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”

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.

The word from FT.com that its information page on companies is now free just came into my email box.

This can be a great source for international M&A activity, IPOs’ and more. The articles remain free for 24 hours after publication. To get to the free company information page from FT.com, link here.

When it comes to knowing print and Net-based publications on business and Internet searching, I thought I was aware of all of the usual suspects. But this past week I was pleasantly surprised to come across a new one, called, simply enough, the Business Researcher Newsletter, which was actually celebrating its 10th anniversary… You can review its free archives here.

The really nice thing about this source-filled free publication is that it focuses specifically on Canada and Canadian sources–a country regularly neglected by too many other North American information publications and analysts (mea culpa–so I’m planning an overdue round up of databases on Canadian companies in an upcoming Information Advisor). The issues even include the lastest releases from Statistics Canada.

The publication and associated links are all made available by a site called Stat Links Canada, which was launched by GD Sourcing, a site that is designed to help Canadian entrepreneurs locate good sources of market data.