Archive for August, 2007

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Some Social Networks May Never Support Brand Advertising

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

Summary Only: Some Social Networks May Never Support Brand Advertising (via IDC)
From the summary:

To generate new revenues in the future, IDC expects that most social network services will employ a mix of business models, including advertising, subscriptions, and e-commerce. Of these three models, only advertising scales well enough to make social networks interesting for portals and major media companies. So far, however, little advertising can be found on social networks. And while the issues underlying slow ad sales may eventually be solved, some services may never be able to attract brand advertisers on a large scale.

Source: IDC

Posted in Information Industry, Search News | No Comments »

Briefs: GPO Authenticates Electronic Documents; blinkx Announces 28 New Media Partnerships to Serve Niche Audiences

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

+ UK: 61% of households had Internet access in 2007

In 2007, nearly 15 million households in Great Britain (61 per cent) had Internet access. This is an increase of just over 1 million households (7 per cent) over the last year and nearly 4 million households (36 per cent) since 2002.

+ GPO Authenticates Electronic Documents
See Also: FDLP Desktop Beta 3.0 Launched

+ blinkx Announces 28 New Media Partnerships to Serve Niche Audiences

+ Changes at Google Scholar: A Conversation With Anurag Acharya (via Info Today)

Posted in Government Documents and Political Information, Multimedia Search, Search News | No Comments »

New Updated Maps via ReliefWeb, Perry-Castañeda Library, and Other Sources

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

+ Iran – Iranian Missiles, Ranges
Source: Federation of American Scientists

+ Iraq – Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, Regulation of (UNEP/GRID)
Source: United Nations Environmental Program

+ Rainfall Forecast Somalia
Source: Famine Early Warning System Network

+ Floods in Asia: Overview Map (as of 29 Aug 2007)
Source: International Federation of Red Cross And Red Crescent Societies

+ Niger: Floods
Source: International Federation of Red Cross And Red Crescent Societies

+ Myanmar: Floods
Source: International Federation of Red Cross And Red Crescent Societies

+ Peru: Earthquake Program Map (as of 27 Aug 2007)

+ Reference Map of Uganda (as of Jul 2007)
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

+ Map of Flood Water over the Affected State of Bihar, India
Source: UNOSAT

+ Sudan: Darfur Crisis – Seven-Day Rainfall Forecast (August 23 – 29, 2007)
Source: Famine Early Warning System Network

Posted in Geographic, Resources for Educators, Source File | No Comments »

Resources for Educators: The NIH Curriculum Supplement Series; Free Lesson Plans on Racial Understanding

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

Resources for Educators: The NIH Curriculum Supplement Series

Supplements are now aligned to state standards. Download the alignment of a supplement to individual state standards in science, mathematics, English Language Arts, and (when available) health. More state alignments will be added as they are completed.

See Also: Curriculum Supplement Series News

+ Free Lesson Plans on Racial Understanding (via SLJ)
If you’re planning a lesson on race relations, you may want to consider this: RaceBridges.net, a nonprofit organization that seeks to promote racial harmony in schools, is offering a set of four lesson plans to high school teachers and librarians.

Posted in Resources for Educators, Science, Source File | No Comments »

Map: Southern Iraq: Oil Infrastructure

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

+ Map: Southern Iraq: Oil Infrastructure
1 pages; PDF
Source: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Posted in Geographic, New Websites and Resources, Resources for Educators, Source File | No Comments »

Statistics: Provisional Vital Statistics for 2006 Released. Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths: Provisional Data for 2006

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

Statistics: Provisional Vital Statistics for 2006 Released. Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths: Provisional Data for 2006
6 pages; PDF.
Source: National Center for Health Statistics, CDC

Posted in Fast Facts, Source File, Statistics | No Comments »

Lists & Rankings: Top 100 Companies in China

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

Lists & Rankings: Top 100 Companies in China

A rush of listings on the Hong Kong and Shanghai exchanges added a dozen newcomers to Fortune’s annual list of China’s 100 largest publicly traded companies. One of them had the largest share offering in the world: Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, which raised $21.9 billion last October. As China’s biggest bank by revenue and Asia’s most profitable bank, with profits of $6.2 billion last year, it grabbed the No. 4 spot on this year’s list.

