Tales from the Terminal Room

February 2001, Issue No.18

Archives

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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:

• Update on Skyminder
• Updates to the RBA Web site
  • Search Strategies for the Internet, 3rd edition
  • Country Versions of Google?
  • UK Yellow Pages Start-up Briefings
  • DespatchWeb
  • Top 10 Business Sites
• These things are sent to try us!
  • BT charges are baffling
• Gizmo of the Month
  • Web pages - date last modified
• Meetings and Training

Review

Update on Skyminder

http://www.skyminder.com/

In our review of Skyminder in the January 2001 issue of TFTTR, I had two questions that had not been answered as TFTTR went to "press": the minimum amount that one is required to put into the "Deposit account" and why credit card accounts have access to only two of the folders. I have now heard from Skyminder that the minimum deposit is USD 500, which can be topped up over the year.

The reason why Skyminder BIT (the credit card account) is restricted to just the two folders is, to quote the email response I received, "due to the fact that customers who don't want to commit to a subscription or a pay as you go contract, we normally find will use the service on a very limited basis. This is why we limit just two folders to our credit cards customers."

I think it is a pity that Skyminder has gone down this route, especially as some very useful and recently added content - MarkIntel Market Research and the Industry Insider Trade Association Reports - is only available to "complete" users.

New content has been added since the January review. The service now includes over 420,000 reports from Thomson Financial covering 40,000 private and public companies from 85 countries. Also available are Investext Broker Reports, MarkIntel Market Research Reports and Industry Insider Trade Association Reports.

Industry Insider Trade Association Reports contain data such as industry growth trends, consumer spending habits, industry sales figures, production rates, export/import data, factory shipments, manufacturing capacity, product developments, market share rankings and demographics.

The Investext Broker Reports are available to all SkyMinder users through the function "Company", whereas the MarkIntel Market Research Reports and Industry Insider Trade Associations Reports are only available to SkyMinder complete users through the "Industry" function.

The D&B Million Dollar Database Plus has been added to Skyminder, providing information on approximately 481,000 leading US and Canadian businesses. These companies will have either USD 3 million+ in sales OR 45+ total employees OR branches with 50+ employees. The company information will include 8-digit SIC codes, number of employees, annual sales figures, location types, principal executives and executive biographies. These reports are available to all SkyMinder users through the "Company" option.

Information Resources

Search Strategies for the Internet http://www.rba.co.uk/search/

As soon as the third edition of Search Strategies had rolled off the presses and an electronic version loaded onto our Web site, the Usenet search service Deja shut up shop and Google bought the Usenet archives from Deja. We can't change the hard copy but we will be updating the relevant sections on the RBA Web site.

Country Versions of Google?

As well as taking over the Usenet archive (the jury is still out as to whether or not the Google interface is better or worse) Google appears to be about to launch country versions of its main search engine. At the time of writing this, there were no links on the Google site to these but Google seems to have been testing out an automatic redirect system similar to that used by HotBot and Lycos. We have been periodically redirected to one of the country Googles depending on the ISP or company Intranet that we happened to be using.

So far, redirects and testing out variations on Google URLs have revealed the following country variations:

Google UK http://www.google.co.uk/
Google Germany http://www.google.de/
Google France http://www.google.fr/
Google Portugal http://www.google.pt/

As well as the interface being in the local language, the country Googles offer an option to limit your search to Web sites from the country concerned.

Support for SMEs http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/sme.htm

Yellow Pages http://www.yell.com/
The new UK Yellow Pages site (confusingly being marketed with a .com domain name) has a whole section offering free Start-Up Briefings. Follow the "For Your Business" link to the Business Advice section, where you will find 30 briefings grouped into Starting a Business, Sales and Marketing, Finance and Legal, Setting up an Office and Recruiting Staff.

Each of the briefings offer clear, factual and practical advice for people starting up in business. These have been pulled together by business, academic and legal experts in the relevant fields and their names and affiliations are given at the end of each report. The documents are PDFs so you will need the Adobe Acrobat reader to look at them.

