Resources of the Week Business Research Trip's Lists Vol. 2 Note: Trip Wyckoff is the proprietor of SpecialIssues.com, a database containing information about salary surveys, industry outlooks, overviews, buyers guides, who's who registers, etc., that can be found in more than 3,200 publications. He is also the current compiler of Price's Lists of Lists, a resource I started about six years ago. It offers direct links to company and industry rankings. The LOL is available for free. From time-to time Trip posts interesting compilations of useful resources to ResourceShelf. His first compilation was posted about four months ago and is available here.
Buyers Guides By Trip Wykoff
In this article, we take a look at the different types of buyers guides and the resources affiliated with them. Many magazines now have a buyers guide issue or products area on their websites. Buyers guides are advertising revenue-generating devices magazines use to do one or more of the following: 1) generate incremental income from their advertisers; or 2) reward advertisers; and/or 3) create a tool for identifying future advertisers and subscribers.
Buyers guides can be very useful for identifying companies, especially large companies that play in many niche industries. They can also help researchers understand players in an industry, understand market share and identify niche players in industries. Let's take General Electric (GE), a large conglomerate, as an example. Below are listed nine different buyers guides; GE has a listing in each.
+ Food Manufacturing
(GE Silicones, GE Water Systems are among the divisions listed.)
+ Medical Dealer
(GE is listed in the Manufacturers Directory; note how small the listing is, probably due to market share)
+ Plastics News
(GE has a large presence, no less than 3 divisions and 2 subsidiaries.)
+ Security Management
(GE Security has a listing; including regional distributors.)
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-- Trip's Cool Buyers Guides
+ DM News
(guide to direct mail lists; can sort lists by NAICS code)
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
