This is from an email I just got from Amazon :

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased books by Fodors often purchased books by Fodor’s.

Duh!!!

Yesterday was Presidents Day in the US. Since I’m in London (flying home today), it wasn’t a holiday here. I guess it’s only a partial holiday in the US anyway, but the folks at Information Today Inc. take the day off. All of them except the inestimable Bill Spence who used his holiday to add a search function to this blog. See that little search box at the upper righthand corner? It seems to work quite well.

I wondered a few days ago what action SLA would take regarding the proposed budget cuts. Well, the association put out a press release today that doesn’t mince words: They’re denouncing the idea of closing EPA libraries and gutting the online catalog of library contents.

Alexandria, Virginia USA, 17 February 2006 — The Special Libraries Association (SLA) announced today its strong opposition to the Bush Administration proposal to close the network of libraries and information centers operating within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Janice R. Lachance, Chief Executive Officer of SLA, offered the following comments on the matter.

And I had an email from Northern Lights CEO, David Seuss, pointing out that the redesigned EPA Web site just went live.

Loren Baker reports that AOL “has released a list of its top searched olympians for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Torino, Italy.” Scanning the list of the top 20 bummed me out when I realized that Ted Ligety wasn’t on the list. Bode Miller was 3rd. Hey, Ted won a gold medal! Bode straddled a gate and was disqualified! Why isn’t anybody looking up Teddy? You might wonder why I’m so exercised about this. Well, it’s because I’ve known the Ligety family for almost 15 years and our kids — when they were still kids instead of ski racers (Ted), computer guys (Mo), and students (David and Charly) — spent loads of hours playing, skiing, and mountain biking together.

The Utah newspapers, particularly the Park Record and the Salt Lake Tribune had good coverage, with the local angle.

OK, all you AOL users: Go search for Ted Ligety and get his numbers up!

Back in the July/August 2005 issue of ONLINE , Amy Affelt contributed an article titled “Envisioning the Environment: The U.S. EPA Web Site,” all about the Environmental Protection Agency’s Web site. She gave particular attention to its Online Library System. Now the Bush administration’s proposed budget would essentially eliminate not only the OLS but the libraries as well. John Heilprin, an AP Datastream journalist, wrote on February 10, 2006 that the “EPA budget cuts trouble environment groups.” His article was picked up by many daily newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury News . He reports that the EPA intends to cut 80% of the library budget, from $2.5 million to $500,000. This would basically cut out the reading rooms and the libraries.

I’m embarrassed by the quote from EPA spokeswoman Eryn Witcher who thinks that simply providing information online rather than in physical form will be superior to having reading rooms and libraries. A library collection of e-journals with no librarians? Not good. As far as I can tell, there are at least 15 EPA librarians who are members of SLA . Wonder if the association will take a position on this? I’m also wondering what Northern Light’s David Seuss thinks about this, since his company’s enterprise search engine is to be used for the EPA Web site.

Reaction was strong from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility , which asks, “How are EPA scientists supposed to engage in cutting edge research when they cannot find what the agency has already done?” Good question.

The Rocky Mountain News notes the impact the budget decreases would have on its local EPA library.

Christina’s rant on the subject is wonderful.

The 20th Winter Olympics starts today in Italy. Whether you call it Turin or Torino, something which has been debated on the pages of several U.S. newspapers, it’s still an exciting event. Or at least, it’s exciting to me since I was so involved with the 19th Winter Olympics in Utah. Gary has put together a list of important Web resources for the 2006 Olympics here . Some of what I wrote back in 2002 in FreePint is still pertinent to this year’s Winter Olympics.

“As an event that happens every four years, there’s a definite cyclical element to information. As the Games come closer, more local sites spring up, only to disappear as the world’s attention shifts to the next venue. Four years ago I followed events in Nagano on sites that no longer exist.

Information about the Olympics falls into several categories: the official organizations, unofficial observers of the Games and the sports (personal and political), news outlets, and sponsor pages.”

The URLs I listed for the various country Olympic Committees and for the individual winter sports are still largely unchanged. One huge difference is the increased news coverage on the Internet, including some commentary by the athletes themselves. Take a look at Yahoo Sports , which I think is doing one of the better jobs of covering the event from many perspectives.

It does make you wonder, though, how NBC can wait until this evening (8 p.m. Eastern time is 2 a.m. in Italy) to broadcast the highlights of the day when anyone with an Internet connection already knows what happened and has probably seen photos, if not video, of the opening ceremony.

The real addition to Olympic coverage since I wrote that FreePint article is blogs. It’s great fun to go to one of the blog search engines and read what bloggers are saying about the Olympics. Again, the timeliness of the blogs makes NBC look silly.

Internet radio is another information source. The Park City (Utah) public radio station, KPCW , will give its unique brand of coverage.

Personally, I’m happy to know two members of the U.S. Ski Team, both of them Parkites, one a downhill skiier and the other competing in bobsled (or bobsleigh as they say in Torino). So I’ll be looking for news on them and hoping they do well.

See anything different? Like a lot more space? Thanks to Steven for pushing the ITI technical guys to rejigger the look and feel of both our blogs — and of ITI’s conference blog as well. Instead of being cramped in the middle of the page, we’ve now spread out to the left. Hopefully this new layout will make reading easier for everybody and give me the incentive to write longer posts (editorial note: I could have said “incent me to write longer posts,” but I continue to resist using incent as a verb!), something I’ve thought is a bit difficult to read in the former format. ITI management has indicated, however, that if anybody wants to advertise on any of the blog sites, it will be happy to rearrange the format once again to accomodate the ad. Duh.

It appears that the Canadian company Competia is no more. At one time, it produced high quality conferences on competitive intelligence in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. It also gave awards for influential books in the field and published an online newsletter. Its founder, Estelle Métayer, had this to say:

Following Competia’s acquisition by Groupe EBDATA in 2004, I had refocused my time and pretty much retired from the Competitive Intelligence world. The recent decision from EBDATA to discontinue operations has provided me with the exclusive use of Competia’s website. As the team has been dismantled a few months ago, I am not able to provide the same level and depth of service you are accustomed to, but have decided to focus on the following two aspects:

1) Continue as a public speaker to keynote conferences and strategic retreats
2) Schedule and personally teach a couple of courses each year to continue helping you build your curriculum

Looks like SCIP lost that particular private sector competitor.