day seminar on what is new and what is hot in the search engine world. Find out what is wrong with Google and why other search tools are often better and more reliable. This session will take you through the latest alternative web search engines; blogs and RSS search tools; image, video and audio tools; and specialist tools including evaluated listings.

Further information and a booking form can be found at http://www.aslib.co.uk/members/northern/news.htm or contact Rona Stedman, rona.stedman@hse.gsi.gov.uk, tel 0151 951 3524

Tom Roper's Weblog: Internet Librarian International: Internet Research Intricacies: Out-Googling Google: Finding what Google Misses

Tom Roper has neatly summarised my ILI presentation on out-Googling Google on his blog. He's done a good job of encapsulating the main points, so worth reading it along side my Powerpoint slides.

ILI - Out-Googling Google presentation

My Internet Librarian International presentation on Out-Googling Google is now available at http://www.rba.co.uk/ili/index.html. I have not written any notes to accompany the Powerpoint so you may not be able to make much sense of some (or even all) of it. If you are interested in seeing photos of the event, go to Flickr and use the tag ili2006.

A fantastic event with lots of good practical tips and case studies. If you have never been, watch the web and feeds for news of next year's event. This year there must have been at least 350 people there and the key note sessions were packed solid with standing room only for late arrivals! The rest of the program was split into parrallel tracks so you could almost guarantee a seat. At the rate this conference is expanding, ILI will have to take over the entire hotel for the event next year :-)

In addition to the main programme, there are plenty of networking opportunities including receptions, "group"dinners, and lunch tables hosted by the speakers. A great way to met new people and exchange experiences and success/disaster stories.

Internet Librarian Inernational starts today

Internet Librarian International starts today in London at the Copthorne Tara hotel, but many of us were here yesterday for the preconference workshops. I attended Greg Notess' Advanced Search Techniques seminar and, as usual with Greg's sessions, I came away with lots of useful tips. Two that have particularly stuck in my mind are:

Windows Live images search - note the scroll bar on the right hand side of the browser. Live lets you view a lot more than the usual 10 or 20 displayed in the other search engines.

Undocumented Yahoo commands - use the region command to restrict your search by continent or region, for example region:europe or region:southamerica.

One day in history

Take part in the biggest blog in history!

Found in Peter Scott's Library blog:

"The heritage organisations involved in the "History Matters - pass it on" campaign are asking every UK resident to take part in a mass blog event, which will record how we lived on one single day: Tuesday, 17th October 2006. The aim is to create a massive electronic treasure chest of diaries showing everyday life at the beginning of the 21st century, to be kept as a social history archive by the British Library. The date is chosen deliberately as an ordinary Tuesday, with no national importance. But with your help, it will become truly "One Day in History": by logging on to historymatters.org.uk and taking part in this mass blog everyone will be contributing something valuable to the historic record a fascinating resource for future generations to explore. Uploading can be done until 31 October 2006"

Blogs and RSS: tools for competitive intelligence

Created by Digimind, this is an excellent overview and introduction to blogs and RSS and how they can be used in competitive intelligence. It includes an extensive list of references and further reading. Highly recommended if you are wondering what all the fuss is about and whether or not you should leap onto the bandwagon.

Passport launched for OurProperty and PetrolPrices.com

Fubra, who run and maintain the OurProperty.co.uk and PetrolPrices.com web sites, have launched the Fubra Passport. This is a single login system that will be valid for all existing and future Fubra web sites and consists of your email address and just one password. You no longer need your user name.

Fubra say that the benefits will become obvious as they launch more sites over the next few months, but no clues from them yet as to what those sites are likely to be. So far, I have been very impressed with Fubra's sites. I use regularly use OurProperty, which repackages Land Registry data, and friends and colleagues reckon that PetrolPrices, which gives details of local petrol prices, is excellent. (We gave up our car 15 years ago as an experiment and are still managing to survive and travel with out it!). Fubra also run Compare Airport Parking.

MSN Search becomes Windows Live

There I was, standing in front of a workshop full of seriously proficient Internet searchers, and running through my list of Google alternatives. I get to MSN Search, hit the bookmark and stand there in bemused silence for what seemed like an eternity but was probably only about 10 seconds. In the couple of hours since I had checked the site, MSN Search had become Windows Live (http://www.live.com/).

The screen may look very different but the search features and commands, some of them well hidden, are the same. The home page is the most obvious difference but the Search Builder, now renamed Advanced Search, has disappeared. It reappears once you display your results list. Why? I can only assume that Microsoft thinks that all searchers only resort to advanced search options when their initial basic search has failed. Not that it really matters, since some of the really good advanced options are not listed in the menu anyway and you have to use them by going into ‘command line’ mode.

For example:

car ownership UK filetype:xls

The home page now has links for Web, Images, News and Local search but the free access to Encarta has been dropped. I have, though, seen various reports saying that you can still get to it by searching on encarta plus your search terms or site:encarta.msn.com plus the terms.

