Derek Willis of The Washington Post and the blog The Scoop says if newspapers want to compete in an Internet-based world we must do much better at adopting new technologies and sharing information internally. He points out how reporters at most newspapers, including his own, don't even share a most basic resource - our contact lists - much less our notes or our files:

"The modern newspaper is the anti-Google - it keeps its best information within its own walls, and makes it hard even for those few who work there to get to it."

Willis points out that with the Internet it's easier than ever for others to see that we don't know as much as we pretend to know:

"It’s not just that, as Dan Gillmor likes to say, our readers know more than we do. We don’t know as much as we could or should, given the amount of information that passes through newsrooms every day."

I read a lot of computer-industry magazines, and a constant theme is how many businesses are trying to use software to capture and make better use of the institutional knowledge they accumulate in the form of letters, memos, notes, email and so on. But not newspapers. We archive the stories we write, but the vast quantity of information we gather each day just dribbles down the drain. All the background and context we could have at our fingertips just isn't available. All those little nuggets of information we gather that don't make it into the daily paper but that could be useful five, ten, fifteen years down the road are just frittered away:

"Can you imagine another information-based business that permitted its employees to build walls around their information? Can you imagine it succeeding today?"

Willis say we aren't saving it "because we don't have to - there's no competitive reason to do it - yet." I think that's right - most businesses must worry about how they manage their information because their profit margins are thin and they must seek any edge they can to survive. Newspapers are de facto monopolies and for decades, in most cities, have had no real competition. The Internet, however, has radically lowered the barrier to competition, and that will increasingly undermine our traditional way of doing business unless we adapt.

The White House Economic Statistics Briefing Room provides "easy access to current Federal economic indicators." It promises the statistics are provided by the agencies themselves and are "the most currently available values."

"The goal of Chance is to make students more informed, critical readers of current news stories that use probability and statistics."

The Association of Food Journalists offers "A Web site by and for professional food journalists."

Steve Hamm of BusinessWeek online, in "The Truth about Linux and Windows," gives a good example of why you should always question any survey's methodology. If you care about the truth, anyway.

"Government Gazettes, which are published by federal governments worldwide, are the means through which the government can communicate to officials and the general public. Although most countries publish a gazette, their regularity and content varies widely, which is noted in the description of each gazette. Gazettes are useful not only to monitor the actions of the government, but also as primary source documentation in research."

"Spogger is a platform for real-time visual information and news provided and managed by the user community. Using this free service, people help each other find and share visual information, such as bargains at a garage sale, traffic conditions on the highway, lunch specials of the day, take-out menus, how crowded the movie theater is, what's on sale at the store, events and happenings, product images, weather conditions of an area, neighborhood around a hotel or rental, surf conditions and many others."

Ethics Updates offers "updates on current literature, both popular and professional, that relates to ethics."

This guy has written a Python script to take your del.icio.us bookmarks, scrape those Web pages and dump them all in your Gmail account, where you can search them.

FreePint has offers tips on "Health Information Sources for Non-Health Professionals."

Jonathan Dube of Poynteronline explains "RSS for Journalists."

"Upcoming.org is a collaborative event calendar, completely driven by people like you. Enter in the events you're attending, comment on events entered by others, and syndicate event listings to your own weblog. As Upcoming.org learns more about the events you enjoy, it will suggest new events you never would have heard about."

Healthopedia.com is "a medical and health consumer information resource containing comprehensive and unbiased information in patient-friendly language from trusted sources on over 1,500 health topics, 70 focussed health centers, and more than 11,000 drugs and medications."

SearchEngineWatch has a review of search engines for kids.

This is much better than a newspaper classified ad: This site has taken property offered for rent or sale on craigslist and combined it with Google Maps. You can instantly see where apartments in your price range are located, complete with a satellite image. (Louisville's not included yet, though).

Now you can sightsee with Google too (the site's motto is "Why bother seeing the world for real" - just as the motto for some reporters is "Why bother leaving the office?").

AutomateExcel.com discusses tools that let you export Yahoo local search results to Excel. Could be handy if you wanted to map a particular kind of business or get quick counts of say, all the liquor stores in a poor neighborhood. Some but not all require Excel 2003, the latest version.

"Where To Find Great Free Photographs And Visuals For Your Own Online Articles"

The Medical Library Association offers help on "deciphering medspeak." It translates common health industry jargon into plain English.

Yagoohoogle.com combines search results from Yahoo and Google side-by-side on the same page.

A mention of it on NICAR-L prompted someone to point to Gizoogle, which you'll just have to see for yourself to understand. Here's what it does to the IRE home page. Unfortunately, it can't handle The Courier-Journal's home page.

Here's a primer on "How to evaluate an Internet-based information source."

NewsU is a new online project by the Poynter Institute that offers "interactive, inexpensive courses that appeal to journalists at all levels of experience and in all types of media," One of its first offerings is a free course by the St. Petersburg Times training director on math for journalists, including such things as figuring a percent, using ratios, calculating cost of living, estimating crowds and more.

Every day the BBC tells you what happened on this day. And you can search for what happened on all the other days too.

I'm tired of plugging Google, but I can't help myself: Type a company's ticker symbol in the search box and it now returns a fever chart of the day's trading in that company's stock. Here's Gannett's. I should also confess here that my 9-year-old daughter now rolls her eyes whenever I mention Googling something ...

The Cliché Finder lets you enter a word or phrase and find matching clichés. From my reading of the average newspaper, however, I'd say most reporters do a good job of finding them on their own.

