Well, done, thought provoking article at: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/.

The first two paragraphs sum up the problem nicely: 

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating
piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami
Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the
sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including
the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a
2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a
teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself,
because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to
read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was
Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I
remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old
kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates
you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about
that conversation a lot these days.

Add to that other disruptive forces, and I'm starting to think that newspapers won't be around in 5-10 years ... who will pay for something that is free!?!

 

A quick link out to Newssift, a news search engine produced by The Financial Times. The site uses semantic search technology, as well as a bit of analysis on the search results to create an interesting new product. While they don't reveal their content sources (and I wish they would at least provide a list of some sort), they have this statement on their site: "Newssift sources consist of thousands of global business news sources and millions of articles, spanning news portals, magazines, newspapers, news wires, research sources, online news, television and radio, and expert commentary."

I could see this being used for quick searches, current awarenes/monitoring type searches as well as to help refine searches and discover relationships between subjects. 

Check it out at: http://www.newssift.com/index.jsp.

Not a lot of time for blogging this week, so here are a few links of interest regarding federated search.

• http://www.altsearchengines.com/2009/01/11/federated-search-finds-content-that-google-cant-reach-part-i-of-iii/ 
• http://www.altsearchengines.com/2009/01/12/a-federated-search-primer-part-ii-of-iii/
• http://www.altsearchengines.com/2009/01/13/a-federated-search-primer-part-iii-of-iii/ 
  

Have a great week!

Been busy with life, holidays, and the introduction of a mischievous Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier into our family, thus haven't had much time to post lately.

Anyway, take a look at the following link: http://www.llrx.com/node/2126/print for a huge list of resources on deep web search tools and resources, compiled by Marcus P. Zillman. There is a lot of information in the list; I'll be reviewing some of the resources for later blog posts.

I've listed the main sections of the guide below (headings taken from the guide):

• Articles, Papers, Forums, Audios and Videos
• Cross Database Articles
• Cross Database Search Services
• Cross Database Search Tools
• Peer to Peer, File Sharing, Grid/Matrix Search Engines
• Presentations
• Resources - Deep Web Research
• Resources - Semantic Web Research
• Bot Research Resources and Sites
• Subject Tracer Information Blogs

Certainly a resource to bookmark and return to ... there is a lot of great information contained in the guide!

OK, sorry for the awful pun. Knol (http://knol.google.com/k) is Google's answer/competitor to Wikipedia, and while it is currently in beta (like much of Google's other properties), I can begin to see some use in the system. Knol differs from Wikipedia in that you can see the authors of an article. So, if I want to author an article on the life and times of budgerigars, I simply need to create an account and publish. If (and this is the key) my article is seen as authoritive, and receives good ratings from other users, the article will get pushed up on the search results page. Knol also allows comments, so be prepared for some constructive criticism if you author on a popular or well-known subject.

It will be interesting to see how Google eventually integrates Knol into their Universal search results ... will Google end up placing Knol results above other resources, such as Wikipedia?

While Knol is still a work in progress, it may become another valuable resource for searchers. Stay tuned! 

In keeping with this week's theme of reviewing some of the existing (free) information resources for conducting research. Today's quick hit is Google's News Archive Search (http://news.google.com/archivesearch), a news search utility that allows the searcher to quickly peer back in time by searching old  editions of newspapers. Results are presented in PDF images, and while not of the best quality, are readable. I did a sample search for Dred Scott, and found a good list of articles pertaining to the decision.

While News Archive is not yet comprehensive,  Google is continuing to add to the index (see their acquisition of paperofrecord.com); hopefully they'll continue building and improving the search functionality, as this could become a valuable tool for students and researchers. 

As a followup to the previous post, thought I'd make sure that I mentioned Google Scholar, Google's academic search engine (see: http://scholar.google.com/). Google Scholar is nice, but I'd like to see it include more power search options, such as what you find in Scirus or Scopus (a fee-based product). Features like citation analysis, searching by subject, by region, as well as other features would be welcome additions.