It would also be helpful to have the More option on the home page rather than having to generate a results page to see it! At present More gives you access to a Feeds search and Academic Live, both of which are still in beta. I first reviewed Academic Live in April 2006 (http://www.rba.co.uk/rss/2006/04/windows-academic-search.html). Not much seems to have changed in functionality but I note they have added many more journals to the database, including biomedical and healthcare titles. I subscribe to just about every official Microsoft alerting service but the enhancements do not seem to have made it to any of them. This is an ongoing problem with MSN Search/Windows Live; if you want to keep up with developments you have to regularly hunt around the site for changes and review the help files for the new and really useful commands*.

The Local search works pretty well, but I need to look at it in more detail and compare it with other similar services before I pass final judgement. One problem that struck me straight away was that although it started off with a UK map it transported me over to the US when I searched for churches in Caversham. I had to include UK in the location to force it back to the UK. The satellite images are slightly higher resolution and crisper than Google’s for my location, and they seem to be more up to date.

Apart from Academic Live, I am not yet convinced that I should be using Live.com as my regular search engine. The web search results still seem to be more consumer and retail orientated than Google and Yahoo, and I am usually looking for research or statistics on a subject. A search on ‘gin vodka sales uk’ in Google and Yahoo will bring up market research reports and industry stats galore: on Live.com, the first is a statistical overview but the remainder on my first result page are online stores where one can buy gin and vodka! This is not actually a problem, and there are times when you may want to bias the search in this way, but it is as well to be aware of it.

Overall, a nice clean interface but very little has changed under the bonnet and some useful search features have disappeared from view.

*One useful command that you might have missed is the feed command. The scenario: you are, like me, a news and RSS feed junkie. You have found a really good news site covering your subject or industry sector but surely it cannot be true that they do not have RSS feeds? Check by using the Live.com feed command combined with the site command. For example:

site:superduperwidget.co.uk feed:superduperwidget.co.uk

Try it on the BBC web site and you’ll discover that they have 1,956 feeds!

Business Information: Top 10 Sites and Tips

Another day another workshop. This time it was Business Information on the Internet organised by TFPL on September 27th, and attended by information professionals from the private, academic and banking sector. As usual I asked them to come up with a group Top 10 Sites and Tips. If you are loosing track of the top 10s that have been popping up on this blog, I shall be compiling two combined lists in December: one for business and market research, and the second for search tips.

This is the order in which the participants nominated the sites:

1. Resource Shelf - http://www.resourceshelf.com/ - “where dedicated librarians and researchers share the results of their directed (and occasionally quirky) web searches for resources and information. The editorial team is headed by Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy. Use the search option to hunt through the archives for recommended sites on a topic, and subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up with the latest additions to the ‘shelf’.


2. Google – http://www.google.com/, http://www.google.co.uk/ . It can be temperamental and it doesn’t always do what it says on the tin, but for much of the time Google still comes up with the goods. Make sure that you are using the advanced search features for example file formats searches, limit by domain, numeric range search, synonym search etc. and that you are using the right ‘bit’, for example News, Blogsearch, Google Books.


3. Yahoo Finance - http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/ . Good starting point for companies listed on the UK stock exchange and a selection of other countries stock exchanges. For some markets there are free, daily historical share prices for 10 – 15 years (varies depending on the country and exchange) and free intraday charts. If you are into share price data and analysis click on the Technical Charts and you can play around with wonders such as Bollinger Bands.


4. Google and Yahoo News for the last thirty days of news stories. Go to Google or Yahoo and click on the News options. Both have good international, national and local coverage, and offer alerting services. Google recently launched a Google News Archive service going back 200 years for some story lines and publications. (Many of the articles are priced). Also try Ask (http://www.ask.co.uk/ or http://www.ask.com/) and Accoona (http://www.accoona.com/)


5. Alacrawiki Spotlights – http://www.alacrawiki.com/ . Click on the Alacra Spotlights link in the top left hand corner of the screen for access to overviews of key resources on industry sectors. Great for bringing yourself up to speed on industry specific sites and as introduction to sectors that are new to you. Although this is a wiki, the Spotlights area is locked so that only Alacra editors can change the content of the pages in this section.


6. Intute – http://www.intute.ac.uk/. The Resource Discovery Network is dead – long live Intute. Do not be put off by the academic address. This is an excellent starting point for evaluated, quality sites on a wide range of subjects and industries. If you are looking specifically for business information, these can now be found under http://www.intute.ac.uk/socialsciences/business/.


7. FT.com – http://www.ft.com/ . What can one say? “No FT – no comment according to the advert strapline. To get the most out of this site you will need to subscribe, that is pay money. Level 1 costs £98.99 a year and gives you access to subscriber-only FT content and tools including personalised news alerts, FT analysis and the 5-year archive. Level 2 costs £200 a year and gives you Level 1 access plus access to 500 global press sources and financial data on about 18,000 companies worldwide.