Users can sort using the following criteria:
2007 Rank
2006 Rank
Company
Revenues ($ millions)
Profits ($ millions)
Market value as of 12/31/2006 ($ millions)
Industry

Top 3
1) China Petroleum & Chemical
2) Petro China
3) China Mobile

Source: Fortune

Posted in Lists and Rankings, Statistics | No Comments »

Number and Diversity of SAT® Takers at All-Time High…and other full-text reports on DocuTicker

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

Posted 28 August 2007 on DocuTicker:
+ Number and Diversity of SAT® Takers at All-Time High (College Board)
+ U.S.: Household Income Rises, Poverty Rate Declines, Number of Uninsured Up (U.S. Census Bureau)
+ Awareness and Perceptions of the Movie “Sicko” (Kaiser Family Foundation)

Posted in Best of DocuTicker, Source File | No Comments »

So Many Reviews, So Little Time: Summize Product Review Search with Meta Aggregation

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

So Many Reviews, So Little Time: New Search Resource, Summize
We’re posting more and more about what we call search and intelligence resources. These include
search tools like:
+ FareCast (air fares + pricing intelligence)
+ mPire (product pricing intelligence)
+ Wize (product review aggregation and algorithm (WizeRank) that assigns a specific score to the reviews)
and others.

Today, word of a new beta that like Wize takes user-generated reviews from disparate web sites and aggregates them into a single entry with links (of course) to read each review.

Say Hello to Summize.

This type of value added service is becoming increasingly necessary especially for reviews. Why? Many reasons, one of them being human nature (for example, if you ask 10 people about a specific hotel you’re going to get several different reviews. From, “this place is awesome,” to “I’m almost positive I saw a cockroach crawl across my bed.” Of course, it’s not only hotels but books, DVD’s, restaurants, video games, you name it.

Fast Facts:
+ Summize says they have 19 million reviews of 2 million products in their database at this time.
+ We didn’t find much in the way of travel but hopefully that’s on the way
+ Here’s the Summize entry for the iPhone
++ Note total number of reviews that make up the “meta review”
++ Source List (in this case, CNET, Amazon.com, Yahoo Shopping, ConsumerSearch and others). Each hyperlinked.
++ Toggle for “Snips” and “Stars.” This page does a great job of explaining how it all works. This is an assigned score.
+++ Snips. Cursor over each color and see total number reviews in that category (sweet, bad, wretches, great, etc.). Get a quick overview as each color represents a different review category. Color blind? Summize has a solution for you.
+++ Stars. Just like in a movie review. A total number of starts for the product.

Clicking on the star rating takes the searcher to more info including what Summize believes to be the “best” reviews for the product. It’s also interesting to see the views over time. For example, this Bluetooth telephone headset.

Clicking the product name takes the user to a store to purchase the product or learn more. I checked for 20 different products and most were linked to Amazon.com for purchase.

Info pros will be happy to know that books CDs and DVDs are listed. Here’s an example.

Overall, a very useful tool that will likely become even more useful going forward as more content becomes available. We would love to see some more:
+ Authority control (makes it easier to get the right item in the shortest amount of time). Sometimes items listed by merchant “A” as “foo” and Merchant “B” as “Bar” might be the same item.
+ More sources. How about not only user-generated reviews but also professional reviews from LJ, SLJ, PW, Kirkus, and others. This might help offset the “gaming” of reviews that goes on from time to time.
+ Finally, take a look at the right rail on most results pages. We love the direct links to see what people:
+ See just what people:
+ love
+ hate
+ disagree on
or + see all

See Also: Summize Blog

See Also: Wize.com
One useful resource deserves another. Enjoy and remember you have choices. No search tool is perfect all of the time.

See Also: ConsumerSearch.com
One of our all-time favorite sites that takes content from disparate sources and creates a meta review from different professionally written reviews. Example: A review for air conditioners. ConsumerSearch is now part of About.com/NY Times.

Posted in Business and Economics, Info Management and Retrieval, Information Seeking, Search News | No Comments »

More Info Available About Searching Patents Using Scirus

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

More Info About Patent Coverage in the Scirus Database Now Available
Elsevier’s publicly accessible science database has added a few words to their documentation about their patent coverage.

The new paragraph reads:

Patent coverage (full text) per patent office: USPTO from 1790 (grants and pregrants), EPO from 1978 (grants and pregrants), WIPO from 1978 (pregrants), UKIPO from 1916 (pregrants) and JPO from 1976 (pregrants).