Miscellaneous Day to Day Essentials http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/misc.htm

Despatch Web http://www.despatchweb.com/
A UK directory of local couriers and postal services. Type in your post code, select the service level required and the consignment type. DespatchWeb then comes up with a list of companies in your area that meet your requirements.

Top 10 Business Sites http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/top10/

The delegates on our latest Business Information on the Internet course (2nd March) voted for the following as their "Top 10" business sites:

1. Corporate Information http://www.corporateinformation.com/
2. Yahoo UK & Ireland http://www.yahoo.co.uk/
3. Google http://www.google.com/
4. Northern Light http://www.northernlight.com/
5. Reuters/Factiva http://www.factiva.com/(priced service)
6. World Markets Online http://www.worldmarketsonline.com/ (priced service)
7. UK Office of National Statistics http://www.ons.gov.uk/
8. BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
9. CIA World Factbook http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
10. Free Pint http://www.freepint.co.uk/

These things are sent to try us!

BT charges are baffling

Apologies to those of you who live outside of the UK for the UK- centric nature of this item, which comes from the Plain English Campaign. You may, though, find it interesting to see what we in the UK are up against when it comes to dealing with our major telecoms supplier.

The Plain English Campaign attempted to study BT's price structure after they had received numerous complaints from BT customers about the incomprehensible gobbledegook on BT's bills. The Campaign found that BT's baffling price structure means an average household could pay any of 36 different totals for the same set of calls, and that the quarterly bill could be anywhere between GBP 83.06 (USD 120) and GBP 287.27 (USD 420).

The Campaign's spokesman John Lister said:

"I've filled in a self-assessment tax form but I think this calculation may have been even more mindnumbing. It was bad enough trying to work out that a 'PSTN line' was just a normal household line, and that there was a difference between 'BT Together' and 'BT Talk Together'.... When we went to BT's Web site for clarification and had to try and work out why there was a difference between 'Geographic Inland Direct Dialled PPM Prices' and 'Inland National NTS Direct Dialled PPM Prices' it nearly brought us to tears."

Further information about the Campaign for Plain English can be found on http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/. The press release relating to BT (dated 17th January 2001) can be found at http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/press.html

Gizmo of the Month

Web pages - date last modified

This month's Gizmo is a piece of JavaScript.

The date on which a Web page was written or compiled is one of the essential criteria for assessing the quality of the information on that page. It is amazing how many sites have been left to fester for years without any attempt to update them! Some pages have a "date created", "date updated" or "date checked" (although these can be "forged") but what does one do if there is no such information?

If you are Netscape user, in the menu bar at the top of the browser click on View followed by Page Info.

There is no similar option available in Internet Explorer but you can type into the address/URL box the following:

javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

Note that the command is case sensitive.

Thanks are due to Matthew McDonnell of the BBC who reminded me of this little gem in a presentation he gave at a recent City Information Group meeting (Making the Web Visible, 20th February 2001, http://www.cityinfogroup.co.uk/).

Be aware, though, that neither of the above techniques is foolproof. In some cases you may get "Unknown", and if it is a dynamically created page you'll either be given today's date or a system default of January 01, 1970. Also the date that the Web server assigns to the page is the date on which the page was loaded onto the server and not when the page was written or compiled. Nevertheless, it can still be a useful way of weeding out horrendously out-of-date information - provided you remember to disregard a 1970 date!

Meetings and Workshops

March 26th
Presentation on "Market Research and Company Sources" at The Best of Business Information on the Internet
Organised by: The British Library
Venue: British Library Conference Centre, London
Web: http://www.bl.uk/services/stb/courses.html

TFTTR Contact Information

Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services
UK Tel: 0118 947 2256, Int. Tel: +44 118 947 2256
UK Fax: 020 8020 0253, Int. Fax: +44 20 8020 0253
Address: 88 Star Road, Caversham, Berks RG4 5BE, UK

Archives

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