This site is very much a work in progress. What you see here is just a fraction of what we hope will become a centralized resource for information about push technology, news alerts, and current awareness tools.

We plan to provide more comprehensive information and critiques, some quick reference tools and tests of various alerts. In addition, in the near future we will be expanding to include alert services offered by commercial online aggregators like Dialog and Nexis, as well as database screening vendors, like PIN and Marts & Lundy.

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Introduction

With just an email account, access to the web, and some careful preparation, registering at various sites and entering data, you can turn the internet into a virtual staff member, who'll work 24/7 making you look good. If one of your goals is to provide more proactive research, these are some of  the tools that can help you. If you'd like research to have a higher profile in your development office, some of these tools may help take you there. And if you're sometimes frustrated by those profiles being out-of-date mere days after they're prepared, here's just the technology you've been looking for.

What is Push Technology?

According to the ComputerUser.com High-Tech Dictionary, push technology is "Internet technology that allows information to be delivered or "pushed" directly to a user who subscribes to it, rather than the user having to go look for the information on an Internet site." For a more detailed definition, refer to What?is.com and refer to articles in the bibliography at the end of this presentation.

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Getting Started

Before setting out to help make the web work for you, you need to be organized. Take care of these preliminaries first:

• Get an email reader or configure your current one to display inline hyperlinks (most now do). These tools utilize hot linked email that allow quick and direct access to the web document to which you're being alerted..
• Identify your top prospects and know which ones are insider owners or directors of publicly traded companies. Make such identification a routine part of your day-to-day activity.
• Create procedures so that companies and prospects you need to track using these tools are added to your alerts regularly. Have a system in place.
• Find the ticker symbols for the companies where your prospects are affiliated. This will make entering your alerts a much quicker enterprise.(Yahoo's ticker symbol lookup is easy to use: http://finance.yahoo.com/l).
• Download a shareware password management program such as: Password Safe (http://www.sharewarejunkies.com/8zwd8/password_safe.htm) or Whisper 32  (http://www.ivory.org/whisper.html) to juggle multiple user names and passwords. That way you'll only ever need to remember one password -- the one to the management program!

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News Alert
(http://www.newsalert.com/)
Reviewed by David Shanton

This comprehensive source for real time financial and business news offers 25 free, user defined Clip Alerts. It searches 15 news sources, including Business Wire, PR Newswire, UPI, CBS Marketwatch and Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. Take advantage of this tool to track mentions of your institution and your top prospects.

Advantages

• Very comprehensive, no cost coverage. A six month study comparing the hits received for the phrase "St. John's University" on News Alert vs. an eclipse using the same phrase in Lexis-Nexis Executive Change file, found that Lexis-Nexis turned up only 2 relevant articles not found by News Alert.
• Receive crucial, user defined news in real time.
• Increased to 25 the number of free alerts you are able to set up per user ID (an increase from 3), though only the first 3 will appear on your personalized home page at News Alert.
• Search supports Boolean operators (and, or, not).

Disadvantages

• Setting up your search expression is not always intuitive, so you'll have to take a look at the help file and test your key words and phrases. Be careful with your search strings and test them. A recent search on Fili-Krushel (Executive Vice President of AOL Time Warner) came up empty, but "Fili Krushel" returned hits, even though "Fili-Krushel" was in the actual returned story.
• Finding search help is difficult. Use the provided link below.
• In the past, several "alerts" sent have not contained any matched terms, but a visit to the News Alert home page turned up hits with match terms for which an email been received.
• The results of your alert are archived for only 3 months, so they cannot be stored indefinitely in electronic form.
• When activating and deactivating an alert, there is sometimes a lag time before you begin or stop receiving alerts.

Quick Set-Up

• Register
• Help File

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10K Wizard
(http://www.tenkwizard.com)
Reviewed by David Shanton

This is one stop shopping for S.E.C. (Securities and Exchange Commission) information, with particularly powerful tools that you should be taking advantage of. Register at the site and then create alerts based on prospect or institutional names or other key words that may be helpful to your prospecting. You'll be notified via e-mail when a new S.E.C. filing meets your search criteria.

