Competitive intelligence isn’t just about competing companies. You and your organization can equally be faced with competitive threats from the economy, new technologies, other industries, and even your customers. While the practice of CI is not a new endeavor, the expansion of web resources adds to its complexity and allows for insights not previously thought possible. Mary Ellen will share her latest experiences with CI research and talk about the newest and most useful sources.

Relevancy of results provided by search engines is improving - partially because we the searchers are contributing immense amounts information to them. Our search terms and behaviors educate the search engines about what’s important, interesting, and useful. With recent personalization efforts, we’re increasingly seeing both search results and search advertisements custom tailored to a profile the search engine maintains for us. Although we’re delighted to have relevant results, what are the implications regarding security and privacy? What are the benefits and potential downsides of personalization?

Whether your research concerns international relations, global trade flows, multinational companies, world news, technology issues spanning multiple continents, or merely basic information about other countries, you need to consider not only where, but how, to search non-U.S. and non-English language sources.

New online web services tools make sharing, embedding, and collaboration easier. You can embed search results, presentations, images, spreadsheets, lists, videos, feeds, mind maps, time lines, and other online information from one site to another. Webbased
tools can be used to create embeddable content—images, projects, flowcharts, databases, and videos, all without downloading or installing software. Learn how to embed search results and other content while understanding the impact embeddable content has on
the search process.

It’s no secret that the U.S. government is a prolific publisher. With so much data floating around, it’s no wonder people have devised creative and innovative uses for it. They’ve mashed it up, built widgets for it, made APIs available, devised custom searches, and a host of other applications. If you ever thought government data was boring, dull, or lackluster, this session will open your eyes to exciting opportunities of maximizing the value of government information.

What does it take to get published? Is it different today than in the preweb world? Several editors discuss what they're looking for, the best way to approach them, and the publishing process.

The general public equates search with Google. Information professionals know better. Not only are there alternative general search engines, there are a plethora of specialized search engines. You can use them to search for images, videos, blogs, podcasts, specific topics, and user-generated content. Your results can be clustered, include thumbnails, or be displayed graphically. There are huge search opportunities on the web-not just Google.

We’ve always evaluated data based on the criteria of accuracy, timeliness, and comprehensiveness. In the web world, those criteria are harder to determine. Who’s truly responsible for a page, when was it updated, and was anything left out? Additionally, new evaluation criteria are creeping into our research world. Is a page what it says it is?  What about malicious code? It’s time to reevaluate evaluation.

What has caught the attention of ResourceShelf lately?  Regular readers of ResourceShelf and DocuTicker know it could be just about anything. With an eclectic set of interests and a comprehensive understanding of what is important to information professionals, these guys are almost certain to have found something of value to everyone at WebSearch University. Yes, we save the best for last and this is it.