Recently I attended a workshop titled Going Beyond Google offered by SCIP (Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals) led by Sean Campbell of Cascade Insights. We have become so dependent on Google that we seldom look elsewhere to find information. This webinar was a great reminder to me about the hidden web, and I picked up some great tips that I’d like to share.

SlideShare

Have you ever thought of Slideshare as a research tool? I must admit I never did until Campbell mentioned it in his presentation. And it makes perfect sense because there are so many companies that have uploaded presentations to slideshare.net about virtually any topic you can think of. Imagine all the company data that you could mine from companies that you are interested in. This could also be a great job search to discover if you really want to work for a particular company based on the information you pick up from their presentations. Slideshare is a great place to start a search.

Archive.org

This site allows you to view the past history of a company’s web presence. I typed in my company’s URL and discovered that it had been crawled over 100 times since 2000, and I saw some of the designs that I had forgotten about. Imagine all the company data you can mine from a company you are interested in, information they have taken down but you can still access. Companies had information that they longer make public on their websites today.

If you conduct a lot of research and are looking for resources other than Google that are free or inexpensive, Sean Campbell and Scott Swigart have a book, Going Beyond Google: Gathering Internet Intelligence that may be of use to you.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

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When was the last time you shook things up? We like comfortable and contentment, which sometimes get us into a rut. I feel like I am in a bit of a rut so I am ready to shake things up, are you on board? Shaking things up does not have to be radical, it can simply mean doing things differently. How can you shake things up at work? What process can you do differently?

James Webb Young in his book A Technique for Producing Great Ideas says that:

An idea is a new combination of old elements

The capacity to combine old elements into something new is dependent on the ability to see relationships

Here is what I am going to do, it may be simple for some folks but right now I do not have a clue how to do it. I am going to convert a slideshow to a YouTube video and then embed it into a PowerPoint Presentation. I will let you know how it turns out. What are two or more old elements that you can combine to get something new? What are you going to do a bit differently? Or what are you going to do that is new to you? Let us keep the conversation going, please leave me a comment.

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Summary of A Technique for Producing Great Ideas

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I created the presentation below for a Slideshare competition, but while I was creating it I had my blog readers in mind because I thought it would be beneficial to you. Please let others know about it if you find it useful. In the presentation there are influential book lists that can help you decide what to read.

There are clickable links within the presentation to make it easy to download the reading lists as well as visit the websites mentioned.

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• Add a video to your LinkedIn profile (slideshare.net)

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