Review of Searchme.com
I just wrote the latest BatesInfoTip newsletter, which looks at Searchme.com, a new search engine with a really interesting interface.
July 21, 2008
July 20, 2008
The Impact of Web 2.0 on Competitive Intelligence
Dow Jones recently hosted a webinar given by Cynthia Cheng Correia on CI in a collaborative world, focusing particularly on processes rather than services. The webinar is available for download here.
July 18, 2008
Just when you thought flying couldn't get any worse
The Washington Times, a DC paper owned by the Moonies and one that leans far to the right, published an article a couple of weeks ago that appears to be, um, true.
According to the article "Want some torture with your peanuts?"
A senior government official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has expressed great interest in a so-called safety bracelet that would serve as a stun device, similar to that of a police Taser®.
If you click through to the promotional video that the "safety bracelet" manufacturer has on its web site, this is not only an ID bracelet to free passengers from the annoyance of having to carry their boarding pass onto the plane but it also can be used to give an "Electro-Muscular Disruption" which will completely immobilize a passenger for several minutes.
Do you feel safer yet?
July 15, 2008
Firefox add-ons
The Confidential Resource blog had a nice run-down of the best add-ons for Firefox. I haven't tried them all to see if they work on Firefox v.3 (which, by the way, has some nice enhancements).
June 17, 2008
welcome home
Just got home from a trip and found that our house had been broken into. Not much taken; the sheriff said that it's probably local meth-heads. And 5 neighbors in this 40-house subdivision have been hit within the last 6 months... Fortunately, nothing taken that isn't easily replaceable, although this will of course give Allstate an excuse for raising our rates.
Update: John F., don't worry! The sheriff caught the perps and they think they have recovered all the stolen property from all the places the losers hit.
June 12, 2008
ProQuest acquires Thomson Dialog
After surviving what has felt like benign neglect for several years now, Dialog is being acquired by ProQuest. Regardless of whether ProQuest decides to maintain Dialog as an aggregated search platform or to break out the databases into other packages, I'm reasonably confident that the wide range of content in Dialog will remain in some form. Whether or not the pricing is friendly to the small budgets of info-entrepreneurs and small organizations remains to be seen.
The virtual melds with the real
OMG. this article describes how Disney and Google have rolled out a virtual version of Walt Disney World, in Google Earth. When I think about this too much, my brain bleeds out my ears. Here we have a virtual representation of Earth, and in it we can 
go on virtual tours of real buildings in the real world.
I'm imagining the day when I could have my business tagged to my little corner of Google Earth (40°07'43.52"N and 105°12'59.66"W to be specific); people can actually "travel" to my home office, where I can give a tour of my business, sell my books, give workshops and consult with clients.
June 05, 2008
Powerset.com
My latest InfoTip newsletter looks at Powerset.com, an intriguing new semantic search engine (right now, only searching Wikipedia).
RIP Live Search Books & Acadmic
According to this announcement of May 23, Microsoft is shutting down Live Search Academic and Books. It's a shame; I particularly liked some of the Academic features, but MSN clearly decided that it wasn't going to compete with Goliath Google in these arenas. As Microsoft said in its announcement:
...the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content.
Translation: we couldn't figure out how to make enough money off it, so we hope someone else will do it...
Fortunately, there are several options, besides Google Scholar, including Scirus, the Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations, Public Library of Science, CiteSeer, BizSeer, among others.
May 28, 2008
Companies (not) going "green"
Call me jaded, but I'm getting hacked off at hotels' fake efforts at looking green when they're really just cheap. First it was the notes about "we care about the environment, please don't make us wash your towels", despite the fact that housekeeping replaces the towels regardless of what you do.
I'm at a Marriott now that has plastic glasses in the bathroom, with a nice note saying that they're "made from corn, environmentally sustainable, and 100% compostable." Let's look at each of those claims.
- First, keep in mind that a real GLASS would have required no environmental cost after the initial manufacture, besides being run in a dishwasher with 100 other glasses. And there are no transportation costs after the first shipment of glasses, as opposed to the trucking cost of an unending supply of disposable cups.
- Making a plastic cup from corn creates artificially high costs for corn. At a time when we're having food riots around the world, we're using corn to make disposable cups. Our generation will live in infamy.
- It's not environmentally sustainable when compared to a glass. And corn is, in fact, NOT an environmentally sustainable crop. It requires more fertilizer, pesticides and energy to produce than other crops. And, um, it's food, folks, at a time when many countries are losing their ability to feed themselves due to climate change.
- It's compostABLE, which is not to be confused with compostED. This cup will go into the general trash flow, which means it will wind up with all the other garbage, and will in all likelihood NOT compost but, rather, will be there for archeologists to discover.
Oh yeah. Instead of a regular coffee maker, with those little paper packets of coffee, this one uses PLASTIC cartridges of coffee, thus generating more material that will never break down. How green can you get here, Marriott?
Thank you. I feel much better now. And yes, I flew to Baltimore from Denver, so my carbon footprint to get here is 1,013 pounds of CO2. The irony is not lost on me.
