Librarian of Fortune

SLA goes corporate

Having served on association boards, I know how difficult it is to think strategically about the association while also putting out the usual fires. SLA - the Special Libraries Association - is doing a good job at finding creative ways to market its brand. Two recent examples:

Dow Jones placed a house ad in the Wall Street Journal during the SLA conference, promoting the association and info pros. This is a great example of partnership; Dow Jones can place the ad for free, and the benefits to SLA from this kind of exposure are significant.

The US Postal Service recently re-authorized third-party personalized postage stamps program, through which you can upload an image and create customized first-class stamps. The cost is the face value of the stamps plus a service fee. Twenty customized first-class stamps (face value $.42) cost between $15 and $19, depending on the quantity you buy.

So here's what's cool -- SLA created stamps with the SLA Centennial logo, and they are selling them for face value plus a flat rate of $4.80 for postage. Nice way for us to show our support... 

NetSnippets alternatives

I've been getting a lot of emails lately asking for alternatives to NetSnippets, a nifty software tool for saving and organizing content from web pages, which is no longer being supported. Following are some of your choices:
Furl.net
Evernote
Surfulator
Onfolio
ScrapBook (Firefox browser extension)
Zotero (another Firefox extension)
Endnote
FastStone
EasyWebAction

Note that the only one of these I use regularly is Furl...

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.

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.

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?

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).