Social Media Search & Monitoring

Trying keep up with social networks and media outlets to perform routine brand protection, media monitoring, and protective intelligence tasks can be overwhelming. Two new services have come across our radar in recent weeks and are worth mentioning. YackTrack provides search capabilities for references and comments to a specific URL (post, page, etc.) as well as a keyword search (chatter) across multiple social networks. The service could be particularly valuable when attempting to track reactions and responses to a product announcement or PR blog post, where the option to turn the query into a feed would seem quite handy. WhosTalkin.com (recently reviewed on ReadWriteWeb.com) takes a more traditional search engine approach focused on the social web, with a plethora of sources. If it will keep the promise to soon offer the option to save searches and create RSS feeds, this tool could quickly become a must for Executive Protection operations and other Risk Mitigation professionals.

Top Five Health & Disease Monitoring and Warning Sources

Google made big news this week by launching Google Flu Trends – showing considerable Early Warning potential of search terms trends analysis. According to the NY Times, ‘early tests suggest that the service may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.’ This would seem like a good time to share our favorite open sources on the subject of global health and disease outbreaks:

1. CDC – The Center for Disease Control and Prevention publishes multiple feeds and updates.
2. HealthMap – A classic and beautifully-executed mashup of news sources, medical bulletins, and official alerts. Created by by Clark Freifeld and John Brownstein.
3. ProMed-mail – A program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases. Offers multiple email channel subscriptions.
4. MedISys – A real-time news alert system for medical and health-related topics maintained by the Health Threats Unit at Directorate General Health and Consumer Affairs of the European Commission.
5. Global Health Atlas – Maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO) which also publishes a Disease Outbreak News Feed (XML).

Honorable mention goes to Pandemicflu.gov – only excluded from the list above because of its more narrow focus – and HHS.gov by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Shipping and Logistics Data: A New Web Source

ImportGenius is a relatively new Web service providing vast amount of data pertaining to shipping to and from US ports. Although much of the data here is open source to start with, the site provides convergence and organization of multiple sources for approachable fees. The $199/month ‘SupplySpy’ subscription leaves little doubt to the competitive intelligence market focus of the product. Interestingly, the New York Times mentioned the company’s analysis of large Apple shipments as possible evidence of the upcoming launch of the next generation iPhone.

Video Search Engines: Top 5 List

As video content continues to show exponential growth across the Web, it is still early to crown the best video indexing and search engine. We routinely check old and new directories and search engines comparing the results on obscure subjects and lesser known individuals to avoid ‘tag-spamming’ results. Our top five destinations include: Blinkx, Truveo, Google Video, MSN Video, and Online Video Guide (more valuable as a directory than as a search engine.) Feel free to let us know if we missed your favorite.

Who is Hosting Whom?

A new, free service allows anyone to identify who is the hosting provider for a specific website. There are of course more ways than one to figure out which provider is hosting a site you might be researching, yet Whoishostingthis seems to be tackling the task quite accurately and with little ‘marketing’ disruptions.

Top Five Hurricane Information Sources and Tools

In occasion of the announcement of Dean as the first hurricane of the ‘07 Atlantic Season . . . these are at the top of our list:

1. NOAA-NWS National Hurricane Center
   The mother of all sources – most other services rely on the National Weather Service data to start with. RSS updates include ‘basin-wide’ feeds: here’s the Atlantic.
2. NOAA Weather Radio All Hazard
   When all else fails (and you better believe it will, if you are among those really needing the news) this radio signal will carry on the news.
3. IBISEYE
   Possibly the most effective mesh up of weather data and Google Maps.
   
4. The Miami Herald Hurricane page – for which much credit must be give to the excellent Tropical Weather section at Weather Underground (also check out their nifty flash-based storm tracker.)
5. Google Earth addicts will find the best collection of live weather and storm tracking info in this KMZ collection we covered back in March. (Thanks to GEBlog.com) Includes hurricanes live positions, global cloud coverage, NOAA severe weather, etc.

Money Laundering: Reference Reports Update

Security and Legal departments of financial institutions and multinational organizations may want to take note of a couple of recent publications on the subject of money laundering. The International Monetary Fund just released a detailed assessment of Gibraltar Anti-Money Laundering (AMF) and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) efforts. The report lists not only the core aspects of these activities but some of their shortcomings and various recommendations of good reference value. Also, earlier this month, The U.S. Departments of Treasury, Justice, and Homeland Security issued the 2007 National Money Laundering Strategy, “a report detailing continued efforts to dismantle money laundering and terrorist financing networks and bring these criminals to justice.” Not be forgotten is the regularly-updated Specially Designated Individuals List maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) within the US Treasury.

Atlantic Hurricane Season ‘07: A Dim Outlook

Seven to 10 possible hurricanes on a total of 13 to 17 named storms – this is what NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center has announced today as the forecast for the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season. We have covered a number of of storm-related sources both this week and back in March. Time to put these tools to work and, please, let us know if we missed something of interest.

Country Reports on Terrorism 2006

Since 2004, the US State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism report has been replaced by the Country Reports on Terrorism. The reports, which are published annually by April 30 and are compiled with data provided by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), can be found here.

Darfur: Updated Crisis Guides

The Council on Foreign Relations has just released a concise, informative and visually stunning compendium of the ongoing genocide in the Sudan. The Darfur Crisis Guide includes narrated, interactive timelines, maps and images in a format capable of raising awareness in the many who still fear exploring this pressing human tragedy. Additional meta-sources on the subject are the dedicated Darfur analysis sites by the BBC, the International Crisis Group and ReliefWeb.