viaLibri - search for rare books

viaLibri searches for old and rare books on eighteen different web sites that aggregate the inventory of hundreds of antiquarian booksellers world-wide. You can search by a number of criteria including author, title, imprint, publication years (before/after), price, first edition and keyword. As the interfaces and search options of the individual sites are different you may get no results at all if your search is too narrow, so it pays to start off with a relatively broad search. You can always edit your search later and add extra criteria.

You can sort the results by year of publication, price, author, title or bookseller and then click on the individual links to view further details of the book or buy it from the bookseller.

There is also a Quick Query Library Search that searches 72 online library catalogues including Worldcat, Copac, National Union Catalogues and National Libraries. You can use viaLibri's Quick Query, which only searches on author, title or keywords, but enables you to click and run your search in each catalogue in turn without re-typing your search. Alternatively you can click through to each of the catalogues advanced search screens, but you will have to re-enter your search terms.

A very nice site if you are trying to locate a rare book for purchase or if you just want to find a copy in a local library for research purposes.

Track down lost bank accounts

If you have lost track of a bank or building society account Lost Accounts can help you find it. This is a free service set up by the British Bankers’ Association, the Building Societies Association and National Savings and Investments. Together they represent most of the firms that offer savings and current accounts in the UK.

Banks and building societies are stepping up their campaigns to reunite customers with lost cash because towards the end of 2009 the Government is going to pool the £1 billion lying in dormant accounts and place the money in an FSA-regulated central reclaim fund. This fund will then be reinvested in the community, particularly in youth services and financial inclusion schemes, but if someone later comes forward to claim their money, the fund will be used to pay account holders.

The procedure for tracking down your dormant or forgotten account is very straight forward. You enter your personal details, current and previous addresses and as much information as possible about the account. Even if the original institution has been swallowed up in mergers and acquisitions, it should still be possible to find your account. The response may take up to 12 weeks but, before you can claim the money as yours, you will have to provide proof of identity.

Online 2008 presentations available

The three presentations I gave at Online Information 2008  are available on Slideshare and authorSTREAM. Details are as follows:

Pre-conference workshop, 1st December 2008: Making Web 2.0 Work

Slideshare
authorSTREAM

Wednesday 3rd December, 11.15-11.45, Gallery Rooms
Competitive Intelligence: Can Free Sources do the Biz?

Slideshare
authorSTREAM

Wednesday 3rd December, 13:45-14:15, Theatre  C
Impact of Web 2.0 on Search

Slideshare
authorSTREAM

Latest Tales from the Terminal Room out now

The  latest Tales from the Terminal Room is now available.

Chipwrapper introduces time-slices

One of my favourite news sites, Chipwrapper (http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/), now offers an option to search for articles within a specified time period. Chipwrapper is a Google custom search engine that covers UK news sources on the Internet. Until now, a drawback  of the service has been the absence of an option to limit  your search by date. You can include a year and/or month in your search but now there are built in options to search for articles published within the past 24 hours, week, month or year.

My earlier review of this excellent service can be found at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2007/12/29/chipwrapper-search-uk-newspapers/

PNC's Christmas Price Index

PNC's Christmas Price Index for 2008 is now available. The index, compiled by PNC Wealth Management,  monitors the cost of the gifts sent by True Love  in the song The Twelve Days of Christmas. The Christmas Price Index (CPI) team, comprising James P. Dunigan, Rebekah McCahan and E. William Stone, have been tracking the index since 1984.

According to the 24th annual survey, the cost of the PNC CPI is  now $21,080, $1,573 more than in 2007 .  PNC comment in their press release:

"The seven swans a-swimming proved to be a driver of this year’s index, carrying the greatest weight with a whopping 33.3 percent increase due to their scarcity. True Loves will spend $5,600 this year for Swans compared with $4,200 in 2007....

Two other costs in the CPI dropped this year: three French hens and Six geese-a-laying. This year the hens cost $30, a drop of 33.3 percent over last year, and the geese cost $240, falling one-third. Four calling birds remained steady, costing $599.96, the same as a year ago."

An interactive chart allows researches to view the total CPI as well as individual items over the years.  More detailed and historical information is available including a spreadsheet containing data going back to 1984.

For True Loves who prefer to shop over the Internet,  PNC Wealth Management calculates that they will pay a grand total of $31,957 , almost $11,000 more than in the traditional index. According to Dunigan:

"In general, Internet prices are higher than their non-Internet counterparts because of shipping costs for birds and the convenience factor of shopping online"

PNC Wealth Management also tabulates the True Cost of Christmas, which is the total cost of items gifted by a True Love who repeats all of the song’s verses. This holiday season,  True Loves will pay more than ever before - $86,609 - for all 364 items, up 10.9 per cent  from $78,100 in 2007.

The Research Practioner Skills Day Presentation

Those of you who attended The Research Practitioner Skills Day at Chelsea Football Club on 26th November should have received all of our presentations by email. If not, mine (Using the Web) can be viewed or downloaded from either Slideshare or authorSTREAM.


Uploaded on authorSTREAM by karenblakeman

ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents Service

I had been doing so well at cutting back on my RSS feeds, but then I bumped into Roddy Macleod at Online Information. He reminded me about the ticTOCs service and then today I spotted their posting about the service in spineless?.

ticTOCs is a new scholarly journal tables of contents (TOCs) service  and Heriot-Watt is one of the fourteen partners who have developed it. You can use ticTOCs to search for the most recent table of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals, from over 400 publishers and also view them on the ticTOCs site.

You can view the latest TOC (table of contents) of the journal, link through to the full text (where subscriptions allow), and save selected journals to MyTOCs so that you can return to the site and view future TOCs. Alternatively, you can save your selection as an OPML file and import the list into your favourite RSS reader. And that has been my undoing :-) . I have already added about 30 journals to my feeds but I suspect that I shall delete some of those once I have had a chance to evaluate their relevance to my areas if interest. But I have at least two more subject areas to investigate. RSS feed overload is imminent!

Begone Searchwiki

Google's Searchwiki sounded like a good idea at the time.  Sign in with your Google account, activate Searchwki, carry out a search and you can promote, or delete entries in your results list and add comments that can be made public.  So I had a go. Unfortunately, should you later want to look at the un-searchwiki'ed results list you cannot just switch it off. You have to log out of your Google account and re-run the search.  What annoys me even more, though, is that it overrides my Firefox Customise  Google add-on.

I like to drop in an out of my Gmail, look at Google analytics about once a day and work on my Google Custom Search Engines. So most of the time I am signed in to one of my Google accounts.  I do not want to have keep logging out  just to carry out an ordinary  search  and to be able to look at the results in the way I want.  Thankfully, Google seems to have seen sense over this.  Techcrunch reports that Google will be providing a add a toggle button to allow users to turn the feature off, possibly in  Q1 2009.

