From a business researcher’s perspective, one of the best things that has come out of blogging is conference blogging. Of course finding conference blogging is not a substitute for the experience of attending an event yourself, but having the ability to tap into timely–or in some cases even near real-time accounts–of what a keynote speaker or other experts are saying at a conference can provide a fast and convenient way to learn the latest state of the art thinking on whatever topic or industry you are following. And with more and more conference organizers assigning Technorati tags to their events, you can even do precision searching on Technorati to more precisely locate persons who have blogged the event.

But I’ve been asked a couple of times now–how does one know how much stock to put into conference bloggers’ notes? And that’s a very good question: none of us are perfect note takers, and so certainly errors, misunderstandings, and omissions are going to likely be found in many bloggers’ accounts of the conference they are reporting on. And because blogging is such an informal activity, it’s not likely that they are going to be put through any special scrutiny.

So what can you do? There are a few strategies you might take: you should try to find more than one person’s blog on a talk and compare their accounts; you can look for the names of persons in your field that you already know and trust to be sharp and rely on their reports; and you can always send an email to a conference blogger yourself to ask a few of your own questions and try to fill any gaps.

Those are a few of my suggestions. Want to suggest any of your own?

Technorati Tags: Conference Blogging

Although the phrase “information overload” sounds positively old fashioned these days, the issue is certainly not going away. One reason? Today we are not only dealing with so much new user created content (and not just trivia and junk–there’s an increasing amount of good stuff too), but also a seeming never ending flow of really useful free digital information management tools . The open source and sharing nature of the Web has created not just an explosion of news and conversation, but an ongoing stream of interesting sites, applications, hacks, bookmarklets, and so on – all geared to helping make information gathering on the Web more efficient.

The May issue of The Information Advisor wraps up a two-part look at the impact of Web 2.0 on business research, including a piece by our Brooklyn, NY contributor DerekTutschulte on Web 2.0 Information Overload. We conclude with his list of “top 10 time saving strategies” a few of which I am excerpting here:

* Archive your voice mails.
Vonage will allow you to send your voice mails to an email address, making archival and retrieval as convenient as going online.

* Get rid of it.
Time to make a decision. If that email is over two weeks old and you aren’t going to answer it immediately, delete it. You will feel better having done so and this small effort should propel you to take on other small tasks that have been clogging your brain. This is the advice of David Allen author of Getting Things Done.

* Put an RSS feed on probation.
When adding a new RSS feeds to your aggregator, label it “probation” or put it into a folder named likewise. In a couple weeks, check to see if you’ve been utilizing your new feed articles. If so, take it off probation. If no, toss it.

* Type your computer what to do.
With ActiveWords you can program keyword shortcuts to those common computer tasks.

* Collaborate on flowcharts and diagrams.
At Gliffy.com you can create and share Visio-like documents in a snap. (Must sign up as a Beta tester)

* Try a widget.
Try a Konfabulator Widget from Yahoo to check your emails at a glance and add other functionality to your desktop that will reduce the time you spend online. These are mini-interfaces to web services you access numerous times a day.

* Today’s popular links all on one web page.
Through an easy-to-use interface, PopURLS.com compiles the most popular links from various information collection sites.

* Roll Your Own Search Engine
Create a customized, searchable database! On Rollyo, you enter the sites you want to search, enter your keywords and Rollyo will do a search just on those sites. Create and name as many different sets as you want for different subjects and applications.

What are your solutions or strategies?

Technorati Tags: Information Overload

While I was not overly impressed with the newly launched online New York Times new company research function, I’ve been more impressed with its new blog-like financial news reporting service called DealBook, edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Sorkin has been the Times’ chief mergers and acquisitions reporter since July 2000.

The service is kind of a “best of” what’s out there being reported in the areas of M&A, venture capital, investment banking, hedge funds and so on. DealBook provides breaking news, as well as analysis, from selected publications, ranging from the Globe and Mail, Guardian, Bloomberg, Times of London, L.A. Times, Business Week, and many others.

For example, in today’s blog there were these lead stories for these key topic areas:

M & A: Nasdaq-L.S.E., Schering, Google
INVESTMENT BANKING: Citigroup, Deutsche Bank
I.P.O.S/OFFERINGS: Hyatt, Standard Broadcasting
VENTURE CAPITAL: Greenfuel, Angioscore
PRIVATE EQUITY: GTCR Golder Rauner, Sun Capital
LEGAL: Enron, MySpace.com, Six Flags

There’s lots of good features: you can browse stories by industry, see a “bankruptcy index” and view some pretty cool charts on deals “in play”. You can even get this delivered to you the old fashioned way, in your email box. Yeah, there are ads you have to put up with but the content and presentation seem first rate. It’s all here except for the famous blogger “snark”

Nice job, NY Times!

Technorati Tags: New York Times

Robert Young, a guest columnist at GigaOM blog wrote on April 4th what I thought to be a very insightful discussion on how URLs are the power behind the shift of power between corporate controlled media/content and user-created content.

In this piece, Young says that if we “to look at the web as a vast collection of URLs” we see that the vast majority of new URLs are created by consumers…Young adds:

“As we all know, the URL is a powerful and extensible concept… it represents the most fundamental element of the web and it continues to grow in breadth and depth of its utility. After all, URLs enabled eBay and Amazon to create virtual storefronts. If you put a major destination site like Yahoo! behind an x-ray machine, the skeleton that you’ll see is a vast collection of proprietary URLs that contain all sorts of media. Google used URLs as way to poll collective wisdom in its effort to determine high relevancy for its search results. Without doubt, in the world of new media, URLs are a source of power, control, influence, and dollars.”

Young goes on to note that linking URLs create social networks, and that since more URLs are being created by consumers, that these powerful networks are also user-driven.

So what does this mean for business research? As more users create social networks that gather around URLs, these may serve as new niche sources of expertise—say a community that follows a smaller private company, or a tiny industry, or product. Niche communities exist already to some degree, as predicted by Chris Andersen in his seminal piece, The Long Tail, the real action on the Net is in the niches, and users, not major publishers or information vendors are increasingly going to be the creator of these niches.

These user created communities take various forms too—see, for instance, today’s New York Times piece about Squidoo, online marketer guru Seth Godin’s Beta site that offers what it calls “lenses” where individual consumers offer advice and expertise on thousands of niche topics from Dale Earnhardt Jr and Africa to Soy Protein and Vieques, PR.

There’s also “Adventures in Market Research” and lots of business oriented lenses on Squidoo too. While most of these lenses are primarily pointers to other sites, again, they generate their own unique URL, and can eventually create communities that form around the particular niche lens.

Technorati Tags: Social Networks

Technorati Tags: Squidoo