Instead of Searchwiki we now have stars or starred results. Sign in to your Google account, run a search and you will see outlines of stars next to the search results. Click on a star to “bookmark” it and the star turns yellow:

Next time you run the same or similar search your starred results will appear at the top of the results page:

Starred results work across different Google types of search or “properties”, so if you star a result in Google News it may also appear in a standard web search.

I like this feature as it does not interfere with Google’s ranking of your search results. It merely highlights pages and sites that you have found useful in the past.

Google Maps has yet to tell UK users to get on their bike, though. We currently have directions for travelling between two locations on foot and by car but in the United States there are now cycling directions for 150 cities. Those of us in the UK do not have “public transit” directions on Google Maps either but we do have http://www.transportdirect.info/, which I notice now has a cycle planner for selected areas. This is the first version of the planner produced in conjunction with Cycling England, Ordnance Survey and relevant local authorities. Transport Direct is looking for feedback from users so if you regularly cycle, and your area is covered, give it a go at http://www.transportdirect.info/Web2/JourneyPlanning/FindCycleInput.aspx

1. The Google Wonderwheel was the clear winner of the day with this group. When your results page appear on screen, click on “Show options” just above the results and to the left of the screen. Then select Wonderwheel from the list on the left of the page. (For further details see Google new search and display options
http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/05/google-new-search-and-display-options/)

2. Google’s Timeline was a close second in the popularity stakes. This is also under Show options in Google when you do a default web search and is also available in Google News. It shows the distribution of your articles over time and gives you an idea of when something started to become a “hot topic” and how a story has developed over time. It is not 100% accurate but is good enough to give you an overall picture of how interest in a subject has waxed and waned.

3. LGSearch http://lgsearch.net/ They liked this one a lot! This a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) set up by Dave Briggs (http://davepress.net/) that searches UK public sector web sites in one go. On the results page you can, if you wish, narrow down your search further to Local Government, Central Government, Health, Police & Fire, LG Related or Social Media.

4. Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/. A site used by many people and organisations to provide access to PowerPoint presentations. Search for presentations on any topic or by a specific person then view online or download the original if the author permits. Once you have selected a relevant presentation Slideshare also shows you a list of other presentations containing similar content. No registration required if you just want to search.

5. Try something else other than Google. As well as giving Yahoo or Bing a go, try and think about the type of information you are looking for: news, video, statistics, what people are talking about. Then use the appropriate search tool for that type of information.

6. Twitter search http://search.twitter.com/ You may not want to indulge in Twitter yourself but it can give you an idea of what people are saying about a topic. It is also an essential part of reputation monitoring and competitive intelligence: what are people saying about you or your products and services? You do not have to have a Twitter account to search Twitter, just go to search.twitter.com.

7. Google Blogsearch (http://blogsearch.google.com/) and Blogpulse (http://www.blogpulse.com/) Blogs are another useful source of views and opinions on every topic imaginable. Blogpulse has a “trend this” option on the results page that displays a graph showing you how many blog posts mention your search terms over time.

8. Zuula.com (http://www.zuula.com/) for quick and easy access to a wide range of search tools covering different types of information. Enter your search once, click on the tab for the type of resource (video, images, reference, news), and then work your way through the list of search engines.

9. Google Custom Search Engines (CSE). We looked at several Google CSEs, LGsearch.net and Directionlessgov (http://directionlessgov.com) being just two of them. You can, though, set up your own CSE at http://www.google.com/cse/. Useful if you search the same web sites day after day. You will need a Google account or Gmail account to set up a CSE but you can host your CSE on your own web site or on Google. CSEs can be made public or kept private.

10. University of Auckland Official Statistics (OFFSTATS)  http://www.offstats.auckland.ac.nz/ This set of web pages provides information on Official Statistics on the Web and is an excellent starting point for official statistics by country and subject/industry.

Date: Tuesday 6 April 2010

Time: 18.00 for 18.30

Venue: Great Expectations, 33 London Street, Reading, Berkshire RG1 4PS
www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=471801&y=173139&z=0&ar=Y

Chrissy Allott: CASH, a Current Awareness Service for Health

From a local to a national current awareness and alerting service; from primary care to mental health and secondary care, the aim of CASH is to provide a nationally managed and coordinated current awareness service to ensure that all health care staff are kept up-to-date.

This is a free event followed by refreshments and a chance to network with your colleagues from the local area. An invitation is extended to anyone with a professional interest in the topic.

Please advise Norman Briggs, Events Co-Ordinator, Tel: 0118 987 1115 or nwbriggs@pcintell.co.uk or Chrissy Allott, Chairperson Chrissy.Allott@berkshire.nhs.uk if you plan to attend.