The Virtual Chase offers a primer, aimed at legal professionals but useful to journalists too, on "How to Conduct a Background Check."

Forbes.com tells you how much baseball teams are worth, sortable by rank, team, value, revenue and income. But I 'd be more interested in the most important baseball statistic of all: steroid consumption.

The Center for Public Integrity unveiled a new database on federal lobbyist spending yesterday called LobbyWatch. The center found that "each year since 1998 the amount spent to influence federal lawmakers is double the amount of money spent to elect them." You can search the database by state, country, issue, agency or industry and many combinations thereof. "With the click of a mouse, you can find out who is lobbying what issues for what company and for how much," the center says.

This may be a good idea, but I dunno yet: NowPublic is trying to bypass has-beens such as yours truly and let the public assign its own stories and report its own news. I wonder, however, if it isn't a plot by the mainstream media to undermine that idea because much of the "news" posted there -- dim, out-of-focus pictures of meeting rooms with gemlike ledes such as "The American Capital Association Kicks off its 2005 Summit this Sunday in San Francisco" -- makes even me yearn for the saving grace of an editor. Granted, it's still in beta, so maybe I'll check back in a year ...

I thought Republicans were against federal intrusion into family life: "4Parents.gov is a guide to help you and your teen discuss important, yet difficult, issues about healthy choices, sex and relationships." Personally, I think the only thing ickier than hearing Mom and Dad talk about condoms is Mom and Dad parroting what they read about condoms on a government Web site ("Even if a condom is used every time someone has sex, they could still become infected with an STD. When condoms slip or break or are used incorrectly, they don't protect against infections.") The site stresses abstinence, by the way, if that quote didn't make that clear enough...

Google has added satellite images to its online maps. When you search for an address, just click on the satellite link in the upper right. Here's one of The Courier-Journal, in its sea of parking lots. The quality of the images and the times of the year the images were taken varies. This one, for example, shows a lake frozen on one side, thawed on the other. This was reported on Slashdot, as was the fact that other sites such as Mapquest and Multimap pioneered satellite images with maps before Google (though Mapquest no longer offers them, apparently).

NASA, meanwhile, offers (although I haven't tried it, because it's a 171 megabyte installation) free software called World Wind that "lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there."

Cyberjournalist.net says it believes this year's Pulitzer for investigative reporting was the first for a story that broke online.

Oops: The New York Times posted a story online about the death of the Pope and left in the line: "need some quote from supporter." Wonder if they found one, and if so, was it mainstreamed?

You can now get financial disclosure reports for federal district court judges online at Judicial Watch. These are in addition to the reports for appeals and Supreme Court judges it began offering earlier.

You can get FBI crime data for states back to 1960 and for local police agencies back to 1985 online at the Bureau of Justice Statisics. There are also stats on homicide trends, law enforcement administration and prosecutors.

webGobbler, "the beautiful trashbin," crawls the web, downloads random images and combines them. "Enjoy the chaos of the internet," it says.

The Institute for Analytic Journalism says its goal is to research and develop "non-traditional analytic methods and communications tools for journalism." I'd be tempted to say the site is devoted to computer-assisted reporting, but it prefers the more highfalutin phrase "analytic journalism," which it defines thusly:

Analytic Journalism is: Critical thinking and analysis using a variety of intellectual tools and methods to understand multiple phenomena and to communicate the results of those insights to multiple audiences in a variety of ways.

These tools and methods are far more sophisticated than the traditional 5 Ws and H of classic journalism, but they are rarely novel and often well known outside of journalism. Indeed, analytic journalists consciously and constantly survey all other professional disciplines searching for methods that can be used by journalists to do more insightful, meaningful stories. The disciplines range from accounting (forensic accounting and performance measurement) to medicine and public health (epidemiology) to zoology (measuring relationships between species and resources).

There are some similarities between computer-assisted reporting (CAR) and analytic journalism. Both typically retrieve and analyze quantitative data, or translate qualitative data into quantitative data for more precise analysis, especially over time. Analytic journalists, though, seek methods beyond crunching numbers on a spreadsheet or running filtering algorithms on a database.

Which is all well and good (if a little stiff and self-aggrandizing), but I'll be anxious to see how the institute translates the methods of those other disciplines into methods that will be useful in a world where money and time for long-term projects are scarce, and most reporters must get things done in two hours, not the two years typical of academia.

ZabaSearch wants to sell you background checks, but at least until April 30, while it's in its beta period, you can use it as a free people finder.

Car-chase.net is a University of Missouri student's blog on computer-assisted reporting.

Type an area code in Google, such as 502, and it will return a link to a map showing where the area code is.

Quoting Google's help page, other numbers you can look up directly are:

• UPS tracking numbers - example search: "1Z9999W99999999999"
• FedEx tracking numbers - example search: "999999999999"
• USPS tracking numbers - example search: "9999 9999 9999 9999 9999 99"
• Vehicle ID (VIN) numbers - example search: "AAAAA999A9AA99999"
• UPC codes - example search: "073333531084"
• Patent numbers - example search: "patent 5123123" Remember to put the word "patent" before your patent number.
• FAA airplane registration numbers - example search: "n199ua" An airplane's FAA registration number is typically printed on its tail.
• FCC equipment IDs - example search: "fcc B4Z-34009-PIR" Remember to put the word "fcc" before the equipment ID.

UCLA has an archive on folk medicine.