The Blogging Bloggers Who Blog

I’ve been online so long, I remember when blog was both a verb and a noun. And we lived in the blogosphere. That is (or was) a community of bloggers and commenters. We did not just put things on Twitter to be clever. We engaged with yesterday’s blog post and looked forward to seeing what they said back to us tomorrow. Do any blogs engage anymore?

The other day that I have ample opportunity to relive the golden days. I wrote this post. I was inspired by a nice find I had made on a case, where I had been clever in how I searched a company name. I tried to make it a bigger lesson on how vital it came when entering names for search. And then it turns out a couple of others were talking about the same thing, and in many ways, in ways better and different than me.

Let me backtrack, am I reliving my blogging days if the post I link to comes from Twitter and not a blog? You get the point, but this tweet from @henvaness (Henk Van Ess) tackled the same question I had addressed in my blog post, namely if you do not put in a name right, you won’t find what you are looking for. I covered two issues. First, dealing with names that can be spelled differently, and secondly, with names that have “noise words” that muddy up search. I looked especially from the perspective of full text databases like Lexis. Hank Van Ess looked at more basic Google searches and how you can get different results based on the order or structure of how you write a name. It’s a good resource. Clip his table for tips in how you enter a name.

Then there was this, which proudly calls itself a blog. Bloggers Chris Weiss and Tracy Kungl point to a great example where spelling mattered. They note that a company

Ran a name through a database and received no hits. The name was later found to be a variation of a hit from the OFAC sanctions list, but wasn't picked up due to the limitations of the search parameters. 

They bring up another really key issue regarding getting names right, “Additional due diligence would have utilized an analyst with the knowledge of the variations of Russian names translated into English.” How do you spell Boris Berezovsky—believe me it’s not a simple as it looks. Arabic names too, often have multiple accepted spellings. For years our spies were calling him Usama when the rest of the world reviled Osama bin Laden. In my previous post, I pointed you to truncators and wild cards to make up for bad spelling. When it comes to names not originally written in Latin letters, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, etc., you can run into problems. There is often no right answer on name spelling nor easy way to mitigate the risk. You just need to know there are risks.

And if we read each others blogs, we’ll know that there’s always more to learn, something you did not think of the first time, an idea you may want to expand. It’s good to challenge your ideas and thoughts. And also good to challenge others ideas and thoughts to see if you were as right as you thought your were. I miss the old days.