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Tales from the Terminal Room ISSN 1467-338X
June 2005, Issue No. 63
Editor: Karen Blakeman
Published by: RBA Information Services
Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is a monthly newsletter,
with the exception of July and August which are published as a single
issue. TFTTR includes reviews and comparisons of information sources;
updates to the RBA Web site Business Sources and other useful
resources; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and
news of RBA's training courses and publications.
In this issue:
- TFTTR and RSS
- Internet Librarian International 2005
- Online Information and Content Management Europe 2005
- Search Tools
- Search Tools Summary and Comparison
- Google Video Search
- Google and Yahoo! Toolbars for Firefox
- Yahoo! Desktop Search
- Yahoo to the Max: an Extreme Searchers Guide
- Gigablast Launches Blog Search
- Information Resources
- VAT number validation
- Marketresearch.com buys Mindbranch
- Pharmaceutical Information Sources
- SPG Media RSS Feeds
- FeedJumbler
- Acronyma
- Searching Questions
- RSS feeds for company news
- These things are sent to try us!
- That darn Google Desktop cache
- Gizmo of the Month
- Meetings and Workshops
- Untangling Your Web: Effective Web Site Management
(Manchester)
- Developing and managing e-book collections (Edinburgh)
- Business Information on the Internet: Free vs. Fee
(London)
- Searching the Internet: Google and Beyond (London)
TFTTR and RSS
A reminder to readers that Tales from the Terminal Room is now
available as an RSS feed. The URL for the feed is
http://www.rba.co.uk/rss/tfttr.xml
.
Further information on RSS feeds can be found at
http://www.rba.co.uk/rss/rss.htm
and Wikipedia has a good article on the topic at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29 .
If you decide to go down this route and already receive TFTTR
by email you can remove yourself from the email distribution list by
going to http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/
and filling in the form, making sure to check the unsubscribe button
before submitting it.
Internet Librarian International 2005
Transcending Boundaries: Information Technologies &
Strategies for the 21st Century
The 7th annual Internet Librarian International will be held
Monday and Tuesday, 10-11 October, at a new venue for 2005 –
London's Copthorne Tara Hotel in Kensington.
Keynotes this year include Ronald Milne from Oxford's Bodleian
Library on the Google digitisation project, and Steve Arnold on
relevance and the future of search. Topics covered by the conference
will include:
- Blogs, Wikis and Collaboration Tools
- Information Organisation and Discovery
- E-Learning and Teaching
- Global Best Practices
- Digital Libraries and Resources
- Innovative Information Environments
- Web Research Skills and Resources
- Technology for Libraries
The full programme and a booking form can be found at
http://www.internet-librarian.com/.
CILIP Member Discount: If you are a member of CILIP
there is a special 20% discount off the full two-day conference fee.
Online Information and Content
Management Europe 2005
29 November - 1 December 2005 Grand Hall, Olympia , London
http://www.online-information.co.uk/ or
http://www.cme-expo.co.uk/
The Online Information and Content Management Europe
exhibitions and conference will be held from 29 November - 1 December
2005 in the Grand Hall at Olympia, London. Online Information and
Content Management Europe bring together companies who provide
information resources, solutions for information management, knowledge
exchange, epublishing, content management, intranets and extranets.
Following a successful launch in 2004, this year also sees the return
of three complementary events: Enterprise Document & Records
Management, Enterprise Search Solutions and ePublishing Solutions.
The Online Information Conference, which runs in parallel with
the exhibition, will be exploring the major issues and key trends
shaping the industry, and predicting developments for the future. The
International Information Industry Awards will be held on the second
evening of the event.
Search Tools
Search Tools Summary and Comparison
My summary and comparison table of the major search tools has
been updated. The chart compares the main search features and commands
for Yahoo!, Google, Exalead, MSN, Gigablast and Teoma. I have given up
trying to squeeze everything onto one page. There are so many features
that are worth mentioning that it now occupies three pages. The HTML
version is available at http://www.rba.co.uk/search/compare.shtml
and the PDF at http://www.rba.co.uk/search/compare.pdf
.
Google Video Search
http://video.google.com/
Google has launched a new Video Search tool. Its collection
includes videos from news channels and web sites. Searching is
relatively straightforward but there are not many that can be played
free of charge, so Google has added a 'playable option'. You can spot
the playable ones in the results list by the triangle icon next to
their entry. Google suggests a number of terms you could use, including
Greenpeace, AdWords and breakdancing to find free videos. One searcher
also managed to find William Shatner's version of Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds.
