All posts by Karen Blakeman

I have worked in the information profession for over twenty years and have been a freelance consultant since 1989. My company (RBA Information Services) provides training and consultancy on the use of the Internet, and on accessing and managing information resources. Prior to setting up RBA I worked at the Colindale Central Public Health Laboratory, and then spent ten years in the Pharmaceutical and Health Care industry before moving to the International management consultancy group Strategic Planning Associates. I edit and publish an electronic newsletter called Tales from the Terminal Room. Other publications include Search Strategies for the Internet. I am a Fellow of CILIP: The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, an active member of the UK eInformation Group (UKeiG) and a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP)
Business Information, Wikis

Wikinvest

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Founded by Michael Sha and Parker Conrad, Wikinvest covers US stocks with a market capitalization of at least USD 100 million. And, yes, it is a wiki where anyone can edit and comment so bear that in mind when using this site. Having issued the health warning, I must add that I have not yet found any vandalism or spamming on the main pages although there have been the expected crop of idiots in the discussion areas. That could be down to the vigilant monitoring by the serious contributors, or that the site is not yet well known, or both. It is not comprehensive in coverage. At the time of writing this, there were 349 companies on Wikinvest and not all had articles associated with them, but the number is increasing and they do all have stock charts. On the Companies page you can browse by industry sector or search by company name. As you type in the name a drop down list appears with the all the options. Once you have found your company, you should see four tabs: Neutral, Bulls, Bears and WikiChart.

Wikinvest Company Information

wikinvest.gif

‘Neutral’ is where you will find the main article about the company, which covers topics such as history, products, market trends, competition. The main ‘contributors’ to the article are listed and you can click on individuals for their profiles, although not all have provided detailed information about themselves. I was initially confused by the uniformity and limited number of job titles but then realised that these are assigned by Wikinvest depending on the number of contributions you have made to the articles. The bottom rung is Analyst and the top is Senior Director. I am still a mere analyst as I have yet to make any edits or comments! This page also includes a thumbnail of the WikiChart for the company and the top three Bulls and Bears. As with most wikis, you can view the History of the page and see who has edited what and when.

The WikiCharts use quotes provided by Thomson Financial and are delayed at least 15 minutes for NASDAQ, and 20 minutes for NYSE and AMEX. They go back to 1981 and you can use the slider on the top time line to focus in on a a particular time period. The main chart can be annotated so that key events are superimposed on the graph, making it easy to see how an event or announcement may have affected the share price. An option to overlay a graph for the stock market index as a whole would be useful here so that one can assess whether any major shift in the share price is due to company events or the to changes in the markets in general.

WikiChart

WikiChart

The concepts section looks at the main trends and ideas within a sector and also get you up to speed with the main issues affecting an industry. For example, under energy there are articles on biofuels, clean coal, carbon trading and peak oil.

At a personal level you can edit existing articles or write new ones, bookmark companies in which you are interested or ‘Track changes’ to an article, for which you need to set up an account (free of charge) and to be logged in. There is an email alerts option for the ‘Track changes’ but no RSS feeds.

Conclusion

I must confess that because of its ‘wiki nature’ I was somewhat hesitant about using this as a serious source of information for US listed companies. So far, I have not spotted any vandalism. Any arguments I may have with an opinion on a stock or market are exactly the same as those I would have with articles that appear in the mainstream press such as the FT or WSJ. For a quick overview of a major company listed in the US I would still go to Yahoo Finance first, and then to the SEC for the official filings. For opinions and a more detailed, and free (!) history, and the ‘1981 – to now’ annotated share price graph I will definitely use Wikinvest.

Search Engines

FuzzFind Web Search

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Yet another gem discovered via Phil Bradley’s blog. FuzzFind Web Search is a meta search tool that combines Google, Yahoo and Live searches with results from social bookmarking site Del.icio.us. The results are amalgamated and deduplicated into a single list. So what? Meta search tools are 10 a penny. But I really like this one because of the way it shows me where each result has been found in each search tool by placing icons and numbers to the left of each entry in the results list. I don’t know why that particular and very simple feature impresses me but it does. Search, and the presentation of the results, is a very personal thing and what works for one person will not necessarily work for someone else. This one really works for me.

fuzzfind.gif

Search Engines

Zuula Search

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Zuula is another search engine along the lines of Intelways and Trovando. You type in your search once and then run it through several search engines one by one. The search engines are grouped into Web, Images, Video, News, Blog and Jobs. It is not as wide ranging or as comprehensive as Intelways, for example it does not have a group for searching by file formats, but it does offer an Advanced Search screen that includes a domain search. You can also keep a list of your previous searches.

