|
|
Tales from the Terminal RoomJuly/August 2001, Issue No. 23 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Please Note: This is an archive copy of the newsletter. The information and links that it contains are not updated.
|
|
Tales from the Terminal Room ISSN 1467-338X July/August 2001, Issue No. 23 Editor: Karen Blakeman Published by: RBA Information Services Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is a monthly newsletter, with the exception of July and August, which are published as a single issue. TFTTR includes reviews and comparisons of information sources and search tools; updates to the RBA Web site Business Sources and other useful resources; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications. In this issue:
Changes to TFTTR DistributionSome of you may already know that Microsoft have discontinued Listbot, which we have used to distribute Tales From the Terminal Room. We have looked at the alternatives that are currently available but, for the time being, have decided to upgrade to Microsoft's List Builder. This seems to offer the simplest and most straightforward solution while we develop our own in-house system. As a result of the move, there are minor changes to the subscribe and unsubscribe procedures. To automatically receive TFTTR by email, send an empty email to: tfttr-subscribe@rba.co.uk OR fill in the online registration form at: http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/ To unsubscribe, send an empty message to tfttr@rba.co.uk with the word unsubscribe in the subject line. As a subscriber to TFTTR, you should not see any significant difference in the way the newsletter is delivered to you but if you do experience any problems please get in touch with us at tfttr@rba.co.uk. Karen Blakeman Interesting use of Google AdwordsGoogle, just like any other search engine, carries advertisements. Thankfully not those ghastly animated graphics but straightforward text ads. You may have spotted "Sponsored Links" at the top or on the right hand side of some of your results screens. The ones that appear at the top of the results are "Premium sponsorship" whilst the cheaper, boxed ones on the right hand side of the screen are "Adwords". One would expect these ads to be exhorting you to buy a product or service but one UK company has put Adwords to a very different use. The company concerned - we'll call them Company X - had carried out a substantial amount of work on upgrading some network servers for a UK Internet Service Provider. Unfortunately, the ISP continually delayed paying their bills and ended up owing more than GBP 8,000. Since the ISP refused to answer the telephone to them or respond to any of their communications, Company X decided to name and shame the ISP and buy a Google Adword sponsored link. Now every time someone searches on the ISP's name, up pops a link to a page on Company X's Web site telling the whole sorry tale. The whole thing cost USD 8 (the budget allocated to the "promotion" by Company X), which they have calculated works out at about 1.5 cents per impression. At the time of writing there was no news as to whether or not this novel approach to credit management has had the desired effect. (If you prefer to adopt a more conventional approach to credit management, there are three sites in the Updates section of this newsletter that may be of interest to you.) Information ResourcesNews sources http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/news.htm New to the section on Circulation and Distribution Figures is Statistical Summary of the US Newspaper Industry (http://www.naa.org/info/facts00/) with information and statistics provided by the Newspaper Association of America. For news from Central and Eastern Europe Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty (RFERL) (http://www.rferl.org/) has news published in English and live RealAudio of broadcasts, some of which are in the local language. You can browse the headlines, carry out a key word search or click on an entry in the country list. We are currently working on a project in Armenia and have found this to be a very useful way of keeping up with events. You can also subscribe to one or more free email newsletters including the weekly reports on the Balkans, the Baltic States, Caucasus, Russian Federation, and the daily Newsline service. RFERL also has a very nice links library for each country. The Jamestown Foundation (http://www.jamestown.org/) is another organization that offers a range of newsletters covering Russia and states of the former Soviet Union, but these are priced services. Annual subscription rates vary and start at USD 100, but there are discounts for students. Miscellaneous day to day essentials http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/misc.htm A new section on Glossaries added has been added to our Miscellaneous Essentials. The first in the section is The Glossarist (http://www.glossarist.com/) which claims to be a directory of glossaries on all subjects. Not an entirely accurate description as some categories e.g. patents do not yet have any entries. Nevertheless, a useful starting point if you are stumped by industry sector jargon. For business and financial terms, the Moneyextra Glossary - A-Z of financial terms (http://www.moneyextra.com/glossary/) is a UK/European biased glossary while the Yahoo Financial Glossary (http://biz.yahoo.com/glossary/) and Bloomberg.com: Financial Glossary (http://www.bloomberg.com/money/tools/bfglosa.html) are more US/Internationally orientated. If you don't know your 10Q from your 18K then EDGAR Online Form Type Definitions (http://www.edgar-online.com/formdef.asp) is the place to try. Another addition to the Miscellaneous page is Current Value of Old Money (http://www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.html). This page is an excellent starting point for resources that answer the question "how much would a specified amount of money at a certain period of time be worth today?". As well as sources giving straightforward purchasing power calculators, there are more esoteric sites such as a list of prices in Southampton in 1625, prices and wages in Medieval Europe, and "How much did things