April 6 2001.

New newsletter on searching: ResearchBuzz Extra

We like Tara Calishain's ResearchBuzz newsletter so much, that we gave her the Pandia Award of Honour last month. She has an uncanny ability to find new newsworthy search resources on the Net, and she presents them in her own entertaining style.

ResearchBuzz is very popular among librarians, and -- we suppose -- other types of information workers.

As most webmasters will tell you. Running a website and a newsletter costs money. Moreover, time is money as well, and Tara must spend a lot of it on her endeavor. After all, she runs to more newsletters as well and has her own company. This is probably one of the reasons she has now launched a fee-based version of her newsletter.

Why should anyone want to pay for something you can get for free? Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch has done this experiment before, and with great success, it seems. He has a special subscription offer that delivers extra newsletters and access to "in-depth" articles on his site.

The point is that you have to deliver something extra. And as the name implies, ResearchBuzz Extra does exactly that.

This week subscribers got no less than three newsletters:

1. The regular ResearchBuzz without the ads.

2. A ResearchBuzz supplement with more reviews of relevant information sites (topics: a visual thesaurus, on contacting doctors over the Web, LWW Medicine and Yahoo Popularity)

3. A newsletter with a feature article on searching techniques and site credibility.

Given the fact that ResearchBuzz Extra costs no more than $20 a year ($15 if you're a student, librarian, or educator), we would say this is a good investment. A corporate version allows you to distribute ResearchBuzz Extra across a company intranet, and provides a quarterly database of materials featured in ResearchBuzz Extra for unlimited use on internal company materials (training manuals, newsletters, guides, intranet etc.)

Hopefully, this support will make it possible for her to keep up the good work. Given that she is so good at delivering news, it is strange, however, that this version of ResearchBuzz is not mentioned on her home page.

As regards her other newsletters, ResearchBuzz Wire is more oriented towards the business side of the search engine and portal world. She comments on relevant news provided by the Moreover news provider. LLRXBuzz delivers weekly news and resources aimed at legal librarians.

Danny Sullivan has announced that Search Engine Watch will launch a new daily newsletter on search engines and searching edited by Chris Sherman, the editor of the About site on Web searching. We will let you know when that happens.

ResearchBuzz
ResearchBuzz Extra
ResearchBuzz Wire
LLRXBuzz
The Search Engine Report Newsletter from Search Engine Watch
The Pandia Post bimonthly newsletter on Web searching and search engines.
Websearch About.com with Chris Sherman (The newsletter mentioned on this site is not the new daily newsletter announced on Search Engine Watch)

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