Internet News

Business News Studies

Those who manage access to news sources in organizaions will be interested in a report prepared by Robin Neidorf - the Freepint Research Report: Survey on News Needs and Preferences 2011 just published.

"Business news drives business decisions. Any environmental change – marketplace, competitive, financial or other – has the potential to create change in a business. Organisations access news through a wide range of paid-for and free sources, and information managers face an enormous challenge in understanding the full portfolio of news sources so that they can manage them efficiently and cost-effectively.

Over the past 4 years, FreePint Research has undertaken a survey to understand the decision-making process and priorities of information managers in reviewing, acquiring and managing the many sources of news that enter their organisations."

There is a relatively modest license fee.

Freepint is also offering a Buyer's Guide On Business News Information at no cost. Request your copy here.

CIA's Social Media Monitoring

Social Media, Sentiment, and the CIA, Angela Guess, Semantic Web (Nov 8)

Thank you Semantic Web for picking up this article from the Atlantic Monthly on How The CIA Uses Social Media to Track How People Feel by Jared Keller.

Staff at CIA's Open Source Centre "are tasked with sifting through millions of tweets, Facebook messages, online chat logs, and other public data on the World Wide Web to glean insights into the collective moods of regions or groups abroad.” They have been dubbed "vengeful librarians" - for reasons that escape me.

Quoted:

According to Bollen, another major challenge “is that sentiment analysis only provides a scrape of potentially useful information. ‘Right now, analysis is very specialized. We’re looking at how people feel about very particular topics,’ says Bollen. ‘There’s a lot room for growth in deeper semantic analysis: not just learning what people feel about something, but what people think about things. There are 250 million people on Twitter….if you could perform even a shallow analysis of people’s opinions about something, their semantic opinions, you can learn a lot from the wisdom of the crowd that could be leveraged.’ Diving deep into the semantics of online communication is the next big challenge for government agencies.”

EVRI for news

Former Search Tool Evri Joins Crowded iPad News Club, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Sep 26)

If you have an iPad, you might like the new EVRI for delivering news you want to read to your iPad. If you don't have the iPad, just set it up for your desktop. There are many topics drawing from many excellent sources.

"Evri claims that what differentiates it is its “topic-based” approach and that users can dynamically create and follow news about any issue or topic, dynamically generated from a search query or keyword. Like other newsreaders Evri will capture content coming from social feeds (i.e., Twitter and Facebook). But it also indexes roughly “2.3 million topics from over 15K of the Web’s best sources.”"

First Rain - Business Search

FirstRain: Searching the Business Web, Perrin Kerravala, FUMSI (Aug 11)

FirstRain is a business intelligence search and monitoring engine. It was reviewed in the VIP Magazine. This short article introduces that review with some information about the product.

"It employs patented search technology to crawl the web and extract only high value business events (news, blog posts, press releases, company and people information, government filings, commentary and more). The search technology greatly improves business relevancy of results, even for simple searches, thanks to the FirstRain Business Web Graph – a dynamic and continuously adapted taxonomy that describes over 8,000 distinct lines of business and business-related topics."

Alerts for search results

Create RSS Feeds for Google Search Results, Digital Inspiration (Aug 11)

RSS may be falling out of favour, but it is still very useful for getting updates. This article shows the use of Google Alerts for top results on a query, or setting up your own search API for all results.

Tame the information beast

Managing the Flow of Information in Social Networks: How do you do it?,
By Melissa A. Venable, Amy J. Hilbelink. ELearn Magazine / August 2011

Social Networks are the largest hose of all for information - much of it irrelevant to your needs. This article describes ways to tame the beast with a disciplined mix of aggregating and filtering.

Begin by creating a list of must-have sources for your profession and tools you can use for curating the content. The examples given in the article are for online learning professionals.

Has advice on using LinkedIn and Twitter.

Newsdesk from Moreover Technologies

Moreover Technologies Releases Three Versions of Newsdesk Monitoring Service, Newsbreaks (Aug 22)

"Moreover Technologies has rolled out three versions of its Newsdesk media monitoring and news sharing solution to serve all types and sizes of business, starting at just $1995 per year. They are Newsdesk Alert, a streamlined Newsdesk offering focused on breaking news feeds and alerts, Newsdesk Corporate featuring advanced media monitoring and customized newsletters, and Newsdesk Enterprise for firms requiring company-wide deployment of media analytics with global coverage and news sharing capabilities."

Thoora - new content curation

Thoora has relaunched as a topic-based update news service for people who like to curate content for themselves and others.

From the email announcement:

"What's different with Thoora? Well, it used to be that we served up the daily news based on what the world was talking about. Now, we're harnessing the science behind that concept and giving you the power to choose what content you want based on the topics you create. We bring you a continuous stream of fresh, relevant content on your topics, and our engine learns from your behavior, so your content stream is personalized to you."

You may set up topics described through keywords and key phrases. Thoora may offer some suggestions. Results are a page of items from sites, blogs, news wires. You'll need to spend time identifying the ones you like and those you don't (not relevant, spam, don't like source). This could take a long time to do - and I find that kind of exercise a lot like swatting at flies.

Some topics may not suit the sources. My topic for e-learning did not judging from the product announcements, spam, and trivial blogs.

Sources are international - and you can learn some very interesting bits if you have time. Such as - "India is on a tear to educate its children. Shantanu Prakash's Educomp is cashing in by bringing computers to the classroom. "

However, good topics can be created. Thoora has some you can explore - such as this one on social media.

Thoora will hound you to connect your Twitter account. FAQ page tells us what it does - "We give you the ability to tell us who are the interesting people tweeting about your topics, and then we filter their tweets so that only the relevant ones are displayed. You might have a topic on “Content Farming,” for example, and you might want to see what Matt Cutts has to say about it, but when he tweets about Pinkberry, you don’t need to clutter your topic with it. "

There is a search function to help you find topics others have created.

Bottom line: has possibilities as a way to follow topics you can define precisely.

Getting a lot more from Linked In Today

The Ultimate Guide To “LinkedIn Today” & How To Optimize Your Presence On It, Greg Finn, Search Engine Land (Aug 17)

LinkedIn isn't just your network and their interests - there is a LinkedIn Today of most shared news - very interesting.

Much more in personalization by which you benefit from what gets shared - "Today then matches content to like-minded people by showing top news across industries that you follow and are a part of. The specific industry of the user sharing the story is taken into account as well. If a LinkedIn member is listed as a member of the advertising industry, that information is factored in when an article is shared or liked and will help to boost the articles presence within the “marketing & advertising” industry. "

Votes figure into the ranking too.

Much more - read the guide.

Business Monitoring with FirstRain

FirstRain Improves Business Web Monitoring Engine , Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (July 14)

Monitoring tools are getting much more intelligent and sophisticated - such as First Rain for gathering business information.

"The FirstRain web research engine finds, analyzes, and categorizes the latest information on companies, their markets, and the business trends affecting the financial markets. The third generation of this subscription-based service just announced July 11, 2011, is designed to unlock the “Business Web” with new simplicity and relevancy. The enhancements focus on role-based workflow improvements and mobile app availability. The target market is general business researchers—sales, marketing, finance, and C-level executives—not information professionals."

Thoora for personal curation

Thoora, once an aggregator for blogs and other social media, became a curating machine for people to create their own stream, cherry pick sources, adjust settings - "human element to assist the computer". They demo it in this demo. (March 10) Intended for the tablet, and coming to the Web. Sign up for beta.

Health News Updates

Top 10 RSS Feeds For Medical News & Alerts, Saikat Basu, MakeUseOf (May 18)

You may need to track new discoveries about a medical condition. This article lists 10 services that produce RSS feeds you can easily monitor through a RSS reader (such as Google Reader).

Notable ones include Medicine Net, Medline Plus, Yahoo Health - worth reviewing all 10.

Real time news surveillance

How to use Web and Twitter feeds for news surveillance, Pandia (May 14)

"Pandia takes a look at how to use web feeds and twitter feeds to find the most relevant news, and at web clients and iPad apps that might help you do so."

+ Web feeds (aka RSS) - use Google Reader - to which I add, Findly.