Source: Scirus

Posted in Information Industry, Intellectual Property, Science, Search News, Search Tools | No Comments »

Preserving Digital Heritage: Principles and Policies

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

Preserving Digital Heritage: Principles and Policies

The UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage addresses these issues.

The instability of the Internet is an additional risk for knowledge accumulated in html format. The need to safeguard this relatively new form of documentary heritage calls for international consensus on its collection, preservation and dissemination which resulted in the adoption of “UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage” Guidelines accompanying the Charter adapt and extend present policies, legal frameworks and archival procedures so that this new form of heritage will not sink into silence.

See Also: Full Text of Conference Report (Including Presentations, PPT)

+ Abdelaziz Abid: Safeguarding our Digital Heritage

+ Marie-Anne Chabin: Selection of Digital Archives; an Archivist’s Point of View

+ Catherine Lupovici: Web Archiving and Cultural Heritage Mission

+ David Bearman Why Selection and Digital Preservation are an Issue

+ Erik Oltmans: The International e-Depot

+ John Mackenzie Owen: Preserving the Digital Heritage

+ Maggie Jones: The Digital Preservation Coalition

+ Ute Schwens: Creating a Network of Roles and Responsibilities in Germany

Source: UNESCO

Posted in Digital Preservation, Digital Repositories, Search News | No Comments »

Frequently Asked Questions : Cataloging of Nonroman Script Materials at the Library of Congress in a Post-RLIN World

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

Frequently Asked Questions : Cataloging of Nonroman Script Materials at the Library of Congress in a Post-RLIN World (PDF)

Q1. Where will LC’s nonroman catalog records be created and maintained after RLIN 21 goes away?
A1. LC will migrate the cataloging of monographs from RLIN 21 to LC’s local catalog (the Voyager system from Ex Libris) in late August, 2007. LC’s nonroman catalogers will also be using an “add on” tool compatible with Voyager developed by Gary Strawn (Northwestern University) and David Bucknum (Library of Congress) that provides a cataloger-friendly interface for pairing regular MARC fields with their 880 field counterparts, as well as providing transliterations between roman and nonroman forms for some languages and scripts. Nonroman serials and integrating resources will continue to be cataloged as part of the CONSER program on OCLC.

Source: Library of Congress

Posted in Cataloging and Metadata, Search News | No Comments »

Google and CNN.com Announce Deal But Still Room for Some Yahoo & Others

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

CNN & Google Sign Multi-Year AdSense Deal

From a searcher perspective it’s interesting to see (at least as of this hour) the search box on CNN.com reading, “powered by Google.” but the search box on CNN International reading, “powered by Yahoo.”

+ Let’s compare this story from CNN.com with the same story from the International edition.
Same story but different search boxes.

CNNMoney sponsored results come from Google (as expected).

However, the sponsored results (at least as of this hour) on the CNN International site continue to come from Yahoo. Cursor over any of the sponsored links here and note the Yahoo/Overture URL.

Finally, look at the bottom of this Money.com story for “sponsored links”. They come from Quigo’s AdSonar program.

Finally, for the historians out there,
CNN and Yahoo made a deal for advertising in May of 2004.

Review as of today:
+ Search box on CNN.com, “powered by Google”
++ Search box on CNN International, “powered by Yahoo”
++ AOL search with Google
++ CNN SI* and CNN Money** not listed, our bet, Google.

* CNNSI sponsored links also come from Google. Just cursor over the ad to see for yourself. Best guess is that they also supply the search function.

** With enough clicks you’ll find that ads on CNNMoney come from a third party. Who that 3rd party is is not listed but cursor over the ads and you’ll spot Google URLs.

+++ The sponsored links we spotted at the bottom of several Time.com stories came from the AdSonar program.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

New/Updated Reports: E-Commerce for Libraries, Digital Collections Management, and More

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

PLA Technotes for Libraries
Almost all of these reports are in DOC format.

+ New Report: E-Commerce for Libraries

+ Digital Collections Management

+ Educational Software
PDF.

