Telegraph Business Club

The Daily Telegraph Business Club aims to help SMEs through weekly case studies, information, free seminars and membership discounts. Registration is free and the club has a page every Tuesday in the Business Section of the Daily Telegraph. There is quite a lot to work your way through on the home page but the main tabs and headings are Strategy, Money, People, Sales, Technology and Operations. The Advanced Search is probably the best way to track down information in the archives as it enables you to search by category, for example legislation, and type of resource. The only really negative aspect of this site for me is the irritating news ticker scrolling across the screen near the top of the page. Luckily I use Firefox as my browser so I was able to 'Remove it Permanently' with the RIP add-on. The ticker really does not add much in the way of content to the site and becomes extremely annoying after a few minutes.

Workshop: Business Information - Key Web Resources

I shall be leading a workshop on key business information resources on October 31st in London. The workshop is organised by TFPL and concentrates on free and pay as you go services. If you are interested in attending, details are on the TFPL web site.

Wordpress introduces tags

At long last Wordpress supports tags. It has always had categories, but you have to set these up beforehand and they are only really useful as broad subject headings. They are usually displayed in a side bar on your WordPress blog, and the list becomes far too long and unusable if you treat categories as index terms or very specific, one-off tags. One of the problems I had when converting my Blogger blog plus tags to a WordPress blog with categories was the huge number of categories the conversion generated. I spent about half a day pruning the category list. Now, as well as assigning categories to a posting, WordPress lets you assign tags on the fly. I am not sure how this will affect the Blogger to WordPress conversion programs, so would be interested to hear from anyone who tries it with the new system in place.

Live.com link commands are back

Live.com's link and link domain commands have been back for a quite a while. Microsoft did not not announce their re- appearance and I have forgotten who told me that they were back online, but Paul in Arizona reminded me in a comment to my original posting regarding their departure that I had not posted about their re-emergence.

There is one important change to the command. You have to precede both the link: and the linkdomain: commands with a plus sign. For example, to find pages that link to the UKeiG's training and meetings page you would type in:

+link:www.ukeig.org.uk/training/

To find pages that link to anywhere on the UKeiG web site you would type in:

+linkdomain:www.ukeig.org.uk

Google has a link command which is virtually useless as it lists a small fraction of the pages that link to your starting page. Yahoo has both a link and linkdomain command but my experience is that they do not list as many pages as Live.com. This suggests to me that Live's database of web pages is larger than Yahoo's.

The link commands are extremely useful in tracking down pages or sites that are similar to one that you already have, the principle being that pages of similar content and type generally link to one another. It is also a great way of identifying links and networks between companies and organisations.

ILI 2007 presentation

My ILI 2007 presentation will be going up on the ILI site soon, but meanwhile you can download a copy of the PowerPoint from my own web site at http://www.rba.co.uk/ili/ILI2007KarenBlakeman.ppt

I have added a slide , or rather re-instated a slide that I had deleted because of time constraints, as a result of a comment from Patrick Danowski after the presentation. It is the one showing Exalead's Wikpedia search interface and tag cloud. The interesting feature of the tag cloud is that the tags/keywords are colour coded depending on whether they are people's names, companies/organisations, geographical locations etc.

The slides are mostly screen shots so will not make much sense to those of you who were not at the presentation. I am planning to do some brief notes over the next couple of days and then possibly a full article based on the session.

P.S. Patrick Danowski experimented with 'Twittering' ILI 2007. Go to http://twitter.com/PatrickD to see the results. Interesting approach and a good way to capture all the keywords/phrases as they are being uttered rather than trying to to do a full blog posting that may not be published for several hours. Speakers beware! :-)

Search engine overlap and the perils of phrase searching

Greg Notess has posted an interesting screencast on his blog that demonstrates the importance of trying search engines other than Google. It also shows that you can miss information if you use long phrases and that you may be better off breaking down your phrase into smaller chunks.

Earthquake alerts

Those of us with friends and relatives in Australia, New Zealand and in other countries on the Pacific rim are well aware that earthquakes regularly hit the region. Many of them are minor but recently there have been more serious events, most of which are not picked up by the UK or European press. A Google News alert will pick up those that make the headlines in the regional press that are local to the quake, but aftershocks are not always reported. Search engine Ask has a map showing recent earthquakes and their magnitude on a map at http://www.ask.com/earthquake but there is no email or RSS alert option so you have to keep going back to the site to see the latest news. The US Geological Survey has detailed information and alerts on earthquakes at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/. In addition there are two RSS feeds: one is for earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 2.5 (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/catalogs/eqs1day-M2.5.xml) and the second for those with a magnitude greater than 5.0 (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/catalogs/eqs7day-M5.xml).

If you are a Firefox user there is an eQuake add-on at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2239 which uses the USGS data. It alerts you with the basic information (date, location, and magnitude) of each earthquake but you can specify a lower limit for the magnitude, for example 4. By default your browser will 'shake' proportional to the earthquake magnitude but you can configure the alert methods. I have only just installed it so I'm not sure how disruptive the quaking browser effect is going to be ...... and as I write this an earthquake of 4.9 has just hit the Santa Cruz Islands region! And having just spell checked this article a 6.8 quake has occurred off the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand. If nothing else this is an interesting way to demonstrate the frequency of earthquakes.