A coincidence.

I had just composed the below note to post on this blog:

Are you finding Dialog less and less useful these days? I am and it’s got me a bit worried. I used to rely on it particularly to do indepth, precision searches of thousands of trade journals, and I still find it a good option and don’t even mind the Dialog command structure on Dialog Classic…but I’m finding that there are fewer journals, and those that are still represented, are not in fulltext and/or do not have recent issues.

Clearly this is a phenomena that’s been going on for awhile, but, unlike Factiva, why don’t I sense any action at all on the part of Dialog to figure out how to remain relevant in the Web 2.0 world? I would hate to see Dialog go, but I’m getting nervous, and Google is not a replacement for deep journal archive reseach!

…then I just came across Steven Cohen LibraryStuff post where he quoted Peter Scott here that Dialog has just instituted RSS feeds–big news that Dialog was catching the Web 2.0 Wave right?

Well, except that Dialog’s RSS is only for reading Dialog’s corporate news, bluesheet updates, its training and Quantum updates. It is not for doing any kind of substantive research or information gathering, such as monitoring keywords against a database…

Come on Dialog–we would like to see you more engaged in integrating the best of what you have (deep rich, archival content with sophisticated search options) with what the Web 2.0 world demands and wants.

Technorati Tags: Dialog

Technorati Tags: RSS

Well I’ve finished my training seminar in Paris on the use of blogs for business research, and I’m thinking that of all the various tips that I talked about for making blog research more efficient and substantive, perhaps the best one is this that combines keyword monitoring, Technorati, and RSS. Here it is:

First be sure that you’ve registered with Technorati with a user name and password. Then:

1. Identify the company, product, issue etc. you want to monitor with as precise keywords as possible;
2. Try that search in Technorati; experiment and modify if need be to get the best searches
3. Run the search
4. Click on “Add to My Watchlist”
5. Scroll down where the RSS icon is; right click it to get the URL
6. Copy it and insert it in your RSS Reader

Voila—Every day you will be alerted in your reader when a blog posting contains that phrase!

Speaking of RSS, I’ve been very happy with Lektora—I particularly like its neat interface, and the way it allows me to easily create categories to organize my incoming feeds.

Technorati Tags: blog monitoring

Technorati Tags: Lektora

I am in the gorgeous Bibliotheque Mazarine in Paris; overlooking the river Seine, and in the reading room, surrounded by books of French history from the 1500s and 1600s. The only hard part is getting used to where the letters are on this French keyboard. No picture taking is permitted in this serious, silent refuge for scholars, so you will need to browse the site yourself at http://www.bibliotheque-mazarine.fr and this pc does not support embedded links!

So here I am flying to Paris on Air France to do a training session (ahh, Paris in the Spring—flowers blooming, cafés, and cars burning in the street) and as I wait on line to board the plane a stocky bearded man looking red-faced and tired while he drags his two large suitcases behind him asks me if I’m on the line that’s boarding or waiting for my seat row to be called; I tell him the latter and he pushes past me, calling behind him to “come on and hurry up now”, apparently to his family. A short dramatic looking dark haired woman and two children hurry forward “Daddy is telling us to hurry” she advises them a bit nervously.

I recognize his face and British accent now—it’s Christopher Hitchins, the well known acid-penned leftist writer—once working for the Nation, but now a freelance after falling into disfavor with his colleagues after he supported the U.S. war in Iraq . No doubt he is on his way to Paris to cover the protests and labor issues, I assume.

Anyway, he gets to the gate and his suitcase is measured as too big to put on the plane. The suitcase’s wheels don’t fit into the little metal measuring cage.

“But the suitcase is designed for travel” Hitchins protests! The attendant shakes her head and says it is “a problem”…

I weasel my way into having a little chat with Hitchins by saying “well you can write about this in your article.” He flashes a smile and repeats “Yes, I’ll write about it in my article.” I move forward to the entry way, C.H. is still arguing with the attendant. I’m not sure how it was resolved (Though later chatting with him at the baggage pick up it turns out he’s just stopping in Paris on his way to Morocco to do a piece on their 50th year of independence)

So what does this little saga have to do with business research? Nothing, but as I’m getting into the blogging mode here—talking about what I’m doing and thinking as I’m doing it….it’s all part of this blog experiment and we’ll see how it all evolves…

All right then, but speaking of business research, I’m actually doing training for a large consulting firm meeting in Paris, on how to/when to use blogs in professional business research. I’ve also been compiling a listing of recommended/most popular business-oriented blogs. If you’d like to see the names of recommended business blogs previously published in The Information Advisor, and recently updated, send a note to me at robertberkman@gmail.com and I’ll email it to you.

(And you see, this is also a strategy on how I can find out who is subscribing to my feed, following up my recent post on that topic)