Librarian of Fortune

Taking a Strategic Retreat

I just posted the latest issue of my Info-Entrepreneur Tip of the Month. This one looks at how to take a strategic retreat and brainstorm through what is frustrating you. Think of this as an invitation to take a fresh start on the year, spend a day creating all the tools you need to get past the painful parts of your work or job.

What makes a sticky web site?

I was just talking with Sandra Gail Abbott about Facebook and what a time sink it can be, and I had one of those a ha moments. Back in the old days, before the web got all collaborative and interactive and fun, web pages struggled to create "stickiness" -- to keep visitors within the site as long as possible by offering them lots of good content, flashy videos and so on.

Fast forward to Web 2.0. Facebook has stickiness that an online retailer would give an eyetooth for. I can easily spend an hour every morning catching up, following comments, sending nudges, you know the drill. Facebook is sticky because all it provides is an infrastructure; it lets its users create the interest themselves. It's sticky because we have put on it what we want to come back to.

WorldWideScience

First, note that I'm not primarily a sci-tech researcher; I've been a business researcher almost all my adult life. That said, WorldWideScience.org sure is cool. It offers a one-stop metasearch in 50 national science portals, ranging from the Indian Academy of Sciences to Science.gov, Canada Institute for Scientific & Technical Info, CERN, and a host of others. I find this an easy first stop when I'm looking into something I suspect would be in the public literature, searching for something that I think a government agency is likely to have studied, or trying to identify the leading voices in a field.

Yeah, it's not perfect. Its advanced search option isn't advanced; since it's a metasearch engine, it dumbs down each query to the lowest common denominator. There's no way to limit your search to only free sources and yes, a good amount of the content in WorldWideScience isn't free. When you click through on a title, you're dropped immediately into that database. If that file is hosted in a non-English speaking country, you may have trouble using the interface.

That said, their search results screen gladdens my heart. There's clustering on the left, sorting and limiting features, and the ability to export the citations. It also shows how many results you got from each of the portals, which might prompt you to go straight to that portal and search it directly.

LexiQuo

I've been doing a lot of searching in non-English languages, and I appreciate how simple English word structure is when I look at German, for example. And it figures that it would be Germans who would figure out how to help searchers expand their search terms meaningfully to catch all the linguistic variants.

Enter Lexiquo.net, brought to you by Weitkämper Technology. It jumps through hoops if you're searching in German, but right now I'm impressed by what it does for plain old English language searches.

So, what is Lexiquo? Well, it lets you:

• search in Yahoo, Google, MSN, Exalead and Wikipedia, individually or clustered (although the clustering feature is only in German)
• add variants and synonyms for my search terms to my search
• get my search terms translated into German, Spanish, French or Italian.
• see results in images, videos, and people as well as the web

It's in beta and it shows... I sometimes get strange results, all the error messages are only in German, and the help files are written by someone for whom English is clearly not the native language.

That said, for help with finding alternate ways of expressing a search, Lexiquo is worth a try.

Social Media Intelligence Cheat Sheet

I recently learned about How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic, which appeared in ReadWriteWeb, a splendid Web technology news blog.

"We'll walk you through how we identify top blogs on any topic, how we quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, how we incorporate their blog archives into our knowledge about the field and how we find where else they are participating in conversation around the web."

This is a 13-step outline of how to determine.. well, what the blurb above promises. This is a fabulous cheat-sheet for any info pro who needs to know how to mine the blogosphere. (Yes, it's more than just Technorati!) The author of this post doesn't have a library/research background, but it's written specifically for info pros.

It sometimes lapses into techno-geek, but the structure is IMO spot on:

• Find The Most Popular Blogs in Your Field
• Rank the Blog Posts With Robots
• Banish Content Overload
• Check out the Hotness
• Make a Reference Search Engine
• Discover Community Leaders Elsewhere, Too

Great cheat sheet!

Shameless commercial

I'm giving two half-day workshops in conjunction with the annual conference of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP) that may be of interest to other info pros as well.

These will be held on Wednesday, March 25 in Albuquerque NM. The morning workshop is Speaking for Fun and (More Importantly) Profit: How to Build Your Business and Your Bottom Line Through Public Speaking and the afternoon workshop is Making Information Actionable: Transforming Your Deliverables for Added Value. Here is more info about both workshops.

And note that, if you can't make it to the conference, I also offer a one-on-one phone version of the workshop. Ping me if you'd like to talk about this option.

Thank you for your attention. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

I haven't been gone.....

I just realized that some people haven't seen any updating on my blog lately. According to Typepad:

"The domain was likely deactivated when your account was migrated to the new platform. This is a one time only change, and we apologize for the inconvenience."

Gee, thanks for notifying us of this potential problem, guys...

Anyway, for those of you are are seeing a lot of postings here for the first time, Typepad apologizes.

Plus ça change...

I just discovered Alltop, offering RSS "aggregation without aggravation". Imagine the early life of Yahoo!, when it was a directory of the best web pages in lots of different categories. Fast-forward and we've got the same thing, only for RSS feeds.

Doing David Filo and Jerry Yang one better, this group is "2 guys and a gal" -- good to see my gender represented here. They identify current topics, select the most authoritative sources on that topic, and aggregates those sites' RSS feeds. They claim to be willing to be talked into doing new topics that interest you. Here's what the Politics topic looked like yesterday:

For now, it's everything from Acne to Zoology, broken out into categories such as Tech, People, News, Work, and so on.

I might quibble about some of their selections for some of the topics, but this may be a good place to start with a new topic.

Social networking or notworking?

I just heard about a delightful blog posting, "Social Networking or Notworking?" from the Open Forum blog.

"For small business owners, entrepreneurs, managers and professionals, it's become an especially sticky problem. We convince ourselves that online networking is important for marketing. It is not just personal, we tell ourselves. It is BUSINESS. However, in the terrestrial world, no business owner does marketing all day long to the exclusion of other activities. Sometimes we're just kidding ourselves."

SLA candidate

I'm running for SLA Division Cabinet Chair-elect. It's a big commitment and I'm honored to have been nominated.