My blogging has been infrequent the last few weeks as I crank towards a book deadline and prepare for my annual summer sojourn to Prince Edward Island.…but please be assured that you’ll find more blog posts here shortly!

Well, while I’m here so to speak, I thought it might be worth mentioning a recent discovery: if you track comments on consumer generated video (eg YouTube, etc), I recently found out that an excellent way to do advanced keyword tracking of the title and description of a wide selection of consumer generated videos can be performed on the excellent audio video search site Blinkx



There are some particularly useful and valuable features too for creating really effective keyword feeds on Blinkx. For one, you can use an advanced search option to create more precise searches, using phrases, “all the words” and a “without the words” semi-Boolean search.

Furthermore, you can even limit the videos in your search to only the consumer generated ones if you so wish, which Blinkx calls the “Viral and Garage” videos. See the above screen shots for examples of how I set up an RSS feed on Blinkx to alert me to any “viral and garage” videos (which includes YouTube, as well as other popular consumer generated video sites) that contained the word “freegan”

I’m in the midst of researching the matter of authority vs. influence vs. popularity for an article in The Information Advisor, so this page from Thomson Scientific’s SciBytes which I located from ’s Gary Price’s always invaluable ResourceShelf was quite relevant and worth passing along here as well. The chart identifies which business journals have the highest citation impact based on various time frames.

Here is the definition of how the rankings were calculated:

The above table compares the citation impact of journals in a given field as measured over three different time spans. The left-hand column ranks journals based on their 2005 “impact factor,” as enumerated in the current edition of the Thomson Scientific Journal Citation Reports^®. The 2005 impact factor is calculated by taking the number of all current citations to source items published in a journal over the previous two years and dividing by the number of articles published in the journal during the same period—in other words, a ratio between citations and recent citable items published. The rankings in the next two columns show impact over longer time spans, based on figures from the Thomson Scientific Journal Performance Indicators. In these columns, total citations to a journal’s published papers are divided by the total number of papers that the journal published, producing a citations-per-paper impact score over a five-year period (middle column) and a 26-year period (right-hand column).

In doing some research for a wrap up of trends in the market research report aggregator business, I came upon a fascinating new site, out of Lyon France, called ReportLinker. ReportLinker is a subscription based site that calls itself an “open source market research search engine.” It has created a crawler to find and index over a million market research reports from governmental agencies, trade associations, research centers, and others with open source reports, and made them fully searchable on its site. ReportLinker’s crawler even is customized to perform deep web searching on specified sites discovered by the firm as containing valuable market research studies.

The site is very new—it was just launched this past March—and I’m in the process of testing it for an article in the July issue of The Information Advisor. So far I’ve been impressed with ReportLinker’s advanced search capabilities, as well as the quality of many of its reports. There are some small problems too (including some translation issues), and the service is not cheap, but I think this is a very significant development for market researchers and is an example of new types of open source document aggregation sites we may see in the near future.

One issue that I wonder about is how some of the market research publishers will react when they discover that the reports that they are publishing for free are being resold by a profit making firm. ReportLinker’s CEO Ben Carpano told me that the fees subscribers pay cover use of its value added search engine’s functions, and not for the reports itself, and that so far the firm has not received any complaints, but will certainly honor any requests not to index reports.