Vertical Blog: A New Angle for Online

April 27, 2011

Our Overflight intelligence system tracks certain types of information. There are some basic Overflight services available from the ArnoldIT.com Web log. We have other systems running as well. One of these identified a new blog called Backnotch. Published by Jean Glaceau appears to cover one narrow segment of online information; namely, transactions related to Angola. What’s interesting about the publication is that the content appears to be summaries of publicly-accessible information. The Backnotch service is similar to a traditional abstracting service. The principal difference is that the contributors are offering some broad editorial comments. These comments, plus the collection of articles, comprise a useful resource for anyone looking at what types of open source information cover certain activities associated with Angola and related topics.

According to the About page of the blog:

In my first week of work, I decided to narrow my focus to a handful of issues which are covered in the open source literature. The information I located struck me as similar in some ways to a fictional story or a Hollywood film. Going forward, I want to continue to explore how the open source information follows a particular story and what entities surface in those stories.

The publisher is Jean Glaceau. When we did a couple of queries for him, we found a number of individuals in the hit list. We were not able to determine which Glaceau was running the research project behind the information service. We wrote the email address for the blog, but we had not received an answer as we queued this story for publication.

We checked out the search engine for the service, and it appears to have a backfile of about 60 articles. If Mr. Glaceau keeps up his current pace of content production, the service will generate about 50 to 60 stories each month. Our view is that online has moved from vertical search to vertical “finding” services.

We will check back with Backnotch in a couple of months. Worth a look.

Stephen E Arnold, April 27, 2011

Freebie

Comments

One Response to “Vertical Blog: A New Angle for Online”

  1. Vertical finding: Abstracts, Indexing and Vertical Files in the Age of Online « Answer Maven on May 2nd, 2011 8:10 am

    […] was an interesting read for librarians and information professionals familiar with abstract services.  It just goes to […]

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