Thinking of hiring an investigator to search phone numbers?

From time to time we all are going to need people search information. Maybe you’ve lost track of an old friend and the only thing you have to go on is an outdated phone number from a few years ago. Or you might be curious about strange numbers appearing your family cell phone bill. Or maybe you’re just tired of the prank calls late at night.

To get answers, you may be tempted to hire a private investigator, but you don’t have to. There is a more affordable solution to your problem – Reverse Phone Detective.

Why Turn To A PI?

Private investigators were once the only option you had when you needed hard-to-find information. Ordinary folks had no way of accessing the databases that we can so easily access today. Most of us had no idea what a reverse lookup was or why it would ever be useful. Today, things have changed and private investigators are going the way of the dinosaur.

One of the bad things about hiring a private investigator is that you are essentially going to be paying this person three times what is necessary. First, you’re going to be paying because they know WHERE to get the information you need. Second, you’ll end up paying a fee to cover ACCESS of the databases. Third, you’ll pay for the TIME they spent working on your case.

In the end, you’ll be paying this private investigator hundreds – maybe even thousands – of dollars for doing what you could do for a fraction of the cost.

Save Your Money with The Phone Number Search – search any landline or mobile.

The same databases private investigators use to get information are available for you to use. There’s nothing secret or special about them; they’re right there on the Internet at ReversePhoneDetective.com. That means now you have the same knowledge as private investigations about how to find people through phone numbers.

Sure, you’ll have to spend a couple of minutes registering, entering the phone number, and waiting for the results, but you probably won’t be sending yourself a bill. Even if you did, the time you’ll spend completing one of these searches is nothing compared to all of the time you’d spend filling in your private investigator about the case details.

The one thing you will still need to do is pay the fee required for accessing Reverse Phone Detective’s massive database of information. And since you were going to be paying a much larger fee anyway to the private investigator, you’ll still come out ahead – because instead of paying three times for the service, you’re only paying once.

In addition, because we give you access to advanced search tools like expanded people search databases, you’ll have more direct access to the information and tools you need. By cutting out the middleman, you’ll get your results faster and cheaper.

Before you consider hiring a PI, visit Dial-a-Genie for Reverse Phone Detective – you’ll be glad you did!

Like to read more about Reverse Phone Search then turn to “The Phone Number Search“.

Kevin Beale,  AMTELCO’s Director of Product Development  gave an informative presentation this morning on one of AMTELCO’s new products.  Simply put Mitey-Mite is a multifunctional desktop  software tool that allows users to search multiple databases within an organization, call phone numbers located within those databases using line-side SIP technology, and record user selected calls or portions of calls. Approximately twenty 1Call hospital customers attended the on-line preview and shared thoughts on features and uses within their healthcare organizations. Mitey-Mite will also have the ability to access employee directory and on-call information that resides in their 1Call Infinity call center/switchboard systems. RED ALERT AMTELCO’s emergency and event notification system also has the ability to send notifications and alerts to the Mitey-Mite desk-top application.

"Mitey-Mite" search tool and SIP soft phone.

Additional technology associate with Mitey-Mite include SMS text messaging, RSS feeds and e-mail.

Please feel free to comment on this topic. If you would like additional information on Mitey-Mite send a request to info@1call.com

Recently, there’s been a surge in complaints by Twitter users whose tweets aren’t getting indexed in Twitter Search.  When I recently shared ways to avoid being filtered from Twitter Search,  the amazing TwitterKarma developer, Dossy, alerted me to his new service: SearchCheck.

SearchCheck will notifiy you via DM on each day that your tweets are not indexed by Twitter. Not only can you use my prevention strategies, but Dossy has simplified the process of worrying over Twitter indexing your tweets with SearchCheck.

When Did You Join Twitter? is a nifty little site that tells you when someone joined Twitter down to the exact date. You can also tweet out these stats to your followers. This is a cool service for establishing your authority on Twitter, figuring out whether someone is a complete newb (or spammer) or Twitter, or just in case you ever wanted to know.

Thanks for everyone participating in the webinars on Thursday, it was great to see so many people sharing info and getting involved in looking at using search tools more effectively. Helping our students by developing the skills of the initial search for information can give them back some time that can be devoted to deepening their projects, as well as increasing their success in finding useful, appropriate information.

