Resources To-Click  

Yet Another Acronym 

EIP is an important component for a web farming system; however, current products are only dealing with internal data--content from operational systems. Where is the external input?

Evaluating Web Content 

Who is the author, owner, and sponsor of the site? Are they recognized as an expert in this area? Do they give a mailing address, telephone, and email address?

To whom is the domain name registered? In general, ORG sites would be more credible than COM sites (present company excluded!).

What is the stated purpose? To educate? If so, why? To persuade you? To sell you something? To collect information about you? A personal soapbox?

What is the intended audience? Is this clearly stated?

How is the site supported financially? Through ad banners, subscriptions, usage fee, or other?

Is the content factual or based upon opinions? Can you tell the difference? Are any biases noted? Are sources identified and verifiable?

Is the content current? When was this specific page last updated?

Is the content grammatically correct? What is the level of quality in the writing? Is the style for content readability or for attracting attention.

Browse the Additional Resources list at the end. Several articles are excellent.

Company Sleuth 

Slicing the Data Smog 

One article is an extract from David Shenk's book Data Smog. His main point is that our information environment has become polluted. Information was "rare and precious like gold." More information was always better, until now! A new era has dawned in which information is so plentiful and so distorted that the basic rules have changed. "Just as fat has replaced starvation as this nation's number one dietary concern, information overload has replaced information scarcity as an important new emotional, social, and political problem."

So, what does data smog mean for web farmers? The old paradigm of 'gather-filter-index' is no longer valid. We must be more systematic in identifying key content creators and building links directly between this content and our business processes.

Other News 

The Search Engine Watch is an excellent resource for understanding and monitoring the major search services. Danny Sullivan revised his tutorial series on search techniques. It is a MUST for web farmers.

For searching, try the Recommended Search Tools of the Librarians' Index to the Internet. Note the usage guide to search engines.

PCDocs/Fulcrum announced its Enterprise Table of Contents (ETOC) whose content analyzer classifies information into a customized hierarchy.

AltaVista is going public! As part of the acquisition of Digital by Compaq, AltaVista can pursue its services and products independently.

Check out the IBM Clever Project at Almaden. Using Kleinberg's Hypertext-Induced Topic Search, the goal is to retrieve a small set of the most relevant documents.

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