8. PWC EdgarScan - http://edgarscan.pwc.com/ (click on the EdgarScan link). Repackages the US official SEC filings data and makes it easier to search and identify relevant official documents from US listed companies. There is a wide range of search, display, export and analysis options, all of which are free of charge.


9. Freepint Newsletter + Bar – http://www.freepint.com/ . Fortnightly newsletter available on the web and by email covering a range of information related issues and subjects. The “bar is a web based discussion area where you can ask for help with tricky questions. But “Where’s the free beer? asked one workshop participant.


10. Marketresearch.com - http://www.marketsresearch.com/. A good starting point for pay as you go market research reports. Also try Mindbranch (http://www.mindbranch.com/) and Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/ . You may find that publishers do not always supply the whole of their catalogue to these content aggregators or that the reports are embargoed for varying periods of time. If you find an interesting report via one of these aggregators, double check with the original publisher to see if there is a more relevant or up to date report available direct from them.

Google RSS Reader Revamped

Thank Heavens! Google has totally redesigned its RSS feed reader. The old interface was a disaster: hideous, confusing and non-intuitive. I suspect that many users who were new to RSS feeds have given up on the technology forever as a result.

Having got that whinge out of the way how does the new reader compare with what is already out there? For starters, the default display will now be familiar to existing RSS junkies like me. The left hand side of the screen lists your feeds, and in folders if you have decided to organise them in that way. The individual items are displayed in the central area of the screen, and there is a tips and tricks box on the right hand side of the "Home" page.

Google Reader now allows you to view just new items, all items in a single list, all items by folder or items by individual feed. For me, a variety of viewing options is essential. I need to view individual, priority feeds as soon as I fire up my reader in the morning but I am then quite happy to scan through all the UK news feeds, for example, as one long "folder" list. The only serious gripe I have with the display of the items and feeds is that Google Reader does not include the feeds own icons. It may seem a minor point but it is a quick way of identifying the feed source when scanning through a combined list of all your new items. One point to watch is that the default in Expanded View is to mark items read as you scroll through them. This is a feature that I find extremely irritating but is easily put right by going to Settings, Preferences.

There are two 'views' for items: Expanded View gives you the title, source and as much of the article that the publisher has decided to include in the item. The List View gives you the title, the first few words of the article and the date in just one line. To view the original or source document just click on the title or the double chevron next to the title.

For each item you can Star, Share, Email, Mark as read and Edit tags. When I tried these out only the Email and Mark as read options worked: the others gave an "error has occurred message". But it is early days with the new interface so hopefully these glitches will be addressed soon. The email option defaulted to my Googlemail account so there could be a problem if you want to send headlines or stories to colleagues and clients using your corporate email account. Other web based readers such as Newsgator use your default email reader. Also, you cannot send more than one headline or item per email - a failing with many web based RSS readers. Another notable omission is that you cannot keyword search your feeds or set up alerts, again a non-feature of most web based readers.

You can easily import and export your existing list of feeds and adding a subscription is straightforward. Google Reader, though, does not support user authentication so if you have Factiva feeds, for example, it is back to your PC based reader or Newsgator.com.

Overall, I am impressed. Until now I have been telling RSS newbies who want to just dip a toe in the RSS stream to avoid Google's reader like the plague. It is still not perfect, and I shall continue to use Omea on my laptop, but I have now added Google Reader to my list of recommended web based readers.

Before the revamp..

After...

Tech Talk: The Laptop Battery Recall Scorecard

If you have bought a new laptop, and are wondering if yours is affected by the latest series of battery recalls, this posting on Tech Talk gives links to the relevant pages on manufacturers' web sites. My particular model of Toshiba seems unaffected but I shall be monitoring the Toshiba page in case that changes. For the Tosh machines the batteries do not burst into flames - they just stop working.

Tech Talk also has information on Dell's free recycling programme, an inititiative that Dell have completely forgotten to tell me about in the numerous emails and newsletters that they send me. The link in Tech Talk takes you to the US site but a quick check on the UK Dell pages revealed that it is available over on this side of The Pond as well. You can use the service to recycle defunct Dell equipment, or if you have just bought a Dell you can recycle your old equipment regardless of manufacturer. Looks promising. In my location one has to pay for computers to be collected for recycling so I have filled in the form and am awaiting further instructions.

Investing in Eastern Europe Conference

Investing in Eastern Europe: Focus on Assets, Ownership & Governance
6th International Conference on Commercial Information Gathering & Analysis
Thursday 19th October 2006, Strand Palace Hotel, London
Registration Fee: GBP 250, EURO 375 per person

The former state controlled economies of Central and Eastern Europe all face a challenge to build full market economies based on private ownership. Whilst legislation can be put in place to act as a guide for ownership structures what is actually needed is the political will to ensure that commercial advancement is not impeded. This specialist one-day conference will examine some of the influences and factors relating to this issue and provide an insight into how the problems are slowly being addressed.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and Effective Technology Marketing are, once again, co-hosting the conference at the Strand Palace Hotel, London to discuss the practical identification, acquisition and analysis of commercial information in the region and its application.