In the mean time if you are curious about Searchwiki, curb your curiousity. Don't go there!

Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts

The Texas Secretary of State is the official office for registering various business entities in Texas, but I have been told that it is not the best source for quick and free information.  The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts - Taxable Entity Search has basic business entity information including name, status, location, agent, file number, SOS (Secretary of State) registration date, and taxpayer ID.  You can search by file number, tax ID or entity name.

Online Information 2008

It's Online Information week at Olympia in London. This afternoon I am doing a workshop on making web 2.0 work and two free 'floor show' seminars on Wednesday. The seminars are:

Wednesday 3rd December,  11.15-11.45, Gallery Rooms
Competitive Intelligence: Can Free Sources  do the Biz?

Wednesday 3rd December, 13:45 - 14:15, Theatre  C
Impact of Web 2.0 on Search

Slides of all three will be going up on the Web after the show.

I am also on the UKeiG stand (number 734) so pop round and say hello if you have time.

Pageflakes introduces obtrusive and inappropriate adverts

Today and without advance warning Pageflakes installed advertisements on all of its members' pages. There had been reports of ads appearing on new users' pages but it was not until today that they were imposed on all existing users.

The ads are garish, often irrelevant to the content of the page, sometimes 'inappropriate' and always fixed. They appear in the top right hand corner of the page. As Phil Bradley has pointed out in the Pageflakes Forum, the positioning of the advert is excellent from their point of view but a disaster from ours. If it is an image it completely dominates the content.  Until I had removed most of my content I saw bright orange,  red and yellow ads being served up on my page.

I am sure that most of Pageflakes' users appreciate that the company has to generate revenue but Pageflakes has not offered any alternative subscription options for those of us who are willing to pay for an ad free environment.

So what are the alternatives? I do not use Pageflakes other than to demonstrate it in workshops but I do maintain pages for other organisations. I have moved them all to Netvibes, which I recommend you investigate as an alternative. (For a very ordinary and straightforward example see the UKeiG  Netvibes page)

LARIA/ALGIS Presentation: Web 2.0 in the Public Sector

The presentation I gave at 'Managing Information in the Public Sector - The Future - Relaunching ALGIS' is now available on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/web-20-in-the-public-sector-presentation and on Authorstream at http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/karenblakeman-109455-web-2-0-public-sector-laria-algis-uk-lariaweb2-others-misc-ppt-powerpoint/ .

The slides are based on earlier Web 2.0 presentations but I have included examples from local government authorities and public libraries. Apologies to those of you I have used as examples: you may be deluged with enquiries from the seminar participants! There was a lot of interest in what is being done especially by local authorities.

The event was a joint LARIA/ALGIS seminar and held in London at Baden Powell House, London, Tuesday 18th November 2008. All the presentations will be available on the LARIA web site.

TriMark Publications - Biotechnology, Healthcare and Life SciencesMarket Research

TriMark Publications focuses on market research in biotechnology, health care and the life sciences. You can browse reports or search by keyword. The market reports vary in price but there are detailed table of contents and the first three or four pages available free of charge as a sample. However, any figures or data on the pages are blacked out.  It is refreshing, though, to see a detailed listing of what is contained in the reports before you part with significant amounts of money.

Sector Snapshots cost just USD 500 and provide a high-level overview of a particular market sector, including key players, sales data and emerging trends.

Database Tables, costing USD 100 each, are a one-page table of hard-to-find numerical information. They are derived from "a proprietary source" and provide a high-level overview of specific data points in a table format. Database Tables are not reports or comprehensive analyses.

African Financials

African Financials is a free Annual Reports portal focusing on investment in Africa. If you need an annual report on an African listed company this is a good place to start. There are 1100 reports and you can browse by sector, year or country. There are also links to CEO blogs and recently added documents. The IPO section lists rumoured, expected, recent, current, archived, cancelled, and postponed IPOs. Some of the IPO documents are available via the Download section.

Ten science search engines

Ten science search engines is actually a list of nine - you are invited to submit suggestions for the tenth via the comments section. The nine are:Scirus, Scitopia.org, Science.gov, ScienceResearch.com, Scitation, WorldWideScience.org, Science Accelerator, TechXtra, and search.optics.org. They all have different coverage and emphasis and none are comprehensive. Which one will work for you depends very much on the subject area. The three I regularly use in this list are Elsevier's  Scirus, TechXtra for engineering (ICBL and Heriot-Watt University) and WorldWideScience.org. Conspicuous by its absence is Google Scholar!

RefSeek for "academic information"

RefSeek is a a new search engine that "aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone".  There is very little information on how it works other than it  searches more than one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopaedias, journals, and newspapers.  A few test searches suggest that it searches just .edu. ac.uk,  .org web and .gov web sites but not .org.uk or .gov.uk.  Straightaway, those of us in the UK are missing out on a large chunk of scientific information and data as are other countries whose academic web domains do not include an organisation type such as. edu or ac. My searches on zeolites, for example,  failed to pick up papers on Zurich University's web site (http://www.uzh.ch/).  Also, .org and .org.uk domains can be bought by anyone and are not guaranteed to carry quality, peer reviewed articles. A search on my husband (Rhodes) and zeolites came up with some of his papers on the Royal Society of Chemistry web site (http://www.rsc.org/) and his own home page that is normally advertised as www.fresh-lands.com, but RefSeek picked up on the alternative freshlands.org domain.

Search options are the standard double quotes around phrases, minus sign to exclude documents containing a term, plus sign to include stop words and the Boolean OR. Next to each entry in the results list is an option to "Search this Site" which does work well. Although searching is free, you may find that you have to pay for articles on some sites.

Overall, RefSeek does a reasonable job of limiting your search to more serious scientific and academic information but there are far too many omissions for it to be reliably used on its own.  There are several other science search engines that I would recommend you investigate and use along side of RefSeek: see Ten Science Search Engines at
http://hwlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/science-search-engines/

SCoRe: national UK catalogue of printed company reports

SCoRe (Search Company Reports) is a catalogue of printed company reports, both current and historic,  held in UK libraries. The catalogue does not provide links to digitised documents but it is a very quick and easy way of  identifying libraries that hold hard copy reports.  The participating libraries include London Business School, the British Library, Manchester Business School, City Business Library, Guildhall Library, Strathclyde University and the University of Warwick. A full list is available at http://www.score.ac.uk/collections.asp .