In addition, with thousands of documents being filed with the S.E.C. daily, how can you easily keep track of the companies affiliated with your top prospects? Easy, with 10K Wizard.  Set up an alert for proxies, or 10-K, or any other forms you'd like to see from a specific company, and you'll receive an e-mail message informing you when such documents have been filed by your targeted corporations.

Advantages

• With a minimum of effort, you can uncover corporate relationships to currently identified prospects or new prospects related to your institution in some way.
• You don't have to regularly check if a new proxy statement with new stockholding or salary information is in. You'll be notified.
• Allows unlimited number of alerts for $99/year per user.
• The Word Search feature supports Boolean operators, allowing for more powerful searching.
• If you do a search on the site that you want to turn into an alert, you can do so by simply clicking on "Add this Query to my Alerts!"
• The key word searches are initially displayed in a KWIC (key words in context) format and by clicking on your hot linked key word(s) you will link only into the portion of the filing where your key word(s) is found.

Disadvantages

• Costs $99/annually per person for full access.
• Since the company moved to paid access and revamped the site, the search engine is quirkier, inconsistent and less reliable.
• There is some inconsistency in the manner in which alerts are sent. On occasion, alerts arrive that do not include the key word displayed in hyper linked, KWIC format, meaning the entire filing must be searched for my matches.

Quick Set-Up

• Register
• Help File

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Northern Light
(www.northernlight.com)
Reviewed by Shelby McClintock

Early in 2001, Northern Light was purchased by Divine, Inc. The website has changed with that purchase, and more changes may be in the works so stay posted!

For now, if you go to www.northernlight.com, you will find a search engine that allows you to search the NL "Special Collection" and some other business journal collections, such as "archived news," "MarkIntel Research," and "American Banker." You cannot, however, search the world wide web from this home page.

To get to the more comprehensive (and more familiar, for "old" NL users) NL tools, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on NL Research. This will take you to http://nlresearch.northernlight/research.html. Here you can search the NL "Special Collection," the NL "Premium Concent," the World Wide Web, or "All NL Sources." You can also search all of the other choices from the original NL page listed above

As in the past, special collection and premium content information can be searched for free, but seeing the full text of results will cost you money. If you can't afford to purchase any special collection/premium content documents, you should still search here sometimes you can get the material from other locations (LNUDP, for example).

To use the alert services on NL, you have to be a registered user. Registration is free, for now.

Once you complete a search, you can select the "SAVE THIS SEARCH AS AN ALERT" icon, which will walk you through that process. Editing alerts is easy and you can do so any time by going to the NL Research site and selecting the alerts button on the left hand side once you've logged in.

Advantages

• Supports Boolean Searches.
• Has advanced searching options which allow you to limit your search by language, date, and type of site, and more.
• Great customer support (so far).
• Alerts are easy to set up, edit, and delete.
• Refund Policy if you purchase a document and it isn't what you needed, you can return it NO QUESTIONS ASKED.

Disadvantages

• For now, NL doesn't have too many disadvantages. However, Divine Inc. staff has reported that membership to the site will eventually cost money. Early this year, the company reported that they would be charging a $5/month fee for use of the site. The fee would come with 50 free special collection documents and include the alert service. This fee structure has not been officially announced, however, so for now, happy NL searching!

Quick Set-Up

• Alert Set Up
• Details on acquisition by Divine

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Forbes People Tracker
(http://www.forbes.com)
Reviewed by Shelby McClintock

The Forbes site is a significant resource for financial information and provides a variety of e-mail newsletters (on everything from Airlines, Media, Technology, US Markets, Biotech, and even Steve Forbes), Investment Newsletters (including Guru Picks, From the Chart Room, Advisor Soapbox), a Free Portfolio Tracker, and a People Alert. The Free Portfolio Tracker and the People Alert are significant alert services that you can use to track financial information as well as news on public companies and public company executives.

Advantages

• Free registration and alert service.
• People Tracker and Portfolio Tracker.
• Easy to create a list of public company insiders; chart will show you the basics.
• Get alerts on your prospect and/or your prospect’s company in the news. Alerts also include SEC information (financials like new salary and bonus information).

Disadvantages

• Only tracks on public company insiders and public company information.
• Only sources are FORBES and SEC documents.