+ Remote Conferencing

+ RFID

+ Virtual Reference

Source: Public Library Association

Posted in Information Industry, Libraries and Librarianship, Search News | No Comments »

Briefs: ProQuest Extends Agreement with Oxford University Press; Vivísimo and Datawatch Enhance E-Discovery and Compliance Capabilities with Integrated E-Mail Archiving Search

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

+ ProQuest Extends Agreement with Oxford University Press

+ Vivísimo and Datawatch Enhance E-Discovery and Compliance Capabilities with Integrated E-Mail Archiving Search

+ Companies should be wary of low-priced Google office suite, study says (via ComputerWorld)

+ Google Book Search in Google Earth (via Google Lat Long Blog)

Posted in Information Industry, Search News | No Comments »

IMLS Seeks Contractor to Study Formula-based Grants to State Libraries

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

IMLS Seeks Contractor to Study Formula-based Grants to State Libraries

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is seeking a contractor to analyze characteristics, trends, and impacts of library services provided under its annual, formula-based Grants to States (2002 to 2007) and to place this program in the larger context of library services.

Also known as “LSTA” grants (for Library Services and Technology Act), the program has played a significant role in the development of library service in the United States for more than 50 years and is the largest source of federal funding for the nation’s libraries.

Source: IMLS

Posted in Libraries and Librarianship, Search News | No Comments »

Lists & Rankings: Legal Industry: Most Visible Law Firms in Legal Directory (What Firms are People Clicking On), Peer Review Ratings, & Active Law Firms

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

Legal Search: What are People Searching For?
Here are three Top 10 Lists from Martindale-Hubble/LexisNexis that offer a monthly look at what people are searching for on the martindale.com site. Martindale-Hubble is a “classic” directory of lawyers and law firms. According to the web site, these lists will be updated regularly.

1) Top 10 by Visibility

More than 700,000 unique visitors search martindale.com each month seeking more information on lawyers and law firms. Find out which firms caught the most attention during the past month.

Sort lists by:
+ Overall
+ Country
+ State
+ Practice Area
+ Compared
+ Articles
Current list dated July, 2007.

2) Top 10 by Peer Review Rated

Peer Review Ratings attest to a lawyer’s ethics and professional ability. Including Ratings in the hiring due diligence process helps validate the lawyers and firms selected. See which firms have the deepest bench strength of Peer Review Rated lawyers.

++++ Methodology

3) Top 10 by Activity (This list is current as of August, 2007)

Understanding the depth and breadth of a law firm’s experience includes knowing in which recent cases they’ve been involved and which recent deals they’ve handled. Federal District Court data and mergers and acquisitions data from LexisNexis atVantage reveals which firms have been most active in the court house during the past 24 months, and which have been advising on the most deals during the past two years.

Source: LexisNexis

See Also: For Business Search: Check Hoover’s

Posted in Business and Economics, Info Management and Retrieval, Lists and Rankings, Search News, Search Tools | No Comments »

National Archives Announces Changes in Copying Fees

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

National Archives Announces Changes in Copying Fees

A final rule published in the Federal Register August 17, 2007, amends the fees for reproduction of archival materials in National Archives facilities nationwide. In addition to Federal records, this includes donated historical materials, Presidential records, and records filed with the Office of the Federal Register. This rule will become effective on Monday, October 1, 2007.

The fees are being changed to reflect current costs of providing the reproductions. The National Archives current fees were established in October 2000 based on a 1999 cost study. As a result of a cost study conducted in 2006, fees for copying records must increase to recover costs. This is the first fee increase in seven years.

+ Proposed rule (PDF; 59 KB)
+ Final rule (PDF; 66 KB)

Source: The National Archives

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Search News | No Comments »

Briefs: Yahoo files to dismiss China human rights suit; Pentagon to Close Talon Database

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

+ Copac in Facebook
New app for the the UK & Irish National Union Catalogue.

+ Pentagon to Close Talon Database as of Sept. 17 (via GCN)

+ Yahoo files to dismiss China human rights suit (via News.com)

+ Asian library statistics: Pilot project attracts enthusiastic number of libraries (Access)

Posted in Uncategorized, Info Management and Retrieval, Preservation/Conservation, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

Statistics: Database Update: UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Database Recently Updated

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

MDG data recently updated

The UN Statistics Division has recently updated more than 70 series of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) data and more updates will be uploaded soon.

Direct to MDG Database

See Also: The UN official Website for MDG Indicators

Source: UN (via UN Pulse and DocuTicker.com)

Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Resources for Educators, Source File, Statistics | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »