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)
Inforum

Live videobroadcasting from INFORUM 2007, Prague

For those of you unable to attend the Prague Inforum conference in person, live videobroadcasting of some of the sessions will be available at http://www.inforum.cz/en/videobroadcasting/.

INFORUM 2007 keynote and guest speakers include Peter Jacso, Peter Godwin, Guus van den Brekel and Zinaida Manzuch.

You can choose between the original commentary of the speaker and its simultaneous translation. The official languages of the conference are Czech and English.

These sessions will be video broadcasted:

Conference Opening
New Technologies and Tools for Electronic Information Resources and Services
European Digital Library and Similar Projects Worldwide
Electronic Information -New Solutions for Traditional Approaches
Web Search Update and World 2.0
Managing Effective Access to E-resources
Conference Closing

The conference takes place on May 22nd – 24th.

Business Information, Market Research

MarketResearch.com acquires Profound

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MarketResearch.com has acquired the Thomson Business Intelligence (TBI) Market Research service, known as Profound. Thomson announced earlier this year that they wanted to sell Profound.

According to the press release “the acquisition expands MarketResearch.com’s international reach with additional content and sales presence in Europe and North America. Profound provides a closed-platform, market research service that complements MarketResearch.com’s open-format, web-based service.” It will be interesting to see what pricing model they adopt for it and how, if at all, they integrate Profound with their existing service. MarketResearch.com bought rival company MindBranch in 2005 but the two sites remain. I suspect that, given the different type of users the services have, Profound will be marketed as a separate product.

Exalead, images, Search Engines

Exalead UK and new search features

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Exalead now has a UK version of its search engine that includes an option to limit your search to UK pages only. Both Exalead.com and UK have added a Wikipedia search and options to limit your results to blogs or forums. Alternatively, you can choose to exclude those types of sites. The Wikipedia search includes a “Narrow your search” panel on the results page that lists ‘tags’ for categories, related terms, people, location and organizations.

Exalead Wikipedia search

Exalead has also launched a new version of its image search with over one billion images indexed. The new ‘Face’ filter enables you to narrow your search results to images containing faces. It is not a hundred per cent accurate and sometimes excludes images that are of faces and includes some in which there are no faces at all, but it is close enough. Other options include size of image, wallpapers, image colour, layout and file type.

Search Strategies

Pipl – People Search (beta)

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Pipl claims to be the most comprehensive people search on the web. Simply type in the first and last names of the person you are looking for, geographic location if known, and Pipl goes off and searches “hidden web” resources as well as the usual Google search. I tried it on myself and it did a pretty good job. The Quick Facts presented at the top of the page were correct, and it pulled in information from blog searches, Google Groups, Linkedin, Flicker and Google Scholar. Pipl also searches electoral rolls, directories, collections of peer reviewed literature such as Scirus and Google Scholar, Hoovers and Zoominfo. A search on my husband, Chris Rhodes, was less successful and I failed to find him amongst the thousands of other Chris Rhodes out there. Google, however, came up with him in the number 1 and 2 positions in a standard web search.

As with all of these types of search engine you still have to differentiate between different people with the same name: I do not work for the Honolulu Advertiser and neither am I the marketing director at Laura’s Lean Beef Company! And the quality of the results is variable. Nevertheless, Pipl is worth adding to your bookmarks for people search.

Pipl home page

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Google

Log out of your Google account!

Google offers so many services and personalisation that it is tempting to log in and not bother logging out. You first connect to Google via your Personalised Home Page, look at your RSS feeds in Google Reader, and then do some Blogger work. You know that you are going to be working on one of your Google Documents so no point in logging out. If, like me, you spend most of your time working at home that is no big deal. No-one else, apart from your SO or the sprogs, are going to mosey on in to your Google ‘space’. (Actually – it might be a seriously big deal but we won’t go into the ramifications of that).

If you are at work, however, where everyone grabs a free terminal wherever and whenever they can, you could find yourself in deep doo-doo. Your arch rival, who is threatening to overtake you on the scrabble up the corporate greasy pole, fires up Google intending to read their own Google Mail but discovers that they can access yours instead – and everything else!. Google does not time you out – and neither does My Yahoo which has a similar set-up. As well as reading all that you have been up to over the last year or so, they could sabotage your account by enabling the search history and conducting “unsavoury” searches and …. well, it doesn’t require much imagination to envisage what could happen.

This can, though, work in reverse. Set up a blemish free Google account with search history enabled, log in, leave it and wait for people to pounce on your unoccupied PC for their lunch-time surfing. Amazing what you could discover. This occurred to me after Phil Bradley and I had given our ‘De-mystifying Web 2.0’ presentation at the LIS last week in Birmingham. I had logged on to my demo Google account but completely forgot to log out at the end. As I went up to the podium on a damage limitation exercise I saw one of the afternoon presenters Googling away. As soon as I was home I went in to my Google account to have a look at what he had been researching. I regret to say that it was all very boring – North Carolina State University 🙁

Better luck next time.

Blogs

Blog Bling

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Phil Bradley has already reported briefly on the double act that he and I performed at the Web 2.0 Forum at the Library and Information show in Birmingham last week. There are no Powerpoints because we made it up as we went along – OK, not strictly true. We discussed via email the areas of web 2.0 ‘stuff’ we would each cover, and decided to adapt our presentations depending on what the other person had just mentioned. It worked! And it was great fun. Phil kicked off with his favourite Web 2.0 stuff (Pageflakes) and instead of going straight into social bookmarking I found myself talking about My Yahoo and Google’s personalised home page (about which there is a warning post from me later). Towards the end, Phil waxed lyrical about all the widgets and gizmos that can add pizazz to your blog, calling them “bling for your blog”. It is barely one week on from that presentation and I am already reading and hearing people call it ‘Blog Bling’.

