Tales from the Terminal Room

Twitter Notes

Sun, 5 May 2013 10:15:58 +0100

The following are some of my recent tweets and retweets. They are selected because they contain links to resources or announcements that may be of general interest. I have unshortened the shortened URLs.

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Test your search skills with SearchReSearch

Sun, 5 May 2013 10:17:35 +0100

Many of us seem to be in Google bashing mode at the moment but they do produce good stuff at times, or at least some of their employees do. Dan Russell, who works at Google, has an excellent blog called SearchReSearch at http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/. The blog is “about search, search skills, teaching search, learning how to search, learning how to use Google effectively, learning how to do research. It also covers a good deal of sensemaking and information foraging“. Dan comes up with a topic for research and invites people to comment on what they find and how they found it.

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Now you see it, now you don't

Sun, 5 May 2013 10:19:16 +0100

April has been a very busy month for me this year. As well as speaking at conferences I also gave six full day workshops so had to prepare the presentations, handouts and notes well in advance. When it comes to the Google sessions the material the delegates receive never matches exactly what they see on their screens during the practicals. That's par for the course where Google is concerned and it's a great way of getting across to people how Google messes up search results. The main problem I'm having is that Google seems to be subjecting me to several major ‘live experiments' and results keep changing second by second. The consequence is that it is impossible for me to pull together a set of consistent screen shots but I, and the delegates, will just have to live with that. And it makes a good story on the day! .

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Business information slides and top tips

Sun, 5 May 2013 10:20:19 +0100

My latest business information workshop, organised by TFPL, was held in London. A large chunk of the session was taken up with exploring and discussing web sites but we also looked at how advanced search options and commands can be used to focus on higher quality business information. An edited version of the slides is available on authorSTREAM at http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/karenblakeman-1775787-business-information-key-web-resources/ and Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/business-information-key-web-resources-19252576.

Towards the end of the afternoon the participants were asked to come up with a list of top 10 tips and tricks. Two more were submitted to me by email soon after, so we have a dozen in total.

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Factiva discontinues pay as you go service

Sun, 5 May 2013 10:21:33 +0100

Factiva is discontinuing its pay as you go option for occasional users as part of a “strategic refocus”. Instead of an annual fee of $69 plus a per document charge of $2.95, there will now be a fixed monthly fee of $249/month.

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