Here are some of the items we touched upon in the webinar sessions:

delicious
A social bookmarking site that represents a great leap forward in quickly locating pertinent and interesting sites. Powered by users, delicious is a great use of social networking that students can tap into to help their search for information.
The bookmarks are user-generated, and information is added to these bookmarks in the form of tags, which is how users search the network. Users can be added to your network, which you may want to do if you find someone who shares similar tagging procedures.
Tag bundles can be created to store bookmarks in an easy to find place, as well as making your bookmarks more accessible to other delicious users.
To create a new delicious account, a user must have a yahoo account.

Google Wonder Wheel
Found under the selection ‘Show Options’ once a search is underway, this is a great tool for developing a visual of a search, as well as providing pathways a researcher can take to find more detailed, focussed information on a topic. The wonder wheel search can be traced forward and backward, which takes away the need to constantly use the back button or history menu when conducting a search.

Google Advanced Search
Allows users to find sites that have exact words or phrases being searched for, date range (particularly useful when researching current events) and sites generated in a particular language. The advanced search also allows users to locate sites similar to one they have found useful, and other sites that link to a particular site, helping a student to find related sites quickly and easily.

Google News Archives
A collection of news reports on reputable news media sites, arranged in date order and featuring a timeline that shows the frequency of results by date. Many of the initial results show sites that need payment to access the information, however under the advanced search option, searchers can select the ‘no price’ option to locate results that can be accessed instantly and without the need for credit cards.

YouTube
The most popular video sharing site contains an amazing number of videos that students can access to deepen their understanding of a topic. Videos are a great tool for gathering reflection on an event or issue, and also for creating an entry point for a research project. Historical events  from the past 50 years are very well represented, in the form of news reports and eyewitness accounts.
Uploaded videos are tagged in order to be located from a number of search entries, and placed in categories which can be accessed by users under the channels selection. In addition, many videos are part of user-generated playlists, which makes a wider search easier to conduct, bringing related videos together in one place.
As with delicious, YouTube is a social networking site that is proving valuable to users being able to locate varied and interesting results from many sources. The ability to create comments and responses to videos means that students can share their knowledge about a topic, contributing the depth of information carried with a video on the site.
Users with accounts can save videos they find useful and interesting, build their own playlists of collected videos, and upload their own videos to contribute and gather feedback.

Flickr
Another instance of a social network, where users can upload and share photographs and images, tag them with information and labels, and create sets for ease of location. Viewers of the images can comment and download the image for their own uses. It is worth noting here that many of the images are copyright protected by the uploader, however a search can be conducted for images that have a Creative Commons license, allowing viewers to download and use images according to the rights set out in the license.
A useful locating tool for images in Flickr is the Groups, which have been created by users and allow other users to join and contribute their images that relate to the subject of the group. A search for groups can narrow down the location of useful images, as well as opening up ideas that may have not been known when the initial search was begun.

Google Earth
Although it was not covered in the webinars, the use of Google Earth as a means of locating information is growing in importance, due to the mass of information contained in the layers that is added to daily, as well as information contributed by users to the Google Earth Community message boards. Searching for a particular piece of information or running through the themed forums can produce results that students may not have been able to locate on websites.

Helping our students to navigate the sometimes choppy waters of online research is something all educators should be concerned with. In future webinars, I will be exploring the structuring of research topics and the evaluation of resources, which will utilize some of the skills focussed on in this weeks webinar. I hope you will join me in the webinars on January 7th, 2010, when I will be exploring the development of effective questioning and the first steps of the research process.

A recording of the Nov. 5th Webinar afternoon session can be found here.

A recording of the Nov. 5th Webinar evening session can be found here.

As I cruise the information super-highway for my ideal match (see: job), I keep coming across a ton of great design and management jobs within our industry. Who says there is a slow-down in hiring? Ok, besides Ipsos Reid and Stats Canada…

Anyway, the point is, I know a lot of amazingly talented designers, web geeks and writers. You are my people. And as such, I feel compelled to share with you some of the postings that may be of interest. I know there are many of you who are not currently working and need a job. I also know there are many of you who ARE currently working – but would much rather be working somewhere else. Just saying. So for you, my friends, here are a few postings that I came across on my journey that you may want to investigate.