Searching is straightforward: simply type in the company name and select a collection, or leave it as the default 'All'. Non UK companies are also covered and you can restrict your search to a specific country by using the Advanced Search. The results give you name of the company and any variations, for example searching on Cadbury will find results on Cadbury Schweppes, Fry Cadbury, Cadbury Brothers etc. The libraries that hold copies of the reports are listed together with the earliest and latest years of a collection's holdings.

An added bonus of this service is that it suggests you look at related companies. For example, clicking on Cadbury Brothers Ltd in my results lists came up with British Cocoa and Chocolate Co Ltd, of which Cadbury Brothers was a subsidiary, and Cadbury Schweppes. Cadbury Brothers, it tells me,  later to become Cadbury Group merged with  Schweppes to form Cadbury Schweppes in 1969).  In addition to locating historical annual reports, this service is a good place to pick up clues on past corporate relationships.

British Services UK

Owned and operated by Infoactive Media Ltd, British Services UK lists major governing bodies, government departments, associations and resources of over 100 industries in the UK along with non-profit organisations, charities, groups, clubs and businesses. My particular interest in this site was the list of trade associations and regulatory bodies at  http://www.britishservices.co.uk/associations.htm. Trade associations are often an excellent starting point for general information and key resources on industry sectors.

You can browse by service type, for example Trade Associations or Chambers of Commerce,  and narrow down your results by location.  There is no option to browse by industry sector and the absence of a proper site search engine makes it even more difficult to find information. Overall, the coverage of trade associations and regulatory bodies is good but not as comprehensive as the Trade Association Forum.

The search box at the top of the screen fails to pick up any results from the listings and at best only displays advertisements.  You could, of course, use Google Advanced Search to carry out a site search, but this was when I began to suspect the quality of some of the data. A search on my own professional body CILIP, which is also a registered charity, did indeed find the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals but it is listed under Bloomsbury Newspapers along with Benjamin Dent & Co, Northcliffe Newspapers, The Friend Publications and The Spectator.

This site has potential, but the navigation needs to be improved and a working search engine ought to be added. Some of the services are incorrectly listed and there are more comprehensive listings elsewhere. British Services UK has an advantage in that everything is in one place, but use with caution.

Tapping into expert networks: email discussion lists

With all the hype and fuss surrounding the newer Web 2.0 stuff one 'old' technology seems to have been forgotten, or has not even been noticed, by many people as a valuable collaborative tool. Email discussion lists have been around for years and are still one of the best ways of tapping into expert knowledge. (I refuse to use the Web 2.0 phrase "wisdom of crowds" as crowds - or should that be mobs? - are rarely wise).

Email discussion lists can be subject specific e.g. BUSLIB-L for business information,  profession specific e.g. LIS-LAW for information professionals working in the legal sector,  or activity related e.g. UKeiG Intranets for anyone involved in ... er... Intranets.

My own interest is business information and the two lists that I read religiously every day are AIIP (The Association of Independent Information Professionals) and BUSLIB-L -the Business Librarians list. The former is only available to members of AIIP but the latter is open to all. For those of you unfamiliar with email discussion lists this is how they work:

1. You sign up to a list with your email address. The procedure used to involve arcane commands that had to be sent via email to a long winded address. Woe betide the person who inserted an extra space, missed a comma, or added extraneous text to the end of the message such as a signature. Nowadays, nearly all lists offer simple web based sign-ups.

2. You should then receive an email back form the list asking you to confirm. This is to stop people signing up on your behalf and an attempt to block spammers.  Click on the link provided or reply to the message and you are in!

3. All correspondence is conducted via email. When you post a query or a comment it goes to everyone else on the list, and you receive everything that everyone else sends to the list. If you feel overwhelmed by the number of individual messages hitting your mailbox, some lists have a daily or weekly digest to which you can subscribe.

Most lists have searchable archives so, before posting your query, investigate those first  to see if your question has already been raised and answered.

JISCmail hosts a wide range of lists and although it has an academic and research bias, it is open to commercial subscribers and worth investigating if you are new to email lists. Usually, though, good discussion lists are discovered by chance or recommendation.

For those of you who. like me, are interested in business information BUSLIB-L is a must-have. It is a US based list with a North American bias but there are  plenty of European researchers as well. Many well known business information specialists are members and willingly share their expertise. Post a problem and within an hour or two someone will have posted a response. It might be along the lines of  "I don't think this can be easily answered - you will probably have to pay significant dosh for bespoke market research" or "Have you tried these free resources......".

Even if you do not have a question yourself, it is worth following the list just to keep up to date with new search techniques, resources, and alternative approaches to locating information. Towards the end of a recent thread on ethics Barabara Quint, editor of Searcher Magazine, reminded us that she used to write editorials on the role of information professionals using the acronym R-A-T-S, Rigorously Aggressive Trained Searchers. "We get the cheese without getting caught in the traps". Perhaps that should be BUSLIB-L's motto? Or maybe the start of new professional body - only RODENTS need apply.  (Suggestions as to what R-O-D-E-N-T-S could stand for in the comments section please).

Free Official Swedish Company Information

allabolag.se - Gratis företagsinformation på Internet is a quick and easy way to access basic official information on Swedish companies free of charge. That is the good news. The bad news is that it is only available in Swedish but it easy enough to navigate. On the home page there are two boxes: in the first you can enter a company or a person's name, whereas the second is for entering components of the address. You can view contact details, key financials and executives free of charge and there is an option to order various reports. If you have the Google toolbar installed in your browser, the 'Translate into English' option works well enough to enable you to understand most of the headings and financial items.

Many thanks to Britta Nordström for the information.

TASI Tutorial: Internet for Image Searching

TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images) has launched a tutorial on Internet for Image Searching. This is a  free-to-use online tutorial that, according to the announcement, is "to assist staff and students within the education sphere in locating images for use in both teaching and learning". I would recommend, though, that anyone who searches for images on the Internet either for personal or business use should work their way through this tutorial.

The tutorial starts off by demonstrating that just because you have found a photo or graphic via Google Images does not mean that it is free for you to use as you want, and it is not always easy to find copyright and ownership information.  Similarly it points out that although a Flickr photo may be given a Creative Commons licence It is not uncommon for people to upload images that are not their own and make them available under Creative Commons licences. And there is more than one form of Creative Commons: if you don't know what they are follow this tutorial or go to http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons

As well as taking you through the legal issues, copyright and licensing models the tutorial list sites that offer free photos, Creative Commons images, royalty free and commercial stock photos. Note that some of the free photo sites are for personal non-commercial use only and that fees apply if you wish to use them for business purposes.

The emphasis of the tutorial is on "finding copyright cleared images which are available free; facilitating quick, hassle-free access to a vast range of online photographs and other visual resources".