In order to play the videos, you have to download and install
Google's Video Viewer. It is supposed to be compatible with IE and
Firefox but problems have been reported with both. I cannot get it to
do anything at all in IE. In Firefox (version 1.0.6) it is very
temperamental. One minute it plays and the next it goes into a sulk,
even with the same video. I have yet to see and hear Captain Kirk's
rendition of the Beatles classic, but perhaps that is just as well!
Google and Yahoo! Toolbars for Firefox
Google has at last launched a version of its toolbar for
Firefox (http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/).
It seems to have all the features of the IE version but appears to be
missing several of the "special" searches that are incorporated into
the separately developed Googlebar (http://googlebar.mozdev.org/),
such as Scholar, Print, Video, Dictionary and Glossary Search.
Googlebar is also experimenting with adding Google Labs' "Google
Suggests" into the toolbar, although the version I tried froze on
occasion. I shall stay with Googlebar for the time being.
Yahoo! has updated its own toolbar for Firefox (http://toolbar.yahoo.com/).
There
is no point in trying to compare it directly with Google's toolbar as
they integrate into two quite different sets of search tools and
features. If you are a Yahoo! fan, though, it is a must.
Yahoo! Desktop Search
http://desktop.yahoo.com/
Yahoo! has updated its Desktop Search and now supports
Thunderbird email. Although previous versions of YDS did index and
search Thunderbird files you had to search them under the "All files"
category. Now you can chose just "Email". The number of file types
supported in the main program has been considerably reduced, though. If
you want the full range of 300+ file types you have to install the
expansion pack. For me, Yahoo! Desktop is still by far the best desktop
search program with Copernic's offering coming second.
Yahoo to the Max: an Extreme Searchers
Guide
Author: Randolph Hock
Publisher: Cyberage Books
ISBN: 0910965692
Yahoo to the Max is a new book from Ran Hock that tells you
all there is to know about Yahoo! together with recommended strategies
for getting the best out of the service. I sometimes suspect that Ran
knows more about Yahoo! than Yahoo themselves!
Gigablast Launches Blog Search
http://www.gigablast.com/
Gigablast has added a blog search to its home page and claims
to cover nearly 16.5 million pages. I have not had time to test it
thoroughly and compare results with tools such as Feedster and
Technorati, but it seems worth adding to my blog search toolkit. There
are the same advanced search features as in the web search and the
usual Giga Bits that suggest related terms and searches to add to your
strategy. For example, I typed in 'climate change peak oil' and it came
up with quite a lengthy list including 'oil production peak', 'oil
depletion', 'action on climate change'. Click on a suggestion and it
adds it to your existing search string.
Information Resources
VAT number validation
http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/taxation_customs/vies/en/vieshome.htm
If you are VAT registered and trading with companies based in
the EU, this site enables you to verify the validity of a company's VAT
number. Select the Member State from the drop-down menu and enter the
number to be validated.
Marketresearch.com buys Mindbranch
MarketResearch.com, a market research reports and services
aggregator, has acquired its major competitor MindBranch. The
acquisition will increase Marketresearch.com's coverage by 40%. The two
services are still available separately on their own web sites.
Pharmaceutical Information Sources
http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/pharma.shtml
The section on pharmaceutical information sources on the RBA
web site has been extensively updated. It lists a selection of
resources that provide data and information on the sector. It is not
intended to be comprehensive and is not a directory of companies
operating in the sector. Several of the sites mentioned in the list
already do that and I do not see any point in reinventing the wheel!
There are also numerous cross-sector directories such as Kompass and
Europages that are not mentioned
in the list (they can be found at
http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/directs.htm)
and which allow you to search for companies by product or services and
country. Kompass, in particular, has a detailed product classification
that enables you to carry out a very precise search and also has a
brand/trade name search option. Searching is free in Kompass and there
is a limited amount of free information, but access to the full service
is priced.
Pharmaceutical Information Sources is part of a relatively new
section on the RBA web site covering industry sectors (http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/industry.shtml).
Other areas in the list at present are Beverages, Food and Telecoms.
Many thanks to Paul Pedley who has encouraged me to set up the pages
and who very kindly provided a list of sites as a starting point.
SPG Media RSS Feeds
http://feeds.spgmedia.com/
This is a really neat site from UK based SPG Media. RSS news
feeds, compiled from news sources world-wide, are organised by sector
for example energy, telecoms, transportation. The emphasis is on
technologies and the companies that supply them. Feeds are available as
both ATOM and RSS. In addition to the news feeds, there are 28 sector
specific technology web sites. Each site provides information on
industry projects in production or under development, an A-Z company
index of contractors and suppliers, a catalogue of companies by product
or service, a diary of relevant exhibitions and conferences, and a list
of industry organisations.