Update or dust off those resumes and throw your hat in the ring for something that would make you happy! Maybe your soul mate (see: job) is out there, just waiting for YOU to make first contact.

For those of you who enjoy chemicals (don’t we all?), ASL Chem International is looking to hire a “Marketing/Advertising/Design” person. In other words, do everything – and be able to throw together an ad  http://bit.ly/2Wdqj4

For all my single webbies (get it? Beyonce reference?), Wasserman + Partners is hiring a Senior Web Application Developer. I found this bad boy on LinkedIn. http://bit.ly/whGMz So if you don’t currently have a profile on that site, I suggest you make one. But just don’t do what I do and accidentally send invites to absolutely everyone you ever emailed out of your Gmail account. I got about ten bounce-backs from random craigslist addresses that I emailed while trying to rent an apartment.

And for those of you who like to quote random numbers repeatedly, Aquent has posted a job for a Web Analytics Manager. This one, too, is on LinkedIn. http://bit.ly/3VpXpY

Lastly, as I need to now focus on my own job search and let you all fend for yourselves… as posted yesterday, Burnkit and Academy are both hiring a few positions. I found them on www.Krop.com which I had never heard about, but it seems promising provided other agencies/companies start posting there. (HR people take note). So just go to Krop.com and do a search for Vancouver. These postings will come up.

That’s all for now. I hope there is something here that might interest someone. Good luck, my friends.

Have you ever wanted to know if people favorite your tweets? What if you could track down every single person that favorites your Twitter messages? Insert  Favstar.fm here!

Thats right, we’ve found another solution for your Twitter problems. Favstar.fm is a popular site for Twitter users to search not only for the most favorited Twitter messages of the day, but also track those who’ve put a star next to your tweets. Find repeat “favoritors” to connect with, or add the new stats to your Social ROI metrics. Using Favstar.fm you can see what your followers would really love to talk more about.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has released a preview of the new PubMed interface. The NLM is hoping that with a cleaner, stream-lined interface PubMed will better facilitate scientific discovery, and be more user-friendly. While overall the new interface appears to be a success, it is important to remember that it always takes some time to get used to a new interface, and this is not a finished product.

A couple things to note when you are exploring the re-designed PubMed:

• Limits, Details and History can now be accessed using Advanced Search

• Links to other NCBI resources can be found at the bottom of each page

• The “Using PubMed” section of the homepage links to a number of different tutorials.

For more information on the PubMed redesign take a look at the NLM Technical Bulletin go tour watch the 30 minute PubMed redesign webcast.

The next PubMed Basics class at the library Nov. 4,  11 – noon, will focus on the using the new version of PubMed. Register now

A word to the wise…never stop researching your market!

We are living in marvelous times.  Every day, every hour, even every minute you can easily keep our finger on the pulse of your industry.  How?  Google.

Google has added some new features that are just amazing.  Check it out:

1.      Go to Google.com

2.      Type in the keyword or phrase you want to search and hit return.

3.      When you have the results on your screen, in the left hand corner just above the search results you will see Web + Show options…   Click on “Show options.”

4.      From there you will see all of the search options available on the left sidebar.

These are the search categories:

All results:  This allows you to see what is on the web by category.  If you just want to know what videos are on the web, click the video link.  Looking for books on the subject?  Click on the books link.  And so on and so on.

Any time:  Another terrific feature is the time range option.  You can see the most recent postings or even specify a specific date range.

Standard view:  This is a fun section.  “Related searches” is just that.  This option will allow you to see what other phrases people are using to search for the same information.  “Wonder wheel” gives you a snapshot of other phrases surrounding your search phrase.  “Timeline” shows the search trends for your search phrase and shows past postings starting with the first posting on the internet.

Standard results:  These are a few more options to find images or shopping sites connected with your search phrase.  The “more text” option simply gives you more text for each site listed versus the standard two or three sentence description.

As you can see, utilizing the options for Google search can give you a wealth of information.  Take some time to become familiar with Google and all of the options available. 

