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)
OnlineInfo2007

Yippee! – It’s Online Week!!

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Well, here I am ensconced in the Kensington Hilton Holland Park, trying to get my brains together for the next four days of the annual online information jamboree at Olympia. Those of us who have done this event in full before know that by Thursday we will be feeling the strain and the fixed grins will appear on our faces at around 2.30 pm. Even so there is a feeling of excitement about ‘Online’ – there is always something new, something about which we can wax lyrical, something on which we can do the thumbs down, always a lot of somethings that we need to follow up, and interesting people we have met.

My ‘Online’ week starts off tomorrow (Monday 3rd December) with a workshop on Blogs, Wikis, RSS and other web 2.0 ‘stuff’. All the notes and demos have been prepared but Mondays are bad for live Internet demos. All the search engines and other web 2.0 providers have had the weekend to revamp and reload their web sites and services. Even if you get away with the morning session a UK afternoon session hits the time when the US services flick-the-switch and make you look a complete idiot if you are demoing live 🙁

For the rest of the week my free exhibition seminars are:

Tuesday 4th December: Searching without Google in Theatre E at 11.45.
Thursday 6th December: Tricks and tips for better web search in Theatre E at 12.15

For the rest of the time I shall be mooching around the conference and on the UKeiG stand (number 734).

Search Engines, Search Strategies, Top 10 Search Tips, UKeiG

UKeiG Top Search Tips

UKeiG held yet another ‘Google and Beyond’ workshop on November 6th 2007, this time in London. As usual, the participants were asked to come up with a list of their Top Search Tips. Here it is!

  1. Graball http://www.graball.com/
    Search two different search engines side by side and compare results.
  2. Use ‘site search’ to search within a specific, individual site or to a particular type of site e.g. UK government sites. Especially useful for sites that have poor navigation or awful internal search engines. Use the site: command, for example site:gov.uk or use the Advanced Search screens of the search engines.
  3. Use file format search to limit your search to one or more file formats, for example PDF, PPT, XLS. A good way of focusing your search: many government and industry/market reports are published as PDFs, statistics in spreadsheet format, and PowerPoints are a good way of tracking down experts on a subject. Use the Advanced Search screens or the filetype: command, for example filetype:ppt
  4. Intelways http://www.intelways.com/. Type in your search once and then run it through individual search engines one by one. The search engines are grouped together by type, for example Image, News, Reference. A useful reminder of what else is out there other than Google and that perhaps you should be thinking of searching different types of information.
  5. Numeric Range Search. Available only in Google and searches for numbers within a specified range. The syntax is 1st number..2nd number. For example:TV advertising forecasts 2008..2015

    or

    toblerone 1..5 kg

  6. Alacrawiki Spotlights http://www.alacrawiki.com/. Extremely useful in providing reviews and commentary on industry specific web sites that have statistics, market research and news. Invaluable if you need to get up to speed on key resources in a sector or industry.
  7. Panoramio. http://www.panoramio.com/. Now owned by Google. A geolocation-oriented photo sharing service with uploaded photos presented as a mashup with Google Earth.
  8. Wayback Machine – http://www.archive.org/. For tracking down copies of pages or documents that have disappeared from the original web site. Type in the address of the web site or the full URL of the document, if you know it. Note: this is not guaranteed but worth a try for older documents that are unlikely to be in the search engine caches.
  9. Google Book Search . Useful for searching within books that Google has been allowed to scan, and in particular older text books.
  10. Use anything but Google! For example – in alphabetical order – Ask.com, Exalead.com, Live.com, Yahoo.com. For a day, try out other search tools to see if you can survive without Google. You may go back to Google as your first port of call but at least you will have discovered the strengths and key features of the alternatives.
  11. For current news try Google News and its alert service (it’s free!). And don’t forget blogs, for example Google Blogsearch, Ask- Blogs, Blogpulse, Technorati.
  12. Blogpulse trends. Click on the graph icon on the results page to see how often your search terms have been mentioned in blog postings over time. Used by many of us who monitor competitor or industry intelligence to see what are hot topics and when. Many of the ‘peaks’ will tie in with press announcements: it is those that don’t that are really interesting. Click on the peaks in the graph to see the postings.
    Business Information, Top 10 Business Sites

    Business Information Top Web Resources

    Another workshop – another top resources listing. This time it was Business Information Key Web Resources organised by TFPL and held on 31st October 2007. The list, which is compiled by participants at the end of the workshop, is usually limited to 10 but this time they came up with 16! As well as specific sources, they also came up with search techniques that they felt would help them target information more effectively.