An added bonus is that as you progress through the tutorial you can add sites to a free 'link basket', which can be saved, printed out or sent to you by email.

Bosses 'should embrace Facebook'

Bosses 'should embrace Facebook' says a report on BBC News. Demos, "The Think Tank for Everyday Democracy", has apparently released the findings of a study that says:

Companies should not dismiss staff who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo at work as merely time-wasters.

The BBC report goes on to quote Demos as saying:

Attempts to control employees' use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate.... Social networking can encourage employees to build relationships with colleagues across a firm. However, businesses are warned to be strict with those who abuse access.

I wanted to read the original report on the Demos site, or at least the press release, but there was no sign of it at 8.33 am UK time on 29th October 2008. So we'll have to make do with the BBC article.

Not much 'everyday democracy' going on here if Demos is restricting access to the study!

ILI 2008 Search Tips Presentation

My ILI 2008 'Search Tips' presentation - Maintaining Quality Search - is now available at  http://www.rba.co.uk/presentations/, on Slideshare and authorSTREAM.  There are notes and comments on some of the slides so you may wish to view the presentation in  'normal view'  rather than as a a side show  if you download the PowerPoint.

Update on MSE360

Soon after I had published yesterday's posting on MSE360,  I sent feedback to them on a couple of issues  including the lack of a 'NOT' command. They replied within a couple of hours and overnight have corrected a bug that had caused the problem.  So the Boolean NOT does work in MSE360.

I raised another question about a green icon that appeared to the left of some entries in the results list.  This was most obvious in my ego-surfing and I had hoped that that the icons next to my web pages and blog postings meant that they were highly recommended. Unfortunately it is not so.  The little green icon represents a site that you have visited before, but it is  a feature that only Firefox supports.  It is a really neat feature, though, especially for those of us who do a lot of desk research.  It is useful to be able to ignore those sites we already know about and have visited and, perhaps more importantly, to quickly track down the perfect site that we found yesterday but cannot easily spot in the results list.

MSE360 Search

One search engine bites the dust (Accoona) and another one is launched. I picked up details of Search (MSE360) via Phil Bradley's blog posting and so far am very impressed with it. The home page is minimalist as is the norm these days and apart from the search box the only other obvious search option is a pull down list of countries. Hidden at the bottom of the page is an Options link that allows you to set safe search for images, change the default country, enable/disable WOT, and choose a different style sheet for your results. WOT is short for "Web of Trust" and is a community whose members exchange knowledge of websites.  If a site has a bad reputation, WOT will warn you by inserting an icon next to the results. The colour of the icon ranges through shades of green, amber and red, red indicating sites about which you might want to exercise some caution. Hover over the icon and you can view the WOT 'scorecard'.

The results page is 'three tiered'. The centre panel contains the usual web listings, and the default style has images on the left, and  wikipedia and blog postings on the right. The layout can be changed by selecting a different stylesheet. I eventually decided to have both sidebars on the right hand side of the screen. There are the inevitable ads (Google) but these are in the sidebar and clearly labelled as Paid Results.

The quality of the results for my standard, basic test searches was excellent and compared favourably with Google.  What did concern me initially was that there is no advanced search screen: I include site/domain and filetype commands in many of my searches and, for me, a search engine without them is a non-starter. After some experimentation, though, I discovered that that you can use the commands as part of your search strategy, for example

"car ownership" UK site:gov.uk filetype:pdf

I also found that you can use Boolean AND, OR and parentheses but not NOT (reminiscent of Yahoo!) . The minus sign can be used in a simple search if you want to exclude pages containing term but it does not seem to work when combined with Boolean operators.

Moving on to general issues, MSE30 stores no private data The only stored data are customization cookies on your own computer.  Your IP is not kept, nor is any other identifiable information. To help combat spyware, they  use an internal spyware alert program to provide warnings next to sites that may host spyware.

MSE360 say that they are still a test site so there are bound to be bugs,  and no doubt some changes will be made to the interface. They say " We’re not at a stage in which we can say we’re ready, but you still love hearing your feedback, good or bad". My first impression is that they are very close to being ready and light years ahead of some of the appalling, over-hyped  search engines that have been launched recently.  I definitely recommend that you pay them a visit.

Accoona is no more

Search engine Accoona has at last closed down. There have been rumours for many months that it was on the way out and now the home page merely says

"Due to an overwhelmingly competitive search market, Accoona.com and Accoona.cn will no longer be active.

We thank you for your previous support."

Accoona came up with some interesting and innovative features such as the talking toolbar and SuperTarget (see my previous postings on Accoona). I was never impressed with the web search, and the business option was just a search on the D&B marketing directory. I did visit  the News section quite a lot, though, and in particular SuperTarget,  which  could be used to identify people and companies mentioned in your search results. More often than not they were the 'usual suspects' but occasionally it would flag up an unexpected association.

The service never realised its full potential and when it started dropping search options and cancelled its IPO, the rumours started flying and I stopped recommending it in my workshops. The search engine business is tough so no doubt many more will bite the dust before too long.

Simmons & Company - energy statistics and data

Simmons & Company International is the only independent investment bank specializing in the energy industry. Founded in 1974, the firm has acted as financial advisor in over $134 billion of transactions, including 535 merger and acquisitions worth over $93 billion. As well as copies of presentations made by senior partner Matthew R Simmons there is a collection of industry statistics gathered from a variety of sources. These are split into upstream and downstream and include rig counts, summaries of oil and gas prices, US crude oil inventories, refining capacity and days of supply. There is some International data but much of it is North American biased.

Under the main Energy Industry link are lists of major public listed upstream and downstream companies (coverage is world-wide), and links to industry news sources, associations, statistics and government sites (many are North American).

Despite the geographical bias, this is a good starting point for information on the oil and gas industry as it lists most of the key resources.  Matthew Simmons's presentations and papers are often quoted in the main stream media and are worth monitoring. There is an email alert for new presentations but no RSS. If you are desperate for RSS rather than email  there is always the Page2RSS service that monitors pages for changes and alerts you via RSS.

Masterseek Business Directory

Rearrange the following words into a well known phrase or saying: pole - a - barge - don't - with - touch.

I picked up the news of Masterseek's imminent launch from AltSearchEngines. Worth investigating further, I thought, especially as I am always on the lookout for quality business directories.

From their press release:

"A new enormous business search engine battles Yahoo! and Google for B2B searches. Masterseek’s global search engine provides quick and free access to, among other things, company profiles, contact information, and descriptions of products and services from more than 45 million companies in 75 countries. .... Behind Masterseek lies nearly 9 years of diligence from Danish and international programmers.