Zuula

News Sources, Search Engines

Chipwrapper – Search UK newspapers

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Chipwrapper

Chipwrapper is a Custom Google Search Engine that searches across the UK’s major national newspapers: The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Sun, The People, News of the World, The Scotsman, Daily Star, The Telegraph and The Times. It also searches the BBC News web site, ITN and Sky. It carries out a Google web search of these sources, not a Google News search, so although you cannot sort the results by date you do pull up older, archival material that is not included in the standard 30 days of Google News. As many of the newspapers give the date as part of the text of the stories you can often limit your search to a year and sometimes a specific month by simply including the month and year in your search. Also available are RSS feeds for the top headlines, general sport, rugby and football headlines, and a Chipwrapper browser search plugin is available for IE7 and Firefox 2.

I ran one of my standard test searches on Richard Budge the UK coal magnate, and included 2007 in the search strategy to limit the stories to the current year. It worked impressively well but the FT was conspicuous by its absence, and I knew that there had been at least two articles about him in the FT this year. I went direct to the FT site, ran a similar search and found three articles. I then did a Google Web search using my Chipwrapper strategy but added site:ft.com. Again three results. Back to Chipwrapper with some different searches, and it did pick up FT articles. Obviously there is something about my Richard Budge search that it does not like.

Comparison with Google News Archive

Of course Google News is probably the service that most people will use as the benchmark and this is where it becomes really interesting. Back to dear old Richard and a search in the Google News Archive. I went into the Advanced Search screen, entered the phrase Richard Budge, typed in 2007 for the year and selected Show Timeline. Unlike the Advanced Search in current Google News you cannot specify a country of origin for the source so I had to resign myself to the possibility of wading through a substantial number of articles. Google Archive News does, though, give you an option to home in on a specific month via the Timeline (see below).

Google Archive News Results with Timeline

It came up with 94 results, about twenty of which claimed to be from the Financial Times and dated Jan 1 2007. I clicked on a few of the links and they took me to the “Access My Library” site where I was repeatedly told that the articles had been deleted. I gave up after eight or nine, but I think we can assume that the FT has decided not to play ball. Three links with $$ signs next to them took me to Press Display but I was told that the items had been “removed from the back issues access”. A minority of the links took me direct to the news source, for example The Telegraph, BBC, Doncaster Today. The articles from the Guardian, Independent and Times that had been picked up by Chipwrapper were nowhere to be seen. I can only think that like the FT they have declined Google’s offer to be part of the Archive.

Conclusion

I have to confess that this is the first time I have analysed the results from Google News Archive in any depth. I was not surprised to find the FT absent but amazed that so many of the other UK daily papers were not there. Even worse, Google still has in its index links to stories that were carried by third party services, such as Access My Library and Press Display, but which have now been removed. The Timeline is still a good way of looking at major stories relating to a company or person but be aware that some of the key resources are not included.

Despite the glitch with the FT in my test search, and that there is no date sort option, Chipwrapper is a great tool for searching new and archival stories appearing in the leading UK papers. I recommend that you give it a go next time you need to research a UK story.

Note on the name Chipwrapper for non UK readers

A favourite take-away food in the UK is deep fried, battered fish with chips (mushy peas are optional but an essential component as far as I am concerned). Today, EU and Health and Safety regulations dictate that these have to be placed in grease proof paper (in practice not grease proof at all) and then wrapped in large plain sheets of off white paper. I recall that in my dim and distant youth newspaper was regarded as the superior wrapping material. Some connoisseurs claimed that the ink, which dissolved in the presence of the salt and vinegar, gave extra flavour.

Christmas

PNC — The True Cost of the 12 Days of Christmas…

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Cost of the Twelve Days of Christmas

PNC Wealth Management and institutional investments have released their annual report The True Cost of the 12 Days of Christmas. PNC have been monitoring the cost of all the items gifted by True Love in the popular Christmas song since 1984. The 2007 Christmas Price Index showed an increase of 3.1% over 2006. The five gold rings rose by a whopping 21.5%, reflecting the general trend of increasing commodity prices in the Consumer Price Index, and geese-a-laying are up by 20%. Maids-a-milking cost 13.6% more because of an increase in the federal minimum wage. In total the cost of all Twelve Days of Christmas, including the repetitions, comes to USD 78,100.10.

Interestingly, shopping on the Internet is not cheaper mainly because of the shipping and transportation costs involved particularly when it comes to livestock. Agency fees and travel expenses probably contribute to the USD 11,283.23 for the 10 Lords-a-leaping hired via the Internet, compared with USD 4,285.06 for hiring them through more traditional channels.

What the report does not cover is how True Love might be expected to fund this annual extravaganza. Taking out a new credit card or increasing the credit limit on existing cards is going to be more difficult in the current economic climate. House prices, in the UK at least, are at best static but starting to fall so re-mortgaging is not going to be a sensible option. There is also the question of air miles and green-house gas emissions generated by this giftfest. One source estimates that the total comes to 54.4 tonnes. Perhaps True Love should play the green environmental card and not send anything this year, thereby reducing his carbon foot print and doing his bit to help combat global warming.

Christmas

Santa in breach of UK laws and EU directives

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Santa could be spending Christmas behind bars. According to Out-Law.com, part of Pinsent Masons an international law firm who advise on IT and e-commerce, Santa’s trading practices break several UK laws and fail to comply with EU directives.

Santa’s crime sheet includes:

  • Failing to comply with the European Union’s Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment Directive, which from this year made producers of goods responsible for their environmentally sound disposal. “Santa and the elves, as producers of electrical and electronic equipment, will have obligations in relation to goods placed on the market, together with responsibilities for financing the treatment, reprocessing and environmentally sound disposal of them,” said Kirsty Isla Cooper, an environmental law specialist at Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com. There is some question ats to whether or not the elves are separately responsible because The Grotto has not disclosed whether elves are employees of Claus or are independent contractors.
  • Santa’s use of a sleigh drawn by nine reindeer in England, which has had outbreaks of of foot and mouth and bluetongue disease, could be a safety breach. “Claus’s bringing of reindeer in and out of restriction zones could be a serious threat to the industry.” say Out-Law.com. A spokeswoman for the Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) told Out-Law.Com “The Bluetongue exclusion zone is still in operation and applies to reindeer. There is a 150km surveillance zone around the exclusion zone. You wouldn’t be able to go in there with reindeer and leave with them alive.”
  • UK employment laws broken: restrictions on the number of hours worked (it is suspected that the elves work for more than 48 hours a week all year round) and race discrimination laws (Claus’s elf-focused employment practices)
  • Work at Height Regulations 2005: Santa should make sure his sleigh has guardrails to prevent a fall and a fall arrest system installed so that if he does fall he is protected.
  • Alcohol restrictions for pilots: the current UK limit is 20 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood. One brandy would probably exceed that limit and Santa has a glass of spirits in each of the UK’s 25 million households in one evening.
  • Flying height restrictions: aircraft must not fly lower than 1,000 feet in major conurbations. Santa flies well below this height as he goes from roof to roof.

Santa is also accused of possible breaches of Data Protection and Distance Selling Regulations.

Full details are at:

Looks as though they will be locking him up and throwing away the key 🙁

Live.com, Search Engines

Live link and linkdomain comands gone again

As Greg Notess and others have already noted, Live.com’s link and linkdomain commands are in a mess again. After they had been disabled in their original form, they reappeared as +link: and +linkdomain: commands. I noticed last week, though, that the +linkdomain was generating some very strange results. Much as I would like to believe that I am very popular I do not honestly believe that over 500,000 people/pages/sites link to my web site! Yahoo’s result of 2895 seems more realistic. Now Live’s commands have gone AWOL again.

Using Live’s Advanced Search screen I can still use the links option, type in the URL of the page and the syntax that it comes back with is link:http://www.rba.co.uk/. But that only gives me 7 results and two of those are internal links on my own site. So I guess it is back to using Yahoo for identifying incoming links.

Live’s ‘linkfromdomain:’ is still working.