Programme

Chairman - Paul Byfield, Legal Information Specialist, EBRD

Keynote Address
The role of the Russian judicial system in protection of shareholders' rights in Russia
Olga Anisimova, Partner, Solicitor, Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe and former Russian Judge

Politics and the Bankruptcy of Russia's Richest Company:
Analysis of the Yukos affair
Alan Rousso, Lead Counsellor, Office of the Chief Economist, EBRD

Corporate Governance in Action.
The situation in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans
Gian Piero Cigna, Counsel, Office of the General Counsel, EBRD

Has eastern Europe benefited from privatisation?
speaker to be confirmed

Overview of the investment climate in The Caucasus
Anna Walker, Senior Editor & Economist for Eastern Europe, Economist Intelligence Unit.

The BIG THREE and others - commercial online east European business information services
Dr Frank Ryan, Manager, Business Information Centre, EBRD

Overview of free sources on the Internet relating to company ownership
in central and eastern Europe
Karen Blakeman, Consultant, Rhodes–Blakeman Associates

The conference is supported by a focused exhibition of leading commercial information providers.

Details and registration forms at http://www.dataresources.co.uk/confintro.htm
PDF brochure download http://www.dataresources.co.uk/EEBIC%202006.pdf

Top 10 Search Tips

Delegates on the recent Advanced Internet Search Strategies workshop held at Manchester Business School came from the commercial sector, charities and the NHS. It was a lively day and the group came up with a very interesting list of Top 10 Tips:

1. It isn't you!
You run your search a second time in Google and you get a completely different set of results despite having run the same search a mere 20 minutes before. Or you run a site search in Google but the results come from here, there and everywhere. Or your results bear no resemblance whatsoever to your search strategy. Don't worry - it isn't you. Google does play up at times and results are rarely consistent or reproducible from one moment to the next. If you are having serious difficulties getting any sense out of Google, don't struggle. Try another search engine (Yahoo, AlltheWeb Livesearch, Ask, Exalead, Windows Live).

2. Google.
OK - we slagged off Google in Tip 1 but it can still deliver the goods a lot of the time and is the first port of call for most of us. Make sure, though, that you are using the advanced search features to the full and that you are using the right part of Google for example News for current headlines, Images, Blogsearch etc.

3. AlltheWeb Livesearch - http://livesearch.alltheweb.com/
Start typing in your search and AlltheWeb Livesearch immediately displays results and alternative search strategies that change as you type. The changing results help you spot when you are starting to go wrong with your search and the suggested alternative searches can be useful if you are unsure of how to tackle a subject.

4. Google Maps/Local - http://maps.google.co.uk/.
Great maps combining ordinary street maps with satellite images. (The business search option is not always reliable, though, and Google does not seem to want to tell you where railway stations are).

5. Use the Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org/) to see what was being said on a web site in the past or to track down "lost" documents and pages.

6. Remember that you are searching an out of date index of the web when you are using Google et al. Google is the least up to date: Yahoo and MSN/Windows Live seem to be the most frequently updated.

7. Explore Blogs as potential sources of information opinions on industry events, products etc and RSS feeds as a means of delivering search alerts and current news headlines. You will need a feed reader for RSS feeds: try Newsgator.com (web based reader) or Omea (http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader/) if you are looking for a PC based reader.

8. Trovando - http://www.trovando.it/
Enables you enter your search strategy once and run it in different types of search tools one by one for example web, images, news, blogs, audio, video.

9. Repeat the most important terms or terms in your search one or more times. This will often change the order in which your results are sorted and give you different results.

10. If your search involves numbers, distances, weights, prices or measurements of any sort use the numeric range search in Google. For example:

toblerone 1..5 kg

to find online shops selling large(!) bars of toblerone

or

TV advertising spend forecasts 2005..2012

to look for forecasts mentioning years from 2005 to 2012.

Market Research on the Web - Top 10 Tips

Information professionals from the commercial sector, universities and government agencies attended the workshop Market Research on the Web, held at Manchester Business School on September 6th. A regular feature of the courses that I run is the Top 10 tips, sites and tricks that I ask the participants to compile at the end of the day. This time, they came up with an interesting mix of sites and search techniques.

1. Use search tools’ Advanced Search screens and commands to help refine your search.For example restrict your search to PDFs for large reports, XLS for spreadsheets containing data. Use the site: option to limit your search to types of organisations or an individual site, for example site:gov.uk for UK government sites or site:statistics.gov.uk to search just the UK national statistics web site.
   