Quick Set-Up

• People Tracker Registration Page
• Portfolio Tracker Registration Page
• People Tracker Help

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Hoover's Alerts
(http://alertswizard.hoovers.com)
Reviewed by David Shanton

Hoover’s Alerts should be called “well kept secret” alerts:  buried deep within the site, not readily accessible from the toolbar, and rarely promoted (they weren’t even mentioned by the Hoover’s reps during their product presentation at Web Search University!) In case you're curious, you can find it by clicking on the News Center channel from the Hoover's home page.

“Alert Wizard,” the propriety alert software developed and used by 10-K wizard, powers Hoover’s Alerts. That alone might make you a bit skeptical, given how quirky the 10-K search engine has proven to be since its revamp.

They do not divulge their source list, so it’s hard to evaluate exactly what they are searching compared to other alerts.  A company rep would only say that the  “list is of over 500 newsfeeds,” though the Web site lists only South China Morning Post, Information Week, The Telegraph, and Chicago Tribune as examples. However, there appears to be some unique content. A quick test search on the ticker symbol EBAY turned up an  A.P. story that did not show up in Yahoo! Recent News, CBS Marketwatch.com News, or E*Trade’s News Stories.

What appears to be most useful, however, is the versatility of their alert features and their user-friendliness. You can track a company by ticker symbol, enter a key word search, or track a topic or industry from pre-selected categories established by Hoover’s.  Editing and deleting alerts is a breeze, and you can even automatically disable your alert emails for the weekend with one click.
 

Advantages

• Unlimited alerts
• Option of having alerts delivered in plain text or in HTML.
• Option of having alerts delivered in real time, twice a day, or daily.
• Option of suspending alerts indefinitely without deleting,  and to suspend only on weekends.

Disadvantages

• Must be premium subscriber to set up alerts
• Source list is not published, so cannot discern what is being searched against.
• Duplication. Test alerts found more than sporadic duplication of alerts, so you'll get some email clutter.
• No apparent archive list

Quick Set-Up

• Help File

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Hoover's IPO Update
(http://www.hoovers.com/ipo/)
Reviewed by David Shanton

The IPO market has cooled significantly in 2000, but it remains a tremendous source of new wealth. Identifying your prospects affiliated with a company before it goes public has distinct advantages. While Ten-K Wizard searches S-1 filings (the IPO registration filed with the SEC), you'll only get a hit if your key word search happens to match something in an S-1. You'll have to go through each filing, comparing insider names to your constituent data base to confirm that you have a hit, but that's the price of being proactive!

Hoover's offers a free, weekly email service, called IPO Update, highlighting S-1 registrations, pricings, and other IPO news. While there are other weekly email IPO newsletters (e.g. IPO.com,  http://www.IPO.com), Hoover's has better coverage, more timely updating, and convenient features.

Advantages

• All new IPO filings are delivered to your email box weekly.
• No registration is required for this service.

Disadvantages

• You'll have to pay to get into the hyper linked officer biographies which may help you establish relationships with your organization.
• The weekly email is lengthy and includes information aside from the previous weeks S-1 registrations.

Quick Set-Up

• Register

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Times News Tracker
(http://www.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html)
Reviewed by David Shanton

Launched in early 2002, Times News Tracker lets you establish up to 3 keyword or subject searches in the New York Times. You could conceivably establish up to 15 searches, however, since News Tracker allows you to set up 5 ticker symbol/company searches within one alert.

It's great to have America's newspaper of record offer free alerts, but it may be a little early to get excited. Many think this is a first step toward a paid online subscription service at the Times.

You also have to deal with that quirky search engine at the Times site, which never seems to return what you expect it to (though seems to be on the improve). Also, some quick testing seems to show that the paid obituaries are not indexed and searched for News Tracker.

And the email alert itself leaves much to be desired. Initially it was just the headline and byline. Recently, the emails have begun to include the first sentance of the story. Still, it is tough to figure out the relevance of the alert without clicking on the link and going to the actual story at the Times Web site.

On the plus side, you can create pre-established alerts on various topics directly from relevant articles. Essentially, the Times has created subject indexing for stories, which you can automatically pull into an alert. You can also narrow your search by adding additional terms that must appear or defining terms that cannot appear.

Look for News Tracker from the home page tool bar (under Member Services), or embedded within the body of any story you decide to view from the Times Web site.
 

