Ardismg

Archive for September, 2009

You are very lucky Why? Because so many people and companies want your attention to such a great extent that they’re willing to give you valuable information for free that you once paid dearly for, or at least mark down the price to what was unimaginable just a few years ago. And guess what? You will continue to get even luckier. In an effort to keep up with the increasing competition for your attention, those companies will continuously need to offer their constituents higher-quality information. How lucky you will be is determined by your ability to exploit this happy circumstance. In these pages, I will share with you some of the most delectable offerings out there. In addition, I will share with you the tricks of the trade to get what you want.
If the beloved American monologist Will Rogers were alive today, he might say the following about the Internet: “You know they’re telling the truth when they say there are over 100 million Web pages on the Internet because when you do a search for something, you get 95 million of them back.” Here you’ll discover how to separate the wheat from the chaff and learn how to whittle down what seems like millions of search results to a meaningful few that deserve your attention and focus. Maybe you’re not looking for a piece of information that’s on the Net, but rather an answer to a question. I’ll show you some places where you can get those questions answered.
Information is like oil. You have to know how and where to drill for it. That knowledge gives you two competitive advantages: First, if your cost of gathering information is lower, you can run smarter and leaner than your competitor. Second, unearthing information your competitor doesn’t know about opens up doors of opportunity that he or she can’t even perceive. Imagine if your competition didn’t use computers today. He wouldn’t be a competitor very long, would he? The same is quickly becoming true for finding and using information on the Internet. If you can’t find information quickly and easily, you will not be a competitor in your field, whether that information is statistics, government regulations, market research, or customer feedback. If you get to those nuggets of knowledge first, you’re that much ahead of everyone else. After reading this chapter, you’ll be armed with information about:
• Search strategies Push
• Boolean searches
• Filtering agents
• Sweet spots for information
• Soliciting customer input
• Selected sites to see