In addition to these great tools, you may want to open a Google account.  It is free to join and gives you yet another level of tools to utilize.  For example, have you ever found a site that you found particularly helpful but forgot to save it to your favorites?  Your Google account comes with a Web History tool that will help you find the site, not to mention search the full text of pages you visited.

This just scratches the surface.  There are many, many more options and tools available including website analysis, gmail, and an excellent keyword search tool, to name a few.

The most successful businesses are those that stay on top of what is going on in their industry – what is being said and who is doing what.  Google has done the work for you and it is all at your fingertips with just the click of a mouse.  

Tired of adding ego feeds to your RSS Reader? Want to keep track of when you’re mentioned on Twitter? MentionNotifier is the perfect solution!

MentionNotifier will check Twitter every minute of the day for mentions of your Twitter handle. It even supports hashtag notifications. Simply enter your Twitter username (or keyword that you’d like notifications for), and enter in the email address you’d like MentionNotifier to send alerts too. You can enter multiple email addresses, which is great for group alerts on specific keywords.

Via the email alerts you can manage your subscriptions, which will look like the image below.

Note: Protected tweets will not show up as they are not part of the public timeline which MentionNotifier uses to scan for your subscriptions.

Ever wish you could search more than one journal article database or search engine at once?  Well — you can with OneSearch!

Hi friends!

I swear I have been fighting the swine flu since handling a child at the Thanksgiving dinner get-together on Sunday. I slept about twenty hours yesterday alone. and it really sucks to get sick when you don’t have a job. I feel like there is no silver lining. I’m already spending my days in sweatpants and watching Maury.

Anyhow, I thought I felt better this morning, so I made a pot of coffee and did four loads of laundry. (Trust me, it was necessary) I decided to revise my resume as it really was not getting the responses that I wanted. I then did a search for local recruitment companies and sent my resume with a personalized cover letter to:

Angus One Professional Recruitment Ltd.
www.angusone.com

McNeill Nakamoto Recruitment Group
www.mcnak.com

Paquette Personnel
www.paquettepersonnel.com

Six Degrees Recruitment
www.6degreesrecruitment.com

I also noticed some great jobs posted on twitter. All I do is a search for #jobs and Vancouver. It’s really quite amazing how many jobs are out there. It just seems that the advertising jobs are on the decline. I also found a long list of a lot more recruiters around Vancouver here http://www.downtownvancouver.com/directory/employment_agencies/ and plan on spending this evening reviewing their objectives/clients and applying to those.

I just got a call from Angus One. I’m meeting with them next week and might grab some contract work that way. They wanted to meet tomorrow, but I didn’t want to infect them all with swine flu. The lady on the phone confirmed my suspicion: she said they hardly have anything in the field of marketing. Not to worry I say. I’m going in to meet with them anyway. It’s been a while since I got to dress up, working from home and all.

Stay tuned for progress. I do have one lead that I really hope works out for me, which I believe is in motion, but in the meantime, I am going to keep looking.

A couple of other good links:

http://www.tweetmyjobs.com/jobsearch?keys=&loc=vancouver%2C+bc&commit=Search

http://canada-arts-connect.blogspot.com/2009/10/job-listings-for-thurs-oct-15-2009.html

Jobspeed, fellow God seekers…. I mean, Godspeed fellow job seekers. (sorry, it’s the flu meds)

TweetChat is a unique approach to hashtag searches and conversations.  After using oAuth to log in, you search for or select a hashtag to view the current tweets around.  This puts you into a channel with only information about that hashtag showing up.

This is important to pull yourself out of the river of Twitter and into a nice bubbling brook (for lack of a better water example).  You can pause (called SmartPausing in their system) the conversation and even block spammers from showing.  This allows you to focus and communicate through tweets with everyone around the topic.

After logging in, I saw my Twitter background overlayed with their UI asking what hashtag to search for.  I chose to check in on one of two conferences going on while writing this.  @Corvida is at Blogalicious09 and UKLUG just finished.  I was able to reply, retweet, favorite and see user controls for each result.  I could also change rooms in the upper right to a new hashtag.

