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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Electronic Jihad: A Traffic Analysis

Using Alexa for Web traffic analysis, two researchers at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies mapped traffic to a selected group of Arabic-language Jihadist web sites. The results, published in this commentary, would seem to contradict the notion that the bulk of the so-called ‘Electronic Jihad’ traffic originates in Europe or in core Persian Gulf States, showing instead a predominance of Middle-East and North Africa visitors. Again, open source tools and data put at relevant use.

New Maps Mashups: 911, Crime and More

Incident1 is an interesting example of what can be done today by tapping into open source data and applications, producing something that just a couple of years back was available only to public agencies, at exorbitant costs. Although still limited only to some regions within the US, this mashup maps (a sample of) recent incidents and emergency calls data from police, fire and EMS. Also relevant to security and command center operators are USA Today’s report on ‘America’s Most Unsafe Cities’, promptly mashed by Morgan Quitno Press, as well as the US EPA Superfund locator.

Global Risks Data: WEF 2007 Report & Maps

In case you missed it, on January 10, the World Economic Forum released its Global Risks Report 2007 which ’suggests that many of the 23 core global risks explored in the report have worsened over the last 12 months, despite growing awareness of their potential impacts.’ The WEF Global Risk Network pages contain numerous useful links to risk data sources and an excellent collection of interactive risk maps provided by Maplecroft (their site provides the same maps, data sets for purchase and also the welcome option to download mapping data in KML (for your very own Google Earth) and World Wind format.