It amazes me that I still hear the following statement from individuals who are not quite familiar with internet research, “I can find everything with Google”. Yes, Google does a good job at searching the web however; it does not allow individuals to find information on the invisible web. Here is an exercise to demonstrate my point.
Try to find the phone numbers of 5 of your friends with Google. Use their names as keywords.
Now, if you are in Canada, visit Canada411 and conduct the same query.
Chances are that you will more success with Canada411 since the tool allows access to a small part of the invisible web. The invisible web contains countless amount of databases that generic search engines do not have access to.
Intelegia was reminded of the invisible web by Michelle Gareau, Trade Information and Knowledge Management Specialist at Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada. Michelle was kind enough to send us the link to the guide, “Deep Web Research 2009“. It is a great resource for those wish to know more about different gateways onto the invisible web.
After going through the guide, I urge you to visit Michelle’s blog, Libtech in LibrarianLand. It is a valuable source for individuals who wish to know about various sources of information from a Canadian perspective.
We, here at Intelegia have been preaching about the power of Web 2.0 and its various tools. There is no doubt that social networking platforms have brought people together regardless of location.
After defining an investment attraction, retention and expansion strategy for Hyron Corporation, thanks to our parent company, E&B DATA under the management of investment strategist, Isabelle Poirier, Intelegia took the mandate to the next level.
Intelegia is quite proud to share with you the details of a pilot project using Facebook.
We have created a page in which members of the local business community and stakeholders of the mining sector can connect to share information and promote the region as a location to invest. The Northern Lights Mining Network© has the objective of building a virtual network for entities in the sector operating north of the 53rd parallel. The network will serve presently as a central hub for those in Labrador and eventually be a resource for those across Canada.
Some of features on the page include:
- Event listings
- RSS Newsfeeds
- The Wall
- Notes
- MyFlickr
If you wish to become a ‘fan’ (member) of The Northern Lights Mining Network© , log onto Facebook and click on the link posted above associated with the network’s name. Stay tuned for new developments on this exciting initiative.
No, this is not an article going into a detailed analysis of dangerously high levels of cholesterol or hydrogenated fat. We all know how important it is to avoid both. What we are trying to understand are the deeper reasons for which 40% of Internet users are deleting third party cookies on a regular basis, while first-party cookies are accepted by 98%+ of visitors.
Cookies are small portions of text (usually no bigger than 4K) that are transmitted to a web browser so that it can keep track of a user’s activity on a specific website. Most anti-spyware and anti-virus programs define some type of cookies as undesirable and block them by default. These are the aforementioned third-party cookies and we will come back to them later.
Maybe we should get rid of a myth right away: Cookies cannot act maliciously on a computer. The main purpose of cookies is to store user preferences and activities while browsing webpages.
Cookies are installed on your computer’s hard drive when you visit a website and there is nothing bad there, as long as it is a first-party cookie. First-party cookies help websites to collect mainly two types of anonymous information: web analytical data pertaining to your usage of the website and personal preferences that you want a website to remember. For example. “Welcome back Steve!” is a typical example of how cookies make our life easier when personal preferences have been recorded during previous visits and are now presented to you. The content of a shopping cart is another good example. How tedious would it be to come back to Amazon.com and to have to fill that basket again with all those books you enjoyed to discover and that you wanted to set aside for a later buy?
Web analytical data on the other hand is collected to help website developers to improve the usability of websites. Data pertaining to the first page you visited, the number of pages you viewed, your visit durations, the links that you clicked are just a few examples. All this information is counted, stored in huge databases and put in relationship with each other to provide usability experts and web marketing analysts with insights that help to find out what works best for both you and them.
Marketers are there to ’sell’ things. ‘Selling’ in the context of a website can mean anything from enticing you to to download a PDF, to fill out a form, to send a message and of course, to buy a product. However, when selling fulfills the purpose of providing you with what you are looking for in the first place, collecting the data that makes this easier or rightous possible should be heaven sent. While this may be true for first-party cookies, other types of cookies, so-called ‘third-party cookies’, play the cookie-monster game differentl but more about that in my next blog.