This site is incredibly useful for working with everything around an event.  The upper (slighty obscure) settings allowed me to pause, refresh speed, font controls, share link and more user controls.

Whoa, last second item.  If there is too much traffic you could slow it down or pause, but a great user control feature I found was the ability to feature users.  I didn’t find a description of this feature, but that is a great!!  Toggling the font made it smaller to show more lines.  Refresh speed allowed every 5 to 60 seconds.

I wish they could bring in picture popup and showing where links go, but otherwise I liked the site.

WhosTalking was referred by a comment to a posting here on EverythingTwitter.  It scouts across social networks looking for posts around whatever search term you include.  The site searches across a reported 60 social sites (which sites it searches was found later) and uses and AJAX interface.

When the results are returned, the middle is a descending, combined timeline of items it finds across the networks.  All are hotlinks to the direct sites themselves.  It would be nice if they could provide some preview when hovering or clicking before opening new tabs/windows.

The left column allows you to sort by a myriad of options and sub-options:

• blogs
• news
• networks
• videos
• images
• forums
• tags

These suboptions show the individual networks that are searched for further filtering.  Below that was a hidden feature of options.  It allows you to save the search and even get an RSS feed result of your search to follow in your favorite feedreader.

Why was this important to Twitter?  Well it is really a search tool but shows the topic across sites, possibly growing the conversation just found on Twitter.

A while back, I was a pretty hesitant to expand my online social network beyond Facebook. I found Linked In to be too complex and could not wrap my head around twitter. And I started to run out of passwords that I could easily remember.

But, after much ridicule from a dear friend, I did open a twitter account – and have not looked back since. I have found so many intelligent and interesting people that I follow. It’s basically my newsfeed to the world.

So now here I am, on Facebook, twitter and writing this blog – and unemployed. I started wondering how I could use my social media tools to help in my job search. A quick search and I found that Mashable.com (Dan Schawbel, who I follow on twitter) has already covered the topic.

His article is very in-depth and he makes some great points. Take a read if here: http://mashable.com/2009/01/05/job-search-secrets/ . I mostly agree with his points, but of course, had some comments to add.

Video Resumes: This seems to be an emerging, if not already well-established trend. I, myself, am not quite ready to post my pitch on YouTube for the entire world to see. You walk a fine line with video resumes. If your production quality or editing is terrible, it really brings down your overall value and impression. If you stutter or are in any way physically awkward, well, that stays with people.

Google Alerts: I didn’t see this in Dan’s blog. I have gone in and set up alerts for any news or updates from Google on “Vancouver Advertising Agency” and “Women in Business”. This is also a great way to stay on top of your local markets and trends.  http://www.google.com/alerts

Twitter: I totally agree that you SHOULD seek out and follow (but not stalk) the folks from the companies of which you would like to work for, but don’t forget to also follow local recruitment agencies. In Vancouver, Smart & Savvy: @smartsavvy

Facebook: I noticed Facebook is much less of a professional tool. It weighs more on the social side. I personally do not use it for business connections. Someone could tag you in an unflattering photo, or post something really offensive on your wall (unintentionally, of course). Then, once again, your image could be somewhat tarnished in the eyes of your potential employer.

Face-to-Face: I’ve been a volunteer with the National Advertising Benevolent Society since 2004-ish. And I have just joined Vancouver Internet Marketers which looks really promising. If nothing else, it will keep my mind active and get me out of the house.

Now, all of these tips and tricks are great. But nothing replaces good, old-fashioned “social networking”. In the past ten years, I only scored one job by applying online and holding my breath for an interview. The rest were all through friends of friends – or business acquaintances. Get out there. Attend events. Find speaker series. Go for after-work beers with your employed friends. That’s where I’m headed.

Looking for jobs online can be very time consuming. Going to so many different sites, creating accounts, remembering passwords for them all and trying to keep track of what you applied for and where. Here are a couple of sites which actually pull jobs from across the various job-search sites. They are, from what I can see, nearly all-inclusive.

ca.indeed.com
eluta.ca
simplyhired.ca
jobs.canadaspace.com

Give these a spin and let me know what you think. I have only used “Indeed.com” myself so far, and when you click on the job post, you will still need to go through the hoops of having to set up accounts, passwords, etc. But at least you can do one single search.

jw

Check out Pillbox a new visual search tool that is currently being developed by the National Library of Medicine in conjunction with the FDA.  The interface looks great and is easy to use.  It includes high resolution images of tablets and pills that you can search  by: imprint , shape, color, size, and scoring. It displays thumbnail images of all the possible matches and as you enter more search criteria it will update your results.