The unique feature of Masterseek is the specially developed crawlers that can sort out irrelevant private websites automatically and simultaneously gather and index relevant company websites quickly and diversely. This includes company profiles, news, as well as contact and product information. The company information is at the same time in the process indexed in more than 50,000 business categories in 21 languages."

This sounded promising so time to put it to the test and indulge in a bit of ego-surfing. My first search on RBA Information Services as a company came up with my own RBA, but gave its location as the US despite the co.uk domain name and contact details clearly stated as being in the UK. A quick email to Masterseek and it was corrected. But then it all went seriously pear shaped.

23rd September 2008, 16.48 UK time: search on RBA Information Services and 'All' category selected.

Results: At the top of the list is a sponsored result for RBA Enterprises based in the US. Nothing to do with me but I am not too bothered as there are thousands of RBAs around the world. However the web site URL was mine and the profile was mine! Numbers 4, 5 and 6 in the results list were for Sources UK (electric cable manufacturers), RBA Enterprises Inc and  RBA Internet Services Inc. All three had my web site URL and a profile extracted from my web site.

23rd September 2008, 17.08 UK time: search on RBA Information Services and 'Company' category selected.

Results: Only two. The first is a 'sponsored result' which is me, the correct URL and correct location. The second is identical to the first but the location is given as the United States.

23rd September 2008, 17.15 UK time: search on Karen Blakeman and 'All' category selected.

Results:The sponsored result at the top of the list was correct. The next four were totally unrelated companies but with my profile and  there were another four dotted throughout the remainder of the twenty sites listed  on the first page.

23rd September 2008, 17.31 UK time: search on Karen Blakeman and 'Company' category selected.

Results: Hurrah! I am the only entry.

I did a few quick searches on other companies and people and the quality of the results was equally dire.

There are additional search and browse options, but I saw no point in investigating them if the underlying data was so horribly wrong. Either the Masterseek "specially developed crawlers" were having a bad day or more serious work needs to be done on processing the information that they gather.

The press release goes on to say:

"Masterseek.com B2B searches will also be a competitor for well-established directories, such as Kompass, Thomson and the Yellow Pages, besides the obvious Yahoo! and Google."

Given the current appalling quality of Masterseek's data Kompass, Thomson and Yellow Pages can rest easy, as can Yahoo and Google.

Masterseek's official global launch is due to take place in November by which time they claim that they will have more than 50 million pieces of company information and more than 1/4 billion indexed websites. Unless they apply more 'diligence' to  the quality of the information in their database, my recommendation is to avoid this directory like the plague.

Internet Librarian International - discounted rate available until 26th September

Internet Librarian International is extending the 'early bird' discount for conference bookings  to Friday 26 September.

This year's conference (London, 16 & 17 October) includes:

Library 2.0 and Web 2.0
Forget the hype - how do they work and how will they affect how you provide information?

Search analytics
Do you know how effective your projects are and whether you’re reaching the right audience?

Information search and discovery
The search world continues to evolve - are you keeping up? What do the changes mean bring for your job? [Declaration of interest: I am giving a presentation on 'Search Tips' on Thursday 16th October, at 11.45 AM)

Transparency
Why are some institutions more prone to adopting transparency and  collaboration than others?

Web design
You understand the principles of usability, learn how web design continues to evolve

For full details of the event and to register visit the website at  http://www.internet-librarian.com

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

As well as being an RSS junkie I confess that I am also a member of the the 'twitterazi'. Deprived of my regular Twitter fixes I suffer severe withdrawal symptoms. What is infobunny up to? Did Jillbrad manage to print her spreadsheet? Did Tebbo meet up with anyone at T5?

Persuading people that RSS is a good thing is not that difficult, but proving the value of Twitter is hard work.  Chris Brogan's blog posting  on 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business is a great starting point for ideas on how you can seriously use Twitter. He also lists 'The Negatives People Will Throw at You' and 'Some Positives to Throw Back'.  My personal favourite in the list is number 11: Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?"

Top Business Research Tips

Yes, I'm sorry, this is another Top !0 list from one of my workshops - a full day in-house session on Business Research. This time around Marketingfile.com  made a return to the list at number 4 after a long absence, three of Alacra sites are at number 2 (nominated by participants as "All the Alacra sites"), and Twitter is at long last being considered as a serious business tool (Yay!!). It is worth noting that this group were interested in Second Life; some of their contacts and clients are involved with Second Life so it would have been useful to have a look at how it works . As usual, though,  we could not connect to SL. It appeared that the ports used by SL were blocked by the by the organisation's network.

Here is the full list:

1. Internet Archive or Wayback machine at http://www.archive.org/.  For pages, sites and documents that have disappeared. Ideal for tracking down lost documents and seeing how organisations presented themselves on the Web in the past.

2. "All the Alacra sites".  Not strictly accurate in that it was just three of their business web sites that attracted attention:

Alacrawiki at http://www.alacrawiki.com/. The Alacra Spotlights section is a good starting point for evaluated sites and information on industry sectors. Note that although it is a wiki only Alacra can edit these pages.

Alacrasearch at  http://www.alacra.com/alacrasearch/. A Google custom search engine that focuses on business sites selected by Alacra.

AlacraStore at http://www.alacrastore.com/.  "Search over 70 million reports on more than 550,000 public companies and private companies from over 55 premium business information publishers." Search for free and pay as you go on your credit/debit card.  A full lost of their content providers is at http://www.alacrastore.com/search-by/publisher.

3. Advanced Search. The advanced search screens of the likes of Google and Yahoo have many options for increasing the precision of your your search: file format (e.g. xls for data and statistics, ppt for expert presentations, pdf for industry or government reports); site and domain search to limit your search to just one web site or a type of organisation (e.g. UK government, US academic); and in Google there is a numeric range search.

4. Marketingfile.com at http://www.marketingfile.com/.  A collection of lists with a bias towards UK and Ireland but there are some International, European and North American lists. The lists are divided into Business and Consumer and further categorised into sectors or type, for example Drinks Trade, Aviation & Defence, Smaller Companies. Each list can be searched by a number of criteria depending on its structure and coverage. Searching is free and data is charged for on a pay per record basis.

5. Freepint at http://www.freepint.co.uk/ Head for the discussion area, labelled as the Bar, where you can post your query and tap into the knowledge of regular ‘tipplers’

6. Trade Association Forum - http://www.taforum.org/ . A useful, searchable directory of UK trade associations.

7. Sector Skills Councils. This was not one that I mentioned in the workshop but is a resource that the organisation that I was visiting often uses. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sector_Skills_Councils) , and please don't complain that I am citing it:

"Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) are state-sponsored, employer-led organisations that cover specific economic sectors in the United Kingdom. They have four key goals:

• to reduce skills gaps and shortages
• to improve productivity
• to boost the skills of their sector workforces
• to improve learning supply"

Further information on the Councils can be found at Alliance of Sector Skills Councils, http://www.sscalliance.org/home/home.asp.