+ Twitter - identify experts to follow.

+ Twitter - share bookmarks (tho I think delicious would be better for that)

+ use tools for following feeds and Twitter - lists several - eg Tweetdeck, Hootsuite.

+ iPhone and iPad

+

Decline of RSS?

Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS, Completely , Stay N' Alive (May 8)

As more people use Twitter and Facebook for their current awareness tools, it seems they are dropping RSS. This article shows that Twitter and Facebook make tapping into their updates through RSS very difficult. This may be the beginning of the decline of RSS. I hope not - I'd rather an RSS aggregator than trying to pick up everything through Twitter.

Setting up a Plan to Stay Informed

Keeping Up-to-Date on Your Industry -- Staying Informed, MindTools.com

This article on staying informed comes from the MindTools.com career building service. Content at MindTools on management skills and techniques is absolutely outstanding, and young people embarking on new management careers will find a the paid subscription worth their while. Some material is free - such as the guide to staying informed. It's a nice mix of use your network along with use the Web - and recommends some good starting points. It does mention blogs. I would add setting up a RSS reader, such as Google Reader, to subscribe to blogs, news sources, and journals.

Get your message out

Preparing for The Death of RSS by Michael Gray, SEO Blog (Feb )

Sounds like RSS is sputtering. Not everyone wants to deal with a RSS Reader - easy as that is. Just takes too much time.

Michael Gray describes other channels in this post.

+ Email - yes - what could be easier?
+ Twitter - broadcast your posts
+ Facebook - but don't post articles
+ mobile friendly

Blogs aren't mentioned - but let's assume they are in the background holding the content.

Whether you are producing or receiving, consider them all.

Moreover has a Newsdesk

Moreover Technologies Releases All-New Newsdesk 4, Newsbreaks (Oct 25)

Moreover is still in the news aggregating business. The new product Newsdesk 4 illustrates the importance today of having tabs on real time news (Twitter and blogs) and social media generally.

"Media aggregator Moreover Technologies announced the release of its all-new Newsdesk 4 real-time news and social media discovery, refinement, and sharing service. Newsdesk 4 gives users unified portal access to millions of daily news articles and social media posts, and ability to refine results immediately using comprehensive cutting-edge faceted search and filtering tools."

From Moreover - "Mine and find relevant business intelligence from 1.7 million+ far-reaching global news, social media and industry sources."

Read the webpage in email

Feed My InBox will email a copy of the webpage when it changes. It has been a very long time since one of these services has been added - though earlier ones, such as TrackEngine , allow refinements to filter on words or types of changes.

Feeds that Alert

36 Reputation Monitoring Feeds You Can’t Afford to Ignore, aimClear (Sep 30)

The webpage is loaded with alerts, and then there is the article. Start wtih Google Alerts, but set up rss feeds as alerts too from YouTube, Facebook, Yelp, Digg, Twitter etc.

"These crucial reputation-monitoring APIs are easily accessible, in most cases, by a basic understanding of URL variables and RSS feeds. Compare the data you cull to Google alerts and you’ll find quick perspective on what content and activity has been missing from daily reputation screenings, threat and opportunity assessment."

Jive to watch Facebook and Twitter

Make social media work for you , Enterprise Search (Sep 22)

Following what people say on Facebook - all 600 million of them - is de rigeur for reputation management and current awareness. Jive offers a new product.

"Jive has introduced Social Media Engagement, which enables companies to monitor and respond in real time to conversations taking place on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Jive claims users can now act faster than ever before in response to online discussions about products, services and brands to strengthen customer relationships, nurture brand champions and capture innovative ideas."

Tracking Items in Google Reader

Turning Off Track Changes Feature, Google Reader Blog, (Sept 22).

That didn't last long - Google Reader is dropping Track Changes for being notified of keywords in rss feeds. Recommends that people use Page2RSS

Short term information trapping

Temporary Information Trapping: The Hopscotch Case, ResearchBuzz (Sept 10)

Tips from the guru on information trapping with this example of setting up trackers on news about an event to run for just a few days.

Tools for staying uptodate

Tips for Handling Information Overload: Too Much Content, Dawn Foster, Bloomberg Business Week (Aug 16)

".. three ways to manage the info flood: RSS readers, news aggregators, and RSS filtering"

Staying up to date on topics of interest can be overwhelming - too much email. too many websites to look at. This piece has good advice about using newsreaders for RSS feeds, and filtering on twitter and other streams.

Of interest: "My favorite aggregator is Twitter Tim.es, since it takes the links from the people I follow on Twitter and displays them in newspaper-like format, with the links that have been posted by more of my friends appearing as headlines on my Twitter Tim.es page."

Also - Yahoo Pipes for filtering on topics - "I have Pipes that comb through industry analyst feeds looking for a few specific keywords, which allows me to find the reports from analysts on those topics while ignoring the rest."

Changes with Google Alerts

Google Alerts Drops Web Filter & Improves Quality, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jun 10)

Google has made some changes to Google Alerts.

1) options are Everything, News, Blogs, Video, Discussions - no Web - just like the search engine.

2) quantity - 20 results in the email - up to 50 if you request

There is talk of a quality improvement - Google said it modified its algorithm. Guess it has tougher checks, leading to fewer results - and if you want to relax the algorithm you should choose up to 50 results.

Using Google Alerts

How To Use Google Alerts For Quick and Easy Domain Alerts, SEOMoz Blog (June 2)

Shows how to use Google Alerts for basic monitoring of a site. Recommends using an email alias - don't load up your work account.

Also mentions social media tracking tools Scout Labs and Trackur, both for fee.

Info Trapping Tips

Google Alerts Slowing Down? Stay Informed With These Seven Information Trapping Tips, ResearchBuzz (Jun 1)

Tara Calishain offers tips "for making the most of alerts for information trapping purposes" - and don't rely on any one tool - such as Google Alerts.

Hurray - Google Scholar Alert

Email Alerts for Google Scholar, Google Operating System (May 9)

"Google Scholar added the option to get email alerts when new articles related to your interests are published. For some reason, this feature is not available in Google Alerts and Google Scholar still doesn't offer feeds for search results."

Yahoo - Firehose of Updates

Yahoo, Now With Firehose, Research Buzz (Apr 13)

Tara Calishain, master at information trapping, reports on the new Yahoo! Updates Firehouse . This "aggregates social updates from Yahoo! and across the Web: It includes a real-time feed of every public action taken on our [ Yahoo ] network … and elsewhere around the Web that users have authorized Yahoo! to make available.”. This will include 750,000+ ratings a day, 8,000+ reviews a day, Flickr updates, delicious bookmarks, You Tube favoriting - and much else.

This was built for "developers", but searchers can be developers.

Yahoo's information page on the Firehose has examples. But to be serious you'll want the YQL Guide. There are screencasts. It may help to know SQL and JSON languages.

Read it Eventually

Read It Later turning bookmarks into news pages, by Josh Lowensohn Webcrawler (Feb 25)

Read it Later (RIL) - bookmark pages you want to read later - with whatever you have in hand - laptop, iphone - and keep the reading in sync.

Now - get a digest of articles on your list that you haven't read yet grouped into topics that RIL figures out. Can also share through a public URL.

"Read It Later's new trick is one that long-time users with little time to waste are likely to enjoy. The bookmarking service, which was designed to help people organize and view bookmarks from multiple computers, is launching (in beta) a "digest" that will convert a person's bookmarks into a news page that's sorted by category."

Video at Introducing Read It Later Digest [ 3 min]

Follow Up on Google Reader's Page Monitoring

Google Reader’s New Page-Monitoring Feature — How’s it Working?, ResearchBuzz (Feb 18)

Tara Calishain has been trying out Google Reader's new page monitoring feature - and - it's ok. Proper software like Web Site Watcher is better.

A couple of interesting bits:

+ a RSS feed on web page is closer to being the rule rather than the exception

+ Twitter lists that include ResearchBuzz

Monitor pages with Google Reader

Follow changes to any website, Google Reader Blog (Jan 25)

With Google Reader we can now create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don't have their own feed. "These custom feeds are most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated. "

Tara Calishain tells us more - Google Reader Lets You Monitor Page Changes Without RSS

Also Barry Schwartz - No Feed, No Problem – Google Reader Now Tracks (Mostly) Any Website Change

Social Media Monitoring and Evaluation

FUMSI has two excellent articles on monitoring social media sources for industry information and competitive intelligence.

