What I Learned Today: Programming, Research, Life

Moving shop ...

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:50:00 GMT

I'll be moving this blog to a different platform over the weekend. We'll be using BlogEngine.NET, which is a snap to setup and has support for social networking, etc ... plus it is open source. New blog will be at: blog.lcm-res.com.

Summize ... Searching Twitter

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:25:00 GMT

If you're needing to track a brand, do some in-depth CI, you may want to add Summize.com into your search toolkit.

Summize searches Twitter, featuring both a simple and advanced search. Advanced allows searching by person, places, attitudes, dates, as well as simple keywords, providing good options if you have a precise search. Those searching for common brands or keywords will possibly be overwhelmed by the non-relevant links returned ... but if you're monitoring a large brand, you'll possibly be running all of your content through additional analytic software.

Summize also provides an API, which could be usefull for companies looking to integrate these searches into their portals.

Yahoo's BOSS, or Build Your Own Search Service

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:17:00 GMT

Just read about a new release from Yahoo ... they've created a new web service platform that allows developers to access their search index and content, allowing much deeper integration into your applications than services like Google Custom Search.

Read more about the release at: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000599.html.

I think this is a good move for Yahoo, if it is successful, perhaps it will push other search engine companies (Google?) to open up their indexes to developers. At the very least, it might encourage some innovation in the search engine arena.

I've listed a couple of search services that use Yahoo's BOSS API (taken from their blog post) ... some companies are attempting to build businesses using BOSS.

Me.dium - http://me.dium.com/
Hakia - http://www.hakia.com/
Daylife To-Go - http://www.daylife.com/page/yahoosearchondaylife
Cluuz - http://www.cluuz.com/

Hopefully this works, the search engine landscape really needs some competitors to Google.

Web 3.0, Semantic Search

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:12:00 GMT

AltSearchEngines just posted a great summary of semantic search, which will be part of "Web 3.0" services.

SearchMe ... A new way to look at web search

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:07:00 GMT

As the bandwidth of the typical Internet user increases, search engine companies are beginning to create new ways of visualizing web search. The SearchMe (still in beta) interface presents results as a series of screenshots of the actual websites; see below for an example of the "st. louis market research" search:

SearchMe also allows for the creation of "stacks" (basically bookmarked sites in a visual way), which you create by dragging a "site" from your results screen to be grouped with other sites. This is a nice feature, and could be useful for researchers browsing topics and other sites.

Other nice features are the highlighting of terms on the search results.

Overall, I've been initially impressed by this technology; I'll be using it more over the next few weeks to evaluate the relevancy of the search results as compared to Google and other engines.

Access SearchMe at: www.searchme.com.

More on Google, Yahoo, MSFT from the NYT

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:31:00 GMT

Link of the day goes to yesterday's article from the NYT ... read more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/business/14nocera.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin.

Yahoo, Microsoft & Google

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 19:26:00 GMT

TechCrunch has a great analysis of the failed MSFT / Yahoo deal, and how the Google/Yahoo deal compares.

I agree with the author ... Yahoo should have swallowed their pride and taken Microsoft's deal ... it would have been good for the company and shareholders, and would have at least provided a bit of competition to the Google behemoth.

Truveo News

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:50:00 GMT

Truveo announced today new features, and performance enhancements for its video search engine, including improvements in video playback, linking related videos, sharing, rating and usability.

Truveo, although not as well known as YouTube and other video sites, indexes over 100 million videos from thousands of sources, including HULU and others. Truveo also has developed an API for developers and users to create new uses for their video content.

Twingly goes live

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:16:00 GMT

Twingly, a new blog search platform that promises "spam free" results, just went live. Check them out at: http://www.twingly.com/.

Try running a search on their "regular" blog search engine, then repeating the same search on the "spam free" search, which is currently in beta. I've found a significant difference (and in most cases, improvement) in the results when using the "spam free" search on Twingly.

I hope that Twingly continues to develop and improve their product ... Google and Technorati certainly need some competition.

IIS 7, Links for configuration

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:51:00 GMT

As I get used to my new laptop with Vista (not as bad as everyone has indicated ...), I found the following page extremely helpful in setting up a local instance of IIS 7 on the laptop for development purposes.