   Use the link commands to find pages that link to a document that you already have and which is highly relevant (pages that link to one another tend to have similar content). Use the Yahoo link command to find pages that link to a specific page (syntax - link:http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/stats.htm) or the linkdomain command to find pages that link to any page on a site (syntax - linkdomain:rba.co.uk)


2. Use the Google define: command to locate definitions of acronyms, abbreviations and jargon terms, for example define:cpm. Alternatively, in any search tool use the search 'what is....', for example what is cpm.


3. Wikipedia - www.wikipedia.org - for quick overviews on topics. [Note: this site was not covered in the course but several of the participants mentioned it as one of their starting points on subjects that are new to them]


4. Alacrawiki - www.alacrawiki.com - a guide to business information companies, publishers and databases. The Alacra Industry Spotlights in particular are extremely useful in providing reviews and commentary on industry specific web sites that have statistics, market research and news. Invaluable if you need to get up to speed on key resources in a sector or industry.


5. Make sure that you are using the right keywords and jargon related to the industry that you are researching. These can also vary from country to country, for example clothes washers versus washing machines. Also be aware that different directories use different coding systems and categorisations, and that there are different national official coding systems.


6. Fita: Import Export Business & International Trade Leads – www.fita.org. Good starting point for country and industry specific directories, market research sites, general information on trading in other countries and cultural differences in doing business.


7. Bureau van Dijk Free Directory – www.bvdep.com – click on the Free Directory link. This can be a useful way of identifying companies active in a sector in a country or region. You can also limit your search to size of company (for example large, medium, small, very small). Free Information includes name of the company, town, country and official registration number. Results can be exported in a variety of formats.


8. Use the free executive summaries and tables of contents provided by market research publishers for keywords and to identify major players in a market.


9. For smaller companies export directories often provide more free information than the official company registries. Information may include names of sales, marketing, export directors; key export markets and the products involved; turnover band; employees band. Search on the phrase export directory combined with a country and/or industry sector. Also try fita.org for directories or Marketingfile.com for searchable mailing lists including exporters/importers.


10. Try social bookmarking services, for example www.furl.net , to see what other people have identified as relevant in a particular area and to set up your own list of useful resources. The service is hosted on an external web site so you do not have to be at your own computer or at work to access your lists. Lists can be kept private, shared between colleagues or made completely public. [A participant on this course explained how her organisation uses FURL to share resources on topics between different groups and departments.]

Investing in Eastern Europe: Focus on Assets, Ownership & Governance

6th International Conference on Commercial Information Gathering & Analysis
Date: Thursday 19th October 2006,
Venue: Strand Palace Hotel, London
Registration Fee: £250, €375 per person

The former state controlled economies of Central and Eastern Europe all face a challenge to build full market economies based on private ownership. Whilst legislation can be put in place to act as a guide for ownership structures what is actually needed is the political will to ensure that commercial advancement is not impeded.

This specialist one-day conference will examine some of the influences and factors relating to this issue and provide an insight into how the problems are slowly being addressed.

The European Bank for reconstruction and development (EBRD) and Effective Technology Marketing are, once again, co-hosting the conference at the Strand Palace Hotel, London to discuss the practical identification, acquisition and analysis of commercial information in the region and its application.

Speakers include:

Chairman: Paul Byfield, Legal Information Specialist, EBRD
Keynote speaker: Olga Anisimova, Partner, Solicitor Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe
Alan Rousso, Lead Counsellor, Office of the Chief Economist, EBRD
Gian Piero Cigna, Counsel, Office of the General Counsel, EBRD
Dr Frank Ryan, Manager, Business Information Centre, EBRD
Karen Blakeman, Consultant, Rhodes-Blakeman Associates

Further details of the programme and registration forms are available at http://www.dataresources.co.uk/confintro.htm

Blog - PetrolPrices.com

My blog posting on Petrolprices.com is the entry that receives the largest number of hits by far. Not surprising as petrol prices continue to rise and there is a wide variation in pump prices even within a small area. The site now has a blog and recent articles include discussions on biodiesel and a special 4p/litre off promotion in Northern Ireland. RSS and Atom feeds are available so you can keep up to date with the topics via your favourite feed reader.

Intute - the best Web resources for education and research

A reminder that the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) has been replaced by Intute.

"Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in our database and write high quality descriptions of the resources."

I find the new service much easier to navigate and I can find relevant gateways much more quickly than with the old RDN. There are 4 main areas: Science & Technology; Arts & Humanities; Social Sciences; and Health & Life Sciences. If you are intrested in business information, the resources covered by the busines and management section of SOSIG are now at http://www.intute.ac.uk/socialsciences/business/. Although their target audience is students, staff and researchers in higher and further education this collection of resources is of value to anyone who uses business information.