Evolution In Source Evaluation: Using Social Media Data , by Emily Wheeler and Samara Omundson

These two information professionals developed a framework for evaluating the influence of social media tools such as Technorati, Digg, Blogpulse, and applying that framework to assessing mentions of a product. They began by identifing metrics that could be indicators of the influence of various information sources. For example, at Twitter the indicators would be followers, following, and listed. They next applied the metrics to media sources to develop ranges of values and to begin to analyze the nature of the influence. "We ultimately identified five Influence Attributes: Reach, Buzz, Engagement, Content and Audience".

The authors show how to apply the Influence Ranking Framework in their analysis of e-book readers that were mentioned in blogs.

Pharmaceutical industry: a discovery-led approach to social media by Daniel Ghinn (Jan 2010)

Pharmaceutical companies monitor the conversations on the Web about health for market research and product development.

The author describes two approaches: "'external discovery', where information about conversations taking place is measured and analysed remotely; and 'internal discovery', where an environment owned or managed by the pharmaceutical company hosts social media activity. Both approaches are necessary in order to gain a complete picture."

There are some tools for social media monitoring: Radian6 and ScanBuzz, developed for the pharmaceutical industry by Medimix. Activity analytical tools can be employed too - YouTube Insights and Google Analytics.

Listimonkey for Twitter Lists

Monitor Twitter Lists with ListiMonkey, Research Buzz (Jan 18)

Recommends ListiMonkey for "information trapping"

"ListiMonkey at http://listimonkey.com/. ListiMonkey allows you to specify a Twitter list, enter the keywords for which you want to monitor that list, and then specify an e-mail address to which you want to get the results, and how often you want to get the results (hourly or daily)."

See full posting.

Journal TOCS

Search engine ticTOCs is now Journal TOCs, Altsearchengines (Dec 12)

Goodbye to TicTocs for finding academic journals, and hello Journal TOCs. TicTOCS, a RSS aggregation service in the UK closed quitely. But Journal TOCS opened - and is run by the same people - Santy Chumbe and Lisa Rogers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. It has 12,750 journals from 422 publishers. Journals are organized by subects and by publishers.

From the front page: "You can start by searching for TOCs by journal title or by keywords (searching 352,703 TOC articles). You also can browse TOCs by publisher or by subject. Then, if you click on a journal title, the latest Table of Contents will be displayed."

Found along the way - the JURN blog - "JURN is a search-engine indexing free ‘open access’ ejournals in the arts and humanities, along with other arts and scholarly journals offering free content."

TicTocs Journal Alerts

ticTOCs searches journal Tables Of Contents, Altsearchengines (Oct 29)

Reminder about TicTocs, the table of contents service from the UK for academics, researchers, students

"You can find over 11,000 scholarly journal Tables of Contents from over 350 publishers. You can view the latest TOC for each journal. You can export an individual TOC RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to popular feed readers. You can link to the full text of hundreds of thousands of journal articles (where institutional or personal subscription, or Open Access, allows)."

iCurrent

iCurrent: A news aggregator that works by Rafe Needleman, Webware (Oct 22)

iCurrent promises to be the news aggregator that will replace all others. Choose the channels to follow according to your interest, and have it learn from what you do. Channels are developed by the iCurrent editors.

Rafe Needleman says that is it well done. Check the iCurrent about page for more detail on how it works.

NY Times Custom Feeds

Not Just for Developers Anymore: New York Times Launches Custom Times Feeds by Frederic Lardinois, Read Write Web (Oct 5)

New York Times has a new tool for filtering articles by keywords and delivering as a feed.

"One neat feature of the application is that users can't just search by keyword but can also copy-and-paste the URL of any New York Times article into the search field. The software will then automatically suggest new search terms based on the tags the New York Times editors added to this post (and which are normally hidden)."

ResearchBuzz recommended the tool in this review - New York Times Launches Keyword-Based Feeds With Cool Extras (Oct 21)

Get the NYT tool at http://prototype.nytimes.com/customFeeds/

Tools for watching pages or saving them

AlertBox keeps an eye out for site updates by Josh Lowensohn, Webcrawler (Aug 10)

AlertBox watches for changes on parts of a web page that you select. This is a Firefox 3.5 add-on You might want to use this for things like price changes, or new headlines.

"AlertBox's way of tracking new content is an in-box-style counter down in the bottom of your browser. When clicked, it takes you to a page of Web clippings that are constantly updated with whatever the latest text is of the page elements you had selected."

Page mentions other addons for watching pages.

+ ReloadEvery - reload a page every few seconds or minutes
+ Check4Change - monitor text on a page for changes (but only works on an open tab).
+ Forum Additive - monitor threads in a forum
Price Protectr Toolbar
+ PriceDrop - prices at Amazon

Iterasi is also mentioned in this article. It saves web pages - and can be made to do so on a schedule. This can used on sites where log in is required, and on pages that change as you interact with them. Pages are saved online in your iterasi account. There is a community aspect as well for sharing pages that are designated as public. Iterasi is in beta - and for now it's free.

GigaAlert for tracking

Giga Alert (formerly Google Alert) has been a service for running saved searches at Google periodically and alerting you by email of new discoveries. I've used it for years and picked up leads I wouldn't have found otherwise.

The name change alone was big, but now it's using the Yahoo index. There seem to be a few other changes: searches news sources, and has several premium services.

The free service allows 5 search statements and a daily search capacity of 150 records. Other levels are Personal (10 statements), Premium (20), Professional (50) and Platinuum (100) - beginning at $4.95 US/month.

The following is its latest email to customers:

Following our earlier message, Google Alert has now been renamed Giga Alert. As part of our ongoing efforts to provide you with the best alerting service on the web, we have introduced a couple of exciting improvements:

* News alerts - You are now able to choose between up-to-date alerts on the entire web, or alerts focused specifically on news sources.

* Deeper searches - You may now search deeper than ever before, with the maximum search depth for the Premium, Professional and Platinum services increasing to 250, 600 and 1000 respectively.

We have also now switched over to the Yahoo search index, as Google is discontinuing providing an API with sufficient search depth to run the service. This transition allows us to offer the improvements above. The change is automatic and you will continue to receive the same great alerting service that you're used to. If you have a spam filter, please make sure to add alert@gigaalert.com to your whitelist, since your alert emails will soon be coming from that address.

Giga Alert is provided by Indigo Stream Technologies Ltd.

Create RSS Feed for Google News Search

Why did Google Make this Harder by David Warlick, 2 Cents Worth (July 16)

Google removed its RSS subscribe link from its news search. Have to manually create the url by adding &output=rss.

Monitoring web pages

Confessions of a Newshound by Steven M Cohen, Information Today (May 2009) in AllBusiness.com

Mentions "Update Scanner (http://updatescanner.mozdev. org/ en/index.html), a Firefox extension that looks at any webpage (at any time interval needed), caches the data, and displays this cached version of the page, highlighting the new content."

Uses this to monitor wires, Drudge Report, Newsnow.co.uk.

In addition Cohen monitors RSS feeds - but that's another story.

Trackle for Alerts

Get Customized Information from Trackle, Rick Broida, PCWorld (May 29)

Pitches for Trackle. My experience was that Trackle took some careful customization else you'd be overwhelmed with alerts. It's also for the US market - not Canadian.

"Like Google Alerts on steroids, Trackle is a free service that delivers customized news and information. It culls the Web for just about any topic you can imagine, from crime reports for your neighborhood to low airfares for specific destinations to your own blog contributions and any resulting discussions."

Information Overload Metrics

Tackling Information Overload, by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (May 4)

Need a cost figure on information overload? Paula Hane has it from a webcast done by Information Overload Research Group (IORG). basex is the part that does "management science for the knowledge economy".

"Basex estimates, based on data it has gathered, that information overload costs the U.S. economy a minimum of $900 billion a year in lost productivity and reduced innovation."

