We mentioned these sources about a month ago and the response we received via email was strong. So, we would post again and also add links to many of our other telephone posts.

We continue to use as many of the following services as possible so we can find the pluses and minuses of each. Try them all. What works for us might not work for you. Choice is good. Btw, perfect material here for a demo or a “brown bag” for your organization. Some of the conversion services (voice to text) use both human transcription and speech-to-text technology.

1) CallWave (Free)
Receive voice mail messages as text (SMS) messages. This post has more about personalizing the CallWave/Vtxt Greeting.

2) SpinVox
Convert voicemail to text. Speak your message, have it delivered as a text message to a group of people.

3) Reqall (Free)
Leave your self “audio notes.” Call to listen to them, sent as text email reminders, etc.

4) Jott (Free)
Mobile notes, group messaging, etc.

5) PrivateCaller (Free)
Get a local number (all area codes) for incoming voice mail. Check your voicemail online or on the web (as an audio file).

6) numbr (Free)
Receive a temporary (auto expiring) and anonymous phone number for a selected period (day, week, month) of time. You tell numbr where to forward the calls to. Many other features. For example, don’t except calls from blocked Caller IDs, Do not disturb from xPM to xAM, and several others.

See Also: What Time is It? Accessing the Precise Time by Telephone & Other Tools

See Also: Free International Long Distance from the U.S. and Canada

See Also: Home Prices, Info and Estimates Delivered via SMS
From HouseFront and Zillow Mobile.

See Also: Voice activated directory assistance services and other voice activated resources.
We have found 1-866-MY-TRAFC to be useful right before we hit the road. The service will even call you when traffic reaches a certain level.

See Also: PhoneCasting, CellCasting, MobileCasting
Listen to “podcasts” over the phone. Services like UpSnap and PhoneCasting.com work with any phone. Extra bandwidth and tools not needed. Just dial a number a listen. For example, to listen to The Onion Radio News dial: 1(832) 532-0435 or diggnation at 1(408) 538-2141. While this may seem not something for the tech geek, it makes accessing podcasts and other audio content very easy for the non-geeks (most people) out there. As I think Greg Linden would say, this method is “grandma ready.”

Instant Messaging in Small Academic Libraries

Librarians working in academic libraries may be interested in the latest field initiated study summarizing a Libnet inquiry posted by Gayle Gunderson, Director of the Colorado Christian University Library.

Responses to Gayle Gunderson’s post can be accessed here (4 pages; PDF)

Source: Library Research Service, Colorado

Use of OAI protocol and its impact in digital libraries: a case study in Spain, Portugal and Latin America (2007)
Authors: Fernanda Peset, and Antonia Ferrer, and Imma Subirats, and Adolfo Muñoz,
From the abstract:

The current communication approaches the situation of the development of repositories that use the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for data collection. These type of digital libraries are undergoing a worldwide boom. This work studies the current state of their implantation in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. In order to do so, the existing projects in the official records have been studied using a methodology beyond the existing records of repositories. It concludes that the situation in 2006 is fairly encouraging in so far as the number of projects, but that it is quite deficient as concerns the quantity of data stored.

Direct to Full Text Paper (PDF)
Source: Proceedings International Conference on Semantic Web and Digital Libraries (ICSD-200) (via E-LIS)

A quick post to point out SM2, a service that monitors the blogosphere and other sources for companies, names, etc. We’re going to try it out and will report back. It comes from Techrigy and is currently an invite-only beta. According to the company’s web site the scan both internal material as well as blogs and wikis on the web.

We’re looking forward to learning more and seeing the results SM2 provides. Other companies in this arena include:

+ BlogPulse (more specifically, their parent Nielsen BuzzMetrics)

+BoardTracker (message boards). We’re curious to see if SM2 includes message boards. Same with BoardReader.

+ Biz360.com

+ Cision

+ Factiva Reputation
Management
Factiva made a deal in 2005 with Intelliseek for web reputation monitoring help. Intelliseek was acquired in February 2006 by Nielsen Buzzmetrics.

+ eWatch (part of PR Newswire)

+ Converson

+ CyberAlert

Transferred Google Domain: AdscapeMediaInventoryTest.net
This domain name was first registered about a year ago (August 2, 2006 to be precise) and was transferred to Google Name Servers last week. AdscapeMediaInventoryTest.com and AdscapeMediaInventoryTest.org are not currently registered to any person or organization.

For Web Page Developers from Yahoo: “Speed Up your Web Pages with YSlow”

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool. YSlow gives you:

+ Install Firebug first!
+ Performance report card
+ HTTP/HTML summary
+ List of components in the page
+ Tools including JSLint

Source: Yahoo Developers Network

+ Court Battle Between Recorded Books and NetLibrary Heats Up

+ Local group starts medical industry networking site (via Business Journal of Phoenix)

+ Meet Yahoo Researcher Elizabeth Churchill

Last week at the Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting several MSFT execs took to the stage and discussed (with some demos) MSFT. Transcripts and video from the event are now online.

+ Transcript and Link to Video: Bill Gates

For example, our online site that delivers search results, there is no one who carries a beeper, because the software understands that if any of the hardware component fails, it knows how to redistribute that load. So it’s completely fail-safe. There’s multiple locations. That kind of capability can be provided to even fairly small-scale datacenters.

+ Transcript and Link to Video: Steve Ballmer
From the transcript:

There are software products, enterprise products, client products that really enable people, other software developers, to build software plus service. So we have stuff like Windows Live, and Office Live, Popfly, MSN, Live Search, Virtual Earth for individuals. I’m particularly charged up about what we’re doing in business services. We have an offer now for managed communications and collaboration where we’ll run the e-mail, the collab infrastructure for an enterprise account out of our own data centers.

