Toolkit Addition

ToolKit: Site Seer -- Adds Sites to Your Bookmark List

It's so easy, it feels like you're cheating. Site Seer. It saves search time and offers sites you may never have thought of.

Site Seer is a bot type thing that finds sites it thinks are compatible with what you're interested in.

How, you ask?

You upload your organized bookmarks to its site. It uses a type of "cooperative agent" technology to discover surfers who share your same interests. Once located, SiteSeer facilitates your sharing each other's site discoveries! It returns loads of new URLs you can add to your bookmark list.

The loading of your bookmarks and the "cooperative agent" technology take a while. The results can be phenomenal. However, it only really works if you organize your bookmarks into logical folders that the bot understands. If you get a listing that says the bot can't find anything, try reorganizing the bookmarks into subfolders that are more coherent and unified.

Unfortunately, there's no way to download the sites they recommend, other than cutting and pasting to your original bookmarks.

The big question we have, is whose information are they using?

Search Tips

Finding People

Finding people. It's still hard if people don't want to be found. Chat and discussion forums and email lists related to a particular profession, can be good, as we've said before. Yet, there is an amazing array of discussion forums that have absolutely no postings and there are others that have been closed due to "abuses" of one sort or another. And several of the real time chat forums have nobody in them.

Having said that though, there are some niches that are inhabited. A few are listed below:.

• RF Global Net is a site where RF engineers look for the latest RF information and hang out with one another.
• IEBB Interactive Chat hosts several moderated discussions with experts in the international trade arena
• Discovery Place hosts online threaded discussions of interest to professionals in the oil and petroleum industry.
• Microsoft Certified Professional is a real time chat that people visit, but the few times we were there, no one said anything.

Even though it takes more time, energy, and reading, we still prefer the email lists. To find some good professional ones, check out:

• The University of Alberta, Canada , although broadly aimed toward the academic sector, it provides interesting links to professional discussion group by subject.
• Subject Listing from the Directory of Professional and Scholarly discussion groups -- includes 68 subjects ranging from computer security to geology to demography. Worth exploring, but it takes a bit of work since none of the actual discussion groups are summarized; only the name is given.