The workshop participants commented that "some of the councils are better than others".

8. Google, Yahoo, Live, Exalead, Ask. Let's admit it - much of the time we head for Google as our first port of call, but it is worth running your search in the other contenders. Results are sorted in a different order and they do have different coverage and search features.

9. Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/. "Looks interesting". "Need to try it out as a source of information". "Could be useful as a promotion/communications tool".

10. RBA Business Sources. http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/. Selected sources of business information organised by type e.g. statistics, share prices, company registers. Yes,  my own site, the basis of the workshop notes, and as one person commented "It is the quickest way to get to all the sites you told us about"!

Renewable Fuels Agency (RFA)

The Renewable Fuels Agency (RFA) (http://www.dft.gov.uk/rfa/) has been set up by the UK Government to implement the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) (http://www.dft.gov.uk/rfa/aboutthertfo.cfm), which came into force on 1st April 2008. The RTFO obliges fossil fuel suppliers to ensure that by 2010 biofuels account for 5% by volume of the fuel supplied on UK forecourts. The purpose of the RTFO is to "reduce the UK's contribution to climate change and its reliance on fossil fuels". The RFA publishes updates on the progress of the RTFO. These include monthly reports on progress on achieving compliance with sustainability criteria and quarterly reports to the Department for Transport and annual reports to parliament. All reports are available on the web site.

With serious questions being raised about the impact of biofuels on food prices, farming and the environment in general, it will be interesting to see how long this all carries on.  The RFA's first monthly report has just been published and covers the period 15th April - 14th May 2008. The press release contains some good summary statistics for those of us who need to get hold of such data in a hurry. There are 'associated files' (PDF and an Excel spreadsheet) that contain more detailed information.

The UK Coal Authority

The UK Coal Authority (http://www.coal.gov.uk) aims "to facilitate the proper exploitation of the Nation's coal resources, whilst providing information and addressing liabilities for which the Authority is responsible, in a professional, efficient and open manner".

If you own or are purchasing a property in a coal mining area there is a search service that will check whether or not the property might be affected by past or existing mining activity.  The gazetteer (under Information Services) gives an indication of places in Great Britain that may, or may not, require a mining search to be performed.  If you are thinking of moving within the UK it would be as well to check this site as well as the Environment Agency's 'In Your Backyard' (http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/maps/), which tells you if the area is at risk of flood and whether there's a landfill site near your house.

The Coal Authority site also has reports on mining activity in the UK and statistics on production. There are links to sites that cover coal mining related topics and information on technologies. The latter includes coal gasification,  cleaner coal technologies and environmental issues. These technology 'fact sheets' are a good starting point if you need to get up to speed on the industry jargon and how it all works.

Autumn one day training courses at Manchester Business School

The following business research skills courses are being run at Manchester Business School from September to October. And yes - I have a vested interest in that I am running the market research workshop!

Maximising Your Qualitative Research Skills and Results
Date: Wednesday 10 September
Trainer: Chris Murphy
Demonstrates this vital form of enquiry needed to make sense of qualitative data. Explores schemes for planning research projects, techniques for documentary evidence, obtaining information, then forming a roadmap for taking initial results further, appraising data quality and reporting findings

Project Management
Date: Tuesday 7 October
Trainer: Chris Murphy
This course provides a set of techniques for managing projects: determining project scope, planning and realisation, project team schedule and control, progress monitoring, software packages? contribution, corrective action if the project strays from course and project reporting

Market Research on the Web
Date: Tuesday 21 October
Trainer: Karen Blakeman
Practical guidance is offered for finding and evaluating statistical, market research and industry information, covering free and fee based services. Suitable for researchers compiling analyses of markets, looking for potential partners, clients, suppliers or who are responsible for competitor intelligence

For more information about the the programme content and course dates or to download a booking form, go to www.mbs.ac.uk/bis-training or call the Business Information Service on 0161 275 6503

TouchGraph Google Browser

Thanks to Phil Bradley for the alert on this search visualisation tool.

TouchGraph is a  Java application that loads into your browser window and displays the networks and connections in your data or a search results list.  There are three free demos that tie into Google,  Amazon and Facebook.  I found the last two very cumbersome to use and limited in their usefulness but the Google one is worth a try.  You type in your keywords or a URL and Google's results are presented as groups of interconnected 'blobs'. You can zoom in and out, hide or expand individual groupings and filter results, although I must admit to not having yet mastered the last feature.

An interesting way to explore search results but I still prefer Cluuz's visualisation of web based data.  I may find TouchGraph more useful for looking at connections and relationships within my locally held information so I have signed up for a TouchGraph Navigator trial.

Yahoo! drops Boolean NOT operator

I go away on holiday for three weeks and on my return disaster strikes. " Yahoo! drops Boolean support" was the headline that jumped out at me as I fired up my RSS reader.  The story, carried by Pandia Search Engine News, refers to a report by Greg Notess in Online Magazine. I was not able to access the original in Online so had to make do with Pandia's summary and test out the claims myself.

It turns out that it is only the NOT operator that has vanished. Not such a catastrophe after all as you can still place a minus sign in front of the term that you want excluded from the search results. The posting goes on to say that nesting with parentheses has also been dumped. That was definitely not the case when I carried out test searches on both the UK and US versions of Yahoo. All of my nested Boolean searches worked, once I had replaced the NOTs with minus signs.

I shall wait a a week or so before assuming that the change is permanent.  Earlier this year, the link and linkdomain commands went AWOL. They were no longer available on the main Yahoo sites but still worked on AltaVista. After a couple of days they reappeared on Yahoo as suddenly as they had vanished.  Hopefully NOT will be back - it is easier to remember to use only Boolean operators rather than a mixture of Boolean and math signs - and fingers crossed that none of the other commands disappear.

Cuil not so cool

Cuil, pronounced 'cool', was launched today claiming to have the largest database of all the search engines and more relevant results. A detailed article on the company's background, together with a critique of its PR, can be found on Search Engine Land - Cuil Launches -- Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?

Cuil's index of 120 billion web pages might indeed make it the most comprehensive search engine on the web. Google no longer discloses the size of its index, although it claims to "know about a trillion unique web pages".  Techcrunch has put Cuil through its paces (Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t The Whole Story and says:

"It seems pretty clear that Google’s index of web pages is significantly larger than Cuil’s unless we’re randomly choosing the wrong queries. Based on the queries above, Google is averaging nearly 10x the number of results of Cuil."

