The LA Times reports on how the Greensboro News & Record is turning to staff and community written blogs as part of an experiment "that could change the way readers approach and digest the news." The Times says the experiment is one of "national consequence" and that "The implication for the future is clear -- the website, not the print edition, might someday drive the newsroom."

A researcher says you can predict the outcome of U.S. Supreme Court decisions by tallying the tenor of questions during oral arguments.

BizStats.com offers "Instant access to useful financial ratios, business statistics & benchmarks, effective and understandable online analysis of businesses & industries." It's by a Washington DC CPA and it's free.

Given that the Indy 500 is almost upon us, I like this chart created in Excel showing how qualifying and race speeds have changed over time. It's the sort of thing newspapers could easily do ...

A couple of fine examples from Florida of what can be done with GIS - geographic information system - mapping:

The St. Petersburg Times used satellite imagery to show how wetlands are vanishing.

The Palm Beach Post used 10 years of home sales data to explore that area's housing boom.

"The International Journalists' Network (IJNet) is an online service for journalists, media managers, media assistance professionals, journalism trainers and educators and anyone else with an interest in the state of the media around the world."

Freepint expounds on "Analyzing corporate websites for competitive intelligence." Their advice is useful for journalists too.

PrivacyActivism.org says it studied two data aggregators, including ChoicePoint, the owners of Autotrack, and found errors with basic biographical information such as name, social security number, address and phone number roughly two-thirds of the time. If you've ever done a search on yourself you know that's about right -- so always be cautious using these services.

Google now lets you create a personalized Google page that includes Gmail, news, weather and so on.

Google also now offers a free "Google Desktop Search for Enterprise" that it says will "Give your users the productivity-enhancing benefits of Google Desktop Search while maintaining company policies."

Another great use of Google maps: This guy has taken GasBuddy.com prices and combined them with Google's map to help you find cheap gas.

A couple of fine examples of what you can do with government data and mapping:

A Web developer for World Online, the Web arm of the Lawrence, Kansas, newspaper, took Chicago crime data and combined it with Google maps to give a detailed view - including satellite images - of where crime occurs in Chicago. PoynterOnline's E-Media Tidbits highlighted this example.

New York City has a truly impressive site where you can get statistics by neighborhood on everything from blocked driveways to deaths due to drug abuse to asbestos complaints. Click here to see the info from a neighborhood in Brooklyn where I once lived.

The New York Times' series on class includes an interesting infographic where you can plug in your occupation, income, education and wealth and find your place in the world. It also includes an enlightening illustration of social mobility.

eHow offers "Clear Instructions on How To Do (just about) Everything."

FirstGov.gov has a "U.S. Government RSS Library" of RSS feeds for various topics - agriculture, forests, consumers, health, data and statistics, military, education, science and more.

This page has a long list of "Internet tools for effective information handling."

Andrew Wolfson tells me yesterday's CAR Report was incomprehensible. I'd say the same thing about his stories. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be true.

That said, we'll try to do better today by keeping it simple:

YouSendIt lets you send very large files - the kind that are too big for attachments, like spreadsheets, databases and high-resolution photographs - for free. The way it works is you store your file, up to 1 gigabyte, on their site and send your recipient the link. They say they delete your files from their computers after 7 days.

Finding Images Online is "a directory of Web image sites."

TweakGuides.com offers tips to help you "maximize the performance of your computer."

I come across a lot of geeky, geeky links that I don't put in the CAR Report because I know most reporters could care less.

I hate to see all that Web surfing go to waste, however, so recently I created a del.icio.us page to hold that stuff at http://del.icio.us/carreport.

del.icio.us is a "social bookmarks" manager where you can store your bookmarks so you can get at them from anywhere. Its greatest value, however, comes from the tags you assign bookmarks. Not only do the tags make organizing and finding your bookmarks easier, they also make it easier to find what other people have saved on the same subjects that interest you.

An example might make it easier to understand what I'm talking about it.

Here's what my del.icio.us CAR Report page looks like:

What you see are the bookmarks, the tags I've assigned them ("dotnet," "programming," "statistics," etc.), the date each was saved, and the number of other people who have saved the same bookmark. You can add a short descriptive phrase for each bookmark, but I usually don't.