There are some figures on how knowledge workers spend their days. 15% is on searching for information (and an estimated 50% of searches fail).

Has more on calculating the overload factor, and controlling it.

IngBoo for Alerts

IngBoo mashes up RSS alerts with feed reading, by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Apr 27)

IngBoo is a new alerting tool. Josh Lowensohn reviews it with some screenshots and concludes that he likes Trackle and Alerts.com more.

"IngBoo is a new service that aggregates RSS feeds and can track topics and keywords across multiple content sites. The service was pitched to me as a tracking tool, but it also serves double duty as a headline reader the likes of Netvibes and My Yahoo. It analyzes each feed to find out how fresh the information is, and will show you with a simple pie graph how often the latest stories came in. You can also preview some of the most recent headlines and click straight to them."

ticTOCS for Table of Contents

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf April issue is about ticTOCS , a current awareness service in the UK with academic bent.

Péter Jacso reviews it warmly concluding that, "In spite of some deficiencies, ticTOCs is an excellent free service and the corrections and enhancements would really justify to apply for another grant to make it even more excellent in helping users keep abreast of the current journal literature more efficiently and in making better use of the journals subscribed to by the library."

Twitter as current awareness tool

Twitter to Expand Search Via Discovery Engine by Rob Hof, Tech Beat in Business Week (Apr 2)

"Now Twitter is looking to roll out a more integrated search feature, which cofounder Biz Stone calls a Discovery Engine. It will include not only the ability to save searches and view them on the right side of the page, but to view currently popular topics"

Alerts at Alertpedia

Alertpedia keeps searching, even when you've given up by Sharon Vaknin, Webware (Mar 25)

Alertpedia is a free alerting service that is aimed at delivering alerts for travel needs, news, weather, health, real estate and jobs and such - probably of most value to people in the United States.

From the review: "Alertpedia is best utilized for those looking for information on an ongoing basis. Users can not filter their alerts based on travel dates, or set a specific price range for their Craig's List searches. Most importantly, the results are not delivered right away. For those looking for immediate results, other search engines would be more useful."

Scitopia Alerts

Scitopia.org search portal for science and technology has alerts

"Get the research you need delivered directly to your desktop. Scitopia now provides free alerts from leading scientific and engineering societies around the world. Scitopia Alerts can be set for any routine search of content from any or all of Scitopia's partners, providing you with exactly the breadth or focus you need. Set your own alert terms and Scitopia will conduct your research automatically, delivering the results at the frequency that makes sense for you."

ChangeTracker

Build a change tracker with this tool from Versionista that includes getting Versionista to watch a web page (now available with free registration) and then use Yahoo Pipe.

Steal Our Code: How to Build Your Own Change-Tracking Feeds
by Brian Boyer, ProPublica - February 19, 2009

New Alerting Service - USA

Crap, I Missed It! aims for the email alert market by Harrison Hoffman, Webware (Feb 11)

Another new alerting service - mostly for day-to-day consumption rather than research - with the expressive name - Crap I Missed It. Mainly for events in the US - concerts, tv shows, and sports teams (no hockey!)

"Crap, I Missed It, a new notification service, looks to tell users about various news or events that they specify. For example, you can set Crap to tell you about the month's top Digg stories, your favorite sports team's scores, or an upcoming concert for your favorite band in your area, via email. The information is all combined into a maximum of one email per day."

Trackle - Personalized RSS

Trackle Feeds You Personalized RSS by Leena Rao, TechCrunc (Feb 10)

Another strong review for Trackle --

"The breadth and specificity of Trackle’s information is what differentiates itself from other RSS tracking applications like Google Alerts, Yotify and Notify.me. Trackle doesn’t just search for keywords, it incorporates change into the keywords and provides up-to-date, highly customized information about ever-fluctuating internet content."

Tracking Changes with Trackle

Trackle makes Web alerts easy, manageable by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Feb 10)

Here is the new face to alerting services - they do more and they can include your social network.

"Much like competitor Yotify, Trackle lets you peruse a long list of sites to find something interesting to track. Once you do, it has a specially created setup wizard for each site that make setting up a new alert a snap. For example, if you want to track crime in your neighborhood, you simply plug in your street address. The wizard expands to give you options on how big a radius you want to search from, along with what specific crimes you want to be notified about."

Building Google News Press Release Alerts

Information Trapping: Follow 17 Press Release Wires with Google News, Research Buzz (Jan 26)

Tara Calashain identifies the source names for 17 press release services that Google picks up and shows how to build information traps on topics and receive them in an RSS feed.

Table of Contents Service for Scholarly Materials

Scholarly journals - new free service makes keeping up-to-date easy by Roddy MacLeod, ticTOCs (Dec 11)

Roddy MacLeod runs a blog to report on the ticTOCs project in the UK - "The aim of the ticTOCs project is to develop a service which will transform journal current awareness by making it easy for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and reuse tables of contents from multiple publishers in a personisable web based environment."

This project has just released a new table of contents service for journals.

"It’s free, its easy to use, and it provides access to the most recent tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. It helps scholars, researchers, academics and anyone else keep up-to-date with what’s being published in the most recent issues of journals on almost any subject."

More details are given in New improved ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents service now available

ticTOCs is impressive. Search by word in title, subject or publisher, find journal titles and select, view the current issue, and add this is a favourite journal (requires registration). You can export the table-of-contents page as a feed to Google Reader or iGoogle home page. This is terrific.

RSS Feed as Search Alert for Google Web Search Results

How to Use the New Google Web Search RSS Feeds by Marshall Kirkpatrick, Read Write Web (Oct 30)

Google now will let you set up an RSS feed for a search query you create and what to track.

"Web search RSS is useful for being alerted whenever search results for your keywords or link have changed; subscribing to at least a few searches will let you know when Google users are seeing something new in the first few pages of search results for your company name, for example."

Posting has instructions on how to use Google Alerts to do this.

Web Monitoring Tools

Four monitoring tools for watching what is said about a company:

+ Facitva Insight: Reputation Intelligence - Dow Jone and Reuters - watch fo mentions in media and web

+ Nielson BuzzMetrics - watches "consumer-generated media (CGM) and online word of mouth".

+ BlogSquirrel - monitor 25 million blogs daily

+ Webclipping.com - "read, track and analyze millions of online voices from traditional media, new media, social networks and blogs"

These four were mentioned in Build Community to Build Brand and Business by Joe Dysart in EContent (Nov 2008)

Yotify Notify

Yotify: A Social Search Engine, by Stephen Arnold, Search It (Oct 15)

Arnold followed up on an article from MIT Technology Review -- Making Search Social- A new engine can turn a difficult search into a communal quest - about Yotify, a search engine for a mix of social searching and sending out "scouts" to monitor partner sites.

If I'm reading this right - he sees some possibility for it as a consumer tool (but, I ask, how many social scouting tools do people need to buy more things?), but much more if Yotify could be converted into an enterprise system - where (I presume) there would be the networks, common interests, and need to be alerted about products and programs.

"Procurement teams and information technology professionals looking to deploy a search system that works may find the Yotify.com technology applied to a regulated industry like pharmaceuticals just the cure for ails information access."

Alerts

How to Know Everything, All the Time: Automated Searches by Mike Elgan, Datamation (Oct 10)

"Here are the five most powerful services, with some tips on how to get the most out of them. "

+ Google Alerts
+ Yotify
+ Alerts.com
+ Twitter
+ Watch that page

Versionista for watching pages

Versionista: Flip-flop tracker By Rafe Needleman, Webware (Jul 17)

Versionista - new web-page tracker

+ display is wiki-like for revision history.

+ shows before and after. Can rollback to see up to 25 previous versions.

+ "You can track two pages for free. Paid versions range from $16 to $499 a month and give you more URLs and storage space, and more control over filters.

+ daily e-mails with updates - no RSS feed yet.

Suggestions for use: "Beyond the gotcha value, there are other very useful applications for this service. You can use it to monitor prices on a product page. You can keep an eye on a competitor's site for changes relevant to your business, or for additions to their news page (although Google alerts can also work for that). Writers or commenters on blogs can use the service to see what changes publishers make to their stories after initial publication."