Once you find the image you are looking for, additional information is provided, including brand/generic name, ingredients, and the National Drug File identification number. Links are provided to NLM drug information resources, such as FDA-approved label information (DailyMed) and the Drug Information Portal, which searches all NLM drug information resources.

This beta version has a big warning label that says not for clinical use because it is still in development. Here is what NLM has to say about when it will be approved for clinical use:

“The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has made substantial efforts to accurately connect each image to the appropriate medication. However, the images contained within Pillbox are not part of the Food and Drug Administration-approved Structured Product Label (SPL) (drug label) and have not been verified by each manufacturer. In fall 2009, the NLM and FDA will initiate a pilot program to begin large-scale photography of prescription solid dosage medications, working with manufacturers to have these images submitted for inclusion with the FDA-approved drug label. Once the images in Pillbox have been verified by manufacturers this warning will be removed.”

The Library is pleased to announce its new online catalogue!
With an easier interface, more features and options, our new catalogue indexes all books, AV materials, electronic resources, and all other items that make up the Mohawk Library collection.
Searching is a snap. A new feature provides suggested links which make it easier to find more by the same author or on the same subject.
Access your account to renew items online, check due dates, account information, holds, etc.
Look for this icon on TheBRAIN.

“… LigerCat is a search tool for NCBI’s PubMed that uses tag clouds to provide an overview of important concepts and trends. LigerCat aggregates multiple articles in PubMed, summing their MeSH descriptors and presenting them in a cloud, weighted by frequency “.

Except from:  http://ligercat.ubio.org/about#contact_us

.

LigerCat is an abbreviation for Literature and Genomics Resource Catalog, which is a free PubMed search tool developed in 2009 as part of the Biology of Aging project at the MBLWHOI Library at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory.

LigerCat is great news for geneticists or anyone involved in translational research, a fairly effortless means of data mining for dynamic links to a very complex literature.

LigerCat can be used to search in several ways: 1) to locate and select a list of individual journal titles indexed in PubMed, 2) search using terms from the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) list, 3) search using keywords, 4) search on Genes found in the NCBI databases.

Following is a screenshot of the LigerCat start page:

__________________________________________

A screenshot of the “in process” retrieval process using LigerCat for the MeSH term “pancreatic neoplasms” and keyword term, “pain“,  is shown below.

Notice that LigerCat provides the searcher two choices for getting the results, which could take a few minutes: the option of simply waiting a few moments for the search to execute, or save the shortened URL of the search-strategy to revisit the results at a later time.  That’s nice!

.

__________________________________________

.Here is a screenshot of the retrieval from LigerCat - which took about 20 seconds to execute:

__________________________________________

.Next:  I used LigerCat do a Gene Search for specific protein sequences.  This is how the site authors described the process of searching genes:

” LigerCat is performing a live BLAST to find similar sequences to your query. Once the sequences are identified, LigerCat will use its indices to map the genes into a set of PubMed articles that reference those genes, and extract all the MeSH terms for those articles. “

.__________________________________________

I went to NCBI to  find the Entrez Protein page and then searched FASTA for P53 and Homo Sapiens.  The search statement I found looked like this:

>gi|14993572|gb|AAK76358.1| P53 [Homo sapiens]
VGSDCTTIHYNYMCNSSCMGGMNRRPILTIITLEDS

.
This string was copied-and-pasted into the LigerCat Gene search box for the following result:

All images above – Courtesy  of LigerCat – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

__________________________________________

As a medical librarian, I think LigerCat is a great step forward — but because the value of information lies in the eye of the beholder — I’ll wait to hear the opinions of geneticists and research scientists as they weigh in on this new search engine.

For a different example of using this resource, see this link from the blog Biology of Aging, dated Aug 21 2009.