While Google Searches are good; anyone needing to research scientific information (and lacking a subscription to Scopus or other fee-based services) should check out Scirus (www.scirus.com), a search engine that focuses on the sciences and social sciences on the web. Scirus searches publicly available information sources, such as PubMed, Science Direct, as well as conference proceedings and scientist homepages. In addition, a search on Scirus can often find pre-published information ... not a bad tool for competitive intelligence or environmental scanning.

Wow! That's my initial impression of Viewzi (www.viewzi.com), a new web search visualization site that does some really cool things with websearch. Basically, Viewzi does away with all of the text links, replacing them with well-designed and intuitive results pages ... with a visual flair. Try typing in a company name, then choosing the Google Timeline view ... suddenly, you can get a quick picture of that company's activities in the past few months. Add to that custom news displays, video, audio, shopping and others ... this could be a game changer, if people adapt to the new modes of search. I'm going to evaluate this site further during the upcoming weeks, but I'm really liking what I see so far. Hopefully they'll be able to build on this beta release ... I can see uses for not only personal users but business users as well.

Just read about the Christian Science Monitor's decision to shift production from a daily format to online only (see: http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1029/p25s01-usgn.html for details). As more print outlets cut staff, will we see additional major papers shift to online distribution?  And how will these entities make money (advertising, subscriptions, or a combination)?

Other issues involve how the information generated will be archived ... since they'll be publishing online only, how will we be able to track different versions of an article ... will there be an "article of record" for each online publisher? This will certainly have an impact on companies involved in media monitoring or reputation management or market research. Should be interesting to see how the traditional online search services react ... how will they index the content from these online only publications?

Should be interesting to follow ... the Christian Science Monitor wasn't the first to go totally online, and certainly they'll have company as traditional publishers move to web-only. 

 

I've been asked on occasion how to find information on some of the smaller / growing economies not extensively covered by traditional online services like Dialog, LexisNexis and Factiva. If your organization has a budget for the acquistion of information (we're talking $100s per month and up), consider looking into ISI Securites (www.securities.com). I was lucky enough in a previous contract assignment to work for a company that had a subscription; having never used it before I was impressed by the breadth of information served up by ISI. While there was overlap between ISI and some of the other vendors, I found many unique sources that were only accessible via ISI. Generally they index news sources, trade journals, wires, government reports, market research reports and other information types commonly found on an online system. 

In addition, ISI allows searching in the native language and character set, which also helps retrieve articles not written in English (this can be a challenge without decent translations, however).  Searchers accustomed to the power of Dialog, LexisNexis and Factiva search interfaces might be a bit disapointed in ISI's search tools, but overall they do a decent job (resembles an advanced web search).

ISI does offer a free trial for those interested in the product; but don't get too enamoured of the service unless you have the $$ to spend! Review some of the content sources via their free RSS feeds at: http://www.securities.com/rss_feeds.html. 

I recommend ISI for companies/organizations needing to track information from non-U.S. sources in the emerging markets area.  

Happy Friday to all. Just a few links of interest today while I work on redesigning a directory application I wrote some time ago.

Anyway, while I've been listing a lot of new search startups of late, I haven't paid homage to the pioneers in the search field. So ... here are a few (the "Big Three"):

• Dialog - Strong tools for business and scientific searching.  
• Factiva - Good international coverage (mainly Europe, with some Asian sources).
• LexisNexis - Great source for news monitoring 

Other links:

• Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy.

 

What tools / techniques do researchers use when conducting "environmental scanning" projects? While the general reading and scanning of resources on the web and print help; I've also found services like Scopus can be of great value when looking for trends in scholarly literature ... some concepts and new ideas will be published in these journals before they're ever seen in everyday life. I've made extensive use of Scopus's ability to do link analysis. One of my favorite techniques is to find articles we liked from 5 - 10 years back, look up the articles on Scopus, then check the citation records to see who cited the original article and what the original authors have published since. In some cases, I'll find completely new concepts to research that cite the orignial articles. 

Of course one can also subscribe to specialized mailing lists to listen in to subject specialists ... occassionally you'll find news/developments months before they break in the traditional media.