nicolas nova

Yesterday I attended a presentation about dangers and opportunities fostered by weblogs (of course ‘danger’ is where the emphasis where). One of the most interesting presenter was certainly David Sadigh from IC Agency (internet marketing firm in Geneva) in the sense that his presentation achieved to show how weblog and their corollary tools (e.g. search engine a la technorati/blogpulse) could be used for marketing/data collection/competitive intelligence issues. His pragmatic view of how using such tool was very refreshing among those talks who more focused on conservative topics.

This made me think about my own practices about intelligence gathering; which are certainly close to what to do, except that the focus is less business-oriented but rather purposely aimed at being part of a research community, finding new information about specific topics and in the end discussing about innovation. But the approach is the same.

Then I made a quick list of the tools I used on a daily basis for various purposes connected to my research activities (be it for my phd funded by public fundings or for my R&D projects for private copmanies):

Scientific database/search engines: web of science, scopus, citeseer (+ less professional but useful: google scholar)

• Web search engine: google, ask keeves, jux, A9, alexa
• Blog tracker/search engine (to see who talk about what + who talk about certain things I blogged): technorati, icerocket, blogpulse, pubsub, google blog search, daypop, g-metrics
• Social Bookmark Managers (to share my bookmarks, I also use them as search engine): del.icio.us, blogmarks, citeUlike
• News aggregator: my offline aggregator is NetNewsWire and my online is rss4you, My opml is there for people who wants to see what I read.
• txt file still rocks: I then have a list of all the books I’ve read + movies I’ve watched here
• Bibliographical references are managed through a bibtex file with bibdesk; there is also a RSS version but it’s down

I should make the same list for statistical sources.