Advantages

• It's the New York Times!
• Allows daily and weekly delivery digest formats.
• You can restrict your keyword search to various fields, like headline, to create a more precise search.

Disadvantages

• Must register at the Times site before establishing alerts.
• Quirky search engine.
• Email notification includes only headline and first sentence of article
• Can only establish 3 alerts, though more are available if you are searching on companies.

Quick Set-Up

• Set Up Page
• Set Up Page/Ticker Symbols
• Help File -- you will have to click on "Take a Tour" from either of the above set up pages.

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Wall Street Journal Interactive
(http://www.wsj.com/)
Reviewed by David Shanton

More "pull" than "push" technology, the Wall Street Journal web site allows registered members to establish 5 news folders as part of the site's Personal Journal feature. Four folders can be named at your discretion and track up to 8 searches each (for a total of 32), using a combination of ticker symbols and/or keywords. A fifth folder, aptly titled Company News, tracks up to 25 companies. After logging on and navigating to Personal Journal, clicking on any folder quickly indicates if any new items from either the Wall Street Journal or Dow Jones Newswire have been found.

Advantages

• Separate folders allow multiple staff members to track items of importance to their personal research while using only one account.
• A way to use the power of the Wall Street Journal without actually reading it cover-to-cover every day.

Disadvantages

• There is a nominal fee for WSJ Interactive -- $29 annually if you are a print subscriber to the Wall Street Journal, $59 annually if your are not.
• Navigating around the site is somewhat cumbersome and not intuitive.
• Hits are only archived for 30 days.

Quick Set-Up

• Thirty-day free trial registration

Help File -- you will have to click on "Take a Tour" from either of the above set up pages.

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American Business Journals
(http://www.bizjournals.com/)
Reviewed by David Shanton

This is a  potentially powerful tool for tracking people and companies in 41 different markets, provided by the American Business Journals chain.

There are lots of canned newsletters and breaking news alert options at the site, but you'll want to get to the "Search Watch" feature, which allows you to set up unlimited keyword searches in any combination of the companies 41 city specific journals.

You can pay to search or set up alerts in most of these publications in Dialog, Factiva of Nexis, but here is an unlimited, free alerting service with unique content. Of all online alerts, this one is the least likely to be duplicated through other free or low cost alerts (more testing on this to come.)

Advantages

• Unique content.
• Can restrict your search to specific publication or publications.
• Unlimited alerts.

Disadvantages

• Top three regions in the country are not covered (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles)
• Once a week delivery (on Mondays).
• Limited help features.
• Boolean searching is not supported.
• No field restriction options (such as a keyword in the headline).

Quick Set-Up

• Registration Page
• Set Up Page

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CBS Marketwatch
(http://www.cbsmarketwatch.com/)
Reviewed by Shelby McClintock

CBS MarketWatch has a portfolio tracker and an news alert service. It's easier to use than Yahoo!Finance and was rated highly by Forbes. Full reveiw to come!

Advantages

Disadvantages

Quick Set-Up

• Registration page
• Help page

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Dialog
(http://www.dialog.com/)
Reviewed by David Shanton

Dialog allows you to set up alerts in almost all of its regularly updated databases (check Special Features or Tips in the Bluesheets to be sure). It can be costly, but you won't be able to combine the power searching tools of Boolean, truncation and proximity operators in anything other than one of the premium online services like Dialog, so if you have a more complicated search where precision matters, you may want to take a look.

How much will it cost? Well that depends. If you set up your alert in Dialog Web, you pay for the alert even if you don't look at the results. If you use Dialog 1, you will see titles for free, and pay only for those you look at in fulltext format.

Other factors that determine price are the file you are establishing an alert in, the frequency you set to receive your alert, and the format in which you choose to receive your alert. Check Rates in the Bluesheets for the file you want to establish an alert in, and it will tell you the cost of a weekly alert. They can vary widely. The cost in Newsday is $2.15/week while a monthly alert in the American Banker publications is $6.40/week.

The best advice is to make sure to choose email delivery. The cost of 48 email alerts from over 50 different files in a one month period was just $3. But those per file set up fees can add up - a monthly charge for alerts in over 50 different files was $341.35!

And Dialog does not make it easy to figure out the costs, either. There is no written price list or pricing information available. In a chat with reps from Dialog , they made it clear that there are too many variables involved to publish a written pricing policy.

