CCR (Central Contractor Registration) offers a searchable database of federal government contractors.
Find a name, address and contact information for whoever registered a Web site at iwhois.com.
Best Search Tools Chart is a table summarizing features of the various search sites.
Why not a museum of bad album covers.
The First Amendment Center explains how to file an FOIA request. It includes section on "Common pitfalls & how to avoid them."
Science.gov now offers email alerts of new science information posted on the site, customized to your areas of interest.
Because you like to watch grass grow: WebCam Central. Links to live webcams all over the world.
At Prognosticate.com you pick a topic from the day's news and try to guess how it will be written. Are they trying to say what we do is boring and predictable?
The Best of Photojournalism, "The Contest Designed by Photojournalists for Photojournalists," calls itself "the world's leading digital photojournalism contest." The latest winners are online.
The Washington Post gives its take on the various desktop search programs.
Cyberjournalist reports on the top news sites for February, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Yahoo! News is first. It also gives the average time spent at each site per person.
Zoominfo spiders the Internet and compiles publicly available information about people. Here's what you'll find if you search for Bennie L. Ivory.
"What do you get if you cross a search engine with an encyclopedia?" Factbites.com says it has the answer.
Type weather and a city and Google will return a weather forecast at the top of the search results.
This "information blog" provides lots of Web sites and tutorials on finding people.
LexisNexis gives you its take on privacy.
This is a database of corporate commands.
"A Corporate Command is an instruction work, a call to action in the form of an imperative: 'Just Do It', 'Turn on the Future', 'Live without Limits', 'Tap into great taste', 'Think different', 'Ride the light'.
It is the hypothesis of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things that these commands, largely and consciously ignored by a public over-saturated with advertisements, function at the level of the infinitely small. Tiny events that do not disturb one's consciousness or disrupt one's identity as 'free' agents, these commands seep under the surface of the individual and lay claim to the territory of the Deleuzian Virtual. Desire, memory, and future potentiality become territories for conquest and tactics for control."
Like, whoa.
You can search business listings in Google by typing bphonebook: and a residential lookup by typing rphonebook: Like this: bphonebook: courier-journal, louisville
Mary Ellen Bates' tip of the month is on finding authoritative sources on the Web.
The National Conference of State Legislatures keeps a list of state legislators with blogs and RSS feeds.
The Clusty search engine now has an option to restrict your search just to government-related sites.
This government site gives you links to all the federal Web sites where you can find press releases.
HomeSales.gov lists all the single-family homes the government is auctioning off or otherwise selling.
Merriam-Webster has Firefox extensions that makes it easy to look up words in its free online dictionary and thesaurus.
If you don't think blogs are at least something of a threat to mainstream journalism, consider this blog from New Albany, which covered a city council meeting last week. (A meeting, as another blogger noted, "both the Courier-Journal and the Tribune apparently declined to cover.") The blogger, Randy Smith, isn't offering straight-up news because he mixes commentary with his reporting. Nevertheless, the simple truth is that a dedicated blogger can provide more comprehensive and more timely coverage of a city council meeting than the local newspaper. Granted, few are doing that, but the potential is there, and someday someone is going to figure out how to exploit that potential...
You can do a reverse number lookup in Google by typing phonebook: and the number, like this: phonebook: 502-875-5136.
The Congressional Research Service offers a report on "Tracking Current Federal Legislation and Regulations: A Guide to Basic Sources."
CoolGov reports on "neat resources" found on government Web sites.
Bpubs is a business publications search page
Daycare.com offers resources on day care, such as information on licensing standards for each state and a search box for finding day care by ZIP Code.
This is a "screencast" on how to use RSS.
Google News now allows you to customize its home page. That means not only choosing between, say, showing only international or sports news, but also including custom news searches. That way you can include stories on just those topics that interest you - say cigarette smuggling or Eastern Kentucky University basketball or methamphetamine news. Whatever.
Here's how to do it:
One the upper right of the news page there's a link that says "Customize this page."
Clicking that link opens this box on the page:
The rectangles that say "World" and "U.S." and so on are the standard Google news sections, as they are arranged on Google's page. Now you can move them around by clicking and dragging them or remove them all together. Even better, though, you can add a custom section.
To do that click on the link that says "Add a custom section."
That gives this box, where you can enter the keywords for the kind of news you want to add to your custom news page:
Here we've entered "Kentucky Derby" because we want any news stories that mention the Derby. We can also choose how many stories we want to include on the page. We'll leave it at the default, which is three. You can include as many as nine.
