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)
Search Engines

Accoona is no more

Search engine Accoona has at last closed down. There have been rumours for many months that it was on the way out and now the home page merely says

“Due to an overwhelmingly competitive search market, Accoona.com and Accoona.cn will no longer be active.

We thank you for your previous support.”

Accoona came up with some interesting and innovative features such as the talking toolbar and SuperTarget (see my previous postings on Accoona). I was never impressed with the web search, and the business option was just a search on the D&B marketing directory. I did visit  the News section quite a lot, though, and in particular SuperTarget,  which  could be used to identify people and companies mentioned in your search results. More often than not they were the ‘usual suspects’ but occasionally it would flag up an unexpected association.

The service never realised its full potential and when it started dropping search options and cancelled its IPO, the rumours started flying and I stopped recommending it in my workshops. The search engine business is tough so no doubt many more will bite the dust before too long.

Business Information, energy, Statistics

Simmons & Company – energy statistics and data

Simmons & Company International is the only independent investment bank specializing in the energy industry. Founded in 1974, the firm has acted as financial advisor in over $134 billion of transactions, including 535 merger and acquisitions worth over $93 billion. As well as copies of presentations made by senior partner Matthew R Simmons there is a collection of industry statistics gathered from a variety of sources. These are split into upstream and downstream and include rig counts, summaries of oil and gas prices, US crude oil inventories, refining capacity and days of supply. There is some International data but much of it is North American biased.

Under the main Energy Industry link are lists of major public listed upstream and downstream companies (coverage is world-wide), and links to industry news sources, associations, statistics and government sites (many are North American).

Despite the geographical bias, this is a good starting point for information on the oil and gas industry as it lists most of the key resources.  Matthew Simmons’s presentations and papers are often quoted in the main stream media and are worth monitoring. There is an email alert for new presentations but no RSS. If you are desperate for RSS rather than email  there is always the Page2RSS service that monitors pages for changes and alerts you via RSS.

Business Information

Masterseek Business Directory

2 Comments

Rearrange the following words into a well known phrase or saying: pole – a – barge – don’t – with – touch.

I picked up the news of Masterseek’s imminent launch from AltSearchEngines. Worth investigating further, I thought, especially as I am always on the lookout for quality business directories.

From their press release:

“A new enormous business search engine battles Yahoo! and Google for B2B searches. Masterseek’s global search engine provides quick and free access to, among other things, company profiles, contact information, and descriptions of products and services from more than 45 million companies in 75 countries. …. Behind Masterseek lies nearly 9 years of diligence from Danish and international programmers.

The unique feature of Masterseek is the specially developed crawlers that can sort out irrelevant private websites automatically and simultaneously gather and index relevant company websites quickly and diversely. This includes company profiles, news, as well as contact and product information. The company information is at the same time in the process indexed in more than 50,000 business categories in 21 languages.”

This sounded promising so time to put it to the test and indulge in a bit of ego-surfing. My first search on RBA Information Services as a company came up with my own RBA, but gave its location as the US despite the co.uk domain name and contact details clearly stated as being in the UK. A quick email to Masterseek and it was corrected. But then it all went seriously pear shaped.

23rd September 2008, 16.48 UK time: search on RBA Information Services and ‘All’ category selected.

Results: At the top of the list is a sponsored result for RBA Enterprises based in the US. Nothing to do with me but I am not too bothered as there are thousands of RBAs around the world. However the web site URL was mine and the profile was mine! Numbers 4, 5 and 6 in the results list were for Sources UK (electric cable manufacturers), RBA Enterprises Inc and  RBA Internet Services Inc. All three had my web site URL and a profile extracted from my web site.

23rd September 2008, 17.08 UK time: search on RBA Information Services and ‘Company’ category selected.

Results: Only two. The first is a ‘sponsored result’ which is me, the correct URL and correct location. The second is identical to the first but the location is given as the United States.

23rd September 2008, 17.15 UK time: search on Karen Blakeman and ‘All’ category selected.

Results:The sponsored result at the top of the list was correct. The next four were totally unrelated companies but with my profile and  there were another four dotted throughout the remainder of the twenty sites listed  on the first page.

23rd September 2008, 17.31 UK time: search on Karen Blakeman and ‘Company’ category selected.

Results: Hurrah! I am the only entry.

I did a few quick searches on other companies and people and the quality of the results was equally dire.

There are additional search and browse options, but I saw no point in investigating them if the underlying data was so horribly wrong. Either the Masterseek “specially developed crawlers” were having a bad day or more serious work needs to be done on processing the information that they gather.

The press release goes on to say:

“Masterseek.com B2B searches will also be a competitor for well-established directories, such as Kompass, Thomson and the Yellow Pages, besides the obvious Yahoo! and Google.”

Given the current appalling quality of Masterseek’s data Kompass, Thomson and Yellow Pages can rest easy, as can Yahoo and Google.