Many of Techcrunch's searches are single word searches and Google's hit count is never accurate for those and is usually grossly overestimated. Add in more terms and the hit count starts to approach reality. My test searches found approximately the same number of pages in both Cuil and Google, apart from those queries that had more than three terms. For example, my standard 'gin vodka sales UK' search came up with:

This is a simple search for which all of the other major search engines find a highly relevant answer from the Gin and Vodka Association (yes there really is one) . Reduce the number of keywords to a maximum of three and Cuil recovers but returns irrelevant results. It looks as though Cuil cannot cope with long search queries and this could be related to the way it ranks pages. It claims not to just catalog keywords on a site and then rank the site based on its importance; it also tries to understand how words are related. This seems to work best with one or two word queries. Results are shown in three columns and on the right hand side of the screen it offers options to refine your results by category. Apparently,  Cuil also recommends related searches in tabs across the top of search results but I never saw these in any of my test searches.

So far I was not impressed and for me the final straw was the total absence of any advanced search features. No file format searching, no limiting to media types, no domain or site searching. I could be charitable and attribute the absence of results for multi term strategies to the service being new and not being able to cope with the traffic generated by the launch announcement. The relevance of the results from my test searches, though, was not sufficiently high for me to be able to dispense with advanced search. Cuil is going to have to try a lot harder if it is to persuade me to return. At present this is not a Google beater and neither does it out-perform the other top search engines.

P.S. Just as I finished this review the Cuil web site collapsed under the pressure. The home page now re-directs to:

"We’ll be back soon...

Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.

Thanks for your patience."

Guernsey Registry

The new Guernsey Registry was launched on 1 July 2008 following a review of the Companies (Guernsey) Law and the existing company processes. The Registry also includes the Bailiwick of Guernsey Intellectual Property Office which administers all Trade Mark and Design registrations and activities, and provides information on the Intellectual Property Laws enacted in the Bailiwick. As well as providing e-filing services for companies, there is a searchable database. You can search by registered number or company name (current and previous). Company number, name, type, status, registered address, activity, and date registered are available free of charge. Company profiles, certificates of good standing and of incorporation are priced as are the annual reports.  There is a link to the Companies (Guernsey) Law 2008, which can be downloaded free of charge.  Be warned - it is 569 pages long!

BookMooch - book swap

BookMooch lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want. Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. You receive a tenth of a point for every book you make available on BookMooch, and one point each time you give a book away. In order to keep receiving books, you need to give away at least one book for every three you receive. You receive three points when you send a book out of your country, to help compensate you for the greater mailing cost, but it only costs the moocher two points to get the book. Sounds a little complicated but in practice the process is very straightforward. The only minor downside is that it taps into the Amazon database and if your book is not listed on Amazon - and Amazon does sometimes manage to mess up bibliographic data - you can't add it to your BookMooch 'inventory'.

Say no to 0870 - alternative telephone numbers

Say No to 0870 has been around for a while but it is only recently that I have had to make serious use of its database. I have been researching hotel business meeting facilities and was amazed at how many still use 0870 numbers. My middle name ought to be 'Scrooge' because I resent having to pay for a phone call when I could be connecting using my mobile's very generous free minutes (geographic numbers only) allocation. When that is used up, I have various VOIP services that I can use for a few pence.

This web site gives alternative geographic numbers for 0800, 0808, 0844, 0845, 0870 and 0871 numbers. Search on the company name or its non-geographic number and you are offered alternative geographic numbers. Sources include web sites and contributions from users. You may wonder why freephone numbers are included: these often take you to a central call centre or redirect you to a branch location based on your telephone area code (if available). You then spend what seems to be forever trying to get connected to the right branch or location. "No I don't want to book a room .... and, yes, I know I am phoning from Newcastle but I want to contact the Events Sales Manager for Whizzo Hotels in Oxford!"

Allplus search tool

Allplus is yet another search tool that searches Ask, Google, Live and Yahoo in one go. As well as web pages, you can also search the News, Image, Video and Blog databases of the search engines. Moreover is added to the mix for News. In addition to displaying the results for your selected type of information, it  gives you items from the other resources on the right hand side of the page.  On the left hand side of the screen, it organises your results into a 'cluster tree' and you can also view a 'cluster graph'.  Clicking on the topic in the tree or graph brings the pages in that cluster to the top of the results list and is a useful way of focussing your search.

Interlend 2008

The presentation and workshop that I gave at the Interlend 2008 conference in Peebles are now available at http://www.rba.co.uk/presentations/index.htm . As well as the PowerPoints there are links to versions available on Slideshare and authorSTREAM.

The tag for the conference was interlend08. Two of us were regularly 'twittering' at the conference and most of our tweets are on Hashtags and Twemes (search on interlend08) .  A record of my own tweets is at http://karenblakeman.livejournal.com/2008/07/01/ and http://karenblakeman.livejournal.com/2008/07/02/.

Tag clouds for analysing documents

CV not getting you those all important interviews? Nobody answering your job advert? Or perhaps your corporate publicity is not doing the biz? Processing your document through a tag cloud generator might give you a clue as to where you are going wrong. Sue Hill gave a presentation at the recent City Information Group open day on CPD and skills. In passing she mentioned that they sometimes run a CV or job description through a tag cloud generator to show people why their lovingly created prose is way off the mark. The tag cloud brings to the fore your most used terms and it can be a shock to discover that you have placed the emphasis in totally the wrong area. It then struck me that you could do this with any form of literature - a web page, training publicity, membership recruitment forms.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of tag cloud generators on the Web and most of them are free. For starters try Wordle, Tagcrowd, or Tag Cloud Generator. The example below is a tag cloud of the UKeiG home page generated by Wordle.

Top Search Tips

I ran another advanced search workshop (Google and Beyond) for UKeiG on June 11th, this time in London. Twenty people attended the event and came up with the following list of top search tips at the end of the day.

1. Use the Advanced Search screen. There are lots of goodies to be found on the advanced search screens: options for focussing your search by file format (e.g. xls for data and statistics, ppt for expert presentations, pdf for industry or government reports); site and domain search to limit your search to just one web site or a type of organisation (e.g. UK government, US academic); and in Google there is a numeric range search.

2. Google Custom Search Engines (Google CSE) at http://www.google.com/coop/cse/. This made its first appearance in the Top Tips from the Liverpool workshop earlier this year. Ideal for building collections of sites that you regularly search, to create a searchable subject list, or to offer your users a more focused search option.