Click the "Add section" button and it add that section to your custom page layout. You can then move the module around to wherever you want it to be on your page by clicking and dragging it.
We'll leave it as is and click "Save layout." Then click "close" in the upper right corner because we're finished editing the page for now.
Now if you scroll down, you'll see that your news page includes a special section showing just news stories that mention the Kentucky Derby:
STATS, at George Mason University, "monitors the media to expose the abuse of science and statistics before people are misled and public policy is distorted."
Stateline.org, which follows politics and policy news for every state, now offers RSS feeds. These include a state-by-state roundup, information on individual states and feeds on specific issues such as crime, the economy, education, health care ane more.
The AAA Fuel Cost Calculator lets you figure out how much it will cost to drive from one city to another.
As of yesterday FlatRateInfo has cut off access to Social Security numbers for the media and many others. This is the result of the ChoicePoint scandal where scammers signed up for its services then used personal information gathered through them, such as SSNs, to defraud. You can still search by SSN, but SSNs in search results will be truncated to the first five digits. ChoicePoint, the owners of AutoTrack, had already cut off access. I think this marks the beginning of the end to relatively easy access to SSNs for journalists, who have done a lousy job of explaining why we should still be able to get them. I rarely read or hear a story on this issue in which someone points out that access to SSNs makes it much easier for journalists to report on crime, corruption and mismanagement. Without a SSN it's much harder for private investigators to track down wrongdoers, for schools or day cares to perform adequate background checks of employees, or for small businesses to identify fraudsters.
InsightAmerica, the owner's of FlatRate, says in a message posted on its site that "Due to the recent corporate security breaches within our industry, we expect significant federal legislation to control what our industry does and who we can serve." If that's so, then journalists should be making the case that there are benefits to public access to information - even Social Security numbers.
The NameVoyager by The Baby Name Wizard ("The ultimate field guide to names") is a fascinating way to see how the popularity of names have waxed and waned over the years. You type in a name and it shows you graphically how many babies per 1,000,000 were so designated by their parents. It also gives that name's overall rank each year. Mark, by the way, peaked in 1961, when I was born, and has been in steady decline ever since. You must have Java installed.
The New York Public Library is making more than 275,000 of its images available free online. This includes "including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more."
Liquid Information is an interesting experiment that turns every word on any Web page into a live link to more information - even if the original site didn't intend it to be a link. "We believe in giving the professional user a more flexible work environment in which he or she can more flexibly navigate through information, change the way it's portrayed and relate it to other information," the site explains. "Extending the user in this way will help the user digest important and useful information. The web is a great step forward in information access and you can think of this project as an effort to turn web 'browsers' into web 'readers'. This is not about 'links' it's about interactive text - text you can issue commands on, such as 'highlight this word in red' or 'look up the dictionary definition of this word.'"
It's something that's better understood by trying the demo (click on demo! on the right after entering the site).
My wife doesn't like it when I say my entire world view was formed by Mad Magazine, but it's true. ResearchBuzz reports that this site offers thumbnail images of all the covers back to 1952.
Copernic has a new version of its free desktop search program.
Mary Ellen Bates writes about how researchers can use Furl, an online filing cabinet I find useful. Furl is free and a good way to store Web pages for later reference.
Beatrix is a "Book Review Review" by freelance writer Ron Hogan. "How did this season's hot books generate their heat? And why do other novels surrounded by buzz turn into duds? Beatrix openly speculates about these questions in the form of a 'book review review,'" Hogan says. "I'll watch the major book reviewers to discern patterns of taste and/or critical strategy, and sometimes I'll follow a book through the review matrix to see how opinions coalesce or wildly diverge." (via Librarian's Index to the Internet)
The U.S. Drug czar is the first cabinet-level agency to have its own blog - "Pushing Back" (so says the National Criminal Justice Reference Service). "Pushing Back provides up to the minute news on the Drug Czar, his staff, and other national efforts that 'push back' against the drug problem in America," the site says
TurboScout, like Mr. Sapo, makes it easy to search multiple search engines. Enter your search terms, then quickly run the same query in every other search engine by virtue of a bar that sticks to the top of your screen. Here's a story on it from the Internet Search Engine Database. (via Infomaniac)
beSpacific notes that the Nooked RSS Directory offers a directory of corporate RSS feeds. Search by keyword or browse categories. The pickings are thin but it's still in beta.
