New Technology for CI - What's Your Favorite?

[Kieran Michael Brown]

What other types of new technology, especially "web 2.0" tools, do you find valuable? I'm thinking of tools like technorati, del.icoi.us and Linkedin and custom RSS feeds. I suppose you could include the whole pantheon of Google apps in there as well. You might also include high end tools like what Anderson Analytics offers.

I'm interested in hearing how other people have adapted some of these great gadgets for CI purposes.

[Arthur Weiss]

Come to the International Online Conference taking place in London in December. I'll be presenting a case study at the conference on using these tools for CI. There are several projects I've worked on which have depended on some of the tools I mentioned and more. Not the analysis tools - but the web-collaboration tools, the social networking sites, etc. Without them, the projects would have taken longer, cost more or not even been possible in at least one case.

[Eric Garland]

We are having grand success with a platform called ClearSpace from Jive Software. It's not especially sophisticated - just an attractive, web-based internal wiki. We use it to keep running track of market trends and competitors, to share the data of multiple analysts so we know what we know and don't forget.

The especially useful features are searchability and the ability to post blogs as a meta analysis of the hard data we're capturing.

Like I said, it doesn't add lots of value in and of itself - it doesn't track trends or people using advanced digital satellite OdorVision or anything - it's just become a best practice for us as we learn to share information and analysis among multiple people in a friendly and secure way.

Love to hear about all the new software from you cats! Very helpful.

-EG

[art]

I use google alerts which is great.

[Tomas Oupicky]

I am using Google alerts as well, save me a lot of time as well as RSS with combination with del.icoi.us it is great.

We are using Wiki as a base for our internal knowledge system. I especially like the semantic Wiki it give you totally new dimension of work.

[Kieran Michael Brown]

Interesting article in Wired today about using webapps like google docs (et al.) offline using Fluid in combination with google gears. Anyone have any experience with this?

I'm thinking of going to something like an Asus eee PC for travel, and the one downside is needing near constant connectivity, so offline solutions like this might be ideal (and inspire me to actually dig into google's .ppt replacement which now has some pretty nice templates).

[Arik Johnson]

As a matter of fact, I got a 901 12G with Win XP and a gig of RAM from Amazon about two months back - it's one of the best laptops I've ever had and I don't miss the DVD drive a bit. Beware installing ANYTHING on the 4 GB C:\ drive however - I had to remove it all and move it to the larger 8GB D:\ drive - but all my docs are on an SD card I can pop out and open up on my desktop at the office and if I wreck the PC, it's only $600, so I can pick up a new one. Good pick.

- Arik

[V. Shuman]

Hello Folks

I just had an inquiry from a friend working on a very specific custom RSS newsfeed - he's facing some pretty ambiguous search terms (e.g., fire) and geographic filtering (e.g., chicagoland) and struggling to produce a "clean" feed. Anybody got any favorite solutions to recommend?

Thanks for your help!

Regards

Valerie

[Dr. Avner Barnea]

Sorry friends, This is not a discussion on "new technology for CI"- this is a discussion about improving gathering capabilities which in my mind is most of the time "basic CI". The real challenge and this is where new technology can give an added value is in adopting technologies for improving the analysis. This will be much more interesting and rewarding to CI professionals.

[Chris Hote]

Well getting a clean feed takes a combination of good web-sources and appropriate taxonomy-based semantic filters. It seems your friend's RSS is clean and thus it may be worth to look at his/her taxonomy. Any insight?

[Alessandro Comai]

Hi Valerie,
I came across this online "best in class "tool which includes filters for your feeds www.feedrinse.com/ see also the following article for more tools: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/6_ways_to_filter_your_rss_feed...)

Regarding the geographic filtering you may have to a) select local sources and B) use taxonomy / semantic tools for extracting the meanings of a text. This is the most difficult part. Look for some online semantic analysis tools. I do not remember the name right now.


Best regards
Alessandro

[Richard]

I use e-sobi. It is a rss and podcast feed reader. I can add the feeds I want, I can store pages for later use, I can set alerts. Seems to be more powerful than the free readers. SInce you can organize it the way you want, it provides a way to quickly get through all the new information to what you want. I used Google RSS as well, I set alerts. I use facebook as a key tool, many of my customers have professional pages and often I get notification of events a full day before the new picks up the feed. Of course my company subscribes to premium servcies like Factiva, Input, Centurion, D&B, Janes, DACIS, Centurion and Frost and Sullivan. WIth all of that I am pretty well covered.

[Chris Hote]

Indeed Richard you seem pretty well covered as far as web information retrieval is concerned.
What about information analysis, sharing, collaboration (field intel) with others? What about aggregating all those feeds together?
Any insights would be helpful.
Thank you for your help. Chris.