PassingNotes.com

yeah, so today find.com was launched by find/svp (a research firm that tried to go public and then watched a 30+% decline in revenue before becoming a penny stock) and media empire (who?) using triplehop technology from matchpoint. site is at: Find.com - True Business Search…but is it any good at filtering out the ‘non business’ web, or are they missing the point: some of the most valuable information regarding organizations comes from the very sites that they are most likely to ding from the roster! gotta run a bunch of test searches on this one, nice interface…need to see if it does or does not suck….

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this was a small but very, very interesting little bit that the guardian put up a few weeks ago, had 3 different researchers using google, the phone and a library for identical questions, timed the responses…questions are listed below, full feedback and analysis of results Read the rest of this entry »

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so i’m looking at the cia world fact book, wondering if a) they have bloody, stumpy little pension-protected fingertips from updating this thing weekly, or if b) they just buy the data from hoovers or the economist intelligence unit and import it all (honestly, i think that the eiu has some equally interesting and timely data)

i was kinda expecting to come back to this site and see some totally neoteric approach to information presentation- like terrorism data, attempted foreign leader murder attemps, number of organs sold through prison system, number of (insert really hard to find out data item here), or just more really detailed ‘cia-knows-it-all’ type crap… versus ‘most of their money comes from selling fruit and cheap electronics under the iron-fisted rule of this dickbag, and a lotta people are on the internet’ or ‘more data on religions, hiv and literacy’ - because that’s info that’s found elsewhere in (often) much richer detail…then again, if it were *really* of value to the intelligence community, would it be on a public website (that’s a trick question, btw, take a look at OSINT in the researcher web guide for an illustrative example)

however - this other thing on there is actually a very useful item - Read the rest of this entry »

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okay, imagine (yes, imagination, remember that?) you’re doing a project and would like to spontaneously create a disposable email address for any one of a number of reasons…now you can. see mailinator at Mailinator “here is how it works: Read the rest of this entry »

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just when you thought that you couldn’t get snowed in by yet another RSS / blog syndication tool for research, along comes the chance to drink from the firehose by email…this is about the ERA, email rss aggregator…the summary: you subscribe to selected RSS feeds via email, set the frequency of updates and then you get the crap sent to you by email…this is great news for mobile device users (as in, not only can i now get spam at dunkin’ donuts, but now i can get spam and feeble, watery blog postings! dreams really do come true! … now if only rolling stone would pull jack white from the top 100 guitarists list…yeah, you heard me)

here’s the instruction set, it’s quite simple: Read the rest of this entry »

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