"Blog" is short for "weblog," a web page made up of short, frequent posts arranged chronologically - an online news commentary. They range from very professional news about a company or person to diaries, photos, essays, poetry, even fiction. Many are the musings and emotional outbursts of the person writing the blog. Others are a collaboration of tips and tidbits on a particular topic, often rich in links. Often they are like online journals on subjects the weblog's author, sometimes called a "blogger," find amusing or interesting. Ever since the Web developed in the early 1990s, people have posted their own home pages giving personal information and quirky observations.
While lots of home pages still exist, many people have now turned to blogging instead of posting notes on home pages. While many weblogs are simply little more than online diaries, other blogs are produced by individuals - often, these are professional people - who are constantly scouring the web looking for useful sites and information, and reporting it. Like newsgroups and discussion groups, weblog resources can be great for finding information about those who post them and the subjects they write about.
A blog written by a specialist in a particular field can serve as excellent "radar" that can rival or even outdo expensive online alerting services. The most useful blogs allow you to keep up with the latest information on subjects you care about. What makes these sites so valuable is that the best ones often find material that is fresh and cutting edge. The trick is finding a blog written by someone who shares your interests. The downside of blogs is they tend not to have much structure. Like webrings, bloggers tend to know about other bloggers with similar interests, so you can usually link from one weblog site to others.
Many blogs are also useful for competitive intelligence research. Searching blogs for the names of companies or business people can often reveal some terrific gossip or even facts that you probably would not find elsewhere. There are two primary ways to find blogs. First, find a blog that interests you and see which other blogs the author links to. The other way is to use a blog-specific search engine or directory.
There are hundreds of fee-based services or commercial online services that provide access to news and information records. Most of them are extremely good search tools. Using them, you can find extensive background information about a person - name, Social Security Number, last five addresses, relatives' names, value of property owned or rented, all kinds of business records, information about neighbors, property records, vital records, voter registration, and so forth.
The three big information supermarkets - Thomson's Dialog, LexisNexis and Factiva - maintain virtual warehouses of information - extensive libraries of published information on a myriad of subjects. Journalists and researchers find the fuli-text periodicals very useful. Fee-based tools can contain public records derived from government entities, publishers' mailing lists, mail forwarding orders, real estate information, registered voter files, tax assessor and county recorder records, bankruptcy courts, and all sorts of "required filings," business and personal. Through services like ChoicePoint, Merlin Data Systems, and PublicData.com, you can "people search" by name using white pages, publishers' mailing lists, voter registration files, credit header files and property data.
To expand their base market beyond librarians and professional researchers, many of the proprietary services have developed easy-to-use point-andclick systems on the Web. Be warned, however: there is so much content available that it still takes time to learn how to use each company's system effectively. All the supermarket databases claim to house more usable information than the entire Web. Dialog alone claims it has more than six billion pages of text in more than nine hundred databases. What you will find remains the most sophisticated and thorough data available, far exceeding the content of any single website.
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08282010
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