Go to: http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2007/05/21/tips-for-classic-asp-developers-on-iis7.aspx.

It really helped me get everything running quickly, with only a small amount of pain and suffering.

Yidio, Yet Another New Video Search Provider

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:18:00 GMT

Yidio just quitely launched their new search engine (powered by Aol's Truveo). This site searches many of the video site (youtube, etc.) and also searches some local media and news outlets, as well as over 2500 full-length movies.

Searching is simple and straightforward, nothing really special, other than they do search a good library of content.

Yidio could be a good source for the casual user, or for a media monitoring campaign on a budget. Those wishing for more comprehensive broadcast coverage would do well to go to a commercial provider.

Once of these days someone will launch a video search engine that makes one notice ... we just haven't seen it yet.

See more at www.yidio.com.

VC Surveys, plus a bit on Nitrogen and Tires

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:32:00 GMT

A few links of interest before I begin a day of programming ...

Found this link on VentureBeat, it discusses the globalization of innovation going on around the world. While the report states that the U.S. still maintains a lead, other countries are beginning to catch up. Read more at: http://www.nvca.org/.

Also caught a bit on the local news here on the supposed benefits of filling up auto tires with pure Nitrogen instead of regular old air (which is about 78% Nitrogen anyway). Consumer Reports recently did a bit of testing, and found that Nitrogen could have a small benefit, but doesn't spare the motorist from checking tire pressure (you do this, correct?). Read more at Consumer Report's Nitrogen in Tires FAQ.

NewsTin - News and Media Monitoring

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:47:00 GMT

Take a look at NewsTin (www.newstin.com), a relatively new site aggregating news from multiple sources and languages. Currently Newstin features content in Arabic, Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian and Czech.

Newstin organizes information into various topical categories (Top Stories, World, Sports, Business, Politics, Tech, Entertainment), and it allows users to search by keywords as well. Nifty features include the ability to search and read information from other languages (see: http://www.newstin.com/info/crosslinguality_help for more information), as well as featuring a large source list and advanced features such as duplicate detection, so readers won't encounter the same press release multiple times.

I'll be testing the service out in depth over the next few weeks; I think this could be a valuable tool for the individual user, as well as corporate users in PR or media monitoring.

OS Security Discussion

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:07:00 GMT

Ed Bott discusses some of coverage of Vista's security issues, and tries to place in context of real-world users. Go to: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=455&tag=nl.e622 to read more.

NextBio, a life sciences search engine

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:11:00 GMT

NextBio (www.nextbio.com) uses the internet to search not only journal articles and other published information, but also data points from study results, allowing a researcher to drill down much deeper into their field of study, discovering new correlations and techniques from other scientists.

NextBio also allows the upload of data, allowing a researcher to post their own data, then run a search against NextBio to find any similarities or matches.

This is a search engine FOR scientific researchers; others can find the published information via alternate outlets such as PubMed (a data supplier to NextBio).

NextBio is currently in beta, and is free to search.

Google's Android Developer Challange

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:52:00 GMT

DB for tracking Import / Export

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Sat, 17 May 2008 09:20:00 GMT

I just learned about a new service called ImportGenius.com from the folks over at altsearchengines.com.

This service takes the shipping manifests from the US customs (Automated Manifest System), and provides access via their website. ImportGenius presents the information in a easy-to-understand manner, allowing companies to track their suppliers and competitors via a series of screens and queries. PIERS, available via Dialog, as well as direct from various US government websites also tracks import/export stats.

If ImportGenius can make this often arcane data easier to use, they'll have a usefull product.

Friday Links of Interest

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Links of the day:

That's all for now!

Google Doctype ... Online Reference For Web Developers

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:13:00 GMT

Google just released an online reference encyclopedia of HTML, CSS, and other web-related technologies. Find it at: http://code.google.com/doctype/. This is an open source effort, and is open to contributions.

My first impressions are positive ... if they can collect code snippets and examples this might become the first place I visit when needing to learn more about a web technology.