3. See what Google does with your search string.

a) If you use the default search box and Google comes back with odd results, click on Advanced Search to see what it has done with your search terms.

b) If you use the Advanced Search screen and fill in the boxes, see how Google formats the search strategy by looking the search box at the top of the results page. By learning the commands and prefixes you can build more specific searches more quickly on the default search page.

4. Cached copies. Look at the search engines cached copy of a web page if you can't find your search terms in the document or if the page is nothing like the description in the results list. You will see the version of the page that has been used by the search engine for indexing and with your terms highlighted.

5. Use tools such as Intelways and Zuula for quick and easy access to a wide range of search tools covering different types of information. Enter your search once, click on the tab for the type of resource for which you are searching (video, images, reference, news etc.), and then work your way through the list of search engines.

6. Alacrawiki. The Alacra Spotlights section is a good starting point for evaluated sites and information on industry sectors. It is also a good example of what to look for when assessing the quality of a wiki and how easy it is for anyone to edit the pages. In the Spotlights sections there is no edit option , not even if you register for an account and login. Only the Alacra editors can edit the pages.

7. Open access journals. Google Scholar sometimes leads you to copies of journal articles in institutional repositories and open access journals, but there are also directories of open access journals. For example: http://www.doaj.org/ , http://www.wsis-si.org/oa-journals.html, http://www.abc.chemistry.bsu.by/current/fulltext.htm . This is not my area of expertise so comments on other directories are welcome.

8. Social bookmarking sites. Try social bookmarking sites, not only for creating your evaluated lists of sites but for searching other peoples. For example FURL, Del.icio.us, Connotea, 2Collab . Connotea (owned by the Nature Publishing Group) and 2Collab (owned by Elsevier) are aimed at researchers and scientists.

9. Search results visualisation. Try out some of the newer search tools that present results and search options in a different way. For example Cluuz, Kartoo, Kvisu, Quintura. [Some of the participants specifically mentioned Cluuz and Kvisu].

10. The Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) at http://www.archive.org/ for pages, sites and documents that have disappeared. Ideal for tracking down lost documents, seeing how organisations presented themselves on the Web in the past, and for collecting evidence for a legal case (e.g. 'passing off', copyright infringement).

Energy Export Databrowser

The Energy Export Databrowser, set up Jonathan Callahan, is based on BP's 2007 Statistical Review and provides a quick and easy way to view country data on consumption, import and export of crude oil and natural gas. It covers over 80 countries and data goes back to the 1960s. There is feedback on the browser itself and an interesting discussion on the accuracy and validity of the underlying data on The Oildrum.

Directories: Major Companies of the World 2008

Seven new Editions of the World's Major Companies Series have been published by Graham & Whiteside and are now available for purchase on the dataresources web site.

Major Chemical and Petrochemical Companies of the World 2008
This directory covers more than 7,000 of the leading chemical and petrochemical companies worldwide.

Major Energy Companies of the World 2008
More than 4,000 companies involved in coal mining and coal products; electricity supply; fuel distribution; natural gas supply; nuclear engineering; oil and gas exploration and production; oil and gas services and equipment; and oil refining worldwide.

Major Financial Institutions of the World 2008 (2 Vols)
Over 9,000 leading financial institutions worldwide, including banks, investment, insurance and leasing companies.

Major Food and Drink Companies of the World 2008
9,800 of the leading food, alcoholic and non-alcoholic drink companies worldwide.

Major Information Technology Companies of the World 2008
This directory covers more than 3,100 of the leading information technology companies worldwide.

Major Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Companies of the World 2008
The world's largest pharmaceutical companies, providing essential business profiles of the international leaders in the industry.

Major Telecommunications Companies of the World 2008
Profiles of more than 3,500 of the leading telecommunications companies worldwide, including many of the top Internet companies.

INFORUM starts in Prague today

The 14th annual INFORUM conference starts today in Prague at 10.30 Prague time. INFORUM covers professional electronic information resources for research, development, education and business purposes. If you are not able to attend the event in person live video broadcasting of the sessions being run in the New Auditorium will be available at www.ikaros.cz. The programme of the event is at http://www.inforum.cz/en/programme/.

I shall be twittering some of the sessions (Twitter name karenblakeman) and I am sure there will be others. Unfortunately, because Twitter is "stressing out a bit" at the moment you can only view one page of tweets. The 'Older' option has been temporarily suspended, which is very annoying if you are trying to follow conference tweets. My own tweets are recorded daily by LoudTwitter at http://karenblakeman.livejoural.com/.

Workshop: Effective Use of Web 2.0 in Business

If you were not able to attend my recent workshops on Web 2.0, I am running a similar course at Manchester Business School on June 5th. The workshop will start with a brief overview of Web 2.0 and what it means, then look in more detail at the different applications. As is usual with my workshops there is a substantial practical element so that you can try out the technologies for yourself. Details and a booking form are at www.mbs.ac.uk/bis-training or you can call the Business Information Service on 0161 275 6503.

Academic Live and Live Books axed

I did a double take when I scanned through my RSS feeds this morning. Live Search have announced that they are closing down Academic Live and Live Books Search. Surely a late report of an April Fool, I thought. Unfortunately it was a genuine posting on Live Search's official blog. Both sites will be taken down this week and they are winding down their digitization initiatives, including their library scanning and their in-copyright book programs.

I have tried to support Live.com and promote it to those who attend my workshops as a viable alternative to Google. In my experience, it seems to have the most up to date database, often finds pages and documents that the other search engines miss, and has a great command for locating RSS feeds on a web site. But it keeps shooting itself in the foot. The site recently had a makeover, but the presentation of the advanced search is still awful and the only reliable way of using the options is via the command line. Live News has improved greatly and now has an RSS alert option, but only in the US version of Live. See my earlier posting Live.com updates news interface - but only for the US. And it had by far the best link and linkdomain commands but disabled those because of mass automated data mining.

Both Live Books and Academic Live were superior to Google's offerings. They had different coverage but the advanced search options, for example date and author search, actually worked in Live, and Academic Live had options for exporting records to RefWorks and EndNote, albeit one by one. Live goes on to say in its announcement that books and scholarly publications "will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes." Sorry, but not good enough. That will work fine if you know exactly what you are looking for and it is a very narrowly focussed search, for example I can easily find my husband's papers on ESR studies of zeolites, but it is impossible to limit a search to books or peer reviewed papers on a more general topic.

It seems that this part of the market does not make enough money for Live and it says that it will now "focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers." Bribery appears to be part of the new company policy: another headline in my morning feed update reads "Office 2007 plus petrol: Microsoft Australia is trying to lure Aussies to buy Office 2007 with petrol"!

Forget about self-inflicted metatarsal wounds, I am beginning to suspect that Live has a serious death wish. I wonder what will be the next part of Live to go?