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.
Monday, 16 October 2006
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"
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"
Friday, 13 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.
Sunday, 8 October 2006
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.
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.
Tuesday, 3 October 2006
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!
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!
Monday, 2 October 2006
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:
This is the order in which the participants nominated the sites:
- 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’.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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/)
- 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.
- 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/.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Saturday, 30 September 2006
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...
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...
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