So what is your favourite blog bling?

Business Information

ZoomInfo fails to address quality issues

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ZoomInfo has updated its business and people search engine. For those unfamiliar with the service, ZoomInfo searches and provides information on 35 million ‘people’ and 3.4 million companies. Unlike most conventional company and people directories, though, the information is gathered and compiled automatically by what it calls a semantic search engine. Content can be edited and corrected by the subject themselves, but you have to pay for at least a trial subscription in order to do it. ZoomInfo is free for basic information and advertiser supported. For full access you can upgrade to a ZoomExec account for USD 99 a month, and the full PowerSearch option costs from USD 3,950/year.

I have been attempting to carry out a proper evaluation for some time on behalf of various clients, and the redesigned site encouraged me to pay for a week’s trial at USD 19.99 for the ZoomExec service. I should make it clear right now, that I started this evaluation with a totally negative opinion of the service. My previous experiences of ZoomInfo in terms of quality have not been good and I regret to have to say that the upgrade has not changed my opinion.

The home page features three tabs – company searches, people searches and job searches via content from Indeed. There is also a tag cloud representing popular keywords used in searches on ZoomInfo. Company search and people searches by name are ad-supported: searches by keywords, job titles and other criteria are part of the priced services. One always starts an evaluation such as this using standard test searches on something or someone you know. Inevitably, then, I first did a search on myself. It found 22 people, or rather profiles. These profiles are compiled from web pages found by ZoomInfo and grouped together. Some of the profiles refer to the same person (there were four for me when I looked) but it is amazing how wrong ZoomInfo can be and that it can miss so much relevant and correct information that is out on the web.

None of my four profiles had my correct company name and the information in all cases was garbled. The most comprehensively supported profile, which was compiled from 36 web sites, has me working for TFPL. Yes, I am one of their associate trainers who they hire on a consultancy basis but I am not ’employed’ by TFPL. One could argue that it is an easy enough mistake for a poor dumb computer to make, especially as I am mentioned several times on the TFPL web site. But ZoomInfo has gone further and given me a non-existent email address at TFPL plus a Glasgow telephone number. I live and work in Reading a long way from Glasgow, but even if I did work at TFPL their main office is in London. To be fair if you are prepared to drill down through the web site references you do eventually arrive at the correct information on my own web site, but then why bother with ZoomInfo? Any half decent searcher could get there far more quickly using standard search engines and find more up to date information

ZoomInfo

If you have an account, you can set up your own public profile and consolidate existing profiles and correct them. Companies can do the same. That does not mean that the information will be any more accurate. ZoomInfo clearly states that it does not verify such information.

For company profiles, you are supposed to be able to view a list of competitors. Not a single one of my competitors were listed. Instead I was presented with a list consisting mostly of search tools: Lycos, Infoseek, Northern Light, EEVL, News Now and so on.

I tried searches on some of my colleagues and the results were even more difficult to fathom. The Advanced Search, where you can also include a company as well as a person’s name, ignored the company name. (I may have been clicking the wrong buttons or this feature may only work for PowerSearch accounts). Since I and most of my associates are running small businesses – probably not ZoomInfo’s forte – I persuaded some of my large, International corporate clients to try it out on people, companies and industries that they know. Their reactions ranged from laughter at the start, through disbelief at how wrong and out of date the data was, and finally to irritation and annoyance.

I did look at some of the other services on offer, such as keyword searching for products and services and Job searches, but I still could not find any redeeming features that would persuade me to pay money for this service or to even use the free search. There are other sources and directories out there that are more reliable and up to date, and some of them free.

Presentations

Phil and Karen at the Library and Information Show

Speakers and presenters – are you fed up with conference organisers hassling you for your PowerPoint slides weeks in advance? Feel threatened by final demands for the text of your presentation? Then try ConfTalk 2.0! All you need is your brain, your list of links – on a Web 2.0 service of course – and an Internet connection*. Phil Bradley and I will be demonstrating the ConfTalk 2.0 [pat. pending] technique at the Library 2.0 Forum at the NEC, Birmingham on April 18th 🙂

We are doing a double act on ‘Web 2.0 for libraries – de-mystifying the technologies’ and have agreed that anything we commit to .ppt or .doc will be old hat, defunct, or superceded by 5.0 as soon as we board the train for Birmingham. As the official conference blurb says “This session will take the form of a discussion and demonstration of a number of different Web 2.0 based products in order to give delegates a much clearer idea of exactly what Web 2.0 is, and how it can be used with a library/information centre environment.”

Further information and programme of the event.

*No Internet connection provided by the organisers? No problem. Any self respecting ConfTalk 2.0 speaker will have a laptop armed with WiFi, LAN connectivity, landline dial up, 3G and GPRS as backup. (May not help, though, if the conference is held in an underground, secure bunker but, thankfully, few are.)

Search Engines, Yahoo

Yahoo! Alpha spotted

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Amit Agarwal has reported on a new version of Yahoo! called Yahoo! Alpha at http://au.alpha.yahoo.com. It has a minimalist home page, which has become de rigueur for search engines these days, and a single search box. The results page displays the usual list of web pages and on the right hand side you can opt to view results from Flickr, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Yahoo News, Wikipedia and Sponsored links.

Yahoo Alpha

In the top right hand corner there is an option to Customise this page that enables you to remove one or more of the resources and to add your own.

I was initially intrigued by this but found it rather slow to respond and not as slick or responsive as Askx.com, which is testing out a similar approach to searching. Missing from both Askx and Yahoo Alpha is an obvious Advanced Search link. Both are in Beta and worth watching to see how they develop.