NW Research Blog
Mongabay
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007I re-found this very interesting link today
This organization provides information on wealthiest and poorest zip codes, cities and states. Very interesting for data mining your own database. It is also broken down by state for wealth. All information appears to be based on IRS data.
Enjoy!
Washington State Assessors
Friday, March 30th, 2007I haven’t found a simple page for Washington State assessor, but you can find all county pages here:
http://www.mrsc.org/countyprofiles/profilesmenu.aspx
Oregon County Assessor Phone Numbers and Website
Friday, March 23rd, 2007Links, email addresses and phone numbers for all of Oregon’s county assessors can be found here
http://www.oregon.gov/DOR/PTD/County.shtml
Introducing Northwest Research Resources
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007I’ve recently set up a simple blog that discusses some basic resources at Northwest Research Resources
The blog focuses on simple resources for beginning researchers, with a special focus on resources helpful to those in the Pacific Northwest.
I’ll continue to blog new and cool things here.
Enjoy!
Article on Naming buildings in The Oregonian
Thursday, January 25th, 2007Here is an interesting and somewhat incendiary article from Sunday’s Oregonian on Philanthropy and naming buildings:
The John Q. Public Memorial Anything
20 cities salary information!
Monday, January 22nd, 2007The Business Journals published salary information based on survey for 20 cities in the USA including Portland and Seattle.
This information can be found here:
What 20 Top Jobs Pay in 75 Metros
Google Search Basics
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007Happy New Year!
I’m always surprised by what I don’t know, and what other people don’t know.
While training a beginning researcher (of the “Congratulations you are now a researcher” variety) I discovered that she didn’t know search basics, like how to create an exact phrase search in Google, so I dug up the Google Basic Search Help Page
From the basic search page, I learned that Google is now automatically stemming searches! This is not particularly good for researchers, as it also stems on names now.
UPDATE TO ADD: After a little more research I found that putting a word in quotes or adding a + before a word will turn off stemming for a particular word.
From the Google Advanced Search Help Page I found out about the Google Synonym Search. If you want to search not only for your search term but also for its synonyms, place the tilde sign (“~”) immediately in front of your search term.
For example I searched for “Bill Gates” ~philanthropy and Google also substituted the word charity, foundation, and community for philanthropy.
It isn’t perfect, but it may make general internet searching a little quicker.
Qwika! and the Wikipedia for prospect research.
Sunday, December 31st, 2006Qwika is a Wiki search engine. According to its marketing materials, it has translated wikis from 12 languages into English.The engine also includes WikiTravel and aims to include all sizable wikis.
I don’t rely on the Wikipedia for a great deal, but it can be useful when researching individuals whose (large) companies have recently been in the news.
Recently a new researcher I had trained was profiling an individual who was an executive at AOL in the 1990s. The organization was preparing to ask the donor for a major gift. I found the Wikipedia article about the AOL-Time Warner merger for her, which allowed her to understand how the stock had devalued during the Internet bust.
Qwika could be useful when researching businesses and individuals who are based overseas.
Somewhat off topic Firefox
Saturday, December 23rd, 2006I looked at my site statistics today, and found that almost 40% of the visits to this blog are by using a Firefox browser.
I find this very interesting, because many of the sites I use regularly are not set up for Firefox. For example, when using Foundation Search I’ve had to switch over to Internet Explorer, because I am unable to get the site to let me save a window as a text file in Firefox. Other sitesare somewhat illegible in Firefox.
I don’t have Lexis, but I remember that I could never get Lexis to work with Opera, another browser, and I don’t know how if works with Firefox.
I hope vendors and information providers catch up soon. I think my blog readers are pretty representative of the prospect research community as a whole, which means that almost 1/2 of them can’t use many sites without switching browsers.
Article on Affluence from The Oregonian
Saturday, December 16th, 2006The Oregonian had an article on “The New Affluence” yesterday. It can be seen here.
What is most interesting is how many people in this article have earned their money through real estate and how little philanthropy is mentioned.