Very Alerting

Never have a quiet moment with Alerts.com By Josh Lowensohn, Webware (June 18)

Alerts.com helps you set up alerts on jobs, weather, flights, press releases, plus ones you custom make for yourself. It partners with others for some of the services - such as Kayak for flights. I suspect that most of this is geared to the US market.

"Alerts lets you set up your e-mail, home and mobile phones to get alerts for just about anything. Some of the more useful ones include weather and gas prices, but there are entertainment ones as well, like the horoscopes and daily tidbits which are essentially factoids. You can go in and tweak which ones you want to receive, and with what velocity throughout the day. The service also has a scheduler to keep you from receiving alerts at certain times during the day and week, along with an away mode that can be toggled remotely to stop all messages entirely."

Others mentioned: "Competing services include Yahoo Alerts, Google Alerts, 4Info"

BBC Monitoring the World

BBC Monitoring Library - service from BBC Monitoring and Vista and Publishers Communication Group providing "news from state owned, independent and clandestine media sources in over 150 countries, in more than 100 languages".

Can search and read headlines for free. Must register for access to articles - must enquire through Contact Us to learn fee.

Prioritizing to handle information overload

Managing Information Flow: How Prioritization Will Improve Your Work and Learning Efficiency Maki at DoshDosh (May 6)

Recommends prioritizing to deal with the pressure of information overload - identify what you must have and set up filters.

Good point: "Don’t just prioritize in your head, make sure you use all the tools available to structure how content is served up to you. Do some research on browser addons or other applications you can use to segment and filter raw data. You want to manage information flow as much as possible initially. Once you have a workable system, you’ll only need to tweak it every now and then to ensure that it’s operating at maximum efficiency."

Mentioned in Get a Handle on Information Overload , TVC ALert.

DailyMe for US Readers

DailyMe delivers news that prints itself By Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Apr 4)

"DailyMe is a customizable news aggregator with a neat twist--it can be set up to automatically print up the day's news at a selected time each morning, emulating some of the experience of having a newspaper delivered to your door."

Seems to have US and UK sources - no Canadian.

Information Trapping with Calishain

Information Trapping 2008 Style ResearchBuzz (Jan 29)

Tara Calishain, information-trapper-extraordinare, tells us what she uses to monitor topics.

+ Web Page Monitor to monitor web pages. This has an online version now.
+ RSS feed reader
+ Text editor - she has a couple of recommendations, and neither are NotePad

Calishain has changed what she monitors too - and Dmoz and Yahoo Directory have dropped from her list. Instead she is using more keyword-based alerts and location-based monitoring.

Information Trapping - Calishain

Information Trapping - An Interview with Tara Calishain at Future Perfert Publishing (Sept 3, 2007)

Tara Calishain talks about her new book on information trapping.

"I define information trapping as using alert services, RSS feeds, and similar services to bring updated content to you as it’s generated. Like the “push” technology we were all hearing about ten years ago, except that this time it works! "

Daily Me Returns

DailyMe Personal News Aggregator Josh Catone, Read/Write Web (Nov 2)

Flash from the past - a new Daily Me for personalized news picks.

"Florida-based DailyMe is a personalized news aggregation service that creates a daily online newspaper that can be delivered at set times via email or browsed from the web. The site aggregates news in a wide variety of topic areas from over 3,000 mainstream and blog sources, including the Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Engadget, Time Magazine, and BusinessWeek."

Reading News at Facebook

Google News Launches Facebook Application by Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Oct 19)

Receive customized topics from Google News in Facebook - works in the same way as a Google Alert.

Doris Lessing

Sometimes a news alert can bring good news. Today, from the New York Times breaking headlines service, came the clip --

Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

The Swedish Academy said that the 87-year-old British author "has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny" with "skepticism, fire and visionary power."

New York Times points to a Featured Author page on Doris Lessing with new and reviews from the archives of the NY Times. There are audio clips as well.

The New York Times recently opened its archives for free access. Registered members can get:

+ Articles from 1981 to present - free access
+ Articles from 1853 to 1980 - free access to articles in public domain
+ breaking news alerts
+ daily headlines from a section
+ a choice of newsletters (travel, movies, money etc)

The change in policy to make more content free is described in Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site (Sept 18, 2007)

The Times Online Fiction section had Comment: a fitting gift for Doris Lessing (Oct 11) also offering a quick overview of her writings. A search for doris lessing at the Times will find more.

Experiences with Current Awareness

Nina Platt examines current awareness in her blog, Strategic Librarian - the elements, the strategies, and the obstacles. She speaks from experience in a law firm. Follow the topic through her tag - current awareness.

LexisNexis® Continuous Alerts

LexisNexis, Dow Jones alliance brings current news to Law Firms LexisNexis (Mar 29)

"LexisNexis today announced an alliance with Dow Jones to produce the newest offering law firms can use to stay current on important news affecting their practices.

LexisNexis® Continuous Alerts, powered by Factiva® from Dow Jones, provides to legal professionals continuously updated crucial news, such as mergers and acquisitions, Initial Public Offerings, national litigation and other vital information.",

Site24X7 for Website Monitoring

Site24×7.com: Excellent Web-Based Web Site Monitoring Tool Leaves Beta, ResourceShelf (Mar 9)

Recommends Site 24X7 from Zoho for monitoring web sites. Can monitor 2 sites for free, and more for a modest charge .

Divvio Personal

Weaving The Web To Your Taste "Hossein Eslambolchi's service will scour the Net for the media you want", BusinessWeek Online (Mar 19)

"On Mar. 13, Eslambolchi's 10-person start-up, Divvio Inc., will turn on a service that automatically finds audio, video, and, eventually, text, on your favorite subjects. Then it weaves these clips together to create personalized multimedia channels that are updated each time you sign on. A channel on the New York Yankees might start with spring training highlights, followed by videotaped interviews and blog postings."

Divvio will start with 750,000 sites and may "hit the mark" only 10% of the time in the beginning. Eventually, through personalization, it will improve to 60% (it is hoped).

Web Page Monitors

How to Best Use Page Monitors For Online Research By Tara Calishain, Informit Network (Feb 9, 2007)

This is a sample chapter from Tara Calishain's new book - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web, published by New Riders.

Calishain is always a delight to read - clear, practical, and useful. If you have any need to monitor the Internet for what is being said and written on a topic, you are sure to find this book very helpful for its coverage of RSS, page monitors, email alerts, creating your own agents.

The chapter, How to Best Use Page Monitors For Online Research, "... discusses the various kinds of page monitors that are available, walks you through how to set one up, and shows you how to limit the number of insignificant page updates you receive."

The web-page monitors - Watch that Page, Trackengine, Infominder, ChangeDetect and Trackle - are described - these are inexpensive to use; as are two client side / software monitors - the excellent WebSite Watcher, and WebWatcher.

More from this book can be seen at Peachpit Press - which itself is worth some time to explore. See http://safari.peachpit.com/0321491718 - and start reading online using Safari.

Here's the table of contents for the book. You can also search inside the book.

"Safari is an e-reference library where you can search across thousands of books from O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, Cisco Press, Microsoft Press and more. Read books cover to cover or flip directly to the section you need in seconds."

Blogs and News Alerts for Research

Leveraging Blogs, RSS, News Alerts and Different Search Engines to Expand Your Research -- "Sabrina I. Pacifici outlines the techniques of a successful strategy and identifies a range of reliable resources that will contribute to the task of customizing your research objectives and maximizing results and services."

http://www.llrx.com/features/expandresearch.pdf

Using RSS to Create and Enhance Current Awareness Services -- "
Jason Eiseman's guide demonstrates how adding RSS to your technological arsenal can enhance the current awareness services you provide, as well as your ability to effectively manage organization-wide information."

http://www.llrx.com/features/currentawarenessrss.htm

Follow that page

Follow That Page: 100 Free Pages Tracked, Search Engine Showdown (Nov 5) -- Describes Follow That Page, a new alert service for tracking changes to Web pages.

Site24X7 for site monitoring

Free: Monitor Any Site (or Page) and Receive Quick Notification When It Goes Offline, Slows Down, and More, ResourceShelf (Aug 28) -- describes Site24X7 -- "It’s a tool of value to many including system librarians, webmasters, journalists, and others. I’ve been using it for a week and have zero complaints. Although many similar services exist, this one is very easy to use, offers lots of info, and is free."