Adverteyes UK – Advertising Slogans Database

Adverteyes is a database of who's said what, where and when in advertisements. It includes endlines, slogans, straplines, taglines and trademarks that are currently appearing or have appeared in the UK, Ireland and the USA media. Data from unique campaigns in Canada, Australia, India and South Africa is now being added. The database is intended to provide assurance that a proposed ad line will not infringe on the current use of that line by others. It also provides information on current overly used advertising themes and on what specific brands have 'said' through the years. The most recent 100 straplines added to the database can be viewed free of charge but you need to subscribe to search the whole database. The annual subscription is currently £19.95

You can search using phrases or keywords that appear in the slogan combined with a product category such as airlines or foods. Alternatively you can just select a category. You cannot search directly by brand name or company - those are only picked up if they appear in the slogan. The results give the "line", brand name, product category, product, media (print, radio, television, outdoor, other), year and country. The results are listed by ad line in alphabetical order but you can re-sort them by brand name.

The database goes back to the 1950's and '60's, and it is interesting to see what advertisers could get away with at that time. There was the famous - or should that be infamous? - "Guinness is good for you" but Guinness also ran a campaign claiming that "a Guinness a day keeps the doctor away"!

New version of Exalead under test

A new version of Exalead (http://preview.exalead.com/search/), one of my favourite search engines, is currently in beta test. The beta home page thankfully remains minimalist and uncluttered but has retained the short cut options that enable you to add other sites and search engines to your own personalised version of the page. Exalead say that they will be increasing the size of the web database from 4 to 8 billion pages and there is a separate image search option on the home page.

The major changes are on the Advanced Search and the results screens. The Advanced Search has been simplified and the phonetic search and approximate spelling have gone. A pity .... er, no they are still there but under ‘What?', 'More’. For heaven’s sake, list them by default along with NEAR, Boolean search and the pattern matching/regular expression options! It was only when Phil Bradley mentioned their location in his blog that I realised they had not been axed. And if I missed the link, so will a lot of other people. If you have never tried ‘regular expression’, it is a pattern matching search that you can use to mask one or more letters in the middle of a word. For example the search /psych.*ist/ will find psychologist, psychiatrist, psychotherapist etc. You start and end the word with a forward slash, and a full stop followed by an asterisk stands in for one or more letters. I find it very useful when searching on chemical names.

The results screen has also been simplified. To limit your search by language, file type, location, RSS feed, video or audio you now have to click on 'Refine your search' on the right hand side of the screen. I think that is a mistake as I suspect that a lot of people will not bother to investigate it. Furthermore, because these options are not on the advanced search screen, they will think that Exalead’s search functionality is limited. I know some people find the current results screen overpowering and confusing, but Exalead could at least restore the RSS, Video and Audio buttons to the results page and include the refine options in Advanced Search as well.

A new feature that I do like is the page preview button on the thumbnails next to the results. If you have opted to display text only results there is preview link included in each entry. Preview enables you to look at Exalead’s own cached copy with your search terms highlighted. This has always been available but it has never been obvious how you do it.

As this is still in beta, changes are continually being made. Watch this space, as they say, for further developments. In the meantime you can compare and contrast at http://www.exalead.com/ and http://preview.exalead.com/search/

techXtra now independent

TechXtra is a free source of information in engineering, mathematics and computing and is now an independent service. Previously connected with the EEVL gateway, TechXtra is an initiative of the ICBL and the Library at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. TechXtra is based around a search engine that provides access to the freely available full-text content of millions of articles, key websites, theses and dissertations, books, industry news, new job announcements, technical reports, eprints, learning & teaching resources and the latest research, in engineering, mathematics and computing. Where the full-text is not freely available, TechXtra provides links to vendors for pay-per-view options. In addition, free trade magazine subscriptions and technical document downloads, job announcements, industry news, new books, information about offshore engineering publications and newsletters are available.

The basic search offers keyword searching combined with categories such as books, industry news, latest research. The Advanced Search offers various keyword options (all the words, phrase, any of the words, without the words) and options for selecting Special Collections for example Directory of Open access Journals, CiteSeer – Computer and Information Science Articles, NASA Technical Reports.

Some of TechXtra’s resources will not be picked up by the standard search engines, or you may have to wade through volumes of murk and mire before you find them. I tried it out on some of my test searches relating to the energy sector, in particular on deep drilling and the origins of petroleum, and was impressed with its speed and relevance. TechExtra is now in my list of key search tools for this area.

Automotive World re-brands

Automotive World, started by the Financial Times in 1990, has re-launched its web site and now incorporates 'AWKnowledge' and 'AWResearcher'. Automotive World's subscriptions include daily updates on 12 key automotive sectors and 37 OEMs globally. Printed research publications include The Automotive Quarterly Review, and the World Car and World Truck reports. Forthcoming research titles will cover detailed OEM forward model insight and merger and acquisition strategies of the supply base. The full text of the articles and reports are available to subscribers only but you can view the headlines freeof charge. There is a free RSS feed of industry headlines, but again, the full text of the stories are available to subscribers only. Free trials are available.