FeedJumbler
http://feedjumbler.com/
Lazytom's FeedJumbler is a web-based application that allows
you to merge several RSS or Atom-based feeds into a single RSS and/or
Atom feed. You can also convert an RSS or Atom-based feed into RSS,
Atom and/or HTML and Javascript.
You enter the URLs of your source feeds and it generates a
link to your merged feeds, which you can put into your feed reader.
Alternatively you can register with FeedJumbler to get a personalized
page where you can keep track of your merged feeds. It is similar to
RSSMix but there does not seem to be any limit to the number of
headlines in your merged feed - with RSSMix it is 20 - and no limit to
the number of feeds that you can combine. Any more than 4 or 5, though,
and I think the resulting mega-feed would become rather unwieldy to
scan.
Acronyma
http://www.acronyma.com/
Acronyma claims to be the largest database of acronyms and
abbreviations on the web with over 471,000 acronyms. Acronymfinder.com
appears to
have more definitions (it claims to have 2,020,000) and sorts the
definitions into categories, for example Science and Medicine, Slang
and Chat. Acronyma returned fewer results with my test searches but as
well as English, it also offers definitions of Spanish, French, German,
Dutch, Italian and Portuguese acronyms.
Searching Questions
RSS feeds for company news
Question:
Is there a quick and easy way to set up RSS feeds for news on
individual companies?
Answer:
This is relatively easy to do but not necessarily quick. It
depends on the number of companies you are monitoring and how
comprehensive you want to be. There are several free news search tools
that you can use:
1. Yahoo! News http://www.yahoo.com/
Carry out a search on the company name in the News search. On the
results page you should see a link to get the URL for RSS alerts for
that search.
2. MSN News http://www.msn.com/
Similar procedure to 1 above.
3. Google News does not do RSS alerts yet but you could try
using the ScrappyGoo interface at http://timyang.com/scrappygoo/
which generates RSS feeds from Google News searches
With the three tools above, you can use the OR Boolean
operator to have more than one company in an alert for example 'Shell
OR Lukoil OR BP'
4. Moreover
http://www.moreover.com/site/products/ind/rss_feeds.html
Use the 'Create your own feed' section to generate individual feeds for
your companies.
5. If the company you are interested in is a major
International company, you may find a predefined feed in the companies
list at Newstrove (http://www.newstrove.com/)
You could go a stage further and combine RSS feeds on a
particular company from each of the tools. Feedjumbler (http://feedjumbler.com/)
is the
best I have found so far.
These things are sent to try us!
That darn Google Desktop cache
So you've downloaded and installed Google Desktop Search
(GDS). It seemed a 'Good Idea' at the time: search your own computer
for documents, cached web pages, emails at the same as the web. But do
you know how it works and exactly what information it is storing and
indexing?
GDS takes a plain text copy of the content of the files on
your PC and stores them in a separate cache. It is this cache that
Google indexes. Other desktop search tools just generate an index, much
like the index at the back of a text book. "So what?" you ask. The
problem is that a copy of the file remains in the cache even when you
have deleted the original. Sometimes that is a useful feature, for
example if you have accidentally deleted a vital document or email, but
there may be occasions when you really do want to remove documents for
reasons of confidentiality, or because of document management policies,
Freedom of Information etc.
Don't think that because a file is password protected it is
safe from GDS. As soon as you view a document on screen GDS adds it to
the cache, which means that a plain text version of your confidential
material is accessible to any one who cares to mosey around your hard
disk. The latest version of GDS does allow you to switch this 'feature'
off. Similarly, GDS caches and indexes all the web pages that you view
including secure pages such as bank statements. Again you can switch
this option off.
At a recent UKeiG meeting, I mentioned this behaviour and
noticed that there were a couple of worried faces in the audience. One
delegate later emailed me explaining that whilst at the meeting he used
Google Desktop to search his laptop for a character string that he knew
would be in his online bank statement. Sure enough, the cached page was
retrieved, whilst offline, and with his bank balance and transactions
clearly displayed. So what do you do if you realise that GDS has been
caching and indexing stuff you don't want it to?
There is now a remove function, but it is far from
straightforward to use and not 100% reliable. You first have to search
for the document and then select it for removal. The difficulty, I
found, was that there may be several different versions of a document
lurking in the cache and you cannot be sure that you have zapped them
all. The only way to be sure is to completely uninstall GDS and start
again from scratch. The later versions do delete the cache when you
uninstall but I would double check by looking in C:\Documents &
Settings\Your user name\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google
Desktop Search\ . And if you are really paranoid, try a utility such as
Eraser (see this month's Gizmo of the Month) to remove all traces of
the files.
Gizmo of the Month
Eraser 5.7
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/
Eraser is a security tool that allows you to completely remove
sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times.
