My Favourite Tipples

• Mashable daily updates: A daily round-up of cool technologies, new-product launches, emerging trends in technology or its users, and occasionally just the entertainingly strange and bizarre.
  
  
• Smartbrief topic aggregators: The Smartbrief tagline is "We read everything. We get what matters." This free service aggregates news, articles, and blog posts on specific topics that you've selected. I track the ones for EdTech, Entrepreneurs, Leadership, Social Media, The Workforce, and Your Career, which allows me to both stay abreast of new developments and consider new ideas, which I can then share with clients.
  
  
• Pew Daily Research Update: Pew Research Center explores and disseminates its findings on multiple topics; often research results will spark an "aha" moment regarding an emerging trend, potential market opportunity, or possible demographic change that signals a contracting market. Being able to share these numbers and suggest potential impacts with clients, when relevant, makes Info Pros look like rock stars!
  
  
• Strategy + Business: A print magazine from Booz & Company that includes an online component, I find that the range of topics (and thought leaders) showcased in Strategy + Business to be invaluable for sparking ideas — for my own business interests as well as those of my clients.
  
  
• Penelope Trunk: Advice at the Intersection of Work and Life: Author of Brazen Careerist and, over the years, columnist for several major media properties, Penelope Trunk provides pretty much uncensored, unfiltered, and spot-on career advice. Although she makes no bones about the fact that her Asperger's syndrome may lead her to make statements without regard to their social acceptability, I generally find her to be insightful, scary smart, and always interesting.
  
  
• LIS Career Options (LinkedIn Group): This is a LinkedIn community I started in June 2010 with the idea that it might create an opportunity for interested LIS professionals to ask questions and share expertise about career options. Although I was assuming we'd have perhaps 25-35 members, we now have nearly 1,000 members from about 50 different countries and 145 discussions going on (for a list, click here). I learn so much from the discussions that I tend to check in at least daily. (Note that to join, you first have to join the ALA LinkedIn group — but not ALA — then go to the More tab and, select "Subgroups > LIS Career Options".)
  
  

However you Find, Use, Manage or Share Information, you'll find something in FUMSI to help.

VIP Magazine: The evolution of market information -
A VIP Editorial

By Ville Vanhala

At the same time that companies, industry associations and governments started constructing their first websites, I started my professional career working with business information in the research team of a global strategy consulting firm. It was a revolutionary period in which facts about companies, industries and even nations were becoming available easily and instantly online. During the 15 years that have followed, a lot of the change in online information has taken the form of incremental developments. Better websites, better interfaces in business information providers' services and constantly improving availability of data. But in the past couple of years, as part of our work at Global Intelligence Alliance to support global companies with market information, I have felt that there are again more fundamental shifts happening in the way that information is consumed in business contexts. For example, there are some interesting shifts in which information is important for business users.

This month's VIP product reviews connect well with some of these changes. Firstly, it seems that interest in macroeconomic intelligence has hugely increased, especially during the economic uncertainty of the past few years but, quite naturally, also due to the longer term trend of globalisation. Secondly, we have all had the opportunity to witness the emergence of a totally a new type of information content: information in social media. We have seen a quickly growing interest, even necessity, to monitor discussions in blogs, microblogs, discussion forums, video sharing sites and other new media.

Considering the first trend — generally increased appetite for macroeconomic data — it is interesting to read this issue's first product review in which Penny Crossland reviews IHS DataInsight 4.1, a workflow tool for using economic data and forecasts. Clearly, it is one of the advanced solutions in this area and the tool offers a range of possibilities for organisations to integrate economic data into the intelligence on their operating environment. For readers familiar with IHS, the review will serve well to compare observations on some of the strengths of this product. For those readers whose work profile does not include economic analysis (at least not yet ...), it will offer an interesting glimpse of the possibilities of macroeconomic market intelligence. It may perhaps trigger some inspiration to consider integrating more macroeconomic monitoring into the range of analysis one's team or organisation works with and what can be done with state of the art tools in that area.

Thinking of the other trend mentioned earlier — the emergence of social media as a totally new type of information for organisations to tap into — Scott Brown's product review of Radian6, a tool for social media monitoring and engagement, is a very interesting read. The story of Radian6 is part of the emergence of a whole new industry around monitoring social media. In just a few years, more than 200 social media monitoring solutions have appeared on the market for information users to choose from. Radian6 has been one of the success stories in the field. In just a few years it has become a recognised brand in social media monitoring and has played its part in making organisations aware of possibilities for social media monitoring an exciting trend for those of us in the information industry to monitor as we keep an eye out for what's next.

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• FreePint No. 302, 27th May 2010 "Government Policies in Support of Electrification of Automobiles" and "Writing for the public domain"
  
  
• FreePint No. 278, 28th May 2009 "Find and Share information on the Internet: Part 1" and "The Lean Intranet: from Intranet Zero to Intranet 2.0 and beyond. (Part Two: Intranet 1.0)"
  
  
• FreePint No. 253, 22nd May 2008 "The Greening of a Business: Looking Beyond the "Bottom Line" to Become a Better Corporate Citizen" and "If Members Won't Come: The Royal Society of Chemistry Builds a Virtual Library"
  
  
• FreePint No. 230, 24th May 2007 "Mentors and Mentees: Structuring a Professional Relationship" and "Development 2.0: A New Paradigm for the Non-Profit Sector?"
  
  
• FreePint No. 206, 18th May 2006 "Beyond the library walls - establishing an information literacy programme for a dispersed user group" and "How the financial world goes round - a primer on financial information resources"
  
  
• FreePint No. 183, 26th May 2005 "Bullying at Work" and "Specialist Tribunals - Your Guide to Informal Justice"
  
  
• FreePint No. 160, 27th May 2004 "Online Information Online - behind the scenes of a virtual event" and "The Semantic Web is Your Friend"
  
  
• FreePint No. 137, 15th May 2003 "Net the Ancestors: the Internet and Family History" and "Business Continuity and Recovery - An Asian Perspective"
  
  
• FreePint No. 113, 30th May 2002 "Trade Unions on the Net" and "The Future of Mobile Telephony"
  
  
• FreePint No. 88, 24th May 2001 "Waste on the WWW" and "Images on the Web"
  
  
• FreePint No. 63, 25th May 2000 "Maximising Press and PR Exposure via the Internet" and "XML: Perception to Practice"
  
  
• FreePint No. 39, 27th May 1999 "Central and Eastern European Web Sources" and "Lingo on-line - Languages resources on the World Wide Web"
  
  
• FreePint No. 15, 28th May 1998 "Web Slavery - Automating Information Retrieval" and "Food Industry Information on the Web".

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