On the right of the screen you'll see a list of all the tags I've created so far and how many bookmarks have been tagged with each one ...

If I click on one of those tags, I get all the bookmarks that I have tagged with that tag- say, "census."

So far, I have just two Census bookmarks ...

If I click where it says "and 113 other people" under the Social Explorer bookmark ...

... I can find all the other people who have bookmarked that site:

They probably have similar interests to mine, and if I visit their pages, I'll probably find more stuff I'd like to know about.

I can also find all the bookmarks tagged census by anyone. The easiest way is to just type the address for a tag, which takes the form, http://del.icio.us/tag/census, in your browser ...

That gives me all the bookmarks tagged census, with the most recently tagged first.

del.icio.us also creates RSS feeds for any page or tag. You'll find the feed link at the bottom of each page ...

So if I want to keep track of what new new census bookmarks have been added, I can enter the RSS feed in my RSS news aggregator. That way I don't even have to visit the page again, I can just check for new links whenever I catch up on my news or blog reading.

Here's what the del.icio.us census feed looks like in Bloglines, one news aggregator I use:

HispanSource is "Your Source for Hispanic Market Information." It's free after you register.

Librarian Gary Price explains how to use the various online book search tools offered by Google, Amazon and the like.

This looks entertaining: MedLine Plus offers "links to pre-recorded webcasts of surgical procedures."

The goal of BookFinder.com, "the open marketplace for books online," "is to provide fellow readers unbiased real-time information about books available online. Rather than selling books ourselves, our team of high-tech book geeks has worked to create a truly useful free book search tool for all kinds of readers. BookFinder.com is a one-stop search site that lets users view the collections of over 70,000 sellers of new, used, rare, and out of print books. The seventy million titles available constitute the largest book catalog available anywhere, either online or offline."

Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Mossberg explains RSS.

And here's a list of "15 things you can do with RSS (it was supposed to be 10, but I got carried away)." Of particular interest to journalists would be "Get the news as it happens from multiple news sources," "Collect your email from all your email accounts in your RSS reader," and "Find out what people are saying about you, your company or your product online."

Podscope, which is still in beta, "is the first search engine that actually allows you to search for spoken words within any audio or video file. We’re starting with podcasts and will be adding all types of multimedia in coming months."

The DesignDirectory is "an international design links database" with "4456 design links in 1627 categories."

All Things Considered got the other side of the furor over data brokers losing personal data: "In the weeks after they announced major security breaches, data brokers like ChoicePoint and Lexis-Nexis have imposed restrictions on access to Americans' personal information. Some of their clients are no longer allowed access to social security and drivers license numbers. NPR's Larry Abramson reports on the affects this has had on private investigators, who have come to rely on personal data to solve cases."

The federal courts offers "A Journalist's Guide to the Federal Courts."

The third edition of CrimeStat has been released. CrimeStat is very good, free, government-funded software for mapping and analyzing crime.

The interminable NBA playoffs are just getting under way so there's still plenty of time to sign up for their RSS feeds. "Use your on-line reader to listen to audio files from NBA TV!," the site says. "Each night the NBA will send NBA Talk and NBA TV Fantasy Hoops directly to the RSS feeds. Check out the audio show archive! You can even have the shows downloaded directly to your mobile music device!"

The Google Tutor & Advisor has an article called "Voyeur Heaven: finding interesting video, sound and image files in unprotected directories." It shows how to use Google's more advance search functions to zero in on particular files.

Snap News Search offers a cool way to find news you're interested in. It filters news sources as you type, so on the left you get a list of stories and the dates they were posted, their titles and their sources, and on the right you get a short excerpt of each one and an image of the actual page. Click on the image and it opens the page itself within Snap. It uses a program called X1, the same technology used by Yahoo's desktop search program.

LocalHarvest "maintains a definitive and reliable 'living' public nationwide directory of small farms, farmers markets, and other local food sources. Our search engine helps people find products from family farms, local sources of sustainably grown food, and encourages them to establish direct contact with small farms in their local area. Our online store helps small farms develop markets for some of their products beyond their local area."

The AP on tagging, which is "all the rage among the digerati."