Masterseek’s official global launch is due to take place in November by which time they claim that they will have more than 50 million pieces of company information and more than 1/4 billion indexed websites. Unless they apply more ‘diligence’ to  the quality of the information in their database, my recommendation is to avoid this directory like the plague.

Internet Librarian International

Internet Librarian International – discounted rate available until 26th September

Internet Librarian International is extending the ‘early bird’ discount for conference bookings  to Friday 26 September.

This year’s conference (London, 16 & 17 October) includes:

Library 2.0 and Web 2.0
Forget the hype – how do they work and how will they affect how you provide information?

Search analytics
Do you know how effective your projects are and whether you’re reaching the right audience?

Information search and discovery
The search world continues to evolve – are you keeping up? What do the changes mean bring for your job? [Declaration of interest: I am giving a presentation on ‘Search Tips’ on Thursday 16th October, at 11.45 AM)

Transparency
Why are some institutions more prone to adopting transparency and  collaboration than others?

Web design
You understand the principles of usability, learn how web design continues to evolve

For full details of the event and to register visit the website at  http://www.internet-librarian.com

Twitter

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

As well as being an RSS junkie I confess that I am also a member of the the ‘twitterazi’. Deprived of my regular Twitter fixes I suffer severe withdrawal symptoms. What is infobunny up to? Did Jillbrad manage to print her spreadsheet? Did Tebbo meet up with anyone at T5?

Persuading people that RSS is a good thing is not that difficult, but proving the value of Twitter is hard work.  Chris Brogan’s blog posting  on 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business is a great starting point for ideas on how you can seriously use Twitter. He also lists ‘The Negatives People Will Throw at You’ and ‘Some Positives to Throw Back’.  My personal favourite in the list is number 11: Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?”

Business Information, Top 10 Business Sites

Top Business Research Tips

3 Comments

Yes, I’m sorry, this is another Top !0 list from one of my workshops – a full day in-house session on Business Research. This time around Marketingfile.com  made a return to the list at number 4 after a long absence, three of Alacra sites are at number 2 (nominated by participants as “All the Alacra sites”), and Twitter is at long last being considered as a serious business tool (Yay!!). It is worth noting that this group were interested in Second Life; some of their contacts and clients are involved with Second Life so it would have been useful to have a look at how it works . As usual, though,  we could not connect to SL. It appeared that the ports used by SL were blocked by the by the organisation’s network.

Here is the full list:

1. Internet Archive or Wayback machine at http://www.archive.org/.  For pages, sites and documents that have disappeared. Ideal for tracking down lost documents and seeing how organisations presented themselves on the Web in the past.

2. “All the Alacra sites”.  Not strictly accurate in that it was just three of their business web sites that attracted attention:

Alacrawiki at http://www.alacrawiki.com/. The Alacra Spotlights section is a good starting point for evaluated sites and information on industry sectors. Note that although it is a wiki only Alacra can edit these pages.

Alacrasearch at  http://www.alacra.com/alacrasearch/. A Google custom search engine that focuses on business sites selected by Alacra.

AlacraStore at http://www.alacrastore.com/.  “Search over 70 million reports on more than 550,000 public companies and private companies from over 55 premium business information publishers.” Search for free and pay as you go on your credit/debit card.  A full lost of their content providers is at http://www.alacrastore.com/search-by/publisher.

3. Advanced Search. The advanced search screens of the likes of Google and Yahoo have many options for increasing the precision of your your search: file format (e.g. xls for data and statistics, ppt for expert presentations, pdf for industry or government reports); site and domain search to limit your search to just one web site or a type of organisation (e.g. UK government, US academic); and in Google there is a numeric range search.

4. Marketingfile.com at http://www.marketingfile.com/.  A collection of lists with a bias towards UK and Ireland but there are some International, European and North American lists. The lists are divided into Business and Consumer and further categorised into sectors or type, for example Drinks Trade, Aviation & Defence, Smaller Companies. Each list can be searched by a number of criteria depending on its structure and coverage. Searching is free and data is charged for on a pay per record basis.

5. Freepint at http://www.freepint.co.uk/ Head for the discussion area, labelled as the Bar, where you can post your query and tap into the knowledge of regular ‘tipplers’

6. Trade Association Forum – http://www.taforum.org/ . A useful, searchable directory of UK trade associations.

7. Sector Skills Councils. This was not one that I mentioned in the workshop but is a resource that the organisation that I was visiting often uses. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sector_Skills_Councils) , and please don’t complain that I am citing it:

“Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) are state-sponsored, employer-led organisations that cover specific economic sectors in the United Kingdom. They have four key goals:

  • to reduce skills gaps and shortages
  • to improve productivity
  • to boost the skills of their sector workforces
  • to improve learning supply”

Further information on the Councils can be found at Alliance of Sector Skills Councils,
http://www.sscalliance.org/home/home.asp.