Russia: All Regions Trade & Investment Guide

'Russia: All Regions Trade & Investment Guide', which was mentioned in an earlier blog posting, now has its own web site at http://www.russiasregions.com/ with a free sample region (Moscow). If you only want data on one or two regions, there are now options on the Order page for purchasing them as individual PDF files (£20 each).

Hard disc failure=lost emails :-(

Apologies if you have already seen this on the LIS discussion lists or on the UKeiG blog.

Some of you will have noticed from the auto-replies to private messages sent to me that I have been on hols for about 2 weeks. I am now back. That's the good news - OK, I know that's debatable :-)

The bad news is that a couple of hours after I had downloaded two weeks worth of email my PC's hard disk crashed in spectacular fashion. Of course Sod's Law was in operation and I had also deleted the downloaded email from my ISP's server. Deleting everything from the ISP mail server was a I habit I developed in the early days of the Internet when ISPs charged an arm, a leg and several pints of blood to store more than a few kb of messages for more than a few days. A practice that I have today abandoned!

Everything that I received up until midday 29th July was backed up but anything between then and midday August 15th has gone. So if you have sent me any emails during that period could you please re-send them? Especially those of you who sent me emails requesting user names and passwords for access to the members area of the UKeiG web site.

Many thanks

Karen Blakeman

Search Strategies 6th edition available

The sixth edition of Search Strategies for the Internet is now available. Further details are available on the RBA web site and, as with previous editions, updates can also be downloaded from the web site. Although the price of the publication itself remains the same - GBP 35 for the ring binder version and GBP 22 if you only want to purchase the pre-punched loose leaf pages - we are now having to charge for postage and packaging. In the past we have been able to absorb these costs but rates have increased considerably over the last two years and a new pricing structure is about to be introduced by Royal Mail.

With this edition we are offering an additional purchase option. You can immediately purchase and download a PDF version of the publication via Lulu.com, price USD 27.50.

The structure of the publication remains essentially the same with section I outlining search tool essentials and key search techniques, section II details the major tools currently available, and search strategies are covered in section III. The summaries and comparison table, which are freely available, are in section IV.

I had a quick look at the contents pages of previous editions and when it comes to the major search engines the fifth edition covered Google, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Gigablast, Teoma and HotBot. This time we have AlltheWeb Livesearch, Ask, Exalead, Gigablast, MSN Search and Yahoo Search. The first edition (published in early 1998) included Yahoo (as a directory), AltaVista, HotBot, Excite, Infoseek, Northern Light, Lycos, Euroferret and DejaNews. Google, officially launched on 7 September 1998, was just a glint in Larry and Sergey's eye!

Top 10 Business Information Sites

I ran another course for UKeiG on Business Information on the Internet last week. It was held in the training room at the Library, Warwick Univeristy. We had a full house with sixteen people from commercial organisations, legal firms, government bodies, public libraries, university libraries and independent consultancies. As usual, I asked them to come up with a top 10 list of sites. The list can be found on the UKeiG blog at
https://web.archive.org/web/20061008165557/http://www.ukeig.org.uk/blog/2006/07/business-information-top-10-sites.html

Alacra Store launches RSS alerts

Alacra have always been keen to try out and use the newer technologies - they already have a blog and a wiki - and now Alacra Store is offering free RSS feeds on all of its Company Snapshots. Anyone can subscribe to company-specific RSS feeds containing credit and investment research from premium content publishers such as CreditSights, Moody's Investors Service, and Thomson Financial. You simply search by company, click on the RSS button on the Company Snapshot page, and add the URL to your feed reader. The alerts are free but you will have to pay to view the full documents. Alacra Store works on a pay per view basis so you don't have to worry about hefty up front subscriptions - just get your credit card out.

In addition to the company-specific feeds, there are several publisher-specific feeds that enable you to track all of the latest content from a given provider:

CreditSights -
http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/publisher-rss/creditsights
Fitch Ratings -
http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/publisher-rss/fitch-ratings
Moody's Investors Service -
http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/publisher-rss/moodys
Newstex - http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/publisher-rss/newstex
TF Investext -
http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/publisher-rss/tf-investext
Thomson StreetEvents -
http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/publisher-rss/thomson-streetevents

Even better would be the ability to have RSS feeds that monitor a company name within a provider, for example Lukoil in Newstex, but this is a good start. I wish more premium information providers offered RSS alerts.

Reed Business + FAST = Zibb.com

Reed Business and search company FAST Search & Transfer have launched a business-to business (B2B) search tool called Zibb. Zibb.com, currently in beta, unifies over 900 of Reed Business titles into a single vertical portal. It will also crawl the indexes of other publisher’s content. There are tabs for searching by News, Products, Suppliers, Webs and Blogs, and All (the default).

