FirstRain: Introduction and FreePint's View
27th September 2012

FirstRain is a powerful solution for delivering web and social media content on companies and industries, designed specifically for account sales and marketing executives. FirstRain offers flexible deployment solutions for the web, customer relationship management and social enterprise systems, as well as tablet and mobile devices. Reviewer Perrin Kerravala provides an overview in this introduction.

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Priorities in the Enterprise
27th September 2012

A variety of projects compete for attention and resources of information services managers. In Benchmarking on Information Services interviews, respondents rated their likelihood of devoting resources to certain types of projects. An analysis of average ratings and the spread of responses highlights just how diverse this profession is, and how many competing priorities an organistion must keep in play.

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Leveraging the power of lesser-known US government sources
27th September 2012

Governments have increased transparency and access to scientific and technical information, providing information professionals with new sources of information.  For those using US government databases, this appears to be a daunting task.  This article reviews some lesser-known resources, with an exploration of the US government's evolution from a dispersed information system to a centralised federated database and portal-based system. 

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FreePint Report: Product Review of FirstRain
26th September 2012

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The Big Free Three for News: Executive Summary
26th September 2012

Bing News, Google News and Yahoo! News are three familiar, free search tools which aggregate news content from a wide variety of web sources. They cover content from many of the same sources - yet each has its own unique strengths and drawbacks. This special review of the "big free three" looks at sources, search options, outputs, alerts and mobile access - as well as important information to know about the terms & conditions of the usage of the content. This is the information that researchers need to know.

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The Big Free Three for News: Caveat Searcher
26th September 2012

Using free news search engines for business research has risk related to usage of the content provided by those search engines. Some organisations have explicit policies forbidding workers to use the likes of Google News, Yahoo! News and Bing News to conduct business research. Robin Neidorf and Africa Hands provide a close reading of the terms and conditions laid out by each service provider to better define the actual risks at stake.

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The Big Free Three for News: Mobile
26th September 2012

Users are increasingly getting their news on mobile devices. How do the "big free three" stack up in this area - both in content and options for sharing news? Africa Hands looks at similarities and differences.

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The Big Free Three for News: Search and Output
26th September 2012

A main difference in using the news search engines is the results are from news specific sources rather than the more general websites indexed by the larger search engine's databases. Advanced search, sharing and alert options can vary significantly - all important components for researchers. Africa Hands and Robin Neidorf share their findings.

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FreePint Report: Review of The Big Free Three for News
25th September 2012

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The Big Free Three for News: User Interface
25th September 2012

Of the big three, users have a choice of interface, with Bing and Google offering the most white space and a clean simple design for easier viewing. Yahoo! News is graphics intensive. Reviewer Africa Hands discusses other interface differences, as well as related results, personalisation, and languages and regions covered.

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