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News Search, Blogs and Feeds: A toolkit

Lars Vage, Mid Sweden University and Lars Iselid, Umeå University, Sweden

Chandos Information Professional Series

 - presents effective tools to evaluate news search engines and databases
 - harness the power of RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds in online news search and monitoring
 - learn how to navigate and critically question the news found in the blogosphere
 - highlight the power of discovering news, as it happens, through social networks
 - presents a mixture of both free news search engines and commercial news databases.

This book is about news search and monitoring. Aimed at professionals with a strategic need of monitoring the surrounding world, users with a need to find the best news sources, monitoring services and news search strategies and techniques will benefit from reading this book. The main purpose is to present a practical handbook with an analysis of readily available tools, blending with passages of a theoretical nature. It is also useful for students at LIS programmes and related information programmes and for librarians and information professionals. The authors aim to aid the reader in reaching a greater understanding of the core in news search and monitoring.

Readership: Information professionals with an interest in using news search and monitoring services will find this book especially useful. Librarians and staff at all managerial and supervisory levels within Library and Information Services, IT managers within LIS units and students of LIS at undergraduate and postgraduate level will also benefit from reading this book.

£47.50 / US$80.00 / €55.00

An e-book version of this title is available to purchase as part of a Collection or Pick n Mix. Visit Chandos Publishing Online

About the authors

Lars Våge is currently a librarian at Mid Sweden University in Sundsvall for the department of Technology and Media. He is responsible for the subject of computer science, electrical engineering, informatics and statistics.

Lars Iselid is an Information Architect on the CS Library team at Teknihuset, a leading technical solution provider for digital libraries. He is a well-known blogger and search engine expert and also works as librarian at the Digital Library Department, Umeå University. Iselid is a popular speaker and trainer in such areas as information search, social media and search engine optimization.

Together they have written and contributed to several books and journal articles for a Swedish audience. They continue to lecture on information searching, blogging, the invisible and the semantic web and have been invited to speak at conferences and worked as consultants. Since 2001 they have maintained a blog reporting on search engines on the Internet, Internetbrus.com.

Titles which may also be of interest:
Google and the Digital Divide
Understanding the Internet
Website Visibility
Effective Information Retrieval from the Internet
A Librarian's Guide to the Internet
The Plugged-In Professor

Contents

Introduction: the nature of news search
 - Discovering the power of news search
 - The concept of news and its relations
 - News published on the web vs printed news
 - Structured vs unstructured news content
 - The different types of news search tools
 - Notes

Free news search
 - Introduction
 - A short history of free news search
 - The best free news search engines
 - Other news search engines
 - Directories of news sites
 - Major newspapers with web archives
 - Broadcast news
 - News agencies
 - Press release wires
 - Scientific wires
 - Historical newspaper digitizing projects
 - Websites mentioned in this chapter

Professional news search services
 - Introduction
 - Advantages of professional search services
 - Advanced searching techniques
 - Search results
 - Search histories and saved searches
 - Search alerts
 - Client billing
 - Other fee-based services
 - Websites mentioned in this chapter

News monitoring services
 - Introduction
 - Describing news monitoring services
 - A short history of news monitoring services
 - The meaning of news monitoring services
 - Evaluating your monitoring service
 - Irrelevance in news monitoring services
 - Sample list of news monitoring and related services
 - Notes

Evaluating news search tools
 - Introduction
 - Frequency of spidering
 - Sources
 - Searching
 - Results

Keeping track of the blogosphere
 - Introduction
 - What exactly is a blog?
 - The roots of blogging
 - The blog explosion
 - The blogosphere
 - The evolution of blog searching
 - The most important blog search engines
 - Blog directories
 - Websites mentioned in this chapter

The power of RSS
 - Introduction
 - A short history of RSS
 - What does RSS look like?
 - What is OPML?
 - Choosing an RSS reader
 - Using news aggregator software
 - RSS feeds – using pre-built and creating custom
 - Subscribing to podcasts
 - Websites mentioned in this chapter

News discovery via social networking tools
 - Introduction
 - Microblogs
 - Twitter
 - Twingly microblog search engine
 - Directories of tweeters and similar services
 - Linking in microblogs
 - Topsy – a search engine powered by tweets
 - Memetrackers and similar tools
 - Digg and other social voting sites
 - Facebook for news and blog reading
 - Google Buzz
 - Websites mentioned in this chapter
 - Notes

Concluding remarks