We’re investing today in two new capabilities. We are going to be an advertising company, and we are going to be a devices company. Being an advertising company means learning about online and operational efficiency. Advertising is a new business model. Now we don’t just talk about ISVs, we talk about publishers.

+ Transcript and Link to Video: Kevin Johnson, President, Platforms and Services Division (
Most of Johnson’s presentation focuses on advertising. He says:

In this last year, I’ve really amplified my personal focus on building this new core business around online advertising.

+ Transcript and Link to Video: Robbie Bach, President, Entertainment and Devices Division
Several points on advertising.

+ Transcript and Link to Video: Ray Ozzie, Chief Technical Officer
Worth reading/watching.

+ Transcript and Link to Video: Craig Mundie, Chief Research & Strategy Officer

The machine will become contextually aware. It essentially has infinite memory or recall capability, and the whole model of search at the global scale is just sort of an indication that there’s not really that much limitation to what we can remember and our ability to go find it. The question is we don’t find it in a way that makes it generally useful to people to build new applications. So the second thing that will happen - and here by “context” I mean not only what you do but the environment in which the machine sits - you know, sensors, video sensors, audio sensors - these all will essentially accumulate context and define the environment.

+ Transcript and Link to Video: Discussion and Questions: Ozzie and Mundie

+ Transcript and Link to Video: Executive Discussion: Ballmer, Gates, and Liddell
Some talk about advertising.
Ballmer says:

On the consumer side our ability to monetize after market a PC with application — I mean, we do better than anybody else selling software. We sell a reasonable amount of Office. You can buy Office for home, student-type use for just over a hundred bucks. And yet most of the Office you would find on home computers has been pirated. And so the notion of being able to monetize — and monetize — I’m not talking about Office now, but in general, advertising is a potential better monetization source in a market where piracy is high; I think we have net opportunity, particularly consumer and tiny businesses, home businesses, et cetera, to actually increase revenue on everything we do that’s application-related, because of the move to software plus services.

Source: Microsoft

For the most part this Reuters article repeats what we posted about last week in this post about the Wikia project. It also points out (something we also mentioned on RS) that LookSmart’s technology will power the advertising platform on Wikia. We also learn that while crawling will be distributed using the newly acquired Grub technology, Wikia will use the open-source Lucene search technology.

Source: Reuters (via News.com)

See Also: As we also mentioned last week, Nutch, part of the Lucene project, is used to crawl and power the massive WebHarvest.gov databases containing permanently archived versions of U.S. government web pages.

From the news release:
A novel, free, public online database opening this week should greatly speed efforts to find genes linked to increase risk of bipolar disorder. The Bipolar Disorder Phenome Database - a joint project of Johns Hopkins Psychiatry and the National Institute of Mental Health - is the first of its kind, offering detailed descriptions of symptoms and course of disease on more than 5,000 people with bipolar illness, a mood disorder commonly marked by alternating bouts of depression and manic or overexcited behavior.

Source: Johns Hopkins Psychiatry and the National Institute of Mental Health

Glossary: Spam Terms
From the Internet security experts at Sophos. From Address harvester to Zombie.

Source: Sophos

Statistics: Global Population Density: Estimates for 2015">Maps and Statistics: Global Population Density: Estimates for 2015

Source: Columbia University and ReliefWeb

New From the United Nations: Sierra Leone Portal

From UN Pulse:

A new online portal intended to meet the information needs of those working to build peace in Sierra Leone was launched last week at UNHQ. The web site, a partnership between Member States, NGOs, the academic community and the Peacebuilding Support Office, is targeted to both practitioners and policy-makers and hopes to consolidate and prioritize information relevant to the elaboration of peacebuilding strategies. This web site provides access to online information on peacebuilding in Sierra Leone, with a focus on four priority areas determined by the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, in consultation with the Government of Sierra Leone.

Source: United Nation via UN Pulse

CyberIntel Source

CyberIntel Source is a free service of Cyveillance providing data, reports and analysis on the latest security threats and trends.

Sections of the site include:

+ Web Risk

As of July 2007, detailed testing of over 110 million registered domains indicates that over 73 million resolve to a live Web site. Of these more than 73 million live Web sites, about one in six sites, or almost 12 million sites, pose a risk to visitors.

+ Malware Risk

As of July 2007, sites hosted at locations within the United States represent the majority of malware hosting locations around the globe.

+ Phishing Risk

+ ID Theft Risk

+ The Incident Blotter has not been updated in nearly 2 months.

Source: Cyveillance

Other Web Resources, Several Updated in Real Time
See Also: Websense Near Real Time Phishing Alerts

See Also: SANS Internet Storm Center

See Also: Internet Traffic Report

See Also: Symantec Security Response Information
Includes searchable database.

See Also: Sophos Hoaxes List ||| Latest Virus Alert (RSS feed) ||| Potentially Unwanted Applications (RSS Feed)

See Also: U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team

See Also: Anti-Phising Working Group

+ Argentina: Electronic Commerce Overview 2007

+ Argentina: Frozen Food
10 pages; PDF

+ Germany: The Golf Equipment Market
7 pages; PDF.

+ Haiti: Telecommunication Market Research June 2007

+ Hong Kong: Cosmetic, Toiletry and Skincare Products
10 pages; PDF.

+ India: Print and Publishing Industry
5 pages; PDF.

+ Italy: Overview of the Waste Recycling Market
7 pages; PDF.

+ Japan: The Esthetic Industry and Cosmetics
7 pages; PDF.

Source: U.S. Commercial Service