Why use this rather than Google? If you are looking for companies and products, and especially smaller companies, you often end up with a large amount of dross even with Google. Try searching for companies such as Next or Smarty in a standard search engine! Zibb narrows down the field considerably. Once you have found the company you are interested in there is a form that you can fill in to request a quote or send an email.

It is still a beta product and is not perfect, but they welcome feedback and quickly corrected some out of date information that I found. I would not use if I were looking for a comprehensive list of product suppliers or manufacturers. For that I would go straight to a directory such as Kelly's or Kompass. Definitely worth a try and one to watch.

The Internet Detective is back

The Internet Detective is back on the case after a year's vacation. Internet Detective was originally developed in 1998 with funding from the European Union but was withdrawn in 2005. The free online tutorial is designed to help students develop the critical thinking required for their Internet research and is now in the Intute (formerly the RDN) Virtual Training Suite at http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective/
Although aimed at students the tutorial is of value to anyone who uses the Internet for research. It highlights why information quality is an issue on the Internet, offers hints and tips on evaluating information, and how to recognise scams and hoaxes. The tutorial and associated exercises take about an hour to complete, although I would expect experienced researchers to be able to do it in less than that and get all the answers right! You can skip sections if you wish and you do not have to complete it in one sitting.
If nothing else, it serves as a reminder to all of us on how to differentiate between the the Good, the Bad and the Ugly on the Net.

Russia: All Regions Trade & Investment Guide 2006

The 2006 edition of the Russia: All Regions Trade and Investment Guide is now avilable. The guide covers all 89 regions giving data on markets, current economic conditions, sources of supply, infrastructure, trade opportunities, operating conditions, investment projects, and the legal and tax environment. Data is provided directly by the local administrations and governments, and reviewed and verified through government agencies. I have found this guide to be an invaluable starting point in the past when researching the trading environment in the region.

Prices range from £395 to £595 depending on whether you order the book and/or the CD ROM and whether you want them in English or Russian, or both. There is a 25% discount if you order before Friday 7th July.

Further information and order forms can be found at http://www.dataresources.co.uk/russ89.htm

Compare airport parking prices

Set up and maintained by Fubra who run Ourproperty.co.uk and petrolprices.com, Aiport Parking Shop compares prices across 6 of the biggest UK parking brokers for 24 UK airports. Select the airport from which you wish to fly, enter you departure and return date, and the number of passengers. It then comes up with a list of possibilities.
As I always use public transport to get to UK airports I was astounded at the variety and range of options and prices. At the upper end of the market you can treat yourself to a meet and greet deal where you drive straight up to departures, leave your car with a valet who will park it for you, and then have it waiting outside arrivals on your return.
For each entry in the results you can see if the service is on/off airport parking or meet and greet, transfer time to the terminal, frequency of transfers, any awards that the service has won, and more detailed information in an aiport car park guide. It also tells you whether or not there is a charge for credit card processing. If you decide to prebook - and apparently you can save up to half the cost by doing so - links take you direct to the car parking service web site.

On every page there are also links to the Car Hire Centre, another Fubra run site, that compares the prices of a range of car hire brokers; coverage is worldwide. Choose the airport or city where you want to pick up the car, enter the dates and you are then presented with a list sorted by price. Cheapest first of course!

Blogs and Social Media Forum Podcasts

If you don't manage to get to the Blogs and Social Media Forum in May, VNU are now offering podcasts of the individual forum sessions for £25 + VAT each, or all 8 sessions for £150 +VAT.

The speakers included Euan Semple - ex Head of Knowledge Management, BBC; Christopher Barger - Blogger in Chief, IBM and JP Rangaswami – Global CIO, Dresdner Kleinwort Wassertein. Brief details of the forum sessions and further information are available on the VNU web site

To purchase a Podcast please contact Belinda Sprules on telephone number +44 (0)20 7316 9126, or by email Belinda.sprules@vnuexhibitions.co.uk

GoshMe

GoshMe brings together hundreds of specialist web sites and databases. The home page has a number of major headings such as science, environment and society, audio, health, law, reference, sports. Select the most appropriate subject or subjects and type in your search. GoshMe looks at the results from different search engines – it claims to cover approximately 1,000 - and then displays what it thinks are the best tools in which to run the search. You can then choose the tools you want to use.

AlltheWeb Livesearch Beta

This is a great new search tool from AlltheWeb, now owned by Yahoo. As soon as you start typing your search terms, Livesearch suggests how you might like to complete your strategy. For example, I had only got to 'peak o' of one of my test searches - peak oil - and it was already suggesting peak oil news, peak oil production, peak oil myth etc. At the same time it starts displaying results in the main part of the screen. The suggested strategies and results change as you type in more letters.

The suggested searches are good but the way the results change so quickly as you add or modify terms means that you can immediately spot if you are going down the wrong track. Highly recommended.