The workshop participants commented that “some of the councils are better than others”.

8. Google, Yahoo, Live, Exalead, Ask. Let’s admit it – much of the time we head for Google as our first port of call, but it is worth running your search in the other contenders. Results are sorted in a different order and they do have different coverage and search features.

9. Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/. “Looks interesting”. “Need to try it out as a source of information”. “Could be useful as a promotion/communications tool”.

10. RBA Business Sources. http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/. Selected sources of business information organised by type e.g. statistics, share prices, company registers. Yes,  my own site, the basis of the workshop notes, and as one person commented “It is the quickest way to get to all the sites you told us about”!

energy, Statistics

Renewable Fuels Agency (RFA)

The Renewable Fuels Agency (RFA) (http://www.dft.gov.uk/rfa/) has been set up by the UK Government to implement the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) (http://www.dft.gov.uk/rfa/aboutthertfo.cfm), which came into force on 1st April 2008. The RTFO obliges fossil fuel suppliers to ensure that by 2010 biofuels account for 5% by volume of the fuel supplied on UK forecourts. The purpose of the RTFO is to “reduce the UK’s contribution to climate change and its reliance on fossil fuels”. The RFA publishes updates on the progress of the RTFO. These include monthly reports on progress on achieving compliance with sustainability criteria and quarterly reports to the Department for Transport and annual reports to parliament. All reports are available on the web site.

With serious questions being raised about the impact of biofuels on food prices, farming and the environment in general, it will be interesting to see how long this all carries on.  The RFA’s first monthly report has just been published and covers the period 15th April – 14th May 2008. The press release contains some good summary statistics for those of us who need to get hold of such data in a hurry. There are ‘associated files’ (PDF and an Excel spreadsheet) that contain more detailed information.

energy, Statistics

The UK Coal Authority

The UK Coal Authority (http://www.coal.gov.uk) aims “to facilitate the proper exploitation of the Nation’s coal resources, whilst providing information and addressing liabilities for which the Authority is responsible, in a professional, efficient and open manner”.

If you own or are purchasing a property in a coal mining area there is a search service that will check whether or not the property might be affected by past or existing mining activity.  The gazetteer (under Information Services) gives an indication of places in Great Britain that may, or may not, require a mining search to be performed.  If you are thinking of moving within the UK it would be as well to check this site as well as the Environment Agency’s ‘In Your Backyard‘ (http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/maps/), which tells you if the area is at risk of flood and whether there’s a landfill site near your house.

The Coal Authority site also has reports on mining activity in the UK and statistics on production. There are links to sites that cover coal mining related topics and information on technologies. The latter includes coal gasification,  cleaner coal technologies and environmental issues. These technology ‘fact sheets’ are a good starting point if you need to get up to speed on the industry jargon and how it all works.

workshops

Autumn one day training courses at Manchester Business School

The following business research skills courses are being run at Manchester Business School from September to October. And yes – I have a vested interest in that I am running the market research workshop!

Maximising Your Qualitative Research Skills and Results
Date: Wednesday 10 September
Trainer: Chris Murphy
Demonstrates this vital form of enquiry needed to make sense of qualitative data. Explores schemes for planning research projects, techniques for documentary evidence, obtaining information, then forming a roadmap for taking initial results further, appraising data quality and reporting findings

Project Management
Date: Tuesday 7 October
Trainer: Chris Murphy
This course provides a set of techniques for managing projects: determining project scope, planning and realisation, project team schedule and control, progress monitoring, software packages? contribution, corrective action if the project strays from course and project reporting

Market Research on the Web
Date: Tuesday 21 October
Trainer: Karen Blakeman
Practical guidance is offered for finding and evaluating statistical, market research and industry information, covering free and fee based services. Suitable for researchers compiling analyses of markets, looking for potential partners, clients, suppliers or who are responsible for competitor intelligence

For more information about the the programme content and course dates or to download a booking form, go to www.mbs.ac.uk/bis-training or call the Business Information Service on 0161 275 6503

Search Engines

TouchGraph Google Browser

Thanks to Phil Bradley for the alert on this search visualisation tool.

TouchGraph is a  Java application that loads into your browser window and displays the networks and connections in your data or a search results list.  There are three free demos that tie into Google,  Amazon and Facebook.  I found the last two very cumbersome to use and limited in their usefulness but the Google one is worth a try.  You type in your keywords or a URL and Google’s results are presented as groups of interconnected ‘blobs’. You can zoom in and out, hide or expand individual groupings and filter results, although I must admit to not having yet mastered the last feature.

TouchGraph

An interesting way to explore search results but I still prefer Cluuz‘s visualisation of web based data.  I may find TouchGraph more useful for looking at connections and relationships within my locally held information so I have signed up for a TouchGraph Navigator trial.