X1 Enterprise Client

X1 Offers Free Desktop Search for the Enterprise by Paula J. Hane, Information Today (June 19)

"The X1 Enterprise Client lets business users search their desktop e-mail, calendars, and documents, but the product’s features that could put corporate data at risk and adversely affect exchange and network performance have been disabled."

Moreover Newsdesk 3.0

Moreover Introduces Newsdesk 3.0 Search Portal, by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (May 30)

"For enterprise clients, Moreover Technologies (http://www.moreover.com) has offered its Connected Intelligence (CI) line of current awareness solutions, including its CI-Metabase (the content database that drives all its products), CI-Builder, and CI Watch. The company’s CI-Newsdesk has provided a single point of access to aggregated online news content. Now, the company has announced a major upgrade to CI-Newsdesk that involved a complete rewrite of the application."

Of interest: For individuals (noncommercial use), Moreover continues to offer free, advertising-supported RSS feeds for more than 330 prebuilt, topic-specific categories (http://w.moreover.com/site/products/ind/rss_feeds.html).

Monitoring Blogs and Podcasts

"Gleaning consumer intelligence from blogs and podcasts" By Patrice K. Curtis, Freepint (May 1)

"Blogs and podcasts provide intelligence for consumer trend monitoring. In conjunction with your existing consumer intelligence (CI) resources, social media can highlight significant issues that affect your brands, identify competitor weaknesses, opportunities in the marketplace and those specific to a brand. Monitoring blogs and podcasts can help you develop actionable solutions to fuel your organization."

Current Awareness and CI

Got Competitive Intelligence? Tips, Tools, Techniques for the Savvy Marketer http://www.llrx.com/features/gotci.pdf - "Donna Cavallini and Sabrina I. Pacifici's guide has again been completely revised and updated to include new recommendations ranging from free websites, news alerts, RSS and blogs to fee-based subscriptions and licensed enterprise applications." This presentation has an excellent list of alerting services.

Silobreaker for global news

Silobreaker Launches Current Awareness Service, Newsbreaks (Feb 27)

" Silobreaker (http://www.silobreaker.com), a current awareness service focused on the understanding and analysis of global instabilities, announced its formal launch into the U.S. marketplace following its introduction into the European market last year." It uses 10,000 sources, extracts meaning and clusters results, and provides many methods for drilling into the information.

Tools to Tailor

Mossberg Positive About Rollyo and PubSub, Rollyo Adds New Firefox Search Bar Feature, SEW blog (

+ Rollyo - roll your own search engine for a collection of sites you choose. Can also use others' "searchrolls". SEW points out that you can only enter the top level domain.

+ Pubsub alerts you of new content that matches your keywords. It reads 23 million weblogs, more than 50,000 internet newsgroups and all SEC (EDGAR) filings.

Yahoo News Alerts

Yahoo Now Offers RSS Feed Monitor as Part of Yahoo Alerts ResearchBuzz (Feb 5) - Now keep up with news, weather etc by using the RSS feed from Yahoo Alerts http://alerts.yahoo.com.

Web Page Watchers

Tracking Changes on Web Pages by Gary Price, SearchDay (Jan 3) - Refers to a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick on A Review of Web Site Change Detection Services. Price adds to this list the WebSite-Watcher software for serious tracking of changes on web pages. Also the new web-based Trackle.

More Tyburski Tips

Short presentation by Genie Tyburski on Tips for Keeping Up - mainly good practices and 2 or 3 tools. Given at Internet Librarian 2005 Conference (Oct)

Search Engine Watch Podcast

Search Engine Watch is producing a daily podcast on search news at The Daily SearchCast. Get instructions there on subscribing, hearing it "live" at 11:30 am EDT, or listening to archives at WebmasterRadio.FM. Good digest that is a bit chatty -- one more thing to fit into the day. WebmasterRadio.FM works best through Internet Explorer.

Factiva and reputation intelligence

Factiva Launches Most Sophisticated Reputation Intelligence Tool Available Empowers Executives to Discover Opportunities and Threats from Blogs, Message Boards, Online Media, Radio and Television Transcripts and Mainstream Media - PRNewswire

"Reputation Intelligence, a powerful new tool that for the first time empowers executives to monitor known issues and discover emerging opportunities and threats from across the mainstream media, radio and television transcripts and consumer-generated content, including blogs and message boards, in one solution. It also enables executives to create effective reputation and brand management strategies that tie to business objectives and drive competitive advantage."

PubSub US Gov

Many eyes are on the new service from PubSub to watch what is being said about the U.S. Government through feeds. The feeds are pre-built searches on aspects of government. Steven Cohen, who now works at PubSub, described the service for the readers of ResourceShelf June 16.
"Today, PubSub reads over over 11 million weblogs, more than 50,000 internet newsgroups and all SEC (EDGAR) filings. In the coming months, we'll be adding many more streams of data, so stay tuned!"

PubSub Government Tracks Political Discussion on Blogs and Web caught Barbara Quint's eye too. [Newsbreaks (June 20)]

"Announcing the new service, Bob Wyman, chief technology officer and co-founder of PubSub Concepts, Inc., stated: “Instead of just relying on professional reporters, citizens today are playing an active role in collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news through blogs. PubSub’s prospective search is an easy way for political professionals and ordinary citizens alike to keep their ear to the ground and stay well-informed about pressing political personalities and issues.” ... "Based in New York, PubSub was founded in 2002 and continues to expand its product line for “prospective searching,” its name for the application of current awareness profiles to the expanding Web data flow."

British Library Direct

British Library launches Direct beta By Mark Chillingworth, Information World Review ( Jun 1)

"British Library Direct is a new online platform offering users a fresh interface for its document supply service, including extended search facilities, and positioning it for future growth." ... "BL Direct is the platform from which the national library will develop new electronic services. Already the beta version of the site acts as a central point for the research, data licence and business & intellectual property centres within the BL, bringing a range of services under one virtual roof."

British Library Direct now provides for pay-as-you-go and immediate download.

Cymphony adds Moreover as partner

Moreover Technologies and Cymfony Announce Partnership eContent (Jun 10)

"Moreover Technologies, which offers aggregated online current awareness and blog content, and Cymfony, a provider of market intelligence and automated media analysis, have announced a partnership to deliver real-time online news and blog content from Moreover into Cymfony's Web-based media intelligence applications. The partnership is intended to provide Cymfony applications with content for to monitor and analyze online news and blog posts, providing insight to consumer discussions, perceptions and issues that could impact brand reputation."

More information on what this means to Cymphony customers at the Cymphony blog - More Content Options for Clients

Ingenta Alerting

Ingenta Introduces New Service for Libraries - EContent (Jun 7) -- " Ingenta library customers can now upgrade their new issue and search alerts to include OpenURL links back to their own holdings, enabling users to link directly from an alert to the "appropriate copy" of the article's full text wherever it may reside." ... "OpenURL-enabled alerting allows libraries not only to offer patrons a current awareness program, with over 29,000 publications from a wide scope of disciplines, but also a service which is fully integrated with local full text holdings. "

Science.gov Alerts

Deep Web Technologies Deploys Alert Service for Science.gov in ECOntent (Mar 25)

"Science.gov now offers a free "Alert" service, created by Deep Web Technologies (DWT), that sends alerts to patron's email each week based on their area of interest in science. "

See also Science.gov Offers Alert Service, Research Buzz (Mar 23)

Mainly keeping up

Two presentations by Genie Tyburski at Computers in Libraries:

The Good, The Dead, and The Dying -- dying and emerging technologies - briefly email and advanced search are dying; IM, RSS, podcasting, simple search are flying. See full presentation for more interesting bits.

Tips for Keeping Up without losing your sanity -- recommended sources and tools including RSS, page monitoring and alerts.

Science.gov alerts

New Science.gov Service Delivers Science Information to Desktops Press Release (Feb 17)

Science.gov, a U.S> government gateway to science and technology information, has introduced a free alerting service about current science developments. Science.gov has "more than 1,700 government information resources and 30 databases on a wide variety of scientific topics".