There are some tricks. By setting up an alert in one of Dialog's Newsroom (File 990), you get access to approximately 6,500 publications, but only one file setup fee -- $10/week. And Dialog reps have informed me that they will soon be unveiling "unified" alerts, which will allow you to run a standard search across numerous files as one search, and dupes will be removed. Keep on the lookout for this potentially useful feature.

Advantages

Disadvantages

Quick Set-Up

• Two Dialog pubications exist that can be of help: Creating and Using Alerts (Catalog #167025) and Alerts Quick Reference Card (Catalog #410073). These can be ordered for free from Dialog's Online Store if you are a Dialog client at: http://usorders.gilmoreglobal.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/DialogOnlineStore/
• Alert How-to Tutorials (check in the right hand column for the links).

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A Few Other Sites
(Details and reviews to come)

• Yahoo! Alerts -- stock and news alerts available.
• Yahoo! Real Estate Alerts -- free alerts to get updates on recent real-estate sales.
• Spyonit-- Register for your free account, then craate your own Internet "spies" or choose from Spyonit's pre-programmed catalog.
• Unlock Dates -- receive an email alert whenever a listing in the National Obituary Archive (NOA)™ matches criteria you establish.
• National Obituary Archive -- receive an email alert when the lock up date for sale of stock following an IPO is about to expire on up to ten companies.
• Free Edgar -- a misnomer, since it isn't free, but this is an alternative to 10K Wizard for SEC information via alerts. Now defunct InsiderTrader.com, which sent alerts regarding insider trades, was absorbed into the site.

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Why Bother?

Taking advantage of these internet tools is a commitment of time and energy. But is it worth it? Definitely! Here's why:

• Identifies new prospects.
• Provides timely information about current prospects.
• Helps you be proactive.
• Saves time.
• Markets your shop.
• Raises profile of research operation.
• Outreach to major gift officers (e.g. "Tom! The new Microsoft proxy was filed today and that prospect of yours, Gates, now has $980 billion in stock!")
• Low cost.
• Triggers updating of prospect profiles.
• Timely, accurate data increases credibility.
• Potential items for a Prospect Research newsletter.

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Further Reading

Arnold, Stephen, Arnold. Erik.. Push Technology: Driving Traditional Online into a Corner. Database. 20(4); 1997 August.

Belfourd, Tony; Furner, Jonathan. Fast learners or time wasters? Intelligent agents on the web: a user study. Managing Information. 4(9): 32-34; 1997 November.

Covell, Andy. Pushing past the hype: delivering to the desktop. Network Computing. 815: 1997 August 15.

Feldman, Susan; Yu, Edmund. Intelligent agents: a primer. Searcher. 7(9): 42; 1999 October.

Glasock, Stuart. Push returns with a punch. Technology News. 1999 November 8.

Gustitus, Cheryl. The push is on: what push technology means to the special librarian. Information Outlook. 2(1); 1998 January.

Helfer, Doris. Push technology on the net: threat or opportunity for the online searcher? Searcher. 5(9): 12-31; 1997 October.

Hudson, Michel. Special delivery. Push technology sends prospect research directly to your desktop. Currents. 26(4): 15-16; 2000 April.

Kelly, Kevin; Wolf, Gary. Push! Kiss your browser goodbye: the radical future of media beyond the web. Wired. 5(3): 1997 March.

Lescher, John. Trying to remember your password? The Cyberskeptic's Guide. 5(4): 5; 2000 April.

Makulowich, John. Alert and news services. Online. 21(2): 82-84; 1997 March/April.

Notess, Greg R. Internet current awareness. Online. 23(2):75-78; 1999 March/April.

Paiser, Barb. I want my breaking news. American Journalism Review 23(7): 66; 2001 September.

Solomon, Marc. When push comes to pull: serving current awareness applications in your company's news cafeteria. Searcher.7(6): 70; 1999 June. 

Sommerfeld, Meg. Prospecting the web for donors: Up-to-the-minute news delivered to fund raisers automatically. Chronicle of Philanthropy. 2001 August 9.

Tyburski, Genie. Personal news travels fast Law Office Computing. 11 (5): 2001 October/November.

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Copyright © 2002, David Shanton and Shelby Radcliffe McClintock