Date for your diaries

Tuesday 4 May: CILIP in the Thames Valley & South East Branch Joint AGM 2010

The South East branch will hold a joint AGM with the CILIP in Thames Valley sub-branch on Tuesday 4 May at the Town Hall, Reading, from 1.00pm. Further details of speakers and events will be announced soon.

PowerPoint (download from this site – 3.2 MB)
Slideshare
authorSTREAM

I have given the presentation a Creative Commons 3 non-commercial by attribution license, which means you are free to download and re-use it as long you cite me as the author and you don’t sell it for a heap of cash!

The other speaker in the debate is Phil Duffy, Information Services Manager at Hammonds LLP.

The pricing plans for Yammer Communities will be the same as the “corporate” version: it will be free to use with priced plans for more advanced features. The service will launch on March 1st.

In Google you have to run separate command line searches if you want to pick up both ppt and pptx files. The advanced search screen file format drop-down menu options only search for pre Microsoft Office 2007 file extensions. Bing does not seem to recognise the newer file extensions at all but you can search for them in Yahoo using the ‘originurlextension:’ command. Like Google, Yahoo’s advanced search screen file format box does not pick up the 2007 extensions.

Most people who use Microsoft Office 2007 generally convert files to 97-2003 format before uploading them to the web, but Office 2010 is well into beta testing and the new extensions will start to become more commonplace. It will be interesting to see if and how Google, Yahoo and Bing manage search for these new filetypes.

Date: Tuesday, 2nd March 2010
Time: 18.00 for 18.30
Venue: Great Expectations, 33 London Street, Reading, Berkshire  RG1 4PS
Speaker: Chris O’Hare

Chris O’Hare is manager at Henley & District CAB. Chris will consider the transferable skills from the information industry, the challenges and joys of working in a small local charity? If you are interested in volunteering, moving into the charity sector or the work of CAB come along and find out more.

Chris has worked in the information industry for more that 20 years, most recently on a freelance basis at Yell. Previous roles include Information Manager for Business Gateway in Aberdeen, Senior Lecturer at London Metropolitan University and Information manager for the Consumer’s Association. Chris is trainer for TFPL. Her book Business Information Sources: A Beginner’s Guide was published in 2007 by Facet.

These meetings are free and open to all.

Refreshments provided afterwards.

Please advise Norman Briggs,  Events Co-Ordinator Tel: 0118 987 1115 or nwbriggs@pcintell.co.uk, or Chrissy Allott, Chairperson Chrissy.Allott@berkshire.nhs.uk if you plan to attend

It covers publicly available PowerPoint presentations that are on the web but does not include services such as Slideshare or Authorstream. The default simple search is straightforward. Type in your search terms and relevant slides are displayed as thumbnails. The advanced search enables you to search by slide title, text, notes, presentation name, keywords, language and site. To see a larger version of a slide and any notes associated with it move the cursor over a slide, or you can download the entire presentation if you wish.

There are also options to restrict your search to university sites. These are listed by country in regions (Europe, North America, Oceania and Asia) but it is not comprehensive. Once you have identified the university you want you can either browse the title slides or keyword search the available presentations. Phil Bradley has already reviewed the service and he commented that no UK universities were listed. This is obviously a part of the service that is under continual development and I note today that  two universities have been added to the UK list since I last looked. It is not clear how the universities are selected for inclusion (there are only 47 for the UK) and many major institutions such as Reading University are missing from the list.

Slidefinder is powered by Slide Executive (http://www.slideexecutive.com/) and is a showcase for Swedish company Novatrox’s desktop and enterprise presentation management tools. They are essentially search tools for presentations stored on your own computer or networks but they also enable you to build new presentations from existing slides and manage “libraries”. There are a range of products depending on the number of users and how you wish to create and organise your files. They are all priced but you can download free trials. I am currently looking at the single user desktop edition and although I know my own presentations inside out and their location I am finding Slide Executive very useful for presentations given to me by co-workers and colleagues. The question for me now is whether or not it is worth 249 Euros. Possibly not, but the free Slidefinder is definitely worth adding to your search toolkit.

Phil Bradley and I attempted to replicate this on our various machines, operating systems, browsers etc but could not and neither could anyone else in @daveyp’s twitterstream. Phil Bradley wondered if @daveyp had stumbled upon some unique, bizarre experiment. In the mean time I had turned to the email discussion list of the AIIP (Association of Independent Information Providers), one of my professional networks. One hour and fifteen minutes later, fellow member Donna Fryer responded with a link to http://blogoscoped.com/forum/163640.html, which suggests that Google are testing a change to the format and layout. The posting also refers to http://searchengineland.com/google-streamlines-search-options-30143 . By this time @daveyp had reported that the icons had disappeared and the layout returned to normal!

