ThomasNet is "the most comprehensive resource for industrial information." (via Internet Legal Research Weekly)

The ILRW also reports that you can turn any MSN search into an RSS feed. (Look for the orange RSS icon at the bottom of the search results page).

The International Architecure Database claims to be "the largest online-database about worldwide architects and buildings from past to present. This database includes over 13000 built and unrealized projects from various architects and planners." (via the Internet Scout Project)

AP now offers RSS news feeds. (via CARR-L)

CyberJournalist reports on how a researcher used eyetracking to study how people viewed the Washington Post's new homepage. The researcher created a "heatmap" to show where the eyes of 19 new viewers lingered.

Google now does movie reviews: Type "movie:" (without the quotes) and the title of a movie in the search box and Google returns reviews about the movie from around the Web. It groups reviews by the number of stars the movie received, links to the full reviews, and tells you the average rating. For Assisted Living, for example, Google found six reviews that gave it an average of 2.8 out of 5 stars. It also groups by positive, negative and neutral reviews, and you can type in a Zip Code to find a theater near you. You won't get every review, though. Courier-Journal critic Judy Egerton's review of the movie, for example, doesn't turn up, presumably because the newspaper charges a toll to see anything older than 7 days.

Google, by the way, offers reassurance to those who think it may have its own biases: "The selection and placement of reviews on this page were determined automatically by a computer program," Google explains. "No movie critics were harmed or even used in the making of this page."

Today I'm going to share an example of how you can use RSS to help follow your beat. I'm going to use Yahoo, which now allows you to create custom RSS news feeds.

First you go to Yahoo's RSS page, http://news.yahoo.com/rss. Below the list of canned Yahoo RSS feeds there's a box that says "Create your own RSS news feeds."

Say you want to follow whatever's written about Sen. Mitch McConnell. Enter "Mitch McConnell" in the search box, including the quotes. The quotes make it so you're searching for a phrase, as opposed to the individual words. That means you will get any pages where the words Mitch McConnell appear together but you won't get pages that mention Mitch Jones buying a house from McConnell Homes.

When you click the search button you get a page that looks like this:

This is called XML. RSS is a form of XML, which is just a way describing information that makes it easier to share. It's something like HTML, the markup language used to create Web pages.

Many sites tell you they have their own RSS feed by displaying a small orange square that says RSS or XML. Here's an example from the C.A.R. Report, which has a feed:

If you click on the icon you'll get an XML page like the Yahoo! page Mitch McConnell above. But you can also just copy the link by right clicking on the icon and choosing "Copy" (in Internet Explorer) or "Copy Link Location" (in Firefox). You then paste the address into an RSS news aggregator, which is a software program that gathers RSS feeds from multiple sites so you can read them easily. Many are free. Some news aggregators and Firefox automatically detect whether a page has an RSS feed, making it easier to "subscribe" to them.

You choose which feeds you want to follow. At the moment, I track about 200 RSS feeds on journalism, programming, computer-assisted reporting and other things that interest me.

My news aggregator of choice at the moment is NewsGator, which you can use for free on the Web or you can buy a $30 version that lets you read RSS feeds in Outlook along with your email. I've also tried SharpReader, My Yahoo! and Bloglines. All are free. Another good one that costs $30 is FeedDemon.

Anyway, you would copy this address from Yahoo:

And paste it into the add-a-feed box in NewsGator:

You tell your aggregator how often you want to check your feeds. Typically aggregators do it every hour, but you do it once a day or however often you want. Yahoo gathers all the news sites for that mention McConnell and combine them into an RSS feed. NewsGator and other aggregators display that and other pages with a headline and a short summary so you can easily scan them to decide whether it's something you want to read. In this way you can check a lot of Web sites very quickly.

You can then click on the link to go to the original page if you want to read the entire story. Many RSS feeds, such as for blogs, include everything posted so you can read them in the aggregator without ever having to visit the originating site.

NewsGator only shows what's new, so you can learn instantly if there's new information without having to go to each site individually and look. It's a huge timesaver.

You aren't limited to searching for people. You can search for subjects, such as "air pollution" or "horse racing" or "Kentucky" or something much more specific, such as the name of a particular drug. Obviously how good your results are depends on which words you choose.