cost in Roman Times?". There is also a bibliography of printed sources. Stock Markets & Company Financials http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/stocks.htm eFinancial News http://www.efinancialnews.com/ Mergers and Acquisitions http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/manda.htm Thomson Financial's well known Acquisitions Monthly is now available at http://www.acquisitions-monthly.com/ on a subscription basis. The Web site is updated throughout the day. All articles from the print publication are available and two thirds of the information on the site is exclusive to the web: breaking news from the three global financial centres - London, New York and Hong Kong; snapshots of daily and weekly data; articles on Global Trends focusing on activity in a different sector each day. There is also a daily Industry View that gives an update on recent key deals in major industry sectors and a Search Archive containing all print and Web articles published by Acquisitions Monthly since 1988. Access to the Web site costs GBP 1000 a year. General Sources & Lists of Sites http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/general.htm Patently Absurd - Weird & Wacky Patents http://www.patent.freeserve.co.uk/ Country Specific Information http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/country.htm Several links have been added to our Country Information page, some of which are new to our listings but have been available on the Web for some time. RFERL - Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty Country Links (http://www.rferl.org/links/) has a links library of sources of information on countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Economist.com Country Briefings (http://www.economist.com/countries/) offers some free news, statistics, profiles and forecasts for 60 countries. For full, detailed information and information on countries not included in the free listing, there are links are to EIU priced reports. Another EIU service, EIU Country Data (http://eiu.xls.com/) offers searchable databases of country data, economic indicators and city data. For example, you can search for the GDPs of a range of industry sectors in specified countries going back to 1990 and download the data into a single or multiple spreadsheets. This is a priced service. Viewswire (http://www.viewswire.com/) - yet another EIU Web site - has daily country analysis from the Economist Intelligence Unit covering 195 countries. You can view some headlines free of charge but this is essentially a subscription service. Privatizationlink (http://www.privatizationlink.com/) has pulled together information from the World Bank on privatization in the emerging markets. You can view the information by topics:
Alternatively you can view the data by country or industry sector. If you are interested primarily in privatization opportunities in Russia, there is a related Web site Privatizationlink Russia (http://russia.privatizationlink.com/). Support for SMEs http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/sme.htm UK Online for Business (http://www.ukonlineforbusiness.gov.uk/) is a UK government backed site providing information for businesses going online. There is a series of free guides including one on "E-commerce and the Law". The guides can be viewed as Web pages or downloaded in their entirety as PDF files. For information on grants and funding for your business, there is Grantfinder (http://www.grantfinder.co.uk/)which claims to be the most comprehensive database of UK and EU funding, including grants, loans, subsidies and other incentives that are available to UK businesses. This is a priced service. You could also try J4b - Search for Government Grants for your Business (http://www.j4b.co.uk/). This is a searchable database of grants and loans available to small businesses. The search process is in four stages:
The service is free but registration for an ID and password is required. On a technical note, your browser must accept cookies from this site otherwise it goes into a permanent loop and tries to set another cookie as soon as each one is rejected. This results in a lot of downloading activity with nothing appearing on the screen. I didn't realise what was going on until I stopped and checked my cookie manager and saw that it had rejected 147 cookies and was still going strong! Business Credit Management UK (http://www.creditman.co.uk/) offers an information brokerage service covering several credit and company financial databases. There is also an excellent collection of links to relevant sites in this area (insolvency and bankruptcy, legal resources, International trading) and a free weekly newsletter that can be read on their Web site or automatically delivered to you by e-mail. The newsletter includes major UK business news, forthcoming creditors meetings, currency exchange rates and Internet and IT news. If your customers are delaying payment of your invoices then pay a visit to the Better Payment Practice Campaign (http://www.payontime.co.uk/). This site gives advice on credit management and is aimed mainly at SMEs. It includes a guide to getting paid on time, current legislation and standard "credit management letters", e.g. first, second and final reminders. There are also private sector league tables showing how quickly (or not!) companies pay their bills. A similar type of site, and one that I regularly use, is Just Claim (http://www.justclaim.co.uk/) which again provides help and advice on credit management and procedures. There is a useful interest calculator for working out interest due on overdue invoices under the UK Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998. The site also provides standard letters and forms, and a list of county courts if you have to resort to legal action. Information Brokers http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/brokers.htm Scottish Business Information Services http://www.scotbis.com/ These things are sent to try us!Out of Date Search EnginesWe all know - or should know - that when we use one of the standard Web based search engines, such as Google or AltaVista, we are not searching the most up to date version of