I subscribe to the Blogscoped RSS feed but had completely forgotten about the posting. In a follow up tweet Phil Bradley echoed my own thoughts when he pointed out that the Blogscoped article was written in November 2009 and asked why they had started testing again now. The answer may be in the Search Engine Land post: “the cleaner display may be launched across Google after the New Year.” So keep your eyes peeled for a new layout in Show Options.

As well as alerting me to a potential change in the Google results layout, this whole exchange reinforced to me the power of networks and social media when one is faced with a problem – and I include the good old-fashioned, traditional email discussion lists. One person reports an oddity on their preferred social network (in this case Twitter). Members of that person’s network pick it up, investigate and pass it on to members in their preferred networks  (in my case the AIIP discussion list). Suggestions, advice and information are passed back to the original enquirer and problem solved!

I am still gobsmacked by the number of organisations that still use IE6. About 20% of the in-house workshops I do have to be run on computers using IE6. Many people highlight local government as the major culprit but there are major international corporations who are still using it. The most common excuse I am given is that in order for them to use bespoke internal databases they have to program an interface between the browser and the databases. Changing the browser means rewriting the code. The scariest set-up I have come across was in an international investment bank whose CIO told me that the easiest way for them to connect a browser to a key database was to make use of  a security loophole in IE 6, which means that they can’t install security updates!

You may think that removing IE 6 support from Google Docs and sites won’t affect the general user. Check the results from your Google searches over the next few weeks. I bet there will be formatted files such as PDFs, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations in the mix. If you want to preview the file before downloading the HTML option is still there for some, but an increasing number are being previewed in Google Docs. And when it comes to accessing web sites it is not just Google services and applications that suffer under IE 6. Forget about fancy Web 2 applications: I am finding in my business information workshops that essential features of many web sites are not displayed in IE 6 .

For the web to move on and integrate new technologies IE6 really must die

Event: Web 2.0 – the truth behind the hype

Date: Monday 1 March 2010, 6.30-8pm. (Doors open 6 pm)

Venue: Hammonds, Rutland House, 148 Edmund Street, Birmingham B3 2JR.

What is web 2.0 and what isn’t it?

In this seminar Karen Blakeman, Independent Information Trainer and Consultant at RBA Information Services, and Phil Duffy, Information Services Manager at Hammonds LLP will debate the pros and cons of using web 2.0 tools and technologies. This event was sold out and highly rated by attendees in London earlier this year.

There will be a networking reception after the event.

Booking Details

All seminars are £10 for CLSIG members, £15 for non-members and half-price for the unemployed. To book or for more information please email events@clsig.org.uk.  Cheques should be made payable to CLSIG and sent to Irena Valouchova, Denton Wilde Sapte LLP, One Fleet Place, London, EC4M 7WS or DX242 City. Please note that refunds are only available up to a week before the event. Travelling details: http://www.hammonds.com/Default.aspx?sID=259&cID=952&ctID=11

CLSIG website: www.clsig.org.uk

I am testing it out on 3 web pages and comparing the results with Page2RSS and the desktop program Website Watcher. My comparison has only been running for 12 hours but already there are differences between Google Reader and Page2RSS. Google Reader is picking up more changes than Page2RSS, which is not surprising because Page2RSS checks a page just once a day and Google checks pages more frequently. But what I did not expect was that Google would miss a major change that Page2RSS picked up. Had I bothered to look at the web page when Google Reader had told me it had changed I would have spotted the new text that it had missed but the temptation is to just view the reported change in Google Reader. Website Watcher, though, has come up trumps every time and picked up all changes to the pages, probably because I told it to check the pages in question every 10 minutes.

The initial stages of my trial suggest that Google Reader is a good way to track changes to web pages as long as you only need to know if a web page has changed in some way and as long as you go to the live web page to view the changes. It seems that if a web page changes frequently throughout the day it will not pick up and report every single change. Google Reader checks pages at pre-determined time intervals but I expected it report on all of the changes since it’s last report. It doesn’t and that puzzles me.

If you really need to know about web page changes as soon as possible then a desktop tool such as Website Watcher is the bees knees. You can choose how often it checks the pages and you can also tell it look for specific keywords  – useful if you are waiting for a product launch announcement for example.  Website Watcher can also easily monitor whole directories of pages. It is not free – prices start at 29.95 euros  (see http://www.aignes.com/shop.htm for details) – but it gives you far more options and control than Google Reader.

If your small business depends on Internet traffic for its revenue or if growing your small business during 2010 has to be done hand in hand with the Internet, you’ll need to know how to market it online. If money is no object you could hire an agency to create your online marketing strategy, but for most of us as small business owners it’s a luxury we cannot afford. Here are 10 tips for marketing a small business online.

Free is the magic word – There are a few online marketing activities which are both free and worthy of your time. Be sure to use them.