This form of serving content on the Web is expanding rapidly. The latest form is called "podcasting," which uses RSS and aggregators to download recordings to your iPod or other audio player. The New York Times just had a front page story on this new form of radio, in which you can find people talking about any subject you can imagine.

I'm always mispronouncing words. The Pronouncing Dictionary of Music and Musicians© from Iowa State University can help with a cultural realm where I am particularly ignorant.

Many people don't realize that when they pass on Microsoft Word documents they can leave much embarrassing or revealing information hidden within them - ready to be discovered by enterprising reporters. PC World writes about a free tool to help identify that hidden data.

ResearchBuzz reports on a Web site listing newspapers with RSS feeds.

This, from the Newark Star-Ledger, could be significant for anyone who does screen scraping:

"Someone sitting at a computer within Union City's school district has a keen interest in lawyers, having accessed 151,910 individual attorney profiles in December through an online database. The owner of that Web site, New Providence-based Martindale-Hubbell and its parent company, Reed Elsevier, want to know who it is and why they have accessed so many profiles. The company filed civil complaints in federal court in Newark earlier this week against three Joe Does, saying the Web users are violating not only terms of use for the site, www.lawyers.com, but also copyright restrictions for allegedly reproducing the site's database."

I'd be interested in knowing: If you put a database on the Web, can you insist under the threat of a lawsuit that no one copy the entire thing? And just how legally binding are a site's terms of use? The Supreme Court has already ruled that you can't copyright a phone book.

WhiteHouseTapes.org is making more than 5000 presidential recordings, from Roosevelt to Nixon, available online for listening. At the moment the home page is touting LBJ discussing actress Janet Leigh's FBI background check, JFK ordering "one of those blue pills" from his doctor, Nixon and Haldeman discussing John F. Kerry, and Nixon discussing that "ruthless little bastard" Donald Rumsfeld, who was up for a posting as Special Trade Representative.

You can see some of Woodward & Bernstein's original Watergate notes and other materials courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin, which recently opened the archive to the public.

Facster takes the Statistical Abstract of the United States, which is online as PDFs, and makes it easier to search. ResearchBuzz has a review.

About.com offers an introduction to data mining. Techniques from data mining will one day make their way into the computer-assisted reporting toolkit.

The British Number Watch monitors "the misleading numbers that rain down on us via the media," the site says. "Whether they are generated by Single Issue Fanatics (SIFs), politicians, bureaucrats, quasi-scientists (junk, pseudo- or just bad), such numbers swamp the media, generating unnecessary alarm and panic. They are seized upon by media, hungry for eye-catching stories. There is a growing band of people whose livelihoods depend on creating and maintaining panic. There are also some who are trying to keep numbers away from your notice and others who hope that you will not make comparisons. Their stock in trade is the gratuitous lie. The aim here is to nail just a few of them."

The Bureau of Economic Analysis offers detailed data on local personal income.

NewsDesigner.com is "A Weblog about newspaper design, etc."

SportsDesigner.com is a blog "about the craft of creating a sports section."

VisualEditors.com is "Where the world's newsrooms come to talk." "Visual Editors provides journalists and students with a virtual classroom and electronic exchange - free of charge," the site says. "VizEds publishes industry news, coordinates education, reporting and training resources and enables interaction with journalists from around the world."

Look up Better Business Bureau "reliability reports" for businesses across the U.S. using the "BBB Information System." It includes reports on local charities, while BBB reports on national charities can be found at Give.org.

"Crime Spider searches for the best crime and law enforcement sites, then categorizes topics so you don't have to sort through hundreds of sites to find the one that fits the bill."

Trend watch: DeKalb County, Georgia, plans to use radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to track juvenile court files. "The system comes with software that connects to a Microsoft SQL Server database to track the movement of files," InformationWeek says.

Pretrieve is a free public record search engine. Enter a name, address, business or phone number and it returns links to public record Web sites. When you click on the links it automatically does the search at that site so you don't have to fill in forms each time. The results are returned in tabs: property info, criminal, court, financial, professional, local info and "miscellaneous."

Essentially it searches many of the sites on the background page mentioned a few days ago.

When I search myself it checks whether I've made any federal campaign contributions, been a sex offender or federal prisoner, died, been banned from holding a federal contract, issued a patent and much more. It also offers links to satellite images, Census data, maps, school info and so on for my neighborhood.