the Web. We are actually searching the search engine's own index and database and there is always a delay in adding new pages to that database. Furthermore, the search engines vary in how often they revisit sites in order to update their databases. Some search tools, such as Google, try and identify Web sites that regularly change, for example news sites, and re-index them more frequently. FAST (All the Web) claims to the freshest and most up to date database but when I carried out a search for some of the Web sites that I maintain, I found that it is actually one of the worst when it comes to retaining pages that were removed from a Web site long ago - 20 months in one case! From a searcher's point of view, two of the most exasperating consequences of these delays are the "error 404 - page not found" messages that pop up when the most promising page in your results list has moved, and finding that the content of a page has completely changed since the engine last indexed it. From a Web site owner's point of view, trying to get new pages into the indexes is bad enough but when it comes to a completely new site, the problem gets worse. Not so long ago, submitting a new site to a search engine was simply a matter of clicking on the Add URL or Submit Site buttons and filling in the details. At best your site would be added within minutes: at worst it would take a couple of days. Today, you are lucky if your site appears in under two months. Much of this down to limitations on IT resources on the search engine side but more and more it is money that gets you in. Some search engines now charge for "express" submission. Hand over the loot and they will index your site straight away: stick with the free option and you could be twiddling your thumbs for months while they get their act together. Earlier this year I set up a completely new site for a client and decided to keep a tally of how soon the search engines visited the site after submission and when the site eventually appeared in their databases. The Web visitor logs supplied details of the first and I used Copernic (see Gizmo of the Month below) to search for the second. Google was the first to visit (spider) the site and took a mere 12 days to do so. But it was another 3 weeks before any of the pages were added to Google's database. FAST, HotBot and Lycos came a close second at 14 days for spidering and it was a further 4 weeks before the site appeared in their search results. As for AltaVista - well, what can I say about AltaVista? Nothing good I'm afraid. AltaVista eventually made an appearance in our visitor logs 6 weeks after I submitted the site and has been regularly re-spidering it for the last 3 months. However, the site has still not appeared in any AltaVista search results! They do say in their submission help files, though, that they do not guarantee that your site will be accepted once it has been spidered. But if they have decided not to accept it, why go on spidering it?! I didn't even bother to try and get the site listed in Excite as it insists on payment for even the basic submit (USD 149 with site review in approximately 8 weeks) and Euroseek no longer accepts site submissions. This makes very depressing reading for anyone setting up a new Web site and on a limited or no budget for promotion. But it has equally if not more serious implications for researchers. As it is increasingly difficult for new sites, both good and bad, to be listed by the search engines we are being given a restricted view of the Web - and one where money not quality counts. The alternatives are to use evaluated subject listings or portals, provided that you can find one covering your subject or industry sector, and to spend more time following links from one site to another. And that all takes time and a lot of patience. Gizmo of the MonthCopernicI hesitate to nominate Copernic as Gizmo of the Month, not because I do not consider it is worthy of nomination but because I always think of a gizmo as being a relatively small device or program. Copernic gives very much the opposite impression although the download of the basic version weighs in at a compact 2.4MB. Copernic is a meta-search tool that you download and install on your PC. As well as enabling you to search across several search engines at once - in this it is no different from any Web based meta-search tool such as Ixquick or DogPile - it has also pulled together and categorised specialist search tools and resources so that you can search in just, for example, online bookstores, encyclopaedias or gardening sites. In this respect it can be thought of as a tool for searching the "Invisible Web". Some people always use Copernic for all of their searching whilst others, like myself, use it occasionally and for quite specific applications. For example, I find it invaluable for finding alternative download sites for a particular piece of software, for locating suppliers of out-of-print books, and for checking when and if the major search engines have added a new Web site to their index. There is not enough space in this edition of TFTTR to go into any more detail but there will be a more extensive review of Copernic, along with LexiBot and Webseeker, in September's TFTTR. If you want to have a look for yourself, there are three versions of Copernic:
All can be downloaded from the Copernic Web site at http://www.copernic.com/ Meetings and WorkshopsOctober 1st TFTTR Contact InformationKaren Blakeman, RBA Information Services ArchivesTFTTR archives: http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/archives/index.shtml Subscribe and UnsubscribeTo subscribe to the newsletter fill in the online registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml To unsubscribe, use the registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml and check the unsubscribe radio button. Privacy StatementSubscribers' details are used only to enable distribution of the newsletter Tales from the Terminal Room. The subscriber list is not used for any other purpose, nor will it be disclosed by RBA or made available in any form to any other individual, organisation or company.
|
| This page was last updated on 29th August 2001 | 2001 |