1. Register with Google Maps – Google allows local businesses (big or small) a chance to register their business address and phone number in its local listings. If for example someone searches for a keyword together with a location e.g. ‘nw11 plumber’, the search results will include listings from Google Local displayed on a map next to the normal search results.

2.  Upload products to Google Product Search – To start selling your products on Google Products all you need is to prepare a data feed and a Google user account. Also known as Google Base, this free service from Google allows businesses to list products or services on its first page results. In most cases these will appear just below the paid results and will include an image, title, price and direct link to the product or service

3. Get a voucher for AdWords – Google’s AdWords is by far the biggest paid ads medium. If you search hard enough you may come across a free voucher which will charge your account and let you use Adwords at no cost until the funds run out. Your bank might offer such voucher when you open an account or when you attend a Google university course (which is free and managed by Google).

4. Use social marketing – The key to dominating the social landscape is to become an authority in your industry. To achieve this status consider using services such as Twitter to share relevant information, Yahoo Answers to answer industry questions and so on.

5. Create a blog – Blogging can go hand in hand with a social marketing strategy and is considered very effective. There are a few blogging platform which are free such as Wordpress and the key is to integrate the blog within your website so it looks and feels apart of the brand, for example www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/.
Consider paid services – Most online marketing activities are unfortunately not free, however most could be executed within a small budget so you are able to test the waters and quickly stop or pause.

6. Register with niche directories – Most industries have a few directories which will drive qualified web traffic to your site. Try not to register with directories which offer little value or are unrelated to your industry because you really want to generate web traffic which is likely interested in your products or services.

7. Start an affiliate program – Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards another for each sale which the other business generated. You can either self manage the program by buying an off the shelf affiliate tracking software or use a type of middleman service to link between you the affiliate. Each has it’s pros and cons, and each case is different.

8.  Email marketing – Newsletters, product updates and email promotions are fantastic to keep in touch with customers and ease to manage. The key is to communicate relevant messages, at the right time and at the right frequency. There are a number of web based email software providers, some such as Mail Chimp even offer a free plan.

9.  Improve search engine ranking – The most cost effective marketing channel with the lowest cost per acquisition is the natural traffic channel also known as seo. By optimising your website in accordance with the search engine guidelines you will notice that with time organic traffic will find its way to your site. Although this channel is technically ‘free’, it does require a lot of your time, hence similar to a paid service. For more on search engine optimisation, head to Google.

10. Use 3rd party sites – Sites such as eBay, Amazon, and Play.com will allow you to list your products for a small charge.  Because they already have high levels of quality traffic and you don’t (yet) you are able to put your offers in front of the right target market quickly.

What are your online marketing tips for small businesses?

Joseph Eitan is founder of Photo Paper Direct. Joseph started the business a few years ago which now sells a selection of Inkjet media from large format paper to cartridges.

Many thanks to Suzanne Bartlett for the information and feedback on the service.

Potholes.co.uk is run by Warranty Direct who specialise in used car warranty, new car warranty and extended warranty. It is a “Campaign website to highlight poor state of British roads and help motorists seek compensation from Councils”. Type in the first part of a postcode or the name of a town to view a Google map showing the location of any potholes in the area. Click on a marker to see a more detailed description of the problem.

To report a pothole you need to register and sign in. First enter a title and description and then the street name and town. A Google map should appear with a marker and you can then drag the marker to the exact location of the pothole(s). You can also upload a photo. Once you have submitted your report you are taken to a page where you are encouraged to report the problem to the local council.

There is a blog at http://www.potholes.co.uk/oursays where they talk about pothole issues and highlight news stories. Potholes.co.uk is also on Twitter at http://twitter.com/potholesuk/

I am not sure how useful this site really is for motorists as it is dependent on people reporting potholes to the web site, so it is not comprehensive. It is also not clear who marks the potholes as filled when the repairs are made. Feedback on both of those points would be welcomed.

Thanks to @cllrdaisybenson for the tweet that alerted me to the site.

Thanks to Gary Price for the alert (http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/01/10/switzerland-in-figures/)

All you have to do is enter the postcode, street name or area. You should then see a map showing existing and previous problems.

To report a new problem, click on the location of the problem on the map. A purple flag will appear and then you fill in the boxes: category (drop down menu), details of the problem, upload a photo if available, and email address and telephone number. Then Submit. FixMyStreet will send your report to the council on your behalf. “Simples”!

You can also subscribe to problem alerts. These can be delivered by RSS feeds or emails alerting you to problems within 7.3 km of your post code (the default), or 2, 5,10 or 20 km. Alternatively you can choose to receive all alerts in the area covered by your council or ward.

Information on other MySociety.org projects such as they “They Work For You” (details of your MP and their activities and “What do they Know ” (Freedom of Information) are available at http://www.mysociety.org/projects/