Impressive.

Google now offers maps. It's fast and you can move the map around just by clicking and dragging it. It also understands queries like "coffee near 525 west broadway, louisville." It's information isn't the freshest though - it misses new businesses like the Highlands Coffee on 4th St. and the Borders at 4th Street Live in Louisville, but it appears easier to use than alternatives like MapsOnUs or Yahoo! Maps.

Slashdot had a discussion of the Google Maps where I learned about another very slick map site called Map24.com. You must have Java installed on your computer, but if you do, it offers a particularly dramatic way of zooming in on your area of interest. And unlike Google, it includes Europe too.

For a laugh, some Slashdot posters noted errors in Microsoft's maps, such as how it gives directions for traveling from one town to another in Norway.

Web's Biggest claims to be the "world's biggest directory search engine." "Web’s Biggest is unique in that we have created a virtual replica of the whois database of more than 40 million domains names," the site says. "This lets us search almost every website in the English-speaking world. Other search engines rely on hyperlinks and manual submissions to find websites and miss more than half of them as a result." Webmasters and users can also revise site descriptions, so Web's Biggest also claims to be the "world's biggest 'Wiki.'"

Here's a primer on Weblogs for the uninitiated.

I've updated the backgrounding page with new Web sites. It offers links to mostly free resources for backgrounding people and businesses.

Among those I've added:

• HUD Enterprise Geographic Information System - for finding subsidized housing, environmental hazards, Census blocks and tracts, flood hazards and more around any address.
• Coast Guard boat query
• National Futures Association background check
• Defaulted docs - doctors who have defaulted on their Health Education Assistance Loans

Suggestions and corrections are welcome.

To fight diploma mills, the U.S. Education Department has a new online database where you can look up which colleges are accredited by agencies the feds consider reliable. The results tell you which agencies accredit a school, if any, and how to contact them. Here's a Wired News article on it.

When you use the yellow pages of Amazon's search site, A9.com, the results now include pictures of the businesses themselves. That means you can search for coffee in New York City, see a picture of the coffee shop, and then use their viewer to visually stroll down the street and see what else is there. Here's an explanation of how they did it. Louisville hasn't been photographed yet, but the site promises that more cities are being added all the time.USA Today has pointed out that some of the pictures, which are taken by an SUV rolling down the street, are wrong. Some people are making slideshows of the images.

This British site lets you write your own Bush speech and hear the Commander in Chief himself say it back to you. (via Infomaniac, the blog of the Miami Herald's research editor).

Annoyed by all those sites that require you to register before you can use them? At Bugmenot.com you enter the site's Web address and it will give you the user name and password from someone who has already registered (using fake information) so you don't have to do it yourself. It's a big time saver, assuming you can get past moral qualms about misrepresenting yourself. And of course there's the argument that in the long run you're only hurting yourself because it will be harder for those sites to know who their readers are, harder for them to sell advertising space and thus harder for them to keep offering their content for free. That said, I use it all the time myself, and if you use Firefox there's a very handy extension that fills in the user name and password fields from Bugmenot so you don't even have to visit the site at all, making it even faster (to truly understand the moral swamp into which you've descended, you should know the extension is by a guy who calls his site "roachfiend"). Thanks to Greg Johnson for suggesting it for the CAR Report, if not for helping me become a better person.

This site lists the number of Social Security recipients for each U.S. Congressional District, including beneficiaries as a percent of voting age population. There's also a count of retired workers, disabled workers, widowers, married couples and children receiving benefits, and a U.S. map showing where recipients are most prevalent. The data was gathered by Techpolitics, which the site says "provides research, information and analysis on politics and policy, focusing on Congress and on housing and banking issues." A former legislative director of the Congressional Black Caucus founded the site. Its politics are clearer when you see that it describes the Bush Administration as moving to "dismantle" Social Security.

Mr. Sapo is a "multi-search interface" that lets you use more than 80 search engines from its home page. When you enter your search terms, the results for whichever engine you choose appear below, but the top of Mr. Sapo's page remains, allowing you to quickly do the same search with many more search engines.

Why is it called Mr. Sapo? "Sapo means toad in Spanish; in some countries this word is associated with curiosity and good humor," the site explains. "The toad is has been also related to fertility, fortune and protection in ancient egyptian and mayan cultures."

That should be clear now.