When you 'delete' a file from your computer the data has not
actually gone. The operating system does not remove the file from the
disk; it only removes the reference of the file from the file system
table. The file stays on your machine until it is overwritten by
another file. Before the file is overwritten it is possible to retrieve
it with an undelete utility. Eraser can be used to overwrite individual
files, folders and unused disc space and it adds an Erase option to the
right click menu of the recycle bin.
The default method is based on Peter Gutmann's paper "Secure
Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" and overwrites
data 35 times. This can be very slow when erasing unused space on a
hard disk so a faster method - US DoD 5220-22.M - is recommended.
Eraser 5.7 runs on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP. It
requires version 4.72 of the Windows Common Control Library
(COMCTL32.DLL). If you are using Windows 95 or NT and have not
installed Internet Explorer 4.01 or later, you can download an update
at: http://www.heidi.ie/common/
.
Meetings and Workshops
Workshop:
Untangling your web: effective web site management
Organiser: Manchester
Business School
Presenter: Karen Blakeman
Venue: MBS, Manchester
Date: Wednesday, 14th
September 2005
Course fee: £215 +
VAT - BIS/BINN members. Others £250 + VAT.
URL: http://www.mbs.ac.uk/bis-training
Course Outline: Whether you already have a web site
or are in the process of setting one up, keeping it in pristine
condition and ensuring that your organisation benefits to the full can
drive you to distraction. Once it is operational it is all to easy too
easy to forget about it; but out of date pages and inaccurate
information are bad news! This course looks at how to painlessly manage
the process of keeping your web site up to date, how to identify key
areas that can drive your business forward, and how to encourage
visitors to come back for more.
Workshop: Developing and managing
e-book collections
Organiser: UKeiG
Presenters: Chris Armstrong, Ray Lonsdale
Venue: Wolfson Technology Resource Centre, Edinburgh
University Library
Date: Wednesday, 14th September 2005, 9.30 - 16.30
Course fee: UKeIG members: £130 + VAT
(£152.75); others: £160 + VAT (£188)
URL:
http://www.ukeig.org.uk/content/public/activities/meetings/14sep05ebk.html
Course Outline: This course opens the door to a new
electronic format. In the last six years, there has been an
unprecedented growth in the publishing of e-books with an increasing
array of different types available for all sectors. Delegates will have
the opportunity to explore a range of different ebooks including
reference works, monographs, textbooks, and fiction. Examples will
include individual titles and also collections of ebooks, such as those
offered by NetLibrary and Oxford University Press. There will be
discussion of the new opportunities ebooks offer for librarians and
users, and the significant collection management and promotional issues
which challenge information and library staff.
Workshop:
Business Information on the Internet: Free vs. Fee
Organiser: TFPL
Presenter: Karen Blakeman
Venue: TFPL, London
Date: Thursday, 6th
October 2005
Course fee: £295.00
+ VAT.
URL: http://www.tfpl.com/
Course Outline: To pay or not to pay for business
information is a question that faces many users of the Net. This one
day course compares what is available for free with pay-as-you-go and
subscription services and will examine quality of content, coverage,
functionality and price. There will be practical sessions throughout
the day and delegates will receive comprehensive notes.
Workshop: Searching the Internet:
Google and Beyond
Organiser: UKeiG
Presenters: Karen Blakeman
Venue: CILIP, 7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE
Date: Friday, 14th October 2005, 9.30 - 16.30
Course fee: UKeIG members: £150 + VAT
(£176.25) ; others £180 + VAT (£211.50)
Course Outline: Most of us head straight for Google when
we want to search the Internet. But Google is not the only search
engine and all too often we would be better off taking a completely
different approach. With so many new tools available to us and so many
new search features being launched every day, it can be difficult to
know which one to use and when. Karen Blakeman will take you through
the best of the search engine world and highlight how they can be used
to significantly improve your results. By the end of the day delegates
will have a vital toolkit to help them search more effectively,
including key search tools, comparisons, top tips and essential
techniques.
Topics to be covered include:
- different types of search tools and how they work
- what the search engines miss - the "invisible web" - and
how to tackle it
- making the most of Google and advanced search
- alternatives to Google
- RSS and blogs - how they can help you stay ahead and
improve your visibility
TFTTR Contact Information
Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services
UK Tel: 0118 947 2256, Int. Tel: +44 118 947 2256
UK Fax: 020 8020 0253, Int. Fax: +44 20 8020 0253
Address: 88 Star Road, Caversham, Berks RG4 5BE, UK
Archives
TFTTR archives: http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/archives/
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Copyright (c) 2005
Karen Blakeman. All rights reserved
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