This blog started last December 3rd with a welcome post. The blog will soon be four months old. I thought it would be fun to see what posts have been the most popular, in terms of views, so I looked at the Wordpress stats for the blog. Here’s what I found:
I’ve made a couple of changes to the resource information in this blog:
1. Most notably, I created a vendor information page. That page contains information about commercial and non-commercial offerings in the federated search market. If your organization sells or provides open source federated search software or services you are welcome to submit your listing at no charge. Please follow the submission guidelines at the top of the search page. In particular, I’d like to have the current contact information for each vendor as I’m interested in engaging vendors in the effort to make demos publicly available.
Along the lines of publicly available demos, if you’re a potential customer of federated search and your vendor doesn’t have a public demo, whether or not it’s referenced from this blog, ask the vendor why and post a comment on the blog to let us all know the reason.
2. I’ve cleaned up the formatting of the resources page a little and have moved the short list of blogs to that page.
If you know of good freely available resources of interest to the federated search community please let me know about them and I’ll add them to the resources page. These would include papers, presentations, web-sites, and blogs.
Also, as there are some conferences coming up that have some relationship with federated search, I’ll be announcing those very soon on this blog and I will also start to list them in the resources page. Please let me know of relevant conferences.
As this blog gains traction I’ve been thinking about how to make sure that there are mechanisms for all vendors and providers of federated search products and services to participate in discussions and to gain visibility in the community. At the same time, I don’t want this blog to become filled with advertisements and marketing pieces for vendors.
A couple of steps I took a few days ago was to announce that I will be creating a vendor resources page and to kick off a campaign to encourage vendors to provide publicly available demo applications to facilitate comparison of federated search products. See One-stop access to multiple federated search applications for more information about those two items.
A third step is the creation of a new blog, The Federated Search Press Releases blog. This new blog is available to all providers of federated search products and services to make public announcements in the form of press releases. The new blog is referenced in this blog’s About page, it will be referenced periodically in blog posts here, and it will be promoted just as this blog is promoted. In other words, I expect there to be a healthy number of readers of the new announcement blog.
I encourage everyone to visit the new blog, to subscribe to it via RSS or email, to use it to create visibility for your press releases, and to tell your customers and colleagues about the new service. And, I invite you to leave a comment here with suggestions and feedback.
Welcome to FederatedSearchBlog. This blog aims to keep you abreast of happenings in the federated search industry and to serve as a forum for discussion of issues, questions, and concerns among vendors, customers, and potential customers.
While this blog is sponsored by Deep Web Technologies, its intent is to serve many diverse interests.
Have a look around. Information is clustered in these areas of the blog.
Please recommend relevant resources for inclusion.