Factiva's Reputation Management Service Stil R&D

Factiva to drop IBM's WebFountain Mark Chillingworth, Information World Review 1 (Jan 17) - Here's a surprise - Factiva felt it had to drop IBM's Web Fountain for its text mining "Insight for Reputation service". They said that Web Fountain was too slow in refreshing content. Insight for Reputation is still in the "R&D phase."

Setting Up News Feeds

Finding News Faster - XML-Based Feeds in Research by Genie Tyburski, Virtual Chase (Jan 11) - Presentation on using RSS feeds (and ATOM) in research. Describes feeds, how to search feeds, how to create them, and some points on avoiding information overload. Lots of good tips.

Competitive Intelligence and Current Awareness

Got Competitive Intelligence? Tips, tools and techniques for the savvy marketer [PPT[ by Donna F. Cavallini and Sabrina I. Pacifici, LLRX.com (Nov 28) - tool kit of resources, free and for-fee, to use to profile companies, track their activities, follow market trends, and monitor clients and propects.

PubSub for current awareness

PubSub pushes the news Frank Barnako, CBS Newswatch (Nov 19)

"Claming to filter millions of Weblogs, SEC/Edgar filings, Internet newsgroups and press releases, PubSub's "matching engine" recognizes new information as soon as it's published and delivers it to subscribers on a Web page or an RSS reader."

Managing the Firehose of Real-Time Information by Chris Sherman, Searchday (Nov 17)

Create a search at PubSub and have it let you know when something comes up in blogs, newsgroups, SEC filings. Set it up to receive the information in a news reader.

Blog Monitoring

BlogSquirrel™ 1.0 — Blog Searching, Monitoring and Clipping Service. --"monitors 100,000+ blogs each day and delivers daily reports of new mentions of your company name, products, brands, issues."

News Alerts for Lawyers

News Alerts Keep You Informed Genie Tyburski. The Virtual Chase (Oct Short guide to news alert services for a law offices. Includes the for-fee Factiva, LexisNexis and Dialog, along with some newspapers, Yahoo, Google, RocketNews, and Nexcerpt for handling all the clippings and briefings.

Yahoo ALerts

Yahoo Alerts by e-mail are finally working. I receive them regularly now. So does Gary Price -- Has Yahoo Improved Already Useful E-Mail News Alerts? (sept 8) "... from what I can tell Yahoo is now making even more sources available via the alert service. Wonderful!"

Get the Scoop

A New Scoop for Business Information Makes Its Debut by Paula Hane. Newsbreaks (Aug 29) There's a new Scoop from NetContent that offers alerts on company information, business topics, and keyword-defined queries.

"The subscription service is aimed at sales and marketing/communication executives. Content suppliers include ProQuest, Thomson Gale, and NewsNow, a U.K.-based Internet news monitoring service. The Scoop Publisher functionality enables group distribution of retrieved content through an RSS/newsletter/news feed mechanism."

The Web news comes from NewsNow.

There is a free 7-day trial. Price is $29.95 US / month.

Writing e-newsletters

Robin Neidorf in Freepint asks -- "E-Newsletters: What's the point? And how do you make it?" Identify the purpose and engage the reader. This is part of a longer Guide for Publishers.

New reports at Dialog NewsRoom

News Reporting From Europe & Hard-to-Monitor Countries Added to Dialog NewsRoom PRNewswire (July 14) - Dialog Newsroom will carry English versions of reports from media in such hard-to-monitor countries as China, Cuba, India, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan and Serbia.

Monitoring and Text Mining

TEXT MINING FOR REPUTATIONS: SCOUG Spring Workshop 2004
by Amelia Kassel Searcher (July 2004) Full report on sessions from the SCOUG day on "The New Gold Rush: Text Mining Finds the Motherlodes". Covered tools, technologies, and implications of data mining, text mining, and reputation monitoring.

FeedDirect to your website

FeedDirect will help you add a news feed to your website. It gathers articles from thousands of news sites worldwide, categorizes by topics and delivers them as Webfeeds. You select the categories and decide on the look. FeedDirect creates the javascript for you to plug into your page. Moreover Technologies is the company behind this. It discontinued its earlier free service a couple of years ago. This version includes advertisements from Google. (Mentioned in ResearchBuzz, July 1)

Moreover and Biz360

Moreover and Biz360 Partner eContent (June 15) Market360, a market intelligence application will be using news from Moreover.

Media Monitoring

Outsell noted that "LexisNexis Beefs up Media Monitoring Through Partnerships" June 8.

"LexisNexis has made two recent moves to serve PR professionals. Last week it announced that a live stream of news from LexisNexis databases will be embedded appear in Dashboard, Cymfony, Inc.'s media analytics product. This week, LexisNexis announced a partnership that would embed a feed of LexisNexis news content into Biz360's Market360 market intelligence application."

LexisNexis and Biz360 Form Alliance to Help Executives Manage Corporate Reputation and Build Brands Press Release (June 7)

Web Page Monitoring

WebMon is a web page monitoring program that is free. Users can specify the part of the page to watch. Also available through SnapFiles.

IngentaConnect coming

Ingenta Launches Beta of New Flagship Web Service EContent (June 1) The new IngentaConnect will replace Ingenta and IngentaSelect.com this fall. This is at long last the integrated service people have been waiting for -- "The new, improved service will integrate all of the electronic, fax and Ariel delivered content currently available from either website ...". Read more about the information architecture and engineering considerations at http://www.ingenta.com/.

Solcara InTheNews

Solcara and LexisNexis Unite to Launch News Monitoring Tool eContent (May 28, 2004 ) - "Solcara InTheNews is a search tool that analyses content provided by the LexisNexis 90 day news service in an effort to enable users to more effectively manage, access, and distribute information. Solcara InTheNews uses a statistical and linguistic analysis routine to identify relevant content. "

PN newswire NewsPrompt

PR Newswire Launches NewsPrompt News Alert System Econtent (April 27 ) NewsPrompt will deliver financial and business news.

GoogleAlert Improvements

GoogleAlert is a free web service that notifies of new hits from Google on saved search queries. It has just enhanced its service to learn from the results you choose to view and can apply case-sensitive and punctuation-sensitive rules to a set of Google search results.

From the announcement:

"The new SightPoint personalization technology automatically rates new
search results based on their similarity to results the user has clicked
on before. SightPoint uses Bayesian statistics, made popular by spam
email filters, to identify useful information in a sea of background
noise. The feature is now available on an opt-in basis to all users of
the free Google Alert service.

Google Alert also announced today the release of case-sensitive and
punctuation-sensitive search technologies. These features help users
filter out unwanted noise by automatically removing any results that
don't match the exact case or punctuation of a search term. Google Alert
already provides users with full access to Google's advanced search
features, including targeting by language, file format, country and
domain."

Mailing Lists In Danger

E-mail lists choke on spam by John Borland. CNet (April 14) "E-mail lists in general, long one of the most popular and useful online tools, are increasingly in danger of becoming collateral damage in the Net's war on unsolicited bulk mail." Mailing lists have been the workhorse for communications on the Net since inception and have survived many other crises. Hopefully, more technical solutions can be employed to filter the wanted from the unwanted.

Trackle

Trackle tracks changes on web pages and sends all changes by email. http://www.trackle.com/

Google Web Alerts

Google has replicated its popular news alerts with a web alert service. Best to develop the search statement at Google using advanced techniques if appropriate, and plug that into http://www.google.com/webalerts.

Accuweather teams up with TriggerNews

AccuWeather® Selects TriggerNews PL For Private Branded Weather Alerting System (March 17)

Accuweather watches weather around the world. People in the USA can download the desktop version for immediate updates. Now they will get real-time breaking news from TriggerNews

TriggerNews itself is a news alerting system that pulls in major sources and reacts to keyword-based rules to deliver alerts. The alerts are pop-up boxes, not email messages. Cost is roughly $140US / year for 45 "triggers".

ZDNet News Alerts

ZDNet announces a personalized news alert system that notifies readers by e-mail as breaking news occurs. ZDNet (March 17) - can set up e-mail alerts by keyword, company or topic.