Microsoft's Touchwall Demo

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Thu, 15 May 2008 03:17:00 GMT

Check out this video of Microsoft's Touchwall, recently demonstrated at Microsoft's CEO Summit. While this won't be in production any time soon, it is interesting, and I can think of several applications that would benefit from this technology.

Tech Tips ... Creating an XP SP3 install CD

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Tue, 13 May 2008 13:55:00 GMT

For those of us still running (and planning to continue) XP, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has a post on his blog with instructions on how to creat a "slipstreamed" XP SP3 disc. Go to: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1848&tag=nl.e622 to read more. If you have and XP installation, this is a prudent thing to do, especially since Microsoft will stop selling XP soon.

The Quest For Natural Language Search

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:46:00 GMT

I've monitored players in the search industry for a long time, and have seen quite a few players introduce (and later discard or forget about ...) natural language search interfaces for their databases. Basically, a natural language search interprets a plain english query ("I'm looking for blue and green budgerigars in Australia") instead of the keyword/boolean (bugerigars blue green Australia) interface we use on Google and the other search engines.

Currently there are several would-be search engines looking at NLP (natural language processing) as a feature to help differentiate themselves from Google and the other major search engine players.

Techcrunch's post about Powerset (see: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/10/powersets-dilemma-go-for-it-or-sell/ ) is an interesting read, if only for the comments regarding NLP and Powerset in particular (strong opinions on this topic from a lot of folks). Currently Powerset only searches Wikipedia articles; they'll need to be able to scale to other media types and/or begin offering an enterprise search options (another crowded space).

Another player in this area is www.cognition.com. They have a NLP search platform, and seem to be targetting vertical industries for their technology demonstrations. If they could scale this technology to index a large swath of the web (or even a subset, much like Scirus does for Sci-Tech), it could be very useful; check out their search comparisons on the site to see how some of their canned searches rannk against Google's.

UPDATE: The 20bits blog ran some interesting comparisons on Powerset vs Google. Check them out at: http://20bits.com/2008/05/12/powerset-launches-verdict-meh/. There analysis illustrates one key point in the search engine competition ... until someone designs an engine that consistently beats Google in terms of quality AND breadth of content (especially in niche or vertical areas), Google will continue to dominate the search landscape.

BlinkX to be Acquired (Google or Newscorp)?

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:50:00 GMT

Video search is certainly attracting attention lately. This news article from Reuters discusses acquisition talk regarding BlinkX and several suitors, including Google and Newscorp.

With video search becoming more important to individual users, as well as corporate shops ... should be interesting to see what happens to the smaller players in this market niche.

Provider to Watch ... CastTV

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:43:00 GMT

OK, so they're still in private beta, and I still haven't received my beta invite yet (go to www.casttv.com to request an invite). CastTV's published goal is to index every video on the web ... while this would be a really good thing, how about "indexing every video on the web, while providing the user with the tools to retrieve highly relevant results". Yes, I'm talking about not wanting to see every video uploaded to youtube.com (why do people upload the same content, over and over ...), just return relevant results (some of us would even pay for this!).

Do this, and Google Video, BlinkX and EveryZing will have some additional competition!

Deep Thoughts, On Video ...

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:35:00 GMT

Link of the day today is TED, located at: http://www.ted.com/index.php. This site collects videos by the worlds "greatest thinkers and doers", on a variety of topics, including: politics, technology, entertainment, design, business, culture and art. The site is free, and is worth a look, also could be valuable for any organization wishing to monitor current thinking on some of the above topics.

Link of the Day: Free CSS Admin Template

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:22:00 GMT

Check out the free admin template, available at: http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/free-admin-template-for-web-applications/. If you're currently just concentrating on your code, this could be a great resource.

First Text, Now Images ...

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:10:00 GMT

VentureBeat reports that Google is working on a new image search algorithm that promises to be the "page rank" for image search. Instead of relying on text tags to search for the images, the new (not released ... perhaps not even in development) system would extract information from the images themselves ... perhaps something like what is currently being used for facial recognition.

This would be nice ... I'd love to be able to type in a description for industrial machinery, and possibly retrieve diagrams and pictures of the exact machine. In addition, it would be great to have better search tools for video and audio ... without having to resort to text tags.

We'll have to wait and see ... perhaps someone else can develop this sooner than Google!

Link: XP sp3 vs Vista Performance

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:47:00 GMT

If you're not a Mac or Linux user, the following post from ZDnet might be of interest. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes benchmarks several versions of XP against a couple of Vista versions ... good stuff. Read more at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1772&tag=nl.e622.

He will be releasing gaming benchmarks later today, which will provide an additional "real world" performance test. Bottom line is that Vista seems to be out-performing XP sp3 (especially the 64 bit versions).

Before launching/naming that product ...

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:23:00 GMT

Before even thinking about designing that new name or marketing mark, remember to check out the USPTO's free search utility at: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=tess&state=6t5g1f.1.1.

While it won't replace the services of a good patent and trademark attorney, this could save some $$, especially if you find that your "unique"concept was already taken, and has been in use for 10 years.

BlinkX adds content provider

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:38:00 GMT

BlinkX (www.blinkx.com), the video search provider, recently added yet another content provider to their growing portfolio of sources. According to the TelevisionPoint.com press release, BlinkX will carry content updated daily from Headlines Today, the English portal of India Today. Add this to the growing list of online partners, and BlinkX is beginning to look like one of the top choices for video search.

Blog Search, With a bit of Analytics on the side

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 04:04:00 GMT

Check out the beta of Trendpedia (www.trendpedia.com), a blog search engine. This engine allows you to query blog postings, and create a trend chart based on the results. This is a nice feature, and will be useful, once Trendpedia solves the puzzle of spam postings to blogs. Query any large company or product, and you'll find many false positive posts ... not a good thing. Trendpedia could develope into a nifty resource for anyone needing to monitor and analyze blogs ... put this one on your watch list.

Alert ... This happened in 2007!

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:42:00 GMT

I'm currently using Google Alerts to track a couple of companies and industries, and was surprised (but not shocked), when Google "alerted" me of a job posting for one of the companies that was posted in 2007. While this was due to Google's spider discovering a new page that fit my search criteria, I'm wondering why we can't eliminate these situations from the alerts.

Anyway, Google Alerts are free, so I really can't squawk too much over the features, and these false positives aren't really that difficult to filter out ... just wouldn't mind NOT seeing them!

BuzzLogic Acquires ActiveWeave ...

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:44:00 GMT

As reported on TechCrunch, BuzzLogic, a media monitoring/reputation management/buzz tracker (insert your description of this space here ... ) just acquired Activeweave, which will give them additional information about who is reading blogs. Activeweave's Firefox plugin, BlogRovR has about 180,000 users (TechCrunch), giving BuzzLogic a nice sample to use for analytics.

I'm wondering, however, if all of those users are active readers, and if they'll be thrilled about having their reading habits (no matter how well cloaked) integrated into a private company's algorithm. Also, what happens if the little space of the blogsphere you're tracking doesn't have many of this user base reading the posts (foreign blogs, niche industries), etc.

Potential problems aside, this is a good move by BuzzLogic ... it gives them at least a method of inching closer to the "holy grail" of marketers ... demographics on every publication they track ... right now, an impossible task.

Earthquake!

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:23:00 GMT

In honor of the minor earthquake that awakened me this morning, here are a couple of links:

Have a great weekend!

Link: "All I need is a Programmer"

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:52:00 GMT

Thought this post needed another link ... it asks a couple of good questions about software development and business. Read the full post at: http://codeclimber.blogspot.com/2008/04/all-i-need-is-programmer.html

Look out Invisible Web, Here Comes Google!

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:08:00 GMT

From the Google Webmaster Central Blog, it seems that Google is now selectively crawling and indexing content from the "invisible web" (content requiring form submissions or search parameter inputs ... often found in Government and Industry sites).

This should be a good feature for Google ... though what is needed perhaps a bit more is the categorization of the available data sets on these sites, accessible via a single search interface (not a trivial undertaking).

According to Google, they are only selectively indexing sites that are open (no password protected sites yet) and that the additional pages won't affect the existing site's pageranking.

Read more on this at the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

AOL still in business ... acquires Sphere!

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:31:00 GMT

OK, couldn't resist the first part of the post title. Of course AOL is still in business, they have valuable properties like Truveo and now, Sphere. Read the PR at: http://www.sphere.com/blog/2008/04/15/aol-buys-sphere/, TechCrunch also has a posting and analysis.

What does this mean for bloggers/searchers? Hopefully AOL will be able to fund some improvements in the search area, to help Sphere produce even more relevant results (they do pretty well already), minus the spam.

Alternate modes to watch / find videos

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:25:00 GMT

I'm a great fan of Lost in Space, and am always looking for old episodes on cable channels (I'm too cheap to purchase the DVDs). Thus, I was quite surprised to find that HULU (www.hulu.com) actually had complete episodes available online, in addition to a large library of other content such as new sitcom shows from the networks.

Hulu is a joint venture of NBC and Newscorp, and is currently free ... this is certainly worth a look ... I'm having fun just browsing through some of their content.

BlinkX ... Video Search

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:31:00 GMT

Ive been experimenting with BlinkX video search (www.blinkx.com), and am liking it thus far.

BlinkX searches public sites, as well as feeds from broadcasters, claiming to index over 18 million videos. While impressive, the 18 million videos is also a problem, as sample searches also retrieved a lot of non-relevant and duplicate results (why do people feel the need to re-upload a video they just watched on YouTube) making it a bit of a problem when searching a large industry or major company.

Like all search engines, BlinkX needs better and more powerful search tools; however, it is a good resource, one that all searchers should use when tracking a company or industry.

Thursday Links of Interest, (Fee vs Free, Data Sources)

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:29:00 GMT

Check out the discussion going on about paying for development tools at the Coding Horror blog: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001097.html. I've always preferred not to pay for a development tool (who does?), but have often done so, simply because some of these tools allow me to: deploy a project quickly, add additional features ... as long as I can get a fully functionaly demo of the tool, I have no problems purchasing.

ReadWriteWeb's article on where to find open data on the web, and the need for tools/sites to help is also worth a read. When I think of "free datasets", I usually find myself at some government site or NGO site. Read the full post here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/where_to_find_open_data_on_the.php.

Tags:dev tools, data sources

Google Apps Engine

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:04:00 GMT

Google just released yet another product that will probably cause disruption among established companies (Amazon, Microsoft, etc.). The product/service is called Google App Engine, and it promises better integration than Amazon, with a fully integrated development environment. Currently, only Python is supported, but Google promises this will be platform neutral, thought I doubt we'll see support for .NET applications anytime soon.

Some other views on this:

I'll be following this closely ... while I was too slow to get in on the initial 10000 accounts, I'd looking forward to experimenting with this. Privacy will be a concern, as Google will be privy to all of the information in the databases.

No spam with my blog search results, please ...

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:23:00 GMT

Anyone who searches blogs for company mentions has experienced it ... retrieving hundreds of "spammy" postings completely unrelated to the topic searched, specifically because someone is placing company names into their postings or tags as keywords. And since most search engines interpret those keywords as part of the text, the "false" postings are returned with the valid articles. While not an issue for narrowly focussed searches, this is a huge problem for anyone needing to monitor company or industry news via blogs ... Google and Technorati just don't provide the tools needed to filter out the junk postings.

Enter Twingly (www.twingly.com), a European startup that is promising "spam-free" blog searching. They recently entered into beta, and my initial impressions are favorable, though I withhold judgement until they're indexing a larger portion of the blogsphere. Currently Twingly allows searching with the following limiters:

Spam Free Index or All Blogs
Languages
Time
Rank

I've found the search performance fast, and am encouraged by the quality of results retrieved, especially when searching the "Spam Free" index. Twingly should be on any searcher's watchlist ... they could provide some much-needed competition to Google and Technorati (as well as some of the other blog search engines).

"Free" is Killing Us ...

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 11:40:00 GMT

Read http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/_free_is_killing_us_blame_the_vcs from the Silicon Alley Insider for a look at how all of the "free" services out their may not be great for the industry.

I see this in the content arena especially; will Dialog, LexisNexis, Factiva be able to charge for content 5 years from now? What about in 10? Will the value provided by these companies be outweighed by people simply settling for the "free" versions of the data ... basically, the searcher finding "an answer" instead of the searcher finding "the correct answer".