    1. Site Search. Use the Advanced Search screens of search engines to limit your search to an individual site or use the site: command. Useful for tracking down information on large sites with poor navigation or internal search.
    2. File format search. As in number 1 above, use the Advanced Search to limit your search to a particular file format. For example PDF for market, industry, government reports; PPT or PDF for conference presentations; XLS for data and statistics.
    3. Think local. If you are researching a market or companies based in a particular country or region, look at the news sources, company registers, databases, and versions of search engines for that country. To change your country version of Google, click on the Language Tools options on the Google home page and go to the list of flags towards the bottom of the page.
    4. Kompass. http://www.kompass.com/. Well known company, product and service directory with world-wide coverage and detailed product codes. You can search free of charge but have to pay to view most of the information. You can opt for a subscription or the pay as you go option.
    5. EXPO 21XX – Industry, Automation, Aviation, Yachting, Fashion and Textile Online Fair. http://www.expo21xx.com/ A directory that mimics a trade exhibition in its design. Each “fair” is subdivided into halls, and each company in the hall has a “stand” with a brief description and a flag showing the country in which it is based.
    6. Blogpulse. http://www.blogpulse.com/ Useful blog search tool with a graph option (Trends) that shows how often your search terms are mentioned in blogs.
    7. Abyznewslinks http://www.abyznewslinks.com/ Lists newspapers and other news sources by country and by region within each country. There is a language code next to each newspaper and separate links to alternative language versions if they are available.
    8. Del.icio.us http://del.icio.us/ and other social bookmarking services. Good way to collaborate and share your favourite resources with others, both inside and outside your organisation.
    9. Official Statistics on the Web http://www.library.auckland.ac.nz/subjects/stats/offstats/
      Starting point for statistical sources by country, topic or subject. This service includes sources offering free and easily accessible social, economic and general data from official or similar “quotable” sources, especially those that provide both current data and time series.
    10. BvD Taste of Mint Free Directory http://www.bvdep.com/ Free directory giving basic information on companies covered by the Bureau van Dijk collection of priced services. Search by name, country or activity, and size. Information provided free of charge includes company name, town, country, activity and size.
    11. Eco5 http://www.eco5.com/. Click on the Research tab. This service is aimed at researchers in the areas of finance and economics world-wide. Resources include links to national institutions such as central banks, stock exchanges and government bodies, and to to national and international institutions.
    12. Try a different search tool. Try something other than Google: another search engine e.g. Live, Yahoo, Ask, Exalead; an evaluated listing e.g. Alacrawiki, Intute; a listing of sites by type of information e.g. news (see number 7), statistics (see number 9).
    13. Repeat your search terms one or more times to change the way results are sorted.
    14. Allwhois. http://allwhois.com/. Domain name registry that can help you track down who owns or is behind a web site.
    15. Wayback Machine. http://www.archive.org/. Use the wayback machine to track down ‘lost’ pages, documents or sites. Also useful for seeing how companies have marketed themselves on the web in the past.
    16. Nationmaster. http://www.nationmaster.com/. Repackages information from many different sources and enables you to compare data in a variety of ways, for example countries, a region, or an economic group such as OPEC and then a category and statistic for that category. Click on Advanced View to see all of the search options. The information is not always the most up to date, but the source is always given so you can then search the original site for the most recent data.
    Uncategorized

    IET announces launch of Inspec Direct

    The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has announced that Inspec Direct, a new web-based version of the Inspec database, will be available directly from the IET in January 2008. Inspec provides an index to literature in physics, electrical and electronic engineering, computer science, information technology, manufacturing, production and mechanical engineering as well as interdisciplinary areas such as materials science, oceanography, nuclear engineering, geophysics, biomedical engineering and biophysics.

    The IET press release says that the new Inspec Direct platform will feature a “user focused design” that will support all levels of scientific and technical research in the corporate, industrial, government and academic sectors. The Inspec Direct platform will be commercially available on January 1, 2008, but researchers and information professionals are invited to trial the new platform for free. For a free trial or further information about Inspec Direct, go to www.theiet.org/inspecdirect

    Business Information

    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.

    Blogs

    WordPress introduces tags

    2 Comments

    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

    Live.com link commands are back

    16 Comments

    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.

    ili2007

    ILI 2007 presentation

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    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! 🙂