NewsAlert Closing

NewsAlert has been sending news alerts on business and finance to members for years, but on March 31, 2004 it will be closing. Marketwatch.com bought it in January 2004 and didn't have time to change the About Us page. People are being directed to CBS Marketwatch where there is a variety of e-newsletters and keyword activated news alerts.

Track Pages

Trackle tracks web pages for changes in content during the day (hour by hour if you like) and will email the excerpts.

CNet News Alerts

CNet has news alerts for registered users. Set them up by keyword, company, or topic. E-mail alerts from News.com

Google News Alerts

Google Newsalerts are now available in French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

DialogPro for Small Business

Dialog Launches DialogPRO NewsEdge, Latest in a Series of Business Intelligence Services for Small Businesses Worldwide Press Release (Feb 25, 2004) -- "DialogPRO ("predictable research online") NewsEdge is a high-value, easy-to-use news alerting tool, available for subscription at fixed monthly fees, that delivers real-time news provided by top news and research sources based across town and around the world, and also offers easy-to-use access to archives of previously reported news stories and research."

E-Newsletters must be timely

Study: E-Newsletter Readers Grow Itchy Trigger Fingers By Janis Mara. Internet Advertising Report (Feb 17) - summarizes Jakob Nielsen's just released "E-Mail Newsletter Usability, 2nd Edition." . Nielsen and Amy Stover surveyed 45 people about their use of email and found they subscribed to 345 newsletters. To be successful a newsletter must deliver "timely and specific information that holds users' attention".

Current Awareness through Lexis

LexisNexis produces a newsletter for information professionals called InfoPro. The January 2004 issue describes enhancements to their Table of Contents services. Lexis has 1,400 TOC sources which can now be viewed through expanding pop-up menu and also searched.

In the December 2003 column, Andrea Diconi described how to use LexisNexis Publisher to push articles to endusers. LexisNexis™ Publisher: A tool that promotes the mission critical role of the IP within the organization

[Spotted through TVC Alert.]

Coping with Information Overload

How We Use Information Technology by Reid Goldsborough. LinkUp Digital (Jan 1, 2004) - Goldsborough interviewed John Horrigan, author of the the Pew Internet & American Life Project on information technology, titled “Consumption of Information Goods and Services in the United States” . Horrigan found that young technology users - the Young Tech Elites - have developed coping mechanisms for dealing with the quantity of information.

Individual.com

Individual.com, the customized news service with email delivery, has been resurrected. It offers a choice of up to 100 topics from a list of 200. (100 would be overload - it is best to keep to 10) The topics are populated with stories from 70 sources including PR Newswire, Business Wire, Knight Ridder. Topics cover business, finance, high-technology, telecommunications, Internet, computer, healthcare, energy, business, transportation, and the environment. Users can select the topics they wish to follow and view the stories daily at the web site or in email. Oddly, for a service of this type there is no RSS feed. Users can also select up to 100 companies to watch. The service is free - supported by advertising. Categorization of stories looks a bit uneven right now but that might smooth out.

Nexcerpt

Nexcerpt Announces Product Enhancements Information Today Newsbreaks (Nov 10) - Nexcerpt has enhanced its media-monitoring product with better text analysis and more sources.

News Alerts at FT.com

News Alerts at FT.com Can choose a combination of 15 company names and topics. Free trial during November 2003.

Medline SDI Services

MEDLINE SDI services: how do they compare?Mary Shultz, M.S., Assistant Health Sciences Librarian1 and Sandra L. De Groote, M.L.I.S, Assistant Information Services Librarian2. JOurnal of the Medical LIbrary Association (October 2003) -- Looks at PubMed Cubby, BioMail, JADE, PubCrawler, OVID, and ScienceDirect.

"Results: Not all MEDLINE SDI services retrieve identical results, even when identical search strategies are used. This study also showed that the services vary in terms of features and functions offered."

Content-based routing engine

Faster, better, with less junk by Anna Salleh . Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Oct 17) An Australian firm, Advanced Messaging Technologies PL, has come up with a third way to deliver content - not web and not email - but through Elvin, a content-based routing engine. "An information producer can notify Elvin that they have generated particular information, and then the technology routes the information on to consumers who have specifically requested that information. Both parties, says Segall, would have to have a special interface to communicate via Elvin." This has been shown to greatly improve speed and decrease volume. It's not expected to hit the home Internet network, but is being used at some universities and by the US military.

Google Alert Release

Google Alert Greatly Improves Web's Leading Automated Search Service. News from Google ALert (Oct 15) Google Alert has announced a new release --

"The new release adds many possibilities for integrating search results into web pages and desktops. Results can now be delivered as email, HTML, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or TrackBack feeds, with a wide variety of customization options. The user experience has been further enhanced by direct links to Google's cached versions of sites, and additional online help and example resources to help users get the most out of the service. "

Blossom Software

Blossom Software of Brookline Massachusetts has a suite of software packages to help web sites and web searchers.

For webmasters it offers a search engine, portal capability, enterprise search (web site integration) and intranet search capability. There is also a linkrot checker.

Most interestingly for web searchers there are two tools for "web mining".

Watch the Web - a web monitoring service with email notification. It will pick up all changes in text and say what has been added, changed, or removed. Price is $12 / month plus $.02 per page probed.

Scour the Web - a web mining service that extracts data from the Web. Examples given are for robots that check names and addresses. Company can custom-make the robots.

Google and Yahoo News Alerts

Free News Alerts By Cindy Carlson LLRX.com (Aug 31) - Reviews features of Google News Alert and Yahoo News Alerts for monitoring topics from multiple sources.

CNN email alerts

CNN breaks news via e-mail alerts CNet News (Aug 25)

Email services for International are described at http://edition.cnn.com/EMAIL/ You can customize up to 30 alerts using your own terms or tapping into popular alerts created by others. Accepts " " for words together, and - to exclude. Receive daily or weekly, html or text. Alerts can be suspended when you go on vacation.

U.S. Legal News

Genie Tyburski covers methods for Searching for U.S. Legal News in SearchDay (Aug 26) - FindLaw.com, Law.com for headline news and articles, and blawgs for legal issues or events.

NetNews Tracker

NetNews Tracker searches Usenet groups at Google Groups and will email hits that match your keywords. First three queries are free. (Mentioned in the Internet Resource Newsletter - August 2003).

Google News Alert

Google has come through for researchers again. It has added an alerting service to Google News. Up to 50 alerts are allowed. They are easy to add and delete. Changes must be done by deleting and creating a new one. Full syntax is supported. Google recommends creating the search using the Advanced Search at Google News and then copying the search query into the Alert's search box.

News Alert page is at http://www.google.com/newsalerts

Google spreads into news alerts by Stephanie Olsen. CNet (Aug 6) - Mentions the news alerts of competitors - CNN, Yahoo, New York Times ($) "and others".

Google Alert (www.googlealert.com) may be considering offering news alerts too. It is surveying its users on what they would like to see in a "more powerful premium service". News alerts, html and rss feeds were two of the possibilities.

Jonathan Dube at Poynter Online offers some tips for constructing the alerts. Naturally you can use "" for words together, OR, and - to exclude. Mainly keep in mind -- source: to limit to a news source, and location: to limit to a country - eg. location:ca Google's New News Alerts (Aug 7)

Online Video: Feedroom.com

Online Video: Feedroom.com is an Internet broadcaster with partnerships with Reuters, NBC, Tribune Company, Playboy, Miramax Films, Business Week, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, General Motors, AT&T, and Bausch & Lom. It offers news and entertainment and "delivers more than 30 million streams of video per month to millions of viewers worldwide".

" The FeedRoom operates the most extensive local video news network in the United States. The FeedRoom sites offer local television stations the opportunity to take advantage of both the surge in popularity of streaming news video and proven demand for more and better local new coverage online. "

The intended customer is the corporate web site, but individuals may view several channels at the www.feedroom.com site. FeedRoom also offers free video alerts for news, business, technology, and fashion. Subscribe at http://subscription.videolink.feedroom.com/FeedRoom/FeedRoom_prefctr.asp.

Thanks to Rod for tip.