Fun with Baseball ...

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:32:00 GMT

To help celebrating the launch of the baseball season ... which usually has more than a few surprises for teams, as injuries and other factors always influence the final standings. Track the baseball buzz by visiting Ballbug, an aggregator of the top web and blog posts about our favorite sport (well, my favorite sport ... closely followed by tennis). I especially like the Ballbug Leaderboard, which provides a listing of the top sources included in Ballbug.

Digitizing newspapers on a local scale

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:41:00 GMT

For an interesting, and perhaps useful (if you live in New York or are interested in New York history), check out this site: http://www.fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html, a searchable collection of newspaper articles from 1832 - 2005.

I've always wondered why some of the historical libraries and associations didn't do this more often, since they are the gatekeepers of this type of information, and since it doesn't help anyone if it is never used or seen. The Fulton Historical Society deserves a big pat on the back! Community efforts like these could really help provide better access to historical documents, which would otherwise be in a sort of limbo ... the only way you'll see them is if you hike out to the local library.

Umbria bought by J.D. Power ...

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:42:00 GMT

Umbria, another one of the smaller media monitoring companies was acquired by J.D. Power (they are a part of McGraw Hill publishing) today; will 2008 see further consolidation in this industry?

Microsoft Surface - First Customer and Deployment

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:21:00 GMT

News.com reports that the Microsoft Surface device will be installed in several ATT stores, with additional rollouts in the future. I'll be interested to see if this interface can be exploited ... I can think of several shopping and design applications that would greatly benefit from this technology (or could only be workable using this tech, or something more advanced).

Link to the original article is at news.com.

Onkosh, an Arabic Search Engine

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:25:00 GMT

Yes, I know that Google is the default search engine for all of us, but often it is worthwhile to search different places, especially when searching information about different countries. Try using the localized versions of Google or Yahoo ... or try a different search engine, such as Onkosh.

Onkosh specializes in indexing Arabic sites, news, blogs and forums. It is easy-to-use, has both Arabic and English versions and claims to be one of the largest indexes of Arabic information on the Internet. It is certainly worth bookmarking this site for the next time you need to find a blog about Lebanon.

Silobreaker ... another CI, Current Awareness, Media Monitoring Portal

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:36:00 GMT

The addition of analytics and additional functionality to a search portal can be a useful bonus for individuals requiring deeper understanding of a topic or company and how it relates to the other industries and companies. While major media monitoring and PR firms can charge huge fees for doing this, Silobreaker joins a growing number of free and low-cost search portals that are offering analytics previously only seen in commercial products.

Since Silobreaker currently only searches freely available sources, the content coverage isn't as broad as services that can integrate fee-based databases (although they do have a "request content" link on their site). However, they do a good job at covering the major sources, which in most cases are what the public reads (though I was somewhat amused to see that they had some of the same problems I've experienced in the past ... pulling multiple versions of the same video from youtube). Their analytics, while simple, are robust enough to track trends, media coverage geographics, and network, as well as extracting key executives and other data points from the data

It will be interesting to see how Silobreaker develops their services ... if they add enough additional analytics and additional data sources, they could begin stealing some business from some of the traditional players. Smaller companies (and budget minded ones) could benefit by using Silobreaker.

Northern Light, Redux

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 01:56:00 GMT

Just read the Information Today blog regarding the release of its new Business Research engine (available at www.nlsearch.com). It is worth a look, and could be a valuable tool for small businesses needing to track industries and/or companies.

The Death of Relational Databases?

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:25:00 GMT

As I'm working on another database, I came across this interesting discussion about relational databases and the semantic web. I especially liked some of his quotes regarding the relational dbs ... "brittle but strong" certainly describes some of the dbs I've encountered over the years!

Anyway, visit the "Why does everything suck" blog to read more.

Back to creating me some brittle dbs!

Viewdle, Next Generation Video Search Engine

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:25:00 GMT

One of my favorite sites, Alt Search Engines (visit them often to learn more about new developments in search), recently posted the following article on Viewdle, a new video search engine. Viewdle differs from other video search engines in that it extracts information from each video frame (instead of using close captioning, for example) and can use facial recognition technology to identify individuals.

Aside from better search results, this technology offers benefits for companies tracking their brands and other information ... stay tuned to their site as they will be offering new products and services soon.

Where did it go? What happens when publishers restrict or remove sources from aggregators?

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:44:00 GMT

Commercial users of the Financial Times content via major aggregators like Dialog, LexisNexis may soon (April 1, 2008) find that they can no longer access the content via their favorite online service. The Financial Times will restrict access to the most current content for commercial subscribers, unless they first pay a licensing fee to the Financial Times, who then register this with the aggregators. See the article from Information Today or visit the Financial Times to learn more.

If this works, I'd expect more major publishers to follow, with at least partial embargoes on the most current content. Competitive Intelligence, Reputation Management and Media Monitoring companies will be affected the most by these changes since they require the current information for their systems.

Video Search Resources ...

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:16:00 GMT

Time for the list of the day; I've been monitoring the development of video search via a variety of methods ... here are a couple of the more notable companies in this space:

The Big Guys (covering most of the U.S. TV stations):

Other players:

I'm assuming that the reader already knows about Google Video, YouTube, Yahoo Video, MSN Video ... !

What happens when you don't find the correct resources ... ?

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:49:00 GMT

Google and other search engines have certainly made it easier for anyone to find information via a few simple keywords and mouse clicks, are they finding the "right" information?

Read this older (but still highly relevant) discussion of this topic for a critical look at the "The high cost of not finding information", by Sue Feldman to learn more.

Scoping out top journals using the Scopus API ...

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:41:00 GMT

Scopus (www.scopus.com) is one of the better end-user search tools for searching peer reviewed literature. The service itself is a bit out of reach for individual users, but many people may be able to access it via their University's website (all the more reason to join the Alumni club).

In addition, Elsevier opened up the API, giving 3rd party companies the opportunity to use the information on Scopus. The best in class thus far is www.scimagojr.com, a service that allows users to visualize citation rankings from the Scopus db, tracked by industry. In addition, they allow free downloading of journal lists as well. This could be a useful fool for anyone looking to generate lists of top research journals by an industry and/or geography.

Back to posting ... a few favorite sources.

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 03:36:09 GMT

We'll try to start posting a bit more these days ... at least more than 3 times in the last year.

Libraries and finding info

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Fri, 04 May 2007 13:26:00 GMT

Head over to ALA's Techsource blog to read a couple of interesting posts regarding library catalogs ... articles cover usability and functionality of many of today's library catalogs. For example, why is it that I can't maintain a history of my checkouts (only of items I select, this wouldn't happen automatically) at my local library? This would help me remember series I've read, authors I like/dislike ... perhaps it could even notify me when a new book by a favorite author is out ... kind of like Amazon!

Here are the links:

Here's to a better library catalog.

2nd post, hurray!!! Ubuntu Rocks!

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 19:11:00 GMT

Linux has been a favorite tool of mine for some time now ... I've successfully used it to give new life to older machines, and newer releases are making this process much easier.

I even installed it on one of my computer challenged friend's old laptop, and he has been using it to surf the web and access email for a couple of months. This was a huge surprise ... Linux is actually easy enough for a complete novice to use ... perhaps not as easy (when it works) as Windows to patch, but at least my friend didn't have to purchase a new system or plunk down 100+ on a new copy of Windows.

Anyway, Ubuntu just released a new version of their distro, and it is really nice. Learn more at www.ubuntu.com.

First post on the DNN platform

lmrazek@lcm-res.com (Lawrence Mrazek) — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 04:00:00 GMT

This is the first post on our new site, powered by the Dotnetnuke content management platform.p>

I've been using DNN off and on over the past few years, and am amazed at how far the system has progressed in such a short time (it is free, you know ). I currently have several clients running off this software; it is great for associations, and for people who really like to manage the content without having to yell out for a web guy!

My goals for this site and blog are to collect and publish many of the tips and techniques I've learned in the past years ... hopefully someone will find it of use!

For now, here is a link to one of my favorite sites: http://stlouis.cardinals.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=stl