Methods of research used to create the blog

After having decided a topic that was in the news and also lent itself to discussion, we proceded to define the parameters of the blog. We chose to research the economic and social impact that the outsourcing phenomenon has on India and the United Kingom.

This blog brings together articles over a three-month research period, although it was put online in the month of December, the first article being dated 03 December.

Key words used for the search

‘outsourcing’, ‘offshore’, ‘india’, ‘united kingdom’, ‘IT’, ‘services’, ‘insurance’, ‘banking’, ‘jobs’, ‘unemployment’

Geographic locations

The United Kingdom (England, most specefically) and India

Internet research techniques used

Mega Search Engines
Copernic Agent Basic www.copernic.com

Search Engines
Google www.google.com

Yahoo www.yahoo.co.uk

Altavista www.altavista.com
The above mentioned search engines were useful in that they served as an excellent way to start the research process or begin research on a new theme. Systematic research on google and yahoo yeilded key words that we used to conduct a more refined research.

Intelligent Research tools
Googlealert : www.googlealert.com This is a very useful research tool because it conducts its research independantly and allows you to change your key words depending on the results you get. However, after a free trial period, it becomes a paid service.

Blog search
Blogarama  www.blogarama.com : This research tool helps to conduct a more streamlined research on other blogs. This was useful because not only did it give us addresses of other blogs, but also gave us links to important information.

Problems encountered

While conducting our research for this blog, we realised that there was a lot of information on the given topic already available on the web. Most of this information was repetitive and was, in reality, many ways of  communicating the same information. Our challenge was therefore to go beyond the obvious results that google provided and then be selective in the articles and links that we chose to put on the blog. We realise, in retrospect, that we should have chosen a topic that was more precisely defined, making the subsequent research easier to carry out.

We had first put up a blog on the same subject on blogspirit but we realised quickly that there were better blog-hosts at our disposal that gave us the possibility to be innovative in terms of display and also presented a range of choices ro manage the content that we chose to put online. Thus, having to relaunch the blog on canalblog took up a lot time that could have otherwise been put to better use.

Comments

[sunny]

vary good post.