Web Capturing and Archiving

A couple of years back, during a crisis management assignment, we experimented with a number of news monitoring options, with the intent to capture all articles, websites, blogs, etc. with references to the event, and make them immediately available to the client. Most solutions available at the time carried one or more serious drawbacks. Collaborative bookmarking tools often returned ‘non existing’ pages and screen captures would typically be limited by screen sizes and impossible to index. Iterasi, a new Web archiving service, would have made our lives a lot easier. The (currently) free service allows you to capture and archive any web page at any given moment. The added, built-in advantages are full text indexing, sharing, and automated capture scheduling. This is a great tool for OSInt, PR, competitive intelligence, crisis management operators.

Scout Labs: Brand Sentiments and Blogosphere Monitoring Matures

We have been addressing the subject of corporate and brand ’sentiment’ monitoring a few times this year (here, and here). The latest addition to this space may well prove to be most powerful and sophisticated thus far. Scout Labs, currently in private beta, will offer brand ’scouts’ (search agents) that can not only weigh the relevance and frequency of positive vs. negative ’sentiments’ in blogs and news outlets, but do so going back to January 2007. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has taken the site for a spin and reported about it here. How this service could benefit Crisis Management teams and EW efforts remains to be seen as the product reaches commercial availability and speed, cost, and flexibility of ’scouting’ criterion become clear. Certainly one to follow closely as it may become the biggest player in this arena.

Storm Info Mashup

Ibiseye is an interesting storms information mashup maintained by Florida’s Heraldtribune.com. Google Maps and Weather Underground data are merged here in a fairly elegant and effective fashion, just in time for ‘07 hurricane season.

Clipping the Web: Done!

We must say the latest version of Clipmarks is truly impressive. This free (so far) web application allows any registered user to ‘clip’ any part of a web site, including text, images and videos. But where things become really interesting is in the options afforded by this wonderful application: in addition to tagging, annotating, editing and adding to collections, Clipmarks allows you to share the clips with your private group or team. As if this wasn’t enough, there are also the options to publish the clips to your own blog, send via email to one or multiple recipients, print, and access a mobile device-optimized version – all of this, in a few clicks on the well-designed browser add-on. We only wish we had this application while collecting news clips, blog entries and other content while performing open source collections during crisis management operations – the ability to capture multiple content, share in a controlled/limited fashion and publish/alert in real time across multiple platforms makes Clipmark a must for crisis command centers and OSInt operators.

Team Bookmarking (a.k.a. ‘Social Bookmarking for the Office’) Overview

The popularity of Social bookmarking sites and applications exploded recently when they became associated with tagging and social news, and when the blogosphere began to explode. (Tags are in fact one of the most useful outcomes of social bookmarking which allow every minute millions of users to add context and meaning to the most diverse content, making the Net a more useful and intelligible place.) There are dozens of social bookmarking services out there, and plenty of comparative reviews already, but only a few seem to fit a corporate work/research team environment and the needs of OSInt operators. Here are the ones we found of interest and worthy of consideration . . .

The Web Collaboration and Meeting Space Has a New Player

Vyew is a promising new option for online meetings and collaboration – a space largely dominated by the likes of WebEx, GoToMeeting, and MS LiveMeeting. Vyew appears to distinguish itself by being 100% browser-based, and focusing on asynchronous collaboration giving the ability to share, annotate, and manage content even when not in a concurrent session. To use the company’s own language: “Vyew Books live in a persistent state,” which pushes this application further toward the project management arena. Although lacking application sharing (found in most of the competition) Vyew offers live desktop and screen capture sharing and a good number of file type and browser compatibility. Assuming a viable business growth and back-end reliability, Vyew would appear to be an interesting option for crisis and emergency management teams where geographically-dispersed team members can find a common space for collaboration. Two features we like the most for this purpose are the absence of heavy downloads and the no-hassle new member invitation process (which skips long registration steps.) By the way, it is also free if you are willing to put up with some ads.

Bibliography 2.0: New Ways to Keep (Good) Old Habits

The Web is making it too easy for many of us to forget the importance of good references and a solid bibliography when conducting research or compiling reports. The flattening of Internet-based information should in fact suggest an even more rigorous source qualification and citation process, even though the traditional classification models may be somewhat inadequate for today, and no effective, widespread standard has emerged. Zotero has recently launched its beta Firefox extension which combines classic bibliographic reference collection features with new (and upcoming) technologies such as tagging, advanced search, sharing, etc.. In this case